New Books in Politics and Polemics

To wrap up the year and look ahead to 2019, we talked about the books we loved. There were so many great books in 2018, that we had the chance to mention just a few. Lilly reviewed her interview with Elizabeth Cohen about The Political Value of Time and Emily Nacol on An Age of Risk. She also mentioned her recent talk with Lynn Vavreck about her co-authored by with Michael Tesler and John Sides, Identity Crisis. On the top of Heath’s list was Jamila Michener’s book on Medicaid, Fragmented Democracy, and Deondra Rose’s book on higher education policy, Citizens by Degree.We finish our conversation with some books we are looking forward to in 2019. Thanks to all of our loyal NB in Political Science podcast listeners! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

One of the themes of the era of Donald Trump is whiteness and white identity. From his first steps into the public eye, Trump used race to frame his positions and relevance. His presidency has been no different.White identity, though, has remained a confusing topic to understand and precisely measure. What does it mean to hold the identity of the dominant racial group? Does white identity even exist? And if it does, what does it mean? Ashley Jardina answers dozens of questions like these in her timely new book, White Identity Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Jardina is assistant professor of political science at Duke University.Where past research on whites' racial attitudes emphasized out-group hostility, Jardina brings into focus the significance of in-group identity and favoritism. White Identity Politics shows that disaffected whites are not just found among the working class; they make up a broad proportion of the American public - with major implications for political behavior, policy preferences, and the future of racial conflict in America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

“One-off” protests don’t change the world; sustained direct action campaigns do. That’s one of the many insights from George Lakey in his new book, How We Win: A Guide to Nonviolent Direct Action Campaigning (Melville House, 2018). Lakey, a retired Swarthmore professor for Issues of Social Change, has been involved in progressive activism for seven decades. In How We Win, he has written practical handbook for budding organizers. Lakey explains how activists can build diverse coalitions, set achievable goals and develop effective tactics. He explores the practical benefit on nonviolent tactics and the importance of persuading “neutrals” to your side. And he draws from his own successes in hopes of passing down knowledge to future generations of changemakers.Bill Scher is a Contributing Editor for POLITICO Magazine. He has provided political commentary on CNN, NPR and MSNBC. He has been published in The New York Times, The New Republic, and The New York Daily News among other publications. He is author of Wait! Don’t Move to Canada, published by Rodale in 2006. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Donald Trump in the United States, Brexit vote in the U.K., various anti-EU parties in Italy, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland, and Hungary, as well as nativist or authoritarian leaders in Turkey, Russia, India, and China—Why has nationalism suddenly returned with a vengeance to the political front stage?  Are we headed back to the type of conflicts between nations that led to two world wars and a Great Depression in the early to mid-20th Century? What are nationalists so angry about concerning free trade and immigration? Why has globalization suddenly become a dirty word for many people? In his new book, The Nationalist Revival: Trade, Immigration, and the Revolt Against Globalization (Columbia Global Reports, 2018), author, Talking-Points Memo editor-at-large, and commentator John B. Judis, explores in his usual expert fashion these intricate and complex issues.Based on his own travels in America, Europe, and Asia, Judis found that almost all people hold some degree of nationalist sentiments. That per contra to the usual liberal, bien-pensant nostrums, in fact nationalism can be the basis of vibrant democracies as well as repressive dictatorships. Today’s outbreak of "us vs. them" nationalism is a plausible reaction to the utopian cosmopolitanism, which advocates open borders, free trade, rampant outsourcing, and has branded unfairly nationalist sentiments as bigotry. As he did for populism in The Populist Explosion, Judis looks at nationalism from its modern origins in the 18th and 19th centuries to the present to help try to find answers to these very important questions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Harkening back to the tribunal on Vietnam once convened by Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre, the World Tribunal on Iraq (WTI) emerged in 2003 from the global antiwar movement that had mobilized against the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq by a US-led coalition.  This decentralized, transnational network of antiwar activists attempted to document and give grounds for the prosecution of war crimes committed by the allied forces.  Ayça Çubukçu's For the Love of Humanity: The World Tribunal on Iraq (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) is a remarkable investigation of the WTI, combining extensive ethnographic fieldwork with close readings of political and legal theory. Çubukçu provides on the ground accounts of the debates and discussions within the WTI, reading them with and as examples of political philosophy in action.  The book engages with urgent questions about the challenges and potentials of horizontal, network forms of political action, transnational politics across differences, and perhaps most fundamentally, with the challenges any anti-imperialist politics faces today.  Through her careful, incisive analysis, Çubukçu convincingly shows that the language of law and global human rights was not merely cynically appropriated by those who pushed for the war on Iraq.  Instead, in complex ways, the ideals of international law and human rights underwrote both the arguments for the war in Iraq and the anti-war praxis of the WTI.  The book thus complicates any attempt to, as the author puts it, simply counterpose “law’s empire” with “empire’s law”, raising critical questions about the relationship between law, human rights, imperialism, and cosmopolitanism.  Required reading for those interested in the contradictions of imperialism and anti-imperialism today, Çubukçu's study attests to the promise and peril captured in the phrase “the love of humanity”.Kamran Moshref is a PhD candidate in Political Science at The Graduate Center, CUNY.  He is a Graduate Fellow at the Center for Global Ethics and Politics at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at the Graduate Center, which co-sponsors the podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

