New Books in American Politics

Today Spiro Agnew is best known for his resignation from the vice presidency of the United States as part of a plea bargain deal related to a legal case involving bribes he took as a public official. In Republican Populist: Spiro Agnew and the Origins of Donald Trump’s America (University of Virginia Press, 2019), however, Charles J. Holden, Zach Messitte, and Jerald Podair present Agnew as a progenitor of the conservative populism associated today with America’s 45th president. As Holden explains, Agnew enjoyed a rapid rise in politics, going from his first election to a county office to the vice presidency in little more than a decade. Impressing many conservatives with his response as Maryland governor to riots in Baltimore, as vice president Agnew burnished his standing with them with a series of speeches that further fueled his popularity within both the Republican Party and much of the country. Though Agnew’s plea deal brought his political career to an ignominious and premature end, much of his rhetoric would be echoed by others in the decades to come, fueling changes within the GOP and becoming Agnew’s greatest political legacy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Agent of Change: Adela Sloss-Vento, Mexican American Civil Rights Activist and Texas Feminist (University of Texas Press, 2020), Cynthia E. Orozco traces the life of Adela Sloss-Vento, a twentieth-century Mexican American woman civil rights activist in Texas. In this episode, Orozco discusses the way Sloss-Vento constructed a modern gendered self-hood, which allowed her to join various movements as a public intellectual relying on her writing and intellect to challenge electoral politics, patriarchal rule, and racial exclusion. By writing a biography of Sloss-Vento, Orozco eloquently gives readers an understanding into the everyday life of middle-class Mexican American women who have shaped community concerns into political issues. Adela Sloss-Vento’s biography is first of its kind, this book pushes the field of Latinx history to consider what women’s lives can tell about state and national debates, such as civic engagement, civil rights, and gendered expectations.Tiffany Jasmin González is an AAUW Fellow and Ph.D. Candidate of History at Texas A&M University. Her research centers on the 20th-century US, Latinx history, American politics, social movements, borderlands, and women & gender. Her dissertation, Representation for a Change: Women in Government and the Chicana/o Civil Rights Movement in Texas.  You can follow Tiffany on Twitter @T_J_Gonzalez Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In their new book, Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior (Princeton University Press, 2020), political scientists Ismail K. White and Chryl N. Laird explore the political behavior of African American voters in the United States and examine extensive data to determine how this particular group of voters have operated as a fairly unified voting block over the course of many election cycles. The research is fascinating, delineating the ideological fissures within the African-American community while also analyzing the voting patterns of African Americans and their inclination to remain loyal Democratic voters. Steadfast Democrats spends time examining the historical roots of this unified voting behavior, noting the roles that slavery and segregation played in creating the tightly connected communities in which many African Americans live and work.White and Laird pay particular attention to how these connections operate in terms of norms in political behavior, building on linked fate theories, but distinguishing differences in terms of understanding how ideology and political behavior operate in context of partisan loyalty. White and Laird explain these dynamics through their theory of racialized social constraint and they build their research from survey data about voting patterns and behaviors, while adding in supplemental, experimental research to test these dynamics and norm enforcement. The research is not necessarily limited to black political behavior in the U.S., and the conclusion of Steadfast Democrats takes the theoretical framework of norm enforcement and community unity and examines other groups in the United States that operate along similar patterns and dynamics.Steadfast Democrats:  is a window into understanding why and how African American voters in the United States remain a strongly unified voting bloc, even among many differences of opinion, a diversity of perspective, and a variety of lived experiences.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), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Christina Wolbrecht and J. Kevin Corder have a new book that builds on their previous work exploring women and suffrage in the United States, Counting Women’s Ballots: Female Voters from Suffrage through the New Deal (Cambridge University Press, 2016). A Century of Votes for Women: American Elections Since Suffrage (Cambridge University Press, 2020), arriving as we mark the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, explores women as voters in the United States while examining the contexts and changes that surround women participating in politics. Wolbrecht and Corder weave together a variety of methodological frameworks to guide the reader through an understanding of both women and men as voters during the past hundred years, examining voter data that they have spent years compiling from a variety of sources.A Century of Votes for Women: American Elections Since Suffrage also provides well-documented and important historical frameworks in which to consider this data, as the authors sketch out the legal, cultural, economic, and electoral shifts that transpire, at different speeds over the course of the century. These shifts in “orders” – the legal order, the gender