The Longest Debate

The Longest Debate
Author: Charles W. Whalen
Publisher:
Total Pages: 332
Release: 1985
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780932020345

Describes how some of the decade's most important legislation made its way through Congress.

First to the Party

First to the Party
Author: Christopher Baylor
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2018
Genre: History
ISBN: 0812249631

What determines the interests, ideologies, and alliances that make up political parties? In its entire history, the United States has had only a handful of party transformations. First to the Party concludes that groups like unions and churches, not voters or politicians, are the most consistent influences on party transformation.

The Long Southern Strategy

The Long Southern Strategy
Author: Angie Maxwell
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 561
Release: 2019
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190265965

In The Long Southern Strategy, Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields trace the consequences of the GOP's decision to court white voters in the South. Over time, Republicans adopted racially coded, anti-feminist, and evangelical Christian rhetoric and policies, making its platform more southern and more partisan, and the remodel paid off. This strategy has helped the party reach new voters and secure electoral victories, up to and including the 2016 election. Now, in any Republican primary, the most southern-presenting candidate wins, regardless of whether that identity is real or performed. Using an original and wide-ranging data set of voter opinions, Maxwell and Shields examine what southerners believe and show how Republicans such as Donald Trump stoke support in the South and among southern-identified voters across the nation.

The Gifted Generation

The Gifted Generation
Author: David Goldfield
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 569
Release: 2017-11-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 162040088X

A sweeping and path-breaking history of the post–World War II decades, during which an activist federal government guided the country toward the first real flowering of the American Dream. In The Gifted Generation, historian David Goldfield examines the generation immediately after World War II and argues that the federal government was instrumental in the great economic, social, and environmental progress of the era. Following the sacrifices of the Greatest Generation, the returning vets and their children took the unprecedented economic growth and federal activism to new heights. This generation was led by presidents who believed in the commonwealth ideal: the belief that federal legislation, by encouraging individual opportunity, would result in the betterment of the entire nation. In the years after the war, these presidents created an outpouring of federal legislation that changed how and where people lived, their access to higher education, and their stewardship of the environment. They also spearheaded historic efforts to level the playing field for minorities, women and immigrants. But this dynamic did not last, and Goldfield shows how the shrinking of the federal government shut subsequent generations off from those gifts. David Goldfield brings this unprecedented surge in American legislative and cultural history to life as he explores the presidencies of Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Lyndon Baines Johnson. He brilliantly shows how the nation's leaders persevered to create the conditions for the most gifted generation in U.S. history.

The Last Liberal Republican

The Last Liberal Republican
Author: John Roy Price
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2023-11-17
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0700636137

The Last Liberal Republican is a memoir from one of Nixon’s senior domestic policy advisors. John Roy Price—a member of the moderate wing of the Republican Party, a cofounder of the Ripon Society, and an employee on Nelson Rockefeller’s campaigns—joined Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and later John D. Ehrlichman, in the Nixon White House to develop domestic policies, especially on welfare, hunger, and health. Based on those policies, and the internal White House struggles around them, Price places Nixon firmly in the liberal Republican tradition of President Theodore Roosevelt, New York governor Thomas E. Dewey, and President Dwight Eisenhower. Price makes a valuable contribution to our evolving scholarship and understanding of the Nixon presidency. Nixon himself lamented that he would be remembered only for Watergate and China. The Last Liberal Republican provides firsthand insight into key moments regarding Nixon’s political and policy challenges in the domestic social policy arena. Price offers rich detail on the extent to which Nixon and his staff straddled a precarious balance between a Democratic-controlled Congress and an increasingly powerful conservative tide in Republican politics. The Last Liberal Republican provides a blow-by-blow inside view of how Nixon surprised the Democrats and shocked conservatives with his ambitious proposal for a guaranteed family income. Beyond Nixon’s surprising embrace of what we today call universal basic income, the thirty-seventh president reordered and vastly expanded the patchy food stamp program he inherited and built nutrition education and children’s food services into schools. Richard Nixon even almost achieved a national health insurance program: fifty years ago, with a private sector framework as part of his generous benefits insurance coverage for all, Nixon included coverage of preexisting conditions, prescription drug coverage for all, and federal subsidies for those who could not afford the premiums. The Last Liberal Republican will be a valuable resource for presidency scholars who are studying Nixon, his policies, the state of the Republican Party, and how the Nixon years relate to the rise of the modern conservative movement.

The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism

The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism
Author: Theda Skocpol
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2016
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190633662

In this penetrating new study, Skocpol of Harvard University, one of today's leading political scientists, and co-author Williamson go beyond the inevitable photos of protesters in tricorn hats and knee breeches to provide a nuanced portrait of the Tea Party. What they find is sometimes surprising.

The Politics of Voter Suppression

The Politics of Voter Suppression
Author: Tova Andrea Wang
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2012-07-27
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0801466032

The Politics of Voter Suppression arrives in time to assess actual practices at the polls this fall and to reengage with debates about voter suppression tactics such as requiring specific forms of identification. Tova Andrea Wang 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 tactics that have been employed to suppress voting in recent elections are not novel, she finds, 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. Wang 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. Wang 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. Wang identifies and describes a number of specific legitimate and positive reforms that will increase voter turnout.