New Books in American Politics

Over the course of less than a century, the U.S. transformed from a nation that excluded Asians from immigration and citizenship to one that receives more immigrants from Asia than from anywhere else in the world. Yet questions of how that dramatic shift took place have long gone unanswered. In Gates to Asia: A Transpacific History of How America Repealed Asian Exclusion (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), Jane H. Hong unearths the transpacific movement that successfully ended restrictions on Asian immigration.

The mid-twentieth century repeal of Asian exclusion, Hong shows, was part of the price of America's postwar empire in Asia. The demands of U.S. empire-building during an era of decolonization created new opportunities for advocates from both the U.S. and Asia to lobby U.S. Congress for repeal. Drawing from sources in the United States, India, and the Philippines, Opening the Gates to Asia charts a movement more than twenty years in the making. Positioning repeal at the intersection of U.S. civil rights struggles and Asian decolonization, Hong raises thorny questions about the meanings of nation, independence, and citizenship on the global stage.

This episode is part of a series featuring legal history works from UNC Press. Support for the production of this series was provided by the Versatile Humanists at Duke program.

Hong is an assistant professor of history at Occidental College where she specializes in 20th-century U.S. immigration and engagement with the world, with a focus on Asia.

Siobhan M. M. Barco, J.D. explores U.S. legal history at Duke University.

How did the modern, American body come into being? According to Rachel Louise Moran this is a story to be told through the lens of the advisory state. In her book, Governing Bodies: American Politics and the Shaping of the Modern Physique (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), she tracks the emergence of the American advisory state -- a key analytic introduced and developed by the author in this book -- and draws attention to polyvalence of bodies as both instruments and objects of public policy. Presenting a series of “body projects” which were pursued both formally and informally by the US federal state, Moran makes a case for the persistent political uses of physique throughout more than a century. In this manner, the author manages to tell a story not only of state expansion and citizenship, but also of gender roles, heteronormativity, standards of normality, and weight. This book, therefore, will be of great interest not only to US historians but also scholars interested in the medicalization of the body, gender and sexuality, childhood development, public health, and fat studies.

In The Positive Second Amendment: Rights, Regulation, and the Future of Heller (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Joseph Blocher and Darrell A.H. Miller insist that the Second Amendment is widely recognized but fundamentally misunderstood by the public and public officials. Misconceptions about what the amendment allows, forbids, and how it function as law distort American debates and public policy. Blocher and Miller provide a nuanced synthesis of politics, history, and legal arguments to recover a more balanced discourse – what they call a “positive” Second Amendment” – that accommodates both a right to bear arms and reasonable regulation.

Blocher and Miller begin with a puzzle. After the Sandy Hook shootings, 90% of the public and 74% of NRA members supported background checks for guns purchased at gun shows and online – yet the Manchin-Toomey Amendment failed in the Senate. The power of interest groups, Blocher and Miller insist, does not fully explain the disconnect between public opinion and policy. Examining the powerful constitutional rhetoric around what is “allowed” by the Second Amendment provides a fuller picture of the political and legal landscape. The book systematically works through the legal history of the amendment to demonstrate how extremists on both sides fail to understand the Second Amendment. Written in clear terms (such that it can be read by citizens, students, and scholars), The Positive Second Amendment provides accessible and balanced scholarship on a polarizing topic in politics and law.

The podcast concludes with thoughts on the firearms law case heard by the Supreme Court in December 2019.

Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University Carroll in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013).