order, electoral behavior, the family, the economic order, etc. – may move in the same direction, but they are often in tension with each other because the rate of change is not the same. Wolbrecht and Corder also parse out differences in ballot access for women—where racial and economic prohibitions also combined to preclude different groups of women (African American, immigrant, etc.) from fully exercising the franchise. This is a fascinating book, providing the reader with broad policy considerations, historical frameworks, and rich data to understand the integration of women as voters, but also the way in which we think about gender distinctions in context of politics.As part of our discussion, we also dive into the concept of republican motherhood and understandings of the social context of gender. Both of these parts of the broader conversation highlight ongoing complications within the narratives that surround any discussion of women in politics.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), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of the most divisive international issues in American politics today is over Israel and Palestine. The close ties between Israel and the United States are very strong and see considerable cooperation between the two countries. However, that cooperation is also challenged because of the status of the Palestinian people and growing concern over their human rights. This has led to increasingly bitter criticisms of Israel, on the one hand, and denunciations of Israel’s critics in the United States for perceived and real anti-Semitism on the other. It threatens to split apart certain groups in the Democratic Party, for example.Michael Fischbach’s Black Power and Palestine told one part of this history by examining how the issue of Palestine created fissures among black power and civil rights activists from the 1960s onward. Fischbach has now written an additional book examining the effects of the Israel-Palestine issue on domestic American politics with The Movement and the Middle East: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Divided the American Left (Stanford University Press, 2019). Fischbach examines the way that a host of groups on the American found themselves divided over which country they ought to support and how to fit that support into campaigns against imperialism or U.S. foreign policy. While most of the left ultimately shifted over to supporting Israel, today those same discussions are playing out in mainstream political parties.Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his new book Muslim American Politics and the Future of US Democracy (New York University Press, 2019), Edward E. Curtis IV interrogates the limitations of American liberalism in light of the states’ and its various actor’s exclusionary politics and rhetoric around Muslim American citizens. Curtis argues that the place of Muslim Americans in the narrative and praxis of American law, politics, rights discourse, and much are, must be questioned. To do so, the book examines various case studies of Muslim American institutions, figures, soldiers, and women who have navigated and negotiated their place within American democracy as citizens. For instance, the Nation of Islam (NOI) is one such case study explored in the book.Curtis considers how the NOI maintained certain forms of American liberalism (i.e., use of law and incurring of capital) while challenging others (i.e., racial and religious logics) as the movement developed. While Malcolm X (El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz) quintessentially models political dissent against American imperialism precisely because of his Islamic ethics and revolutionary politics. Both in and beyond his involvement in the NOI, Malcolm X’s politics was defined by global pan-African movements, as well as by revolutionary Muslim state leaders like Egypt’s Gamal Abdul Nasser. Using various other such examples, from the ways in which Muslim American women’s bodies were used by the nation state to justify foreign policies and military interventions to the memorialization of fallen Muslim American soldiers by American politicians, Curtis provocatively challenges his readers to content with the exclusionary, problematic, and complex rhetoric of American liberalism’s treatment of Muslim Americans as second-class citizens and Muslim Americans’ responses to this injustice. The book is a must read for scholars interested in American Islam and politics, while chapters of the book can also be accessibly used in courses on contemporary Islam, American Islam, and religion and politics.Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. Her research areas are on contemporary Sufism in North America and South Asia. She is the author of Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism (Bloombsury Press, 2018) and a co-author of Contemporary Sufism: Piety, Politics, and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2017). More details about her research and scholarship may be found on here and here. You can follow her on Twitter via @shobhanaxavier Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Since 2008, the Tea Party and the Resistance have caused some major shake-ups for the Republican and Democratic parties. The changes fall outside the scope of traditional party politics, and outside the realm of traditional social science research. To better understand what’s going on Theda Skocpol, the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Strategy at Harvard and Director of the Scholars Strategy Network, convened a group of researchers to study the people and organizations and at the heart of these grassroots movements.Skocpol joins us this week to discuss their findings and the new book (co-edited with Caroline Tervo) Upending American Politics: Polarizing Parties, Ideological Elites, and Citizen Activists from the Tea Party to