A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY9 start with N start with N
The transformation from an undifferentiated public to a surfeit of interest groups has become yet another distinguishing feature of the increasing polarization of American politics. Jill Edy and Patrick Meirick contend that the media has played a key role in this splintering. A Nation Fragmented reveals how the content and character of the public agenda has transformed as the media environment evolved from network television and daily newspapers in the late 1960s to today’s saturated social media world with 200 cable channels.
The authors seek to understand what happened as the public’s sense of shared priorities deteriorated. They consider to what extent our public agenda has “fallen apart” as attention to news has declined, and to what extent we have been “driven apart” by changes in the issue agendas of news. Edy and Meirick also show how public attention is limited and spread too thin except in cases where a highly consistent news agenda can provoke a more focused public agenda.
A Nation Fragmented explores the media’s influence and political power and, ultimately, how contemporary democracy works.
In National Insecurity ten prominent experts describe, from an insider perspective, what went wrong with U.S. intelligence and what will be necessary to fix it. Drawing on their experience in government administration, research, and the foreign service, they propose a radical rethinking of the United States' intelligence needs in the post-Cold War world. In addition, they offer a coherent and unified plan for reform that can simultaneously protect U. S. security and uphold the values of our democratic system.
As we now know, even during the Cold War, when intelligence was seen as a matter of life and death, our system served us badly. It provided unreliable information, which led to a grossly inflated military budget, as it wreaked havoc around the world, supporting corrupt regimes, promoting the drug trade, and repeatedly violating foreign and domestic laws. Protected by a shroud of secrecy, it paid no price for its mistakes. Instead it grew larger and more insulated every year.
Taking into consideration our strategic interests abroad as well as the price of covert operations in dollars, in reliability, and in good will, every American taxpayer can be informed by and will want to read this book. National Insecurity is essential for readers interested in contemporary political issues, international relations, U.S. history, public policy issues, foreign policy, intelligence reform, and political science.
In NATO and the UN, Lawrence Kaplan, one of the leading experts on NATO, examines the intimate and often contentious relations between the two and describes how this relationship has changed over the course of two generations. Kaplan documents the many interactions between them throughout their interconnected history, focusing on the major flashpoints where either NATO clashed with UN leadership, the United States and the Soviet Union confronted each other directly, or fissures within the Atlantic alliance were dramatized in UN sessions. He draws on the organizations’ records as well as unpublished files from the National Archives and its counterparts in Britain, France, and Germany to provide the best account yet of working relations between the two organizations. By examining their complex connection with regard to such conflicts as the Balkan wars, Kaplan enhances our understanding of both institutions.
Crisis management has been a source of conflict between the two in the past but has also served as an incentive for collaboration, and Kaplan shows how this peculiar but persistent relationship has functioned. Although the Cold War years are gone, the UN remains the setting where NATO problems have played out, as they have in Iraq during recent decades. And it is to NATO that the UN has turned for military power to face crises in the Balkans, Middle East, and South Asia.
Kaplan stresses the importance of both organizations in the twenty-first century, recognizing their potential to advance global peace and security while showing how their tangled history explains the obstacles that stand in the way. His work offers significant findings that will especially impact our understanding of NATO while filling a sizable gap in our understanding of post-World War II diplomacy.
For a half century following the end of World War II, the seemingly permanent cold war provided the United States with an organizing logic that governed nearly every aspect of American society and culture, giving rise to an unwavering belief in the nation's exceptionalism in global affairs and world history. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, this cold war paradigm was replaced by a series of new ideological narratives that ultimately resulted in the establishment of another potentially endless war: the global war on terror.
In The New American Exceptionalism, pioneering scholar Donald E. Pease traces the evolution of these state fantasies and shows how they have shaped U.S. national identity since the end of the cold war, uncovering the ideological and cultural work required to convince Americans to surrender their civil liberties in exchange for the illusion of security. His argument follows the chronology of the transitions between paradigms from the inauguration of the New World Order under George H. W. Bush to the homeland security state that George W. Bush's administration installed in the wake of 9/11. Providing clear and convincing arguments about how the concept of American exceptionalism was reformulated and redeployed in this era, Pease examines a wide range of cultural works and political spectacles, including the exorcism of the Vietnam syndrome through victory in the Persian Gulf War and the creation of Islamic extremism as an official state enemy.
At the same time, Pease notes that state fantasies cannot altogether conceal the inconsistencies they mask, showing how such events as the revelations of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and the exposure of government incompetence after Hurricane Katrina opened fissures in the myth of exceptionalism, allowing Barack Obama to challenge the homeland security paradigm with an alternative state fantasy that privileges fairness, inclusion, and justice.
Historically, race has always been at the heart of American politics, and southern politics more specifically. Southern elections revolved almost entirely around racial issues during the 1950s and 1960s as debates raged over integration of schools, voting rights, and busing patterns. The election of George Wallace as governor of Alabama in 1962 underscored the electoral power of ruthless racial rhetoric, not only in Alabama, but throughout the South and the entire country. Almost 40 years later, segregation is no longer legal, tensions between blacks and whites have lessened, and the influx of large numbers of African Americans into the electorate has forced politicians to court black voters.