Political Scientist and presidential expert Lori Cox Han has written an absorbing analysis of the many, many memos that Pat Buchanan wrote while working in Richard Nixon’s White House. Buchanan was in the Nixon White House from the very beginning until the very end, and many of his memos are now available to study at the official Richard M. Nixon Library & Museum in Yorba Linda, California. Cox Han has had an interest in these memos and Buchanan’s particular role in the Nixon White House for quite some time, and this book fits into her long-standing research stream examining presidential administrations, especially their communications structures and strategies. As Cox Han notes, Buchanan had a unique position in the Nixon White House and this also helps to contextualize these many memos and Buchanan’s thinking while working for Nixon. In her analysis of these memos, Cox Han lays out the role that Buchanan played in the Nixon White House as a strategic thinker in terms of the shifting political dimensions, especially in the Republican Party at the time and the growing conservative movement. Advising Nixon: The White House Memos of Patrick J. Buchanan (UP of Kansas, 2019) brings together over a hundred of Buchanan’s memos, either written directly to President Nixon or to other close advisors to the president. These memos, chronologically arranged and annotated by Cox Han, provide readers and scholars with insight into not only the president himself, but the structure and processes of the Nixon Administration, from the campaign trail in 1968 through the last days of his presidency as Richard Nixon resigned amidst the Watergate scandal.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of Political Science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She co-edited the award-winning Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012).

Around the McCourtney Institute, we like to say that we’re “partisans for democracy.” We can think of few people who better embody that notion today than David Frum. He was among the first people to talk about the Trump administration’s impact on democracy and remains one of the loudest voices defending democratic norms in the United States. David is a longtime contributor to The Atlantic and author of Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic (Harper, 2018)

In many ways, this conversation speaks to the very idea of this podcast. Democracy, no matter where it’s happening in the world, is most successful when people come together to build something greater than the sum of its parts. As you’ll hear, David is a strong advocate for joining organizations that require deliberation and working with people who might hold different political beliefs than you do — in person and away from social media.

The gradual shift away from those habits of democracy is one of the things that paved the way for the Trumpocracy that David writes about in his book. Rebuilding those habits, he says, is part of the cure for what ails democracy and must happen in tandem with voting to restore faith in democratic institutions and reduce polarization.

Democracy Works is created by the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State and recorded at WPSU Penn State, central Pennsylvania’s NPR station.

While media pundits continually speculate over the future leanings of the so-called “Latino vote,” Benjamin Francis-Fallon historicizes how Latinos were imagined into a national electoral constituency in his new book The Rise of the Latino Vote: A History (Harvard University Press, 2019). Francis-Fallon, Assistant Professor of History at Western Carolina University, examines the rhetorical construction of a national voting bloc by politicians, parties, and a national network of Latino political elites. This interview explores some of the major themes in the book, including the essential role of Latino congressmen, the ideological struggles between Latino elected officials and radical activists, and the ongoing appeals to a panethnic Latino voting bloc from presidential campaigns. Of course Democratic Party politics is only half of the story, with the efforts of the Republican Party featuring prominently in the text as well. By discussing the parallel Latino engagement strategies of both parties, Francis-Fallon underscores the fact that the “rise of the Latino vote was a multiparty phenomenon.” Building upon existing studies that detail how panethnic Latinidad was constructed in the twentieth-century United States, Francis-Fallon adds national and presidential politics to the list of forces that continue to define what it means to be Latino.

Jaime Sánchez, Jr. is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at Princeton University and a scholar of U.S. politics and Latino studies. He is currently writing an institutional history of the Democratic National Committee and partisan coalition politics in the twentieth century. You can follow him on Twitter @Jaime_SanchezJr.

As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump broke not only from the Republican Party consensus but also from the bipartisan consensus on the direction of recent U.S. foreign policy. Calling the Iraq war a terrible mistake and lamenting America's nation building efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, President Trump has shown little interest in maintaining the traditional form of American leadership of the liberal international order. He has threatened to pull the United States out of NATO, complained that the United States was being taken advantage of by its trading partners, and argued that uncontrolled third-world immigration was a terrible mistake and indeed a threat to the American heartland. Instead, Trump's “America First” vision called for a reassertion of American nationalism on the economic front as well as in foreign affairs. In short, President Trump’s foreign policy is more akin to that of the pre-Franklin Delano Roosevelt America. Fuel to the Fire: How Trump made America’s Foreign Policy Even Worse (and How We Can Recover) (Cato Institute, 2019), co-authored by Christopher A. Preble, John Glaser, and A. Trevor Thrall, this book provides an assessment of Trump’s America First Doctrine, its performance to date and its implications for the future.