the Anti-Trump Resistance (Oxford University Press, 2020). Her work in particular focuses on the Tea Party and includes interviews with Tea Party members across the country. We also discuss the Resistance and whether these oppositional forces to the party in power are likely to continue after November’s election.Jenna Spinelle is a journalism instructor at Penn State, host of the Democracy Works podcast, produced by Penn State’s McCourtney Institute for Democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sarah Burns’ new book The Politics of War Powers: The Theory and History of Presidential Unilateralism (University Press of Kansas, 2020) pulls together distinct threads in analyzing the theoretical framing of presidential power in the American constitutional system and then tracing that power through forty-five presidents. Burns begins by assessing Locke’s impact on the constitutional design of the presidency and then turning her attention to the more substantial contributions made by Montesquieu, since Montesquieu had an equally sizeable impact on the Founders and their thinking about this office. There were great tensions at the time of the Founding about the powers that the president has in pursuing war and military engagements. The Politics of War Powers pays close attention to the distinctions made in the Constitution between the role of the legislature in declaring war, and the role of the president in prosecuting war. This is the foundation for Burns’ analysis of presidential implementation of these powers over the course of more than 200 years, and she carefully examines these theoretical foundations, devoting the first third of The Politics of War Powers to unpacking and discussing the competing views of this important and, at times, suspect, power.Following from this theoretical basis, The Politics of War Powers dives into deeply researched explorations of not only the presidents themselves and how they thought about and used their war powers, but also how and where Congress acted and responded. This dimension of the analysis is particularly important to consider, and Burns sketches the ways in which the early Congress exerted its authority and constitutional role in regard to war and the war powers embedded in the Constitution. She then goes on to explore the tension between the executive and the legislature over the course of a number of military engagements that pressed on these competing capacities. The final section of the book outlines the ways in which presidential war powers have grown substantially and the legal reasoning that has grown up around these powers as Congress has stepped back from its own role in regard to war powers. In many ways, The Politics of War Powers is as much about congressional engagement or abdication in its constitutional role as it is about the expansion of presidential power. The delicate balance between the branches has shifted rather substantially, according to Burns’ analysis, and The Politics of War Powers draws out the ways in which this balance has shifted over the course of American history and political development.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). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Though the story of emancipation is well known in American history, the roles of many of the key figures involved in it are often overlooked. Among them is James Mitchell Ashley, the Ohio congressman who shepherded the Thirteenth Amendment through the House of Representatives. In The Forgotten Emancipator: James Mitchell Ashley and the Ideological Origins of Reconstruction (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Rebecca E. Zietlow recounts the intellectual development of Ashley as an abolitionist and how he sought to turn freedom into a reality for millions of African Americans. As Zietlow explains, an important strain in Ashley’s thinking was his commitment to the free labor ideas prominent in the Democratic Party in the antebellum era. As a committed abolitionist, he played a prominent role in the emergence of the Republican Party in Ohio in the 1850s culminating in his election to Congress in 1858. As a representative during one of the critical period in the nation’s history, Ashley was at the forefront of Congress’ response to the issue of slavery during the Civil War, working not just to pass the amendment that ended the “peculiar institution” but to craft legislation designed to ensure that the freedom won by African Americans was real and not undermined by the unreconstructed Southern governments in power in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

School choice, widely touted as a system that would ensure underprivileged youth have an equal opportunity in education, has grown in popularity in the past fifteen years. The strategies and rhetoric of school choice, however, resemble those of segregationists who closed public schools and funded private institutions to block African American students from integrating with their white peers in the wake of the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision.In Overturning Brown: The Segregationist Legacy of the Modern School Choice Movement (NewSouth Books, 2020), Steve Suitts examines the parallels between de facto segregationist practices and the modern school choice movement. He exposes the dangers lying behind the smoke and mirrors of the so-called civil rights policies of Betsy DeVos and the education privatization lobbies. Economic and educational disparities have expanded rather than contracted in the years following Brown, and post-Jim Crow discriminatory policies drive inequality and poverty today. Suitts deftly reveals the risk that America and its underprivileged youth face as school voucher programs funnel public funds into predominantly white and often wealthy private schools and charter schoolsStephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices