New Books in American Politics

America's Inequality Trap (University of Chicago Press, 2020) focuses on the relationship between economic inequality and American politics. Nathan J. Kelly, Professor of Political Science at the University of Tennessee, argues that the increasing concentration of economic power effects political power, thus allowing the gap between the rich and everyone else to become more acute and more rigid. The increasing level of inequality, according to Kelly, also tends to be reinforced by public policies. This then creates a self-perpetuating plutocracy because those with more economic resources will have more political power or the capacity to influence those with political power and the kinds of policies that are being made. Thus, we have the theory of the inequality trap.

Kelly’s analysis is fairly specific to the United States, since the inequality trap itself combines aspects of the American political system that are rather unique, but he notes that the trip is not exclusive to the U.S., it is part of a “more general phenomenon.” In order to understand this inequality trap, Kelly’s research links politics, policy, and income inequality. He then explores different pathways that contribute to establishing and perpetuating this system, which concentrates more and more wealth in fewer and fewer hands. Each chapter assesses a different pathway: public opinion, elections, inegalitarian policy convergence, and policy stagnation, all of which contribute to economic inequality in the United States and how it operates within the political system. Public opinion and elections center around political attitudes and behavior while inegalitarian policy convergence and policy stagnation focus on policy-making institutions and processes. Each pathway shares the same outcome that they contribute to the inequality trap in which only those who are wealthy benefit from it.

In analyzing the effects of high inequality on each of the pathways, Kelly exposes the pattern of political response, or non-response, to the problem of inequality and the role of partisan politics within these dynamics. Kelly also emphasizes that racial bias and economic inequality play a substantial role in political decision making, especially in public opinion and elections. These distinct areas often have some overlap in terms of voter engagement and political behavior and choices and, according to the research, this also helps us understand the outcome in the 2016 presidential election. America’s Inequality Trap concludes with a discussion about economic inequality before the Great Depression and the Great Recession. Both events occurred during times of high economic inequality but there were distinct differences in the political response to that inequality and the economic collapses that followed. Kelly explains how and why the political responses differed, and by comparing the two, he suggests possible strategies for escaping the ongoing inequality trap.

Daniella Campos assisted with this podcast.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).

In September 1941, a handful of isolationist senators set out to tarnish Hollywood for warmongering. The United States was largely divided on the possibility of entering the European War, yet the immigrant moguls in Hollywood were acutely aware of the conditions in Europe. Many works of American film history only skim the surface of the 1941 investigation of Hollywood. In Hollywood Hates Hitler! Jew-Baiting, Anti-Nazism, and the Senate Investigation into Warmongering in Motion Pictures (University of Mississippi, 2020), author Chris Yogerst examines the years leading up to and through the Senate Investigation into Motion Picture War Propaganda, detailing the isolationist senators’ relationship with the America First movement.

Chris Yogerst is assistant professor of communications at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Joel Tscherne is an adjunct professor of history at Southern New Hampshire University. His Twitter handle is @JoelTscherne

Nearly everyone in the United States is aware of the fiery rhetoric and divisive political stratagems of Donald Trump and the contemporary Republican party. What many people forget, however, is that Trump is not the first Republican to rise to power by pushing incendiary policies and destroying opponents. Julian E. Zelizer, Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University, traces many of these tactics back to Newt Gingrich, the former representative from Georgia and Speaker of the House of Representatives. Zelizer argues that Gingrich’s success with such tactics paved the way for Trump’s rise and his path to power. Burning Down the House examines Gingrich’s ascent within the Republican Party and to the Speakership, and the long-lasting effects of this approach to partisan politics.

Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, the Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party(Penguin, 2020) follows Gingrich through his controversial political career in the House of Representatives. Originally, he was dismissed by many within the Republican establishment as an angry newcomer who would, with time, mellow. Many of the party elites never suspected that he would transform their party’s approach to politics. His first conquest as a junior member of the House was a takedown of long-standing congressman, Charles Diggs, whose expulsion he called for over alleged ethics violations in the House of Representatives. Gingrich pushed hard for Diggs to be punished, and Diggs was officially censured in 1979. This bold success brought Gingrich attention within the Republican Party, and he continued to hammer away at the Democratic majority with personal accusations and media manipulation that catapulted into the national spotlight. These methods would lead to Gingrich’s famous showdown with the Democratic Speaker of the House, Jim Wright, and Wright’s ultimate resignation from his seat, representing the 12th congressional district in Texas, and the speakership.

Zelizer’s deep dive into this historical event highlights how Newt Gingrich fundamentally changed partisan politics, directly attacking political opponents, using the media to his advantage, and doggedly pursuing partisan power instead of legislative outcomes. This template, as he demonstrated the capacity for success, leading the Republicans to their first majority in the House of Representatives since the 1950s, has reshaped the GOP and has pushed a generation of Republican leaders to adopt his approach. Gingrich and his approach to politics has upended the Madisonian ideal of compromise—replacing it with a form of zero-sum partisan battle. And the former Speaker is still involved in politics in many ways, but especially as a media advocate for the GOP and Trump.

This podcast was assisted by Benjamin Warren

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).

Over the past six decades, Henry Kissinger has been America's most consistently praised--and reviled--public figure. He was hailed as a "miracle worker" for his peacemaking in the Middle East, pursuit of détente with the Soviet Union, negotiation of an end to the Vietnam War, and secret plan to open the United States to China. He was assailed from the left and from the right for his indifference to human rights, complicity in the pointless sacrifice of American and Vietnamese lives, and reliance on deception and intrigue. Was he a brilliant master strategist--"the 20th century's greatest 19th century statesman"--or a cold-blooded monster who eroded America's moral standing for the sake of self-promotion?

In Henry Kissinger and American Power: A Political Biography (Hill and Wang, 2020), the renowned diplomatic historian Thomas A. Schwartz  offers an authoritative, and fair-minded, answer to this question. While other biographers have engaged in hagiography or demonology, Schwartz takes a measured view of his subject. He recognizes Kissinger's successes and acknowledges that Kissinger thought seriously and with great insight about the foreign policy issues of his time, while also recognizing his failures, his penchant for backbiting, and his reliance on ingratiating and fawning praise of the president as a source of power. Throughout, Schwartz stresses Kissinger's artful invention of himself as a celebrity diplomat and his domination of the medium of television news. He also notes Kissinger's sensitivity to domestic and partisan politics, complicating--and undermining--the image of the far-seeing statesman who stands above the squabbles of popular strife.

Rounded and textured, and rich with new insights into key dilemmas of American power, Henry Kissinger and American Power stands as an essential guide to a man whose legacy is as complex as the last sixty years of US history itself.

How did the Trump and Hillary Clinton campaigns affect other elections in 2016? How did the use of gender stereotypes and insulting references to women in the presidential campaign influence the way House and Senate candidates campaigned?

The 2016 American elections forced scholars and candidates to reassess the role that gender plays in elections. In Trumping Politics as Usual: Masculinity, Misogyny, and the 2016 Elections (Oxford UP, 2019), Robert G. Boatright and Valerie Sperling (professors of political science, Clark University) focus on how gender norms are used to frame – both positively and negatively – the people who run for office. The book interrogates gender and sexism in campaigns (the “gender issue”) and what happens when the media, electorate, and candidates expect to have a clear winner and loser(the “loser” issue). Boatright and Sperling distinguish between the top of the ticket and down ballot elections to tell a story about the impact of the 2016 presidential race on competitive congressional races. They demonstrate how Donald Trump’s candidacy radically altered the nature of the congressional campaigns by making competitive races more consequential for both parties and changing the issues of contention – towards sexism and misogyny – in many congressional races.

It is unusual to see a collaboration of this kind – a comparativist who specializes in Russian politics and wrote an award winning book on political legitimacy in Russia (Sperling) and an Americanist usually focused on campaign finance reform and congressional redistricting (Boatright). The book is a tribute to how crossing disciplinary boundaries in political science yields a more compelling and nuanced qualitative and quantitative analysis – one that is more relevant to contemporary politics.

