New Books in Politics

[Cross-posted from New Books in Political Science] Elaine Kamarck is the author of How Change Happens–or Doesn’t: The Politics of US Public Policy (Lynne Rienner, 2013). Kamarck is a lecturer in public policy at the Harvard University Kennedy School after serving in the Clinton administration. She is also a senior fellow in the Governance Studies program at Brookings and the founding director of the Center for Effective Public Management. Kamarck draws on her years of political service to describe how the policy process works. She highlights the practical dimensions of what slows and speeds policy change.

[Cross-posted from New Books in African American Studies] Cindy Hooper is a veteran of various local, state, and national political campaigns. She is the founder of a national organization for African American women that is headquartered in Washington, D.C. Hooper is also a member of the American Political Science Association. Her new book, Conflict: African American Women and the New Dilemma of Race and Gender Politics (Praeger Press, 2012), draws on all of her experiences. Please listen to our lively exchange.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Political Science] On the podcast over the last few months, we’ve heard from Phil Krestedemas, Ron Schmidt, Shannon Gleeson about various aspects of immigration and immigrants in the US. Adding to this impressive list is Natalie Masuoka and Jane Junn are authors of The Politics of Belonging: Race, Public Opinion, and Immigration (University of Chicago Press, 2013). Masuoka is assistant professor of political science at Tufts University. Junn is professor of political science at the University of Southern California and has previously published Education and Democratic Citizenship in America (University of Chicago Press, 1996). Masuoka and Junn marshal a variety of data sources to unpack how immigrants in the US form political identity and beliefs. They argue that the relative placement of immigrant groups and the unique history and experiences of racialization by group as important factors related to public opinion on immigration.

[Cross-posted from New Books in History] If you went to college in the United States and took a Western Civ class, you’ve probably read at least a bit of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791). The two are so often paired in history and political science classes that they are sometimes published together. No wonder, really, because Paine’s Rights of Man was written in response to Burke’s Reflections. It’s easy to understand why these two book are standard fare in college: arguably, Burke’s and Paine’s books are the intellectual well-springs of what we call the republican (with a small “r”) “Right” and the “Left.” Much of what American Republicans think can be traced to Burke; much of what American Democrats think can be traced to Paine. For this reason, Burke and Paine are–with the possible exception of J.S. Mill–the most important political thinkers in the modern Western republican tradition. And for all these reasons, Yuval Levin‘s wonderful The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left (Basic Books, 2013) is very relevant today. Levin masterfully explains not only why Burke and Paine thought what they thought (that is, he provides the historical context for their ideas), but he also makes clear how their ideas matter today. Listen in and find out why.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Political Science] Stephen Medvic is the author of In Defense of Politicians: The Expectations Trap and Its Threat to Democracy (Routledge 2013). He is associate professor of government at Franklin and Marshall University. Medvic confronts the widespread dissatisfaction with Washington, Congress, and politicians from a new perspective. He argues that much of the antipathy towards politicians is based on faulty expectations, what he calls an “expectations trap”. The public wants often contradictory things from politicians: strongly held beliefs and the willingness to make deals; ambition and wisdom, but not so much of each that they are self-serving. Medvic calls for more realistic expectations of what function politicians play in a democracy to move beyond some of the current public frustrations.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Political Science] Glenn Feldman is the author of The Irony of the Solid South: Democrats, Republicans, and Race, 1865-1944 (Alabama UP 2013). He is professor of history at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the author of eight other books. Feldman’s book is a deeply provocative analysis of southern politics and political history. He explains the recurring themes in southern politics as an outgrowth of “Reconstruction Syndrome”. Themes of anti-government, anti-taxation, and deep suspicion of outsiders (African Americans, Catholics, Jews, and immigrants), run throughout the history of southern politics, and remain today. Feldman focuses much of his book on showing that the Democratic Party lost the south long before the passage of the civil rights laws in the 1960s. He tracks the shift in political allegiances back to the 1930s and even earlier. The book challenges conventional notions and is likely to stimulate debate and controversy. It is a worthwhile read for historians of the time period and political scientists, alike.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Public Policy] In Emergencies and Politics: A Sober Hobbesian Approach (Cambridge UP, 2013), Tom Sorell argues that emergencies can justify types of action that would normally be regarded as wrong. Beginning with the ethics of emergencies facing individuals, he explores the range of effective and legitimate private emergency response and its relation to public institutions, such as national governments. He develops a theory of the response of governments to public emergencies which indicates the possibility of a democratic politics that is liberal but that takes seriously threats to life and limb from public disorder, crime or terrorism. Informed by Hobbes, Schmitt and Walzer, but substantially different from them, the book widens the justification for recourse to normally forbidden measures, without resorting to illiberal politics. This book will interest students of politics, philosophy, international relations and law.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Biography] John F. Kennedy remains one of the most remembered and most enigmatic presidents in American history, perhaps precisely because, as Thurston Clarke writes in the preface of his new biography JFK’s Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President, he was “more than most presidents– more than most middle aged men… a work in progress.” This is perhaps also why he’s a perennial favorite of biographers: because he proves such a challenge to pin down and because it is so very tempting to try to imagine who he might have become had he lived. Alas, he didn’t. And so we’re left to wonder, a temptation Clarke resists in JFK’s Last Hundred Days. Instead, he mines that period to see who JFK was then and leaves us to the imagining. For, undoubtedly, he was a changed man in many respects: grieving the death of his infant son, somewhat renewed in his commitment to his wife, moving towards a policy of détente with Russia, re-examining American involvement in Vietnam. Clarke borrows from the journalist Laura Bergquist the idea of JFK as our most “prismatic” president, and systematically examines the various facets that were presented in his final hundred days. The end result is a portrayal that, while doing nothing to quell the unanswerable question of who JFK might have become had he not died, does go a long way towards answering the question of who he was while he lived.

