Donald Trump famously said “We’re going to win so much you may even get tired of winning.” Tell that to the losers of politics; those who have lost major elections or key political debates. We rarely focus on those who have lost, but Jeffrey Tulis and Nicole Mellow suggest we can learn a lot from the losers. In Legacies of Losing in American Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2018), they demonstrate that in three key points in American political history, the losing side won a lot more than we typically acknowledge or understand. Focusing on the founding period, the Civil War era, and the time after the passage of the New Deal, they show how the direction of the country was greatly shaped by defeat.
Tulis teaches American politics and political theory at the University of Texas at Austin. Mellow is professor of political science at Williams College.
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