The podcast was recorded the day after Democrat Joe Biden selected Kamala Harris as his vice presidential running mate. Sperling and Boatright discuss how stereotyping has already affected the 2020 race. Their trenchant analysis of the code already being deployed by the Trump campaign against Harris in terms of both gender and race should not be missed.

Both authors are veterans of the New Books Network and you can hear their earlier interviews with Heath Brown (Boatright, The Deregulatory Moment?) and Amanda Jeanne Swain (Sperling, Sex, Politics, and Putin).

Daniella Campos assisted with this podcast.

Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013) and, most recently, “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” in the Journal of Politics (July 2020). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @SusanLiebell.

What are the policy implications due to a fundamental distrust and dislike of “outsiders”?

Today I talked to political scientist John R. Hibbing about his new book The Securitarian Personality: What Really Motivates Trump’s Base and Why It Matters for the Post-Trump Era (Oxford UP, 2020)

Hibbing teaches political science at the University of Nebraska and has been both a NATO fellow in Science and a Guggenheim Fellow. Media appearances have included Star Talk, The Hidden Brain, and The Daily Show.

Topics covered in this episode include:

• What are the biggest misconceptions, among the media and others, about Trump’s staunchest supporters?

• In what ways are Trump’s fans different from the Republican party’s traditional base?

• In a battle over the soul of whether America might be a democracy or an oligarchy in the future, where do securitarians land and what are the implications for the country?

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his “Faces of the Week” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com.

In This Land of Plenty: Mickey Leland and Africa in American Politics (University of Pennsylvania Press) by Benjamin Talton is a transnational history that explores the influence of African American leaders on US foreign policy towards Africa in the 1980s.

By examining the life and labors of the political activist turned Texas congressman, Mickey Leland, Talton traces the afterlives of 1960s-era Black radicalism in the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) after Leland’s election in 1978. Leland shaped the CBC’s outlook on famine in Ethiopia and established the Committee on Hunger where he developed a broad transformative vision for ending world hunger.

Talton analyzes Leland’s career alongside contemporaneous political developments in Ethiopia and apartheid South Africa, an issue which ultimately became the focal point of CBC endeavors. Talton investigates the ways that anti-apartheid limited Black Congressional action on other African-related foreign policy issues throughout the decade. Talton paints a portrait of Leland as an activist, statesman, and visionary who lived out his politics of humanitarian solidarity from Houston to Addis Ababa.

Benjamin Talton is Professor of History at Temple University.

Amanda Joyce Hall is a Ph.D. Candidate in History and African American Studies at Yale University. She is writing an international history on the grassroots movement against South African apartheid during the 1970s and 1980s. She tweets from @amandajoycehall

“Four score and seven years ago…” Those are some of the most famous words in American history. Most of us know that President Abraham Lincoln spoke them in what is now known as the Gettysburg Address in 1863, at the official dedication of a cemetery for men who had fallen during the Battle of Gettysburg. And most of us know that Lincoln was referring to 1776 and the Founding Fathers who wrote the Declaration of Independence. But why did Lincoln mention that year and that event in the very first line of his speech that day?

That is one of the questions that Lucas E. Morel answers in his short but illuminating book, Lincoln and the American Founding (SIUP, 2020). In a time when some Americans are vandalizing statues and other artistic representations of the Founding Fathers and even some of Lincoln and going so far as portraying the men of the founding generation as villains, Morel’s book is vital reading. Morel tells us which of the founders Lincoln particularly admired, why the Declaration was of greater import to Lincoln’s political thinking than the Constitution and how Lincoln turned to the Declaration again and again throughout his adult life as ammunition in his argumentation and as a source of personal inspiration and aspiration for the nation as a whole.