[Cross-posted from New Books in History] For many people, the most important questions about the Kennedy assassination are “Who killed Kennedy?” and, if Lee Harvey Oswald did, “Was Oswald part of a conspiracy?” This is strange, because we know the answers to both questions: Oswald killed Kennedy and he did so alone. These facts won’t keep people from speculating–everyone loves a mystery–but they might allow us to focus on more pertinent questions about what happened on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas. One such question is this: “Why did Oswald do it?” Obviously, the answer will not be straightforward. Assassinating the President of the United States is, well, not really something a rational person would attempt, so we should not expect a completely rational explanation. Oswald was not crazy, but he was doubtless mentally ill. He had “reasons” for killing the president; it’s just that his “reasons” are not going to make much sense to us. To comprehend why he did what he did, then, we must comprehend how his “reasons” made sense to him. In his insightful, well-researched book The Interloper: Lee Harvey Oswald Inside the Soviet Union (Basic Books, 2013), Peter Savodnik helps us do just this by investigating Oswald’s decision to defect to, live in, and ultimately abandon the Soviet Union. He convincingly argues that Oswald’s Soviet Period was part of a larger pattern, one that dominated his entire life: that of taking on and abandoning identities, always unsuccessfully. Even as a child (and, as Peter points out, Oswald had a horrific childhood), “Lee” never really “fit.” He could never find a group of people he could rely on, a social context in which he could thrive, a community that would respect him.  As he matured, he began to search for an identity–in politics, in the Marines, and in the Soviet Union. Yet he was always, as Peter says, an “interloper”: he never lasted long in the skin of any given “Lee.” To this reader, the fact that Oswald was essentially an interloper goes a long way in explaining why he murdered Kennedy. It was his last attempt to fit in, to establish who he really was, to find an identity.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Political Science] Isaac Martin is the author of Rich People’s Movement: Grassroots Campaigns to Untax the One Percent (Oxford UP 2013). He is professor of sociology at University of California, San Diego. Martin’s deep archival research into several waves of conservative activism results in a very readable and important scholarly contribution to the literature on social movements, interest groups, and public policy. The sweep of the book is broad, covering movements across over a hundred years of US history. From JA Arnold to Vivien Kellems to Grover Norquist today, Martin combines a historian’s attention to detail with a social scientist’s background in public policy theory and methods. He also uncovers significant links between social movements, explaining how Grover Norquist – and his Americans for Tax Reform —  is not just an ideological off-spring of the estate tax opponents of the early 20th century, but also indebted to the tactical innovations of the 19th-century Populist Movement. Paradoxically, grass roots strategies, rather than traditional lobbying, have been at the center of conservative appeals to lower a variety of taxes on the rich.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Political Science] Cindy I-Fen Cheng is the author of Citizens of Asian America: Democracy and Race during the Cold War (NYU Press 2013). She is associate professor of history and Asian American studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Cheng places the conflicted history of Asian Americans in the United States into the context of Cold War politics. US policy makers sought to combat Soviet propaganda that portrayed the nation’s racism and legal discrimination. But as policy makers upended unconstitutional housing policies and racially restrictive covenants, the Cold War also compelled the prosecution of Asian Americans for their alleged links to communism. Cheng pieces together original interviews, interesting interpretations of legal proceedings, and media analysis to tell a fascinating political history of the Cold War era.

For this podcast, I usually interview book authors. This week, I am trying something a little different. I focus on a new political science journal and one of their upcoming book review articles. On the podcast are: Eric Waltenburg, Associate Professor and Purdue University and Stephen K. Medvic, Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Government, Franklin & Marshall College. Waltenburg is the Lead Editor, Politics, Groups, and Identities, a new journal affiliated with the Western Political Science Association. Medvic has written a review of four new books about political partisanship (see below). We discuss the review and the larger vision for the journal. Zoltan L. Hajnal and Taeku Lee. Why Americans Don’t Join the Party: Race, Immigration, and the Failure (of Political Parties) to Engage the Electorate (Princeton University Press, 2011) Howard G. Lavine, Christopher D. Johnston, and Marco R. Steenbergen. The Ambivalent Partisan: How Critical Loyalty Promotes Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2012) Matthew Levendusky. The Partisan Sort: How Liberals Became Democrats and Conservatives Became Republicans (University of Chicago Press, 2009) Paul M. Sniderman and Edward H. Stiglitz. The Reputational Premium: A Theory of Party Identification and Policy Reasoning (Princeton University Press, 2012)

[Cross-posted from New Books in American Studies] What do Barry Goldwater, Edward Abbey, and Henry David Thoreau have in common? On the surface, they would seem to be at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. As Brian Allen Drake shows, however, environmental concerns often brought together public figures with wildly different political orientations. Throughout his book, Loving Nature, Fearing the State: Environmentalism and Antigovernment Politics Before Reagan (University of Washington Press, 2013), Brian Allen Drake analyzes the complex relationship between modern conservatism and postwar environmentalism. Through a wide-ranging narrative that fuses together elements of political, intellectual, and cultural history, Drake illuminates the tense nature of a movement that sought to balance an aversion to centralized government power with a desire to protect America’s natural landscape. Brian Allen Drake is a lecturer in the University of Georgia History Department. His previous work has appeared in Environmental History, the Great Plains Quarterly, and the Georgia Historical Quarterly.

[Cross-posted from New Books in History] Presidents, you know, are people too. They read the newspaper (including the sports page and the funnies), settle in with books (yes, beach reading too), watch movies and TV (after all, they have a private theatre in the White House), and listen to music (“President Obama, what’s on your iPod?”). Ordinarily, we don’t pay a lot of attention to this sort of stuff, even in the White House. It can be funny in a “human interest story” sort of way,  but it’s rarely ever seen as important for understanding how our most important leaders lead. This neglect–or, rather, trivialization–of presidents’ popular cultural tastes, according to Tevi Troy, is a mistake. In his fascinating book What Jefferson Read, Ike Watched, and Obama Tweeted: 200 Years of Popular Culture in the White House (Regency, 2013), Tevi not only tell us about the reading, watching, and tweeting habits of our Commanders-in-chief, but also why it has mattered and continues to do so. Listen in.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Political Science] Robert Horwitz is the author of America’s Right: Anti-Establishment Conservatism from Goldwater to the Tea Party (Polity, 2013). Horwitz is professor in the Department of Communications at the University of California San Diego. Over the last few months, we’ve heard from several authors discuss their books about neoliberalism and the Tea Party. Horwitz seeks to pull these movements together. He highlights the long history of paranoia in politics and the ways it influences the Tea Party today. He describes the ideological underpinnings of anti-establishment conservatism but also the institutions, people, and mechanisms through which the beliefs were spread. You can read a chapter here.