For all of the books written about Winston Churchill, much remains to be said about his extensive life and career. In Churchill: Walking With Destiny(Viking, 2018), Andrew Roberts takes advantage of newly available archival holdings – most notably the diaries of King George VI – to add to our understanding of this vitally important figure. Churchill’s life was never short of drama; born in Blenheim Palace, he spent his early years as a correspondent and a soldier in Britain’s imperial wars before embarking on his long political career. Initially a Conservative like his father, he rose rapidly after joining the Liberal Party, though he switched back after the First World War. His period in the political wilderness in the 1930s was the result of his stands on India and the threat posed by Nazi Germany, with his return to office coming only with Great Britain’s entry into the Second World War. As Roberts explains, his successful wartime leadership came in the face of numerous domestic and international challenges, from colleagues plotting his downfall to the eclipse of British power with the rise of the American and Soviet superpowers, all of which had to be addressed for Britain to triumph in the end. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Whether you love him or hate him, it is indisputable that few, if any, other 20th-century American presidents were as historically consequential as Woodrow Wilson. Historian Patricia O’Toole explores the many complexities and ramifications of the Wilson presidency in her book The Moralist: Woodrow Wilson and the World He Made (Simon and Schuster, 2018). As we near the 100th anniversary of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, O’Toole follows Wilson’s attempt to establish a League of Nation which, while ill-fated in his time, still laid the groundwork for the United Nations. She tackles Wilson’s sorry legacy of racially segregating parts of the federal civil service, arguing Wilson was driven by a desire to accommodate Southern Democratic legislators in order to win their support for his progressive economic agenda. Whether despite or because of his uncompromising, moralistic nature, she concludes that his forceful embrace of internationalism and democracy defined the 20th century and helped transform the world.Bill Scher is a Contributing Editor for POLITICO Magazine. He has provided political commentary on CNN, NPR and MSNBC. He has been published in The New York Times, The New Republic, and The New York Daily News among other publications. He is author of Wait! Don’t Move to Canada, published by Rodale in 2006. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French workerist and autonomist thought, two “imaginative readings of Marx,” and two “unique takes on the body politic.” There are significant implications of these ideas for how we live and work at the contemporary university, and we discussed some of those in our conversation. This is a great book to read and to teach with! Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

In Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America (Princeton University Press, 2018), co-authors John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck explore the underlying question of American identity as a key component within the political landscape that was used during the 2016 primary and general election. Identity Crisis delves into the way that the Republican primary battle was shaped by this question of identity, specifically the ways in which candidate Donald Trump was able to leverage embedded tensions around social identity, especially in regard to issues like immigration. Through the use of substantial data sets that dive into voters’ choices over time, Sides, Tesler, and Vavreck are able to parse policy and issue preferences, how those choices coordinate with partisan inclinations and candidate selection, and what shifted during the course of the election cycle in 2015 and 2016. This incredibly compelling book, accessible to academics and non-academics, examines the tensions around American identity and what it means to be an American today, while exploring how that very idea is contested and seen through partisan lenses. The book examines not only an understanding of individual identity, but also the ways that group identity continues to contribute to further partisan cleavage and polarization. The authors also find interesting backlashes within this political dynamic, as responses to antagonistic attacks on certain groups prompts a variety of responses among voters. Identity Crisis will help readers understand what happened in 2016—from a variety of perspectives and considerations of different dimensions of American politics.This podcast was hosted by Lilly Goren, Professor of Political Science and Global Studies at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. You can follow her on Twitter @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Though early American labor organizers agitated for the eight-hour workday on the grounds that they were entitled to “eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what we will,” free time as a political good has received little attention from politicians and political philosophers. In her book, Free Time (Princeton University Press, 2018), Julie L. Rose explains that this neglect arises from the mistaken characterization of free time as a matter of personal choice and preference. The book instead argues that not only should we understand free time as a resource that is required for the pursuit of one’s chosen ends and for the exercise of formal liberties and opportunities, but also that it is a resource to which citizens are entitled on the basis of the widely held liberal principles of individual freedom and equality. The claim that the fair distribution of free time is required for justice serves as grounds for the book to interrogate a whole host of policy choices—including maximum work hours provisions, restrictions on over time, universal basic income, income subsidies to caregivers, publicly provided caregiving services and facilities for the elderly, disabled, and children, and workplace accommodations, among others. Though Rose notes that the specific choices societies make about how much free time is required and how exactly to guarantee it will vary, she ultimately argues that the just society must ensure that all citizens have their fair share of free time—time not consumed by meeting the necessities of life, time to devote to their own projects and commitments, whatever those might be.Emily K. Crandall is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is a fellow at the Center for Global Ethics and Politics in the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics