New Books in American Politics

A sweeping and surprising new understanding of extreme poverty in America from the authors of the acclaimed $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America. Three of the nation’s top scholars – known for tackling key mysteries about poverty in America – turn their attention from the country’s poorest people to its poorest places. Based on a fresh, data-driven approach, they discover that America’s most disadvantaged communities are not the big cities that get the most notice. Instead, nearly all are rural. Little if any attention has been paid to these places or to the people who make their lives there. This revelation set in motion a five-year journey across Appalachia, the Cotton and Tobacco Belts of the Deep South, and South Texas. Immersing themselves in these communities, pouring over centuries of local history, attending parades and festivals, the authors trace the legacies of the deepest poverty in America—including inequalities shaping people’s health, livelihoods, and upward social mobility for families. Wrung dry by powerful forces and corrupt government officials, the “internal colonies” in these regions were exploited for their resources and then left to collapse. The unfolding revelation in The Injustice of Place: Uncovering the Legacy of Poverty in America (Mariner Books, 2023) is not about what sets these places apart, but about what they have in common—a history of raw, intensive resource extraction and human exploitation. This history and its reverberations demand a reckoning and a commitment to wage a new War on Poverty, with the unrelenting focus on our nation’s places of deepest need.Stephen Pimpare is a Senior Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sarah Coleman, an historian at Texas State University, is the author of an important and topical book about immigration policy in the United States. The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America (Princeton UP, 2023) focuses much less on the often-discussed physical border between the United States and other countries, and more so on the internal touchpoints where immigration federalism takes place. Coleman does a number of things in this book, including providing a fascinating overview of immigration policies and prohibitions throughout U.S. history, but not in a linear mode—instead, she integrates the historical record into the discussion of the domestic policies that were developed over the past 70 years. These policies are the central focus of the book, since it is the structure, execution, and implementation of these policies that constrain and impact citizens and non-citizens in the United States. The Walls Within examines education policy and court decisions, labor policy and the debate about employer sanctions, welfare policy and questions of immigrant contributions and benefits, and, finally, civil liberties and localized immigration enforcement regimes.Given the current political debate around immigration, the complexity of the politics within and around that debate, and the constantly looming image of “the wall” at the southern border, Coleman’s book explains and clarifies so much of the history, political conversations, policies, and implementation of immigration inside the United States. Sifting through demographic changes, economic shifts, congressional legislation, and court challenges, Coleman weaves together the different policies and outcomes, and the different forms of enforcement. This is what contributes to immigration federalism, since restrictions, prohibitions, and denial of opportunities generally happen at a state or local level. Thus, where immigration policy is actually touching people—citizens and non-citizens alike—is not, per se, where a Border Control officer examines a passport or a document, but in implementing sanctions against employers or in denying a second-grader breakfast before school. The exploration of these touchpoints highlights the themes running through The Walls Within: political culture, electoral politics, and political economy. Coleman notes that there are approximately 24 million immigrants in the United States, and about half that number are unauthorized. Most of the unauthorized immigrants are not coming across either the northern or southern border of the United States but are overstaying visas. Thus, the imaginary that often wraps around these questions is disconnected from the reality of authorized and unauthorized immigration in the United States. The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America works to clarify our current situation and how we ended up where we are, while also explaining the policies and actions that were put into place along the way and how those policies and actions shape the actual immigration landscape in the U.S.Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With the US Supreme Court confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson, “it makes sense to revisit the life and work of another Black woman who profoundly shaped the law: Constance Baker Motley” (CNN). Born to an aspirational blue-collar family during the Great Depression, Constance Baker Motley was expected to find herself a good career as a hairdresser. Instead, she became the first black woman to argue a case in front of the Supreme Court, the first of ten she would eventually argue. The only black woman member in the legal team at the NAACP’s Inc. Fund at the time, she defended Martin Luther King in Birmingham, helped to argue in Brown vs. The Board of Education, and played a critical role in vanquishing Jim Crow laws throughout the South. She was the first black woman elected to the state Senate in New York, the first woman elected Manhattan Borough President, and the first black woman appointed to the federal judiciary.Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality (Knopf Doubleday, 2023) captures the story of a remarkable American life, a figure who remade law and inspired the imaginations of African Americans across the country. Burnished with an extraordinary wealth of research, award-winning, esteemed Civil Rights and legal historian and dean of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Tomiko Brown-Nagin brings Motley to life in these pages. Brown-Nagin compels us to ponder some of our most timeless and urgent questions–how do the historically marginalized access the corridors of power? What is the price of the ticket? How does access to power shape individuals committed to social justice? In Civil Rights Queen, she dramatically fills out the picture of some of the most profound judicial and societal change made in twentieth-century America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In my talk with Barry Gewen on his 2020 book, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World (W. W. Norton, 2020), we explore the disparate influences that shaped Kissinger as both an intellectual and as a practitioner of power. Our conversation touches on Kissinger’s upbringing in a German-Jewish community in Bavaria at the time of Hitler’s rise to power and pivots to an understanding of Kissinger’s Realism as his pessimistic yet unwavering approach to foreign affairs and exigencies like the balance of power. In his committed opposition to the Wilsonian creed—the missionary idea of America’s role in the world—Kissinger was decidedly in the camp of the political scientist Hans Morgenthau, a fellow German-Jewish immigrant and mentor of sorts. Barry Gewen, a former editor at The New York Times Book Review, deserves to be heard, and his book deserves to be read, for his judicious, textured appraisal of Kissinger. His Kissinger is neither a war criminal nor a diplomatic magician but one guided by the stern maxim that order is prior to justice in the affairs of an ever-perilous world. Our talk closes with Gewen’s assessment of Kissinger’s thinking on the present-day foreign-policy challenges for the U.S. of China and the Russia-Ukraine war.Veteran journalist Paul Starobin is a former Moscow bureau chief for Business Week and a former contributing editor of The Atlantic. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and many other publications. His latest book, Putin’s Exiles: Their Fight for a Better Russia (Columbia Global Reports) will be published in January. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Natural law theory is known to be more emphasized among Catholics than Protestants. Why is that the case, and should it be? Do Protestants need to focus more on philosophy? Today's guest, Andrew T. Walker of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, discusses why Protestants need natural law too, and specifically the work of the Madison Program’s founder and Director, Professor Robert P. George. We discuss Dr. Walker's book, Social Conservatism for the Common Good: A Protestant Engagement with Robert P. George, which features essays from a variety of Protestant scholars on Professor George and the importance of his contributions to the field of natural law.Andrew T. Walker is associate professor of Christian Ethics at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and an associate dean in their School of Theology. He also serves as the executive director of the Carl F. H. Henry Institute for Evangelical Engagement, as Managing Editor of WORLD opinions, and as a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. More on Natural Law, from a former JMP fellow here. A little bit on New Natural Law here. An overview of John Rawls here. Rawls' "original position," where he advocates for his famous "veil of ignorance" here. His recent article, "True conservatism is not mere progressivism in slow motion" in WORLD Opinions here. His recent book review, "Were problems baked into the American cake?" in WORLD Opinions here. "The Baby and the Bathwater," an essay co-authored by Professor George mentioned during the interview here. Annika Nordquist is the Communications Coordinator of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and host of the Program’s podcast, Madison’s Notes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her concise history Slavery and Abolition in Pennsylvania (Temple UP, 2021), Beverly Tomek corrects the long-held notion that slavery in the North was “not so bad” as, or somehow “more humane” than, in the South due to the presence of abolitionists. While the Quaker presence focused on moral and practical opposition to bondage, slavery was ubiquitous. Nevertheless, Pennsylvania was the first state to pass an abolition law in the United States.Slavery and Abolition in Pennsylvania traces this movement from its beginning to the years immediately following the American Civil War. Discussions of the complexities of the state’s antislavery movement illustrate how different groups of Pennsylvanians followed different paths in an effort to achieve their goal. Tomek also examines the backlash abolitionists and Black Americans faced. In addition, she considers the civil rights movement from the period of state reconstruction through the national reconstruction that occurred after the Civil War.While the past few decades have shed light on enslavement and slavery in the South, much of the story of northern slavery remains hidden. Slavery and Abolition in Pennsylvania tells the full and inclusive story of this history, bringing the realities of slavery, abolition, and Pennsylvania's attempt to reconstruct its post-emancipation society.Beverly C. Tomek is Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences at Monroe County Community College. She is the author of Colonization and Its Discontents: Emancipation, Emigration, and Antislavery in Antebellum Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania Hall: A "Legal Lynching" in the Shadow of the Liberty Bell, as well as the coeditor of New Directions in the Study of African American Recolonization. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Organizing Occupy Wall Street: This is Just Practice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) is the first study of the processes and structures of the Occupy Wall Street movement, written from the perspective of a core organizer who was involved from the inception to the end. While much has been written on OWS, few books have focused on how the movement was organized. Marisa Holmes, an organizer of OWS in New York City, aims to fill this gap by deriving the theory from the practice and analyzing a broad range of original primary sources, from collective statements, structure documents, meeting minutes, and live tweets, to hundreds of hours of footage from the OWS Media Working Group archive. In doing so, she reveals how the movement was organized in practice, which experiments were most successful, and what future generations can learn.Marisa Holmes is an organizer, filmmaker, writer, and educator based in Brooklyn, NY. She is the director of two non-fiction feature films, All Day All Week: An Occupy Wall Street Story, which captures the occupation at Zuccotti Park, and After the Revolution, a non-linear narrative of the post-2011 context in North Africa. In addition, she has authored numerous short films and articles. Her work has appeared in Truthout, Paris-Luttes, Nawaat, PBS, and Al Jazeera, and We Are Many: Reflections on Movement Strategy from Occupation to Liberation. She teaches courses on social movements and media at Rutgers University and Fordham University.Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this 2014 episode from the Institute’s Vault, we hear from Betty Medsger. Medsger was a Washington Post reporter in March 1971, and received a cache of stolen FBI files that detailed the elaborate surveillance activities the bureau was using against Vietnam war protesters and others whom J. Edgar Hoover deemed “subversive.“ All Medsger knew about the documents was that they had been stolen by a group of anonymous individuals who called themselves the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI. In 2014, she revisited the story in her book, The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI (Vintage, 2014). In it, she tells the story of an unlikely group of academics and ordinary citizens who broke into a suburban FBI office and shed light on the way the intelligence community was spying on its own citizens. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I am joined on “America and Beyond” by historian Peter Fritzsche for an appreciation of The Future of Nostalgia (Basic Books), the landmark book published by the late Svetlana Boym in 2001. I do not use the word “landmark” lightly. The Future of Nostalgia is, first, impressively prescient. Pages, as in Boym’s chapter on “Restorative Nostalgia: Conspiracies and Return to Origins,” sound eerily present day. But even more than that, Boym, who died in 2015 from cancer, at the age of 56, bequeathed a rich vocabulary for plumbing the contemporary meanings of nostalgia. Her essential distinction between restorative nostalgia, the politically-toxic desire to “rebuild the lost home,” and reflective nostalgia, the often-sentimental longing for shards of the personal past, endures. In these terms, nostalgia can be a poison—or a cure. My conversation with Peter Fritzsche, author of the 2004 book Stranded in the Present, revisits Boym’s wonderful work and meanders its way into topics like nostalgia as a frame for grasping Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement. Enjoy.Veteran journalist Paul Starobin is a former Moscow bureau chief for Business Week and a former contributing editor of The Atlantic. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and many other publications. His latest book, Putin’s Exiles: Their Fight for a Better Russia (Columbia Global Reports) will be published in January. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

America has relied on public schools for 150 years, but the system is increasingly under attack. With declining enrollment and diminished trust in public education, policies that steer tax dollars into private schools have grown rapidly. To understand how we got here, The Death of Public School: How Conservatives Won the War Over Education in America (Basic Books, 2023) argues, we must look back at the turbulent history of school choice.Cara Fitzpatrick uncovers the long journey of school choice, a story full of fascinating people and strange political alliances. She shows how school choice evolved from a segregationist tool in the South in the 1950s, to a policy embraced by advocates for educational equity in the North, to a conservative strategy for securing government funds for private schools in the twenty-first century. As a result, education is poised to become a private commodity rather than a universal good.The Death of Public School presents the compelling history of the fiercest battle in the history of American education--one that already has changed the future of public schooling.Laura Beth Kelly is an assistant professor of Educational Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices