Browse

This book uses hundreds of hours of newly opened interviews and other sources to illuminate the life and times of Bill Clinton. Combining the authoritative perspective of these inside accounts with the analytic powers of some of America’s most distinguished presidential scholars, the chapters offer a major advance in our collective understanding of the Clinton White House. Included are chapters on the major domestic and foreign policy initiatives of the Clinton years, as well as objective discussions of political success and failure. This is the first book to make extensive use of previously closed interviews collected for the Clinton Presidential History Project, conducted by the Presidential Oral History Program of the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. These interviews explored officials’ memories of their service with President Clinton and their careers prior to joining the administration. Interviewees also offered political and leadership lessons they had gleaned as eyewitnesses to and shapers of history. Their spoken recollections provide invaluable detail about the inner history of the presidency in an age when personal diaries and discursive letters are seldom written. The authors had first access to more than fifty of these cleared interviews. The book provides a multidimensional portrait of Bill Clinton’s administration, drawing largely on the observations of those who knew it best.

This book argues that current self-described antifascists are not struggling against a reappearance of interwar fascism, and that the Left that claims to be opposing fascism has little in common with any earlier Left, except for some overlap with critical theorists of the Frankfurt School. The book looks at antifascism from its roots in early twentieth-century Europe to its American manifestation in the present. The pivotal development for defining the present political spectrum, the book suggests, has been the replacement of a recognizably Marxist Left by an intersectional one. Political and ideological struggles have been configured around this new Left, which has become a dominant force throughout the Western world. The book discusses the major changes undergone by antifascist ideology since the 1960s, fascist and antifascist models of the state and assumptions about human nature, nationalism versus globalism, the antifascism of the American conservative establishment, and Antifa in the United States. Also included is an excursus on the theory of knowledge presented by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan. The book concludes that promoting a fear of fascism today serves the interests of the powerful—in particular, those in positions of political, journalistic, and educational power who want to bully and isolate political opponents. It points out the generous support given to the intersectional Left by multinational capitalists and examines the movement of the white working class in Europe—including former members of Communist parties—toward the populist Right, suggesting this shows a political dynamic that is different from the older dialectic between Marxists and anti-Marxists.

This book dives deep into the lives of Muslim American advocacy groups in the post-9/11 era, asking how they form and function within their broader community in a world marked by Islamophobia. Bias incidents against Muslim Americans reached unprecedented levels a few short years ago, and many groups responded through action — organizing on the national level to become increasingly visible, engaged, and assertive. This book draws on more than four years of participant observation and interviews to examine how Muslim American organizations have sought to access and influence the public square and, in so doing, forge a political identity. The result is an engaging and unique study, showing that policy advocacy, both foreign and domestic, is best understood as a sphere where Muslim American identity is performed and negotiated. The book offers ever-timely insight into the place of Muslims in American political life and, in the process, sheds light on one of the fastest-growing and most internally dynamic American minority groups.

For more than one hundred years, governments have grappled with the complex problem of how to revitalize distressed urban areas. In 1995, the original urban Empowerment Zones (Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Philadelphia) each received a $100 million federal block grant and access to a variety of market-oriented policy tools to support the implementation of a ten-year strategic plan to increase economic opportunities and promote sustainable community development in high-poverty neighborhoods. This book confronts the puzzle of why the outcomes achieved by the original Empowerment Zones varied so widely given that each city had the same set of federal policy tools and resources and comparable neighborhood characteristics. The book's analysis shows that revitalization outcomes are best explained by the quality of local governance. Good local governance makes positive contributions to revitalization efforts, while poor local governance retards progress. While policy design and contextual factors are important, how cities craft and carry out their strategies are critical determinants of successful revitalization. The book finds that good governance is often founded on public-private cooperation, a stance that argues against both the strongest critics of neoliberalism (who see private enterprise as dangerous in principle) and the strongest opponents of liberalism (who would like to reduce the role of government).

In an original assessment of all three branches, this book reveals a new way in which the American federal system is broken. Turning away from the partisan narratives of everyday politics, the book diagnoses the deeper and bipartisan nature of imbalance of power that undermines public deliberation and accountability, especially on war powers. By focusing on the lawsuits brought by Congressional members that challenge presidential unilateralism, the book provides a new diagnostic lens on the permanent institutional problems that have undermined the separation of powers system in the last five decades, across a diverse array of partisan and policy landscapes. As each chapter demonstrates, member lawsuits are an outlet for frustrated members of both parties who cannot get their House and Senate colleagues to confront overweening presidential action through normal legislative processes. But these lawsuits often backfire—leaving Congress as an institution even more disadvantaged. The book argues these suits are more symptoms of constitutional dysfunction than the cure. It shows federal judges will not and cannot restore the separation of powers system alone. Fifty years of congressional atrophy cannot be reversed in court.

This book, a concise primer for understanding the US defense budget ($700 billion plus) and rapidly changing military technologies, provides a deeply informed yet accessible analysis of American military power. After an introduction which surveys today's international security environment, provides a brief sketch of the history of the US military, its command structure, the organization of its three million personnel, and a review of its domestic basing and global reach, the book provides in-depth coverage of four critical areas in military affairs. For policy makers and experts, military professionals, students, and citizens alike, the book helps make sense of the US Department of Defense, the basics of war and the future of armed conflict, and the most important characteristics of the American military.

Presidents have long invoked electoral mandates to justify the use of executive power. This book draws on an original dataset of more than 1,500 presidential communications, as well as primary documents from six presidential libraries, to systematically examine choices made by presidents ranging from Herbert Hoover in 1928 to Barack Obama during his 2008 election. The book argues that Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 marked a shift from the modern presidency formed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt to a more partisan era for the presidency. This partisan model is a form of governance in which the president appears to require a popular mandate in order to manage unruly and deeply contrary elements within his own party and succeed in the face of staunch resistance from the opposition party. The book finds that when the presidency enjoys high public esteem and party polarization is low, mandate rhetoric is less frequent and employs broad themes. By contrast, presidents turn to mandate rhetoric when the office loses legitimacy, as in the wake of Watergate and Vietnam and during periods of intense polarization. In the twenty-first century, these two factors have converged. As a result, presidents rely on mandate rhetoric to defend their choices to supporters and critics alike, simultaneously creating unrealistic expectations about the electoral promises they will be able to fulfill.

Radical redistricting plans, such as that pushed through by Texas governor Rick Perry in 2003, are frequently used for partisan purposes. Perry's plan sent twenty-one Republicans (and only eleven Democrats) to Congress in the 2004 elections. Such heavy-handed tactics strike many as contrary to basic democratic principles. This book uses a combination of political science methods and legal studies insights to investigate the effects of redistricting on U.S. House elections. It concludes that partisan gerrymandering poses far less of a threat to democratic accountability than conventional wisdom would suggest. Building on a large data set of the demographics of redrawn districts and subsequent congressional elections, the book looks less at the who and how of gerrymandering and considers more closely the practical effects of partisan redistricting plans. It finds that the redrawing of districts often results in no detrimental effect for district-level competition. Short-term benefits in terms of capturing seats are sometimes achieved but long-term results are uncertain. By focusing on the end results rather than on the motivations of political actors, the book seeks to recast the political debate about the importance of partisanship. It supports institutionalizing metrics for competitiveness that would prove more threatening to all incumbents no matter their party affiliation.

This book addresses an important set of questions about the current state and future trajectory of U.S. politics in the midst of increasing racial and ethnic diversity. The book's analysis of voting behavior among the newest segment of the American electorate is especially timely. This book captures the reader's attention not only for the importance of the questions at stake but because of the book's perspective in considering in detail immigrant-serving nonprofit organizations and their role in electoral politics.

More than half of the 41 million foreign-born individuals in the United States today are non-citizens, half have difficulty with English, a quarter are undocumented, and many are poor. As a result, most immigrants have few opportunities to make their voices heard in the political process. Nonprofits in many cities have stepped into this gap to promote the integration of disadvantaged immigrants. They have done so despite notable constraints on their political activities, including limits on their lobbying and partisan electioneering, limited organizational resources, and dependence on government funding. Immigrant rights advocates also operate in a national context focused on immigration enforcement rather than immigrant integration. This book examines how immigrant-serving nonprofits can make impressive policy gains despite these limitations. Drawing on three case studies of immigrant rights policies—language access, labor rights, and municipal ID cards—in San Francisco, the book develops a tripartite model of advocacy strategies that nonprofits have used to propose, enact, and implement immigrant-friendly policies: administrative advocacy, cross-sectoral and cross-organizational collaborations, and strategic issue framing. The inventive development and deployment of these strategies enabled immigrant-serving nonprofits in San Francisco to secure some remarkable new immigrant rights victories, and the book explores how other cities can learn from their experiences.

Recent years have brought public mourning to the heart of American politics, as exemplified by the spread and power of the Black Lives Matter movement, which has gained force through its identification of pervasive social injustices with individual losses. The deaths of Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, and so many others have brought private grief into the public sphere. The rhetoric and iconography of mourning has been noteworthy in Black Lives Matter protests, but this text argues that we have paid too little attention to the nature of social mourning—its relationship to private grief, its practices, and its pathologies and democratic possibilities. The book addresses significant and urgent questions about how citizens can mourn traumatic events and enduring injustices in their communities. The book offers a framework for analyzing the politics of mourning, drawing from psychoanalysis, Greek tragedy, and scholarly discourses on truth and reconciliation. This book connects these literatures to ongoing activism surrounding racial injustice, and it contextualizes Black Lives Matter in the broader politics of grief and recognition. The text also examines recent, grassroots-organized truth and reconciliation processes such as the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2004–006), which provided a public examination of the Greensboro Massacre of 1979—a deadly incident involving local members of the Communist Workers Party and the Ku Klux Klan.

This book chronicles and assesses the little-known involvement of US diplomat George F. Kennan—renowned as an expert on the Soviet Union—in US policy toward East Asia, primarily in the early Cold War years. Kennan, with vital assistance from his deputy John Paton Davies, played pivotal roles in effecting the US withdrawal from the Chinese civil war and the redirection of American occupation policy in Japan, and in developing the “defensive perimeter” concept in the western Pacific. His influence, however, faded soon thereafter: he was less successful in warning against US security commitments in Korea and Indochina, and the impact of the Korean War ultimately eclipsed his strategic vision for US policy in East Asia. This was due in large part to Kennan’s inability to reconcile his judgment that the mainland of East Asia was strategically expendable to the United States with his belief that US prestige should not be compromised there. The book examines the subsequent evolution of Kennan’s thinking about East Asian issues—including his role as a prominent critic of US involvement in the Vietnam War—and the legacies of his engagement with the region.

In the aftermath of the 2010 Citizens United decision, it's become commonplace to note the growing political dominance of a small segment of the economic elite. But what exactly are those members of the elite doing with their newfound influence? This book presents an account of legislation promoted by the US's biggest corporate lobbies across all fifty state legislatures and encompassing a wide range of labor and economic policies. In an era of growing economic insecurity, it turns out that one of the main reasons life is becoming harder for American workers is a relentless—and concerted—offensive by the country's best-funded and most powerful political forces: corporate lobbies empowered by the Supreme Court to influence legislative outcomes with an endless supply of cash. These actors have successfully championed hundreds of new laws that lower wages, eliminate paid sick leave, undo the right to sue over job discrimination, and cut essential public services. The book shows how corporate strategies have been shaped by twenty-first-century conditions—including globalization, economic decline, and the populism reflected in both the Trump and Sanders campaigns of 2016. Perhaps most important, the book shows that the corporate legislative agenda has come to endanger the scope of democracy itself.

This book examines the history of how U.S. election reforms have been manipulated for partisan advantage and establishes a new framework for analyzing current laws and policies. The book finds that the tactics that have been employed to suppress voting in recent elections are not novel, but rather build upon the strategies used by a variety of actors going back nearly a century and a half. This continuity, along with the shift to a Republican domination of voter suppression efforts for the past fifty years, should inform what we think about reform policy today. The book argues that activities that suppress voting are almost always illegitimate, while reforms that increase participation are nearly always legitimate. In short, use and abuse of election laws and policies to suppress votes has obvious detrimental impacts on democracy itself. Such activities are also harmful because of their direct impacts on actual election outcomes. The book regards as beneficial any legal effort to increase the number of Americans involved in the electoral system. This includes efforts that are focused on improving voter turnout among certain populations typically regarded as supporting one party, as long as the methods and means for boosting participation are open to all. The book identifies and describes a number of specific legitimate and positive reforms that will increase voter turnout.

The Laurence and Lynne Brown Democracy Medal is an initiative of the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Pennsylvania State University. It annually recognizes outstanding individuals, groups, and organizations that produce exceptional innovations to further democracy in the United States or around the world. This book unveils the Public Mapping Project, which developed DistrictBuilder, an open-source software redistricting application designed to give the public transparent, accessible, and easy-to-use online mapping tools. As the book shows, the goal is for all citizens to have access to the same information that legislators use when drawing congressional maps—and use that data to create maps of their own.

From Ronald Reagan's regular invocation of America as “a city on a hill” to Barack Obama's use of spiritual language in describing social policy, religious rhetoric is a regular part of how candidates communicate with voters. Although the Constitution explicitly forbids a religious test as a qualification to public office, many citizens base their decisions about candidates on their expressed religious beliefs and values. This book shows that Americans often make political choices because they identify with a “civil religion.” The book examines the role of religious political rhetoric in U.S. elections by analyzing both how political elites use religious language and how voters respond to different expressions of religion in the public sphere. The book evaluates how citizens respond to religious stumping. Effective religious rhetoric, the book finds, is characterized by two factors—emotive cues and invocations of collective identity—and these factors regularly shape the outcomes of American presidential elections and the dynamics of political representation. While we tend to think that certain issues (e.g., abortion) are invoked to appeal to specific religious constituencies who vote solely on such issues, the book shows that religious rhetoric is often more encompassing and less issue-specific. It concludes that voter identification with an American civic religion remains a driving force in U.S. elections, despite its potentially divisive undercurrents.

This book discusses how U.S. officials, influenced by publisher Henry R. Luce in an essay in Life magazine in 1941, strove to create an American Century at the close of World War II, and beyond. The United States, Luce held, must seek comprehensive leadership, that is, global hegemony. The advent of the Cold War hastened that undertaking. Communist victory in China’s civil war in 1949 and the start of the Korean War in June 1950 made the Cold War international. U.S. officials implemented the dual strategy of global containment and multilateralism in trade and finance in order to counter Soviet influence. By the late 1950s, however, a changing world, which the nonaligned movement epitomized, was questioning U.S. leadership and, thus, the appeal of the American Century. International crises and adverse balance of payments meant trouble for Luce’s project in the early 1960s. The debacle of 1968 for Lyndon Johnson, as seen in relations with allies, the Vietnam War, and a weak dollar, cost him his presidency and curtailed the growth of the American Century. Richard Nixon then attempted to revitalize U.S. leadership through détente with the Communist world. At most, there remains today a quasi-American Century, premised largely on military power.

In the wake of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), the case that allowed corporate and union spending in elections, many Americans despaired over the corrosive influence that private and often anonymous money can have on political platforms, campaigns, and outcomes at the federal and state level. In McComish v. Bennett (2011), the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the matching funds feature of so-called “Clean Elections” public financing laws, but there has been no strong challenge to the constitutionality of public funding as such. This book considers the impact of state-level public election financing on political campaigns through the eyes of candidates. The book is not only an effort to judge the effects of existing public election funding but also a study of elite behavior, campaign effects, and the structural factors that influence campaigns and voters. The book states that the presence of publicly funded candidates in elections results in broad changes to the electoral system, including more interaction between candidates and the voting public and significantly higher voter participation. The book provides evidence that by providing neophytes with resources that would have been unobtainable otherwise, subsidies effectively manufacture quality challengers. It describes how matching-funds provisions of Clean Elections laws were pervasively manipulated by candidates and parties and were ultimately struck down by the Supreme Court. The book concludes with an evaluation of existing proposals for future election policy.

This book represents one of the first systematic comparative studies of immigrant incorporation at the metropolitan level. It considers immigrant reception in seven different metro areas, and the book's analysis stresses the differences in capacity and response between central cities, down-at-the-heels suburbs, and outer metropolitan areas, as well as across metro areas. A key feature of case studies in the book is their inclusion of not only traditional receiving areas (New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles) but also newer ones (Charlotte, Phoenix, San José, and California's “Inland Empire”). Another innovative aspect is that the book links to the new literature on regional governance, contributes to emerging research on spatial variations within metropolitan areas, and highlights points of intersection with the longer-term processes of immigrant integration.

This anthology provides a timely critical overview of the American conservative movement. The chapters cover subjects that have not previously been discussed. In particular, the book hits hard at the blatant cult of celebrity and intolerance of dissent that has come to characterize the conservative movement in this country. As the book shows, the conservative movement has not often retrieved its wounded, instead dispatching them in order to please its friendly opposition and to prove its “moderateness.” The movement has also been open to the influence of demanding sponsors who have pushed it in sometimes bizarre directions. Finally, the chapters highlight the movement's appeal to “permanent values” as a truly risible gesture, given how arduously its celebrities have worked to catch up with the Left on social issues. This critical examination of American conservatism opens debates and seeks controversy.