Morel also brings into focus long-ago debates such as that over the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 and explains why Lincoln was so reluctant to declare himself an abolitionist but also why he was adamant that as the newly elected president and head of the quite new Republican party, he could not make any concessions to the Secessionists. Morel makes the case for Lincoln as master logician in his debates with Stephen Douglas in 1858 as Lincoln tried to persuade his fellow white Americans that not only was slavery unjust but that it was a unsustainable foundation on which to base governance in any part of the growing nation.

This is a gem of a book by a scholar for a general audience in need of an understanding of how the founders influenced Lincoln and, thereby, all of us.

Give a listen.

Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher.

How does the United States use immigration to suppress free speech? Should interests of “national security” take priority over individual liberties? What happens to democracy when the most vulnerable are denied their right to speak and exchange ideas? In Threat of Dissent: A History of Ideological Exclusion and Deportation in the United States (Harvard University Press, 2020), historian and lawyer Dr. Julia Rose Kraut argues that ideological exclusions and deportations are rooted in political fear of subversion – and the United States has used these exclusions and deportations continuously from the 18th to 21st centuries to suppress free speech.

The book explores the constitutionality of ideological restrictions and exclusions as interpreted by American courts – as well as the specific intersection of American immigration and First Amendment law – through a political, historical, legal and personal lens by following the lives of real people as well as key court decisions. The book chronicles the actions of those we know (e.g. Clarence Darrow, Thurgood Marshall, Charlie Chaplin, Carlos Fuentes, and J. Edgar Hoover) as well as some that we may have forgotten (e.g. Ernest Mandel, Leonard Boudin, Carol King, and Frank Murphy). At issue for Kraut is the essence of American liberal democracy and the rule of law. She fears a national identity rooted in fear of the threat of dissent and political repression rather than J.S. Mill’s marketplace of ideas and free exchange of ideas.

The actions of the Trump administration on immigration have put a recent spotlight on this issue – and Kraut’s book concludes with the Travel Ban – but she details how immigration law has been used throughout American history to suppress dissent and radical change. Beginning with the Alien Friends Act of 1798, immigrants in America have always had their First Amendment rights violated on the basis of their values, ideas, and associations. These violations are often backed by the Supreme Court as immigrants are judged more greatly on their immigrant status than in accordance with first amendment rights. Threat of Dissent systematically reveals the ways immigration law is used by officials to intimidate, threaten, and repress foreigners. Kraut unveils this, criticizing not only the damaging effect this has on immigrants’ lives themselves, but additionally the overall damage this does to the idea of American liberal democracy and the overstep of executive power.

The podcast includes a discussion of the recent SCOTUS decisions on DACA and the recent passage of the NOBAN Act by the House of Representatives on July 22, 2020.

Bernadette Crehan assisted with this podcast.

Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013) and, most recently, “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” in the Journal of Politics (August 2020).

Over the course of three decades of public service, Herbert Lehman dedicated himself tirelessly to advances the causes in which he believed. In Herbert H. Lehman: A Political Biography (SUNY Press, 2017), Duane Tananbaum describes his livelong public activism and the role Lehman’s relationships with key individuals played in shaping his political career. Tananbaum identifies the first of these as relationships as the lifelong friendship Lehman established with the social reformer Lilian Wald, with whom Lehman worked in a settlement house on New York’s Lower East Side. It was Lehman’s partnership with Al Smith, however that led to a career in elected office, as Smith was key in convincing Lehman to run for the lieutenant governorship of New York in 1928.

As lieutenant governor, Lehman labored closely with Franklin Roosevelt throughout the latter man’s tenure as governor. When Roosevelt became president Lehman succeeded him as governor, and for the rest of the decade worked with his predecessor to implement the New Deal in his state. Lehman was also concerned about the threat posed by Nazi Germany, and his efforts on behalf of Jewish refugees led to roles administering relief aid in the Roosevelt administration during the Second World War. While he left public office soon after the end of the war, Lehman’s election to the United States Senate in 1949 gave him a new opportunity to fight for the causes of civil rights and immigration. Though frustrated by the seniority enjoyed by the body’s more conservative members, Lehman’s efforts kept the issues at the forefront of the national political scene, with the legislative solutions he advocated passed soon after his death in 1963.