New Books in American Politics

In From Oligarchy to Republicanism: The Great Task of Reconstruction (University of Missouri Press, 2017) , Forrest Nabors sets out to show that congressional Republicans regarded the work of Reconstruction in the same way they regarded the work of the Founders: as regime change, from monarchy in the one case and from oligarchy in the other, to republicanism. Nabors examines the writings and speeches of Republicans in the Thirty-Eighth, Thirty-Ninth, and Fortieth Congress (1863-1869), recovering their political analysis of the antebellum South. While Reconstruction scholars have typically emphasized black citizenship as the central concern of congressional Republicans, Nabors demonstrates that they identified Southern oligarchy (tightly linked to slavery) as the problem of the age.

Andrew R. Lewis is the author of the new book, The Rights Turn in Conservative Christian Politics: How Abortion Transformed the Culture Wars (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Lewis is assistant professor of political science at the University of Cincinnati and is the book review editor at the journal of Politics & Religion. Following up on recent podcasts with Daniel Bennett and Christopher Baylor, The Rights Turn demonstrates a transformation of American politics with the waning of Christian America. As opposed to conservatives focusing on morality and liberals on rights, both sides now emphasize rights-based arguments to win policy battles and build support. Based on historical and quantitative data, Lewis analyzes evangelical advocacy and public opinion related to abortion, free speech, and the death penalty. He shows how rights claims have been used to protect evangelicals, whose cultural positions are increasingly in the minority.

Heath Brown, associate professor, City University of New York, John Jay College and CUNY Grad Center, hosted this podcast. Please rate the podcast on iTunes and share it on social media.

Christopher Baylor is the author of First to the Party: The Group Origins of Political Transformations (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). Baylor is an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow. Based on substantial archival research, Baylor’s book positions interest groups at the center of what makes parties change. Using the case of civil rights organizations and the Democratic Party in the 1940s and cultural conservative organizations and the Republican Party in the 1980s and 90s, First to the Party shows how groups gain influence within existing political parties and foment transformation. He argues that parties respond less to public opinion and voters than to powerful groups, especially during the nomination process. Baylor deepens what we know about political parties, interest groups, and their interactions.

Heath Brown, associate professor, City University of New York, John Jay College and CUNY Grad Center, hosted this podcast. Please rate the podcast on iTunes and share it on social media.

Over the course of a public career that stretched from the Washington administration to the Mexican-American War, John Quincy Adams became a living link to America’s revolutionary generation. In The Lost Founding Father: John Quincy Adams and the Transformation of American Politics (Liveright, 2017), William J. Cooper describes how Adams held fast to the values of that generation during a time of dramatic political change. Though aspiring to a career in politics from an early age, Adams sought to win office mainly through merit. Thanks to his ability and experience he served in a series of diplomatic and political postings, culminating in his selection by President James Monroe as Secretary of State in 1817. While Adams succeeded Monroe as president in 1825, the controversy surrounding his election thwarted his ambitious agenda and crystalized the development of a new party alignment that contributed to his defeat four years later. Yet Adams’s return to public office with his election to the House gave him an opportunity to play a continuing role on the national scene, particularly as the country’s leaders grappled with the increasingly problematic issues of slavery and territorial expansion.

This week on the podcast, Daniel Bennet joins us to talk about his new book, Defending Faith: The Politics of the Christian Conservative Legal Movement (University Press of Kansas, 2017). Bennett is assistant professor of political science at John Brown University. From Hobby Lobby to Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court has ruled on controversial social policy issues. At the center of many of these cases are a set of legal organizations, what Bennett calls Christian Conservative Legal Organizations or CCLOs, including the American Center for Law and Justice and Alliance Defending Freedom. In his book, he explains how CCLOs advocate for issues central to Christian conservatives, highlights the influence of religious liberty on the CLM’s broader agenda, and reveals how the Christian Right has become accustomed to the courts as a field of battle in today’s culture wars. Bennett studies these groups as a type of interest group and legal advocacy the primary strategy to fulfill their interests.

Timothy LaPira and Herschel Thomas are the authors of Revolving Door Lobbying: Public Service, Private Influence, and the Unequal Representation of Interests (University Press of Kansas, 2017). LaPira is associate professor of political science at James Madison University; Thomas is assistant professor of political science at University of Texas, Arlington.

What is the consequence of the rapid spin of the revolving door in Washington? Once a rarity, today nearly half of members of Congress join a lobbying firm after their time on the Hill ends. In Revolving Door Lobbying, the authors show that they are not alone. Former aides join the ranks of lobbyists and generate massive amounts of revenue for lobbying and law firms. These patterns have changed the political economy of Washington politics. LaPira and Thomas mine a decade of new Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) data to show the way the rise of revolving door lobbying has made representation less equal and enhanced private influence.