Matthew Streb finds, however, that although extreme racial rhetoric has disappeared from the modern campaign trail, voters are still polarized along racial lines. By comparing gubernatorial campaigns in four southern and three northern states-Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas, Virginia, Ohio, Iowa, and Massachusetts-the author examines how candidates use, or fail to use, race in their campaign strategies. He demonstrates that race indeed remains a significant factor in American elections, couched in alternative issues, such as affirmative action, profiling, and social welfare.
Streb's analysis of the appeal by politicians for the elite vote and the public vote reveals that class has replaced race as a definitive issue in American politics. This book will, therefore, be important not only to academic libraries and students and scholars of political science, southern history, and civil rights, but also to pollsters, campaign strategists, and state political party officials.
"Well written and, while indispensable for college courses, should appeal beyond academic audiences to anyone interested in how well we govern ourselves. . . . I cannot help regarding it as a grand sequel for my own The Imperial Presidency."
---Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
Has the imperial presidency returned? This question has been on the minds of many contemporary political observers, as recent American administrations have aimed to consolidate power.
In The New Imperial Presidency, Andrew Rudalevige suggests that the congressional framework meant to advise and constrain presidential conduct since Watergate has slowly eroded. Rudalevige describes the evolution of executive power in our separated system of governance. He discusses the abuse of power that prompted what he calls the "resurgence regime" against the imperial presidency and inquires as to how and why---over the three decades that followed Watergate---presidents have regained their standing.
Chief executives have always sought to interpret constitutional powers broadly. The ambitious president can choose from an array of strategies for pushing against congressional authority; finding scant resistance, he will attempt to expand executive control. Rudalevige's important and timely work reminds us that the freedoms secured by our system of checks and balances do not proceed automatically but depend on the exertions of public servants and the citizens they serve. His story confirms the importance of the "living Constitution," a tradition of historical experiences overlaying the text of the Constitution itself.
In No Caption Needed, Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites provide the definitive study of the iconic photograph as a dynamic form of public art. Their critical analyses of nine individual icons explore the photographs themselves and their subsequent circulation through an astonishing array of media, including stamps, posters, billboards, editorial cartoons, TV shows, Web pages, tattoos, and more. Iconic images are revealed as models of visual eloquence, signposts for collective memory, means of persuasion across the political spectrum, and a crucial resource for critical reflection.
Arguing against the conventional belief that visual images short-circuit rational deliberation and radical critique, Hariman and Lucaites make a bold case for the value of visual imagery in a liberal-democratic society. No Caption Needed is a compelling demonstration of photojournalism’s vital contribution to public life.
Few question the “right turn” America took after 1966, when liberal political power began to wane. But if they did, No Right Turn suggests, they might discover that all was not really “right” with the conservative golden age. A provocative overview of a half century of American politics, the book takes a hard look at the counterrevolutionary dreams of liberalism’s enemies—to overturn people’s reliance on expanding government, reverse the moral and sexual revolutions, and win the Culture War—and finds them largely unfulfilled.
David Courtwright deftly profiles celebrated and controversial figures, from Clare Boothe Luce, Barry Goldwater, and the Kennedy brothers to Jerry Falwell, David Stockman, and Lee Atwater. He shows us Richard Nixon’s keen talent for turning popular anxieties about morality and federal meddling to Republican advantage—and his inability to translate this advantage into reactionary policies. Corporate interests, boomer lifestyles, and the media weighed heavily against Nixon and his successors, who placated their base with high-profile attacks on crime, drugs, and welfare dependency. Meanwhile, religious conservatives floundered on abortion and school prayer, obscenity, gay rights, and legalized vices like gambling, and fiscal conservatives watched in dismay as the bills mounted.
We see how President Reagan’s mélange of big government, strong defense, lower taxes, higher deficits, mass imprisonment, and patriotic symbolism proved an illusory form of conservatism. Ultimately, conservatives themselves rebelled against George W. Bush’s profligate brand of Reaganism. Courtwright’s account is both surprising and compelling, a bracing argument against some of our most cherished clichés about recent American history.
Ted Osius, former ambassador during the Obama administration, offers a vivid account, starting in the 1990s, of the various forms of diplomacy that made this reconciliation possible. He considers the leaders who put aside past traumas to work on creating a brighter future, including senators John McCain and John Kerry, two Vietnam veterans and ideological opponents who set aside their differences for a greater cause, and Pete Peterson—the former POW who became the first U.S. ambassador to a new Vietnam. Osius also draws upon his own experiences working first-hand with various Vietnamese leaders and traveling the country on bicycle to spotlight the ordinary Vietnamese people who have helped bring about their nation’s extraordinary renaissance.
With a foreword by former Secretary of State John Kerry, Nothing Is Impossible tells an inspiring story of how international diplomacy can create a better world.
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