Since Trump took office, it has become clear that “America First” was more campaign slogan than coherent vision of American grand strategy and foreign policy. As president Trump has steered a course that has maintained some of the worst aspects of foreign policy of the Bush and Obama era – namely the pursuit of primacy if not hegemony and frequent military intervention abroad – while managing to make a new set of mistakes all his own.

Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs.

In his book Red State Blues: How the Conservative Revolution Stalled in the States (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Matt Grossmann examines, first, the watershed event of Republican takeovers of governors’ offices and state houses over the past twenty or so years. He then, through a triangular model, explores what actually happened in terms of policy outcomes and directional changes based on this political shift. What Grossmann finds, which might be a bit surprising, is that, overall, the size of state governments was not reduced under conservative leadership. He also finds that state government spending was not substantially reduced either. Grossmann argues that the policy outcomes did not necessarily match the political rhetoric on which Republicans campaigned to achieve these statewide offices.

Red State Blues provides a systematic examination of policies passed across statehouses during the course of the last twenty-five years and finds that there are some gains made in regard to passage of socially conservative policies, particularly around abortion and the deregulation of guns. Grossmann also observes that criminal justice reform, decriminalization and legalization of marijuana, and same-sex marriage have all seen state-level success in terms of liberalized policy outcomes. In some cases, there has been bi-partisan support for these more progressive policies even while the state house and governors’ mansions have been dominated by more conservative Republicans. Red State Blues concludes that even with substantial electoral successes, the conservative revolution to curtail the size, cost, and scope of state-level government has not necessarily brought the anticipated outcomes. The data and the analysis bolster this conclusion, noting that it is much more difficult to cut spending and fundamentally change the way that state-level government works.

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).

In his book Red State Blues: How the Conservative Revolution Stalled in the States (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Matt Grossmann examines, first, the watershed event of Republican takeovers of governors’ offices and state houses over the past twenty or so years. He then, through a triangular model, explores what actually happened in terms of policy outcomes and directional changes based on this political shift. What Grossmann finds, which might be a bit surprising, is that, overall, the size of state governments was not reduced under conservative leadership. He also finds that state government spending was not substantially reduced either. Grossmann argues that the policy outcomes did not necessarily match the political rhetoric on which Republicans campaigned to achieve these statewide offices.

Red State Blues provides a systematic examination of policies passed across statehouses during the course of the last twenty-five years and finds that there are some gains made in regard to passage of socially conservative policies, particularly around abortion and the deregulation of guns. Grossmann also observes that criminal justice reform, decriminalization and legalization of marijuana, and same-sex marriage have all seen state-level success in terms of liberalized policy outcomes. In some cases, there has been bi-partisan support for these more progressive policies even while the state house and governors’ mansions have been dominated by more conservative Republicans. Red State Blues concludes that even with substantial electoral successes, the conservative revolution to curtail the size, cost, and scope of state-level government has not necessarily brought the anticipated outcomes. The data and the analysis bolster this conclusion, noting that it is much more difficult to cut spending and fundamentally change the way that state-level government works.

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).

In Creating the Law: State Supreme Court Opinions and The Effect of Audiences (Routledge, 2019), Michael Romano and Todd Curry examine whether judges tailor their language in order to avoid retribution during their retention elections. Using an extensive dataset that includes the text of all death penalty and education decisions issued by state supreme courts from 1995–2010, Romano and Curry examine the connection between retention incentives and legal language choices. In doing so, they find that judges write with their audience in mind, and emphasize dueling strategies of justification and persuasion in order to appeal to diverse audiences that may be paying attention.

Michael Romano is an assistant professor of political science at Shenandoah University; Todd Curry is an associate professor of political science at the University of Texas, El Paso.