The host of this week’s podcast is Heath Brown, associate professor of public policy at the City University of New York, John Jay College and the CUNY Graduate Center.

The New Americans? Immigration, Protest, and The Politics of Latino Identity (University Press of Kansas, 2017) by Heather Silber Mohamed weaves together a number of different strands within the discipline of Political Science in context of the diverse Latino community in the United States. Silber Mohamed integrates analysis of social identity and citizenship, social movements and protest politics, immigration policy, and the multiplicity of communities within the Latino-American population in the U.S. The research for The New Americans? is broad and complex, but the centerpiece of the book are the protests and demonstrations in 2006 in regard to the immigration reform bill that the George W. Bush Administration advocated, and that was debated in the House and the Senate. This piece of legislation and the national conversation that it engendered is the unique case study that Silber Mohamed delves into to expose and analyze the relationship between social movements and understandings of identity and identity-framing, especially within the contemporary Latino-American communities. Silber Mohamed integrated the results from the Latino National Survey in her analysis of political attitudes and shifts of attitudes during this public debate. She traces the history and experiences of distinct groups within the broad umbrella of the American Latino community, explaining the different approaches each group has towards immigration policy and their understanding of citizenship and political advocacy. Given the more recent high profile and polarizing discussion of immigration in the United States, Silber Mohamed’s book is important contribution to this complex policy arena and our understanding of the many dimensions and political actors within the immigration debate.

Before Transgender actors entered popular culture, and before the “T” was included in LGBT, Transgender activism was a small and marginalized movement. However, though courage and perseverance, Transgender rights began to enter the public consciousness. Drawing on her own life story, Riki Wilchin’s newest book TRANS/gressive: How Transgender Activists took on Gay Rights, Feminism, the Media & Congress…and Won! (Riverdale Avenue Books, 2017) traces the origins of the Transgender movement. From the backwoods of rural Michigan to the nation’s capital, the movement challenged not only conservative politicians and worldviews but also challenged the boundaries of gender, sex, and sexuality within more progressive movements. How do Trans issues and concerns intersect with notions of masculinity and femininity? What was the relationship between the Trans movement and the Gay movement? How do movements transcend the local and become national? Wilchins offers answers to these (and many more) questions within the pages of TRANS/gressive.

In addition to TRANS/gressive, Wilchins is also author to three other books on topics of gender and sexuality: Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion & the End of Gender, Queer Theory/Gender Theory: An Instant Primer, and Voice from Beyond the Sexual Binary. Wilchins’ works has been featured in many periodicals, and Riki has held many trainings on gender norms and nonconformity for audiences that include the White House, Centers for Disease Control, and the office on Women’s Health. Continuing her activism as well as her authorship, Wilchins expects another forthcoming book in the near future.

Nathan Kalmoe and Donald Kinder are the authors of Neither Liberal or Conservative: Ideological Innocence in the American Public (University of Chicago Press, 2017). Kalmoe is an assistant professor of political communication at Louisiana State University and Kinder is the Philip E. Converse Distinguished University Professor at the University of Michigan. Neither Liberal or Conservative looks straightly at what we have known in the past about ideology and the formation of ideology.

Kalmoe and Kinder take up the seminal research of Phillip Converse on “ideological innocence.” What they find largely supports this historic finding that Americans are not that ideological. Several decades later, most of the country remains innocent of ideology. With the exception of some highly engaged and informed individuals, partisanship remains the central organizing feature of political life and identification for most Americans.

William Davenport Mercer‘s Diminishing the Bill of Rights: Barron v. Baltimore and the Foundations of American Liberty (University of Oklahoma Press, 2017) argues that if we want to understand how Americans in the early Republic viewed the sources of their rights, we need look no further than the mud at the bottom of Baltimore harbor. In the early nineteenth century, two men, John Barron, Jr. and John Craig, decided to buy a Baltimore wharf on credit. They were hoping to capitalize on rapidly-expanding commercial growth in city in the wake of the War of 1812. Instead, the city diverted water into the harbor, leaving Barron and Craig’s wharf silted up and the pair with a pile of debt. The men sued, and eventually their case was argued before the Supreme Court. The decision in Barron v. Baltimore, as William Davenport Mercer shows, marked a key development in the history of American constitutionalism. In arguing that the Bill of Rights (and thus, the Fifth Amendment) applied only at the Federal level, the court rejected a multi-sourced view of liberties. The contentious politics of the era, Dr. Mercer argues, precipitated our modern turn toward locating the sources of rights exclusively in documents. Dr. Mercer teaches history and law at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.