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Everything is new in this second version of AEI's all-time bestseller, which brings coverage of the vital trends in American political life up to the present.
The National Book Award Finalist and New York Times bestseller that became a guide and balm for a country struggling to understand the election of Donald Trump "A generous but disconcerting look at the Tea Party. . . . This is a smart, respectful and compelling book." —Jason DeParle, The New York Times Book Review When Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, a bewildered nation turned to Strangers in Their Own Land to understand what Trump voters were thinking when they cast their ballots. Arlie Hochschild, one of the most influential sociologists of her generation, had spent the preceding five years immersed in the community around Lake Charles, Louisiana, a Tea Party stronghold. As Jedediah Purdy put it in the New Republic, "Hochschild is fascinated by how people make sense of their lives. . . . [Her] attentive, detailed portraits . . . reveal a gulf between Hochchild's 'strangers in their own land' and a new elite." Already a favorite common read book in communities and on campuses across the country and called "humble and important" by David Brooks and "masterly" by Atul Gawande, Hochschild's book has been lauded by Noam Chomsky, New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu, and countless others. The paperback edition features a new afterword by the author reflecting on the election of Donald Trump and the other events that have unfolded both in Louisiana and around the country since the hardcover edition was published, and also includes a readers' group guide at the back of the book.
This collection of entries offers a front seat view of the rise, reign, and fall of powerful modern political families and examines the effects they have had on political, social, and economic issues in American society. Modern American Political Dynasties: A Study of Power, Family, and Political Influence is a unique research resource and fascinating read that explores the dynamics and modern America's most influential political families. It provides a thorough study of approximately 20 of the best-known surnames in 20th-century American politics. More than just a biography, it highlights how these families' dynamics have influenced political practice and thought, providing a holistic context for the evolution of political dynasties in the United States. The text includes a historically grounded examination of the crossroads of family and politics as it charts the origins, development, peak strength, and decline of each family. It is the only published volume to include biographical and contextual information on major political dynasties in addition to fascinating research on high-profile personalities. The book is for any research institution collection and will be of interest to both academics and general readers interested in American history and politics.
From the bestselling author of Fatherland and Pompeii, comes the first novel of a trilogy about the struggle for power in ancient Rome. In his “most accomplished work to date” (Los Angeles Times), master of historical fiction Robert Harris lures readers back in time to the compelling life of Roman Senator Marcus Cicero. The re-creation of a vanished biography written by his household slave and righthand man, Tiro, Imperium follows Cicero’s extraordinary struggle to attain supreme power in Rome. On a cold November morning, Tiro opens the door to find a terrified, bedraggled stranger begging for help. Once a Sicilian aristocrat, the man was robbed by the corrupt Roman governor, Verres, who is now trying to convict him under false pretenses and sentence him to a violent death. The man claims that only the great senator Marcus Cicero, one of Rome’s most ambitious lawyers and spellbinding orators, can bring him justice in a crooked society manipulated by the villainous governor. But for Cicero, it is a chance to prove himself worthy of absolute power. What follows is one of the most gripping courtroom dramas in history, and the beginning of a quest for political glory by a man who fought his way to the top using only his voice—defeating the most daunting figures in Roman history.
Drawing together leading scholars, the book provides a revealing new map of the US political economy in cross-national perspective.
Acrimony and hyperpartisanship have seeped into every part of the political process. Congress is deadlocked and its approval ratings are at record lows. America's two main political parties have given up their traditions of compromise, endangering our very system of constitutional democracy. And one of these parties has taken on the role of insurgent outlier; the Republicans have become ideologically extreme, scornful of compromise, and ardently opposed to the established social and economic policy regime.In It's Even Worse Than It Looks, congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein identify two overriding problems that have led Congress -- and the United States -- to the brink of institutional collapse. The first is the serious mismatch between our political parties, which have become as vehemently adversarial as parliamentary parties, and a governing system that, unlike a parliamentary democracy, makes it extremely difficult for majorities to act. Second, while both parties participate in tribal warfare, both sides are not equally culpable. The political system faces what the authors call &"asymmetric polarization," with the Republican Party implacably refusing to allow anything that might help the Democrats politically, no matter the cost.With dysfunction rooted in long-term political trends, a coarsened political culture and a new partisan media, the authors conclude that there is no &"silver bullet"; reform that can solve everything. But they offer a panoply of useful ideas and reforms, endorsing some solutions, like greater public participation and institutional restructuring of the House and Senate, while debunking others, like independent or third-party candidates. Above all, they call on the media as well as the public at large to focus on the true causes of dysfunction rather than just throwing the bums out every election cycle. Until voters learn to act strategically to reward problem solving and punish obstruction, American democracy will remain in serious danger.
Social scientists and campaign strategists approach voting behavior from opposite poles. Reconciling these rival camps through a merger of precise statistics and hard-won election experience, The American Political Landscape presents a full-scale analysis of U.S. electoral politics over the past quarter-century. Byron Shafer and Richard Spady explain how factors not usually considered hard data, such as latent attitudes and personal preferences, interact to produce an indisputably solid result: the final tally of votes. Pundits and pollsters usually boil down U.S. elections to a stark choice between Democrat and Republican. Shafer and Spady explore the significance of a third possibility: not voting at all. Voters can and do form coalitions based on specific issues, so that simple party identification does not determine voter turnout or ballot choices. Deploying a new method that quantifiably maps the distribution of political attitudes in the voting population, the authors describe an American electoral landscape in flux during the period from 1984 to 2008. The old order, organized by economic values, ceded ground to a new one in which cultural and economic values enjoy equal prominence. This realignment yielded election outcomes that contradicted the prevailing wisdom about the importance of ideological centrism. Moderates have fared badly in recent contests as Republican and Democratic blocs have drifted further apart. Shafer and Spady find that persisting links between social backgrounds and political values tend to empty the ideological center while increasing the clout of the ideologically committed.
Politics, the workings of government and of people in government, has long been a fertile field for exploration by the novelist. The political arena offers many examples of conflict—between individuals, groups, or the individual and the group, or within the individual. It is natural then that a sizable body of fiction has grown up using politics as a main source of action. In this study Joseph Blotner attempts "to discover the image of American poIitics as presented in American novels over a sixty-year span." His major discussion is limited to 138 novels dealing directly with candidates, officeholders, party officials, or "individuals performing political acts as they are conventionally understood." He also refers to nineteenth-century predecessors, European analogues, or other twentieth-century American novels as they bear on his discussions. Blotner gives a thorough examination of certain archetypal figures (the young hero, the political boss, and the Southern demagogue), which appear in central or subordinate positions in the action of many political novels. He finds that the novels reflect certain major movements or upheavals in the political history of the United States or the world (in particular, fascism and McCarthyism), and that they also give the political aspects of universal attitudes or problems (corruption, disillusionment, reaction, and the role of women and of the intellectual). The author presents a detailed analysis of each of these subjects, prefacing each analysis by a survey of the historical background out of which the fiction grew, and including a brief and often pungent assessment of the literary merits of each novel discussed. He also surveys a large body of political fiction which cuts across all of these categories: the novel of the future—both utopian and apocalyptic. The Modern American Political Novel will be of great interest to the student of twentieth-century literature; the political scientist, the sociologist, and even the practicing politician will also find its analyses useful and illuminating.