Download Free Conservatives And The Crisis Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Conservatives And The Crisis and write the review.

This book should be of value to students of contemporary British politics.
The conservative theorist who blueprinted Nixon's "Southern Strategy," coined the term "Sun Belt," and wrote the prophetic Emerging Republican Majority, analyzes the origins and make-up of the Reagan electoral coalition, which he now sees as extremely unstable and not at all the Republican majority he once envisioned, arriving at a conclusion that will astonish the left and infuriate the right. -- Book cover.
With a new afterword on the 2016 election Trent Lott and Tom Daschle, two of the most prominent senators of recent time, served as leaders of their respective parties from the 1990s to the current century. Their congressional tenure saw the Reagan tax cuts, the Clinton impeachment, 9/11, and the Iraq War. Despite stark ideological differences, the two have always maintained a positive working relationship--even a warm friendship--the kind that in today's hyper-partisan climate has become unthinkable. In Crisis Point, Lott and Daschle come together to sound an alarm on the current polarization that has made governing all but impossible; never before has faith in government been so dismally low. The senators itemize damaging forces--the permanent campaign, unprecedented money, the 24/7 news cycle--and offer practical recommendations, pointing the way forward. Most crucially, they recall the American people, especially our leaders, to the principles enshrined in the Constitution, and to the necessity of debate but also the imperative of compromise--which will take vision and courage to bring back. Illustrated with personal stories from their eminent careers and events cited from deeper in American history, Crisis Point is an invaluable work--one of conscience as well as duty, written with passion and eloquence by two men who have dedicated their lives to public service and share the conviction that all is far from lost.
In early 2016, as it became increasingly apparent that Donald Trump might actually become the Republican nominee, a movement within conservatism formed to stop him: Never Trump. Comprised primarily of Republican policy elites and conservative intellectuals, the Never Trumpers saw Trump's stated views as a repudiation of longstanding Republican foreign and domestic policy goals. Just as importantly, they saw him as erratic, mendacious, and unfit--the sort of person the founders warned about and someone who would bring everlasting shame to the Republican Party. Over the coming months, many well-known and previously influential figures signed on to the Never Trump movement. Of course, their efforts failed, and Trump now dominates the Republican Party like a warlord. As Robert P. Saldin and Steven M. Teles argue in Never Trump, however, the influence of the movement turned out to be much larger than its disappointing impact on the election. For one, it has had an enormous impact on the actual composition of the Trump administration. There has never been a party in the Western World that was elected and sought to govern with such a wide range of intra-party opposition. As Trump supporter Pat Buchanan observed after the election, the Never Trumpers essentially gifted Trump with a readymade enemies list-a list that those in charge of appointments paid close attention to. Trump's picks for a wide range of positions, especially in the area of foreign policy, look vastly different than they would have in any other Republican administration, in large part because so many potential office-holders had declared themselves implacably opposed to Trump. Even more profoundly, the administration found it very difficult--and in many cases impossible--to fill a wide range of positions because all of the plausible candidates for jobs that required technocratic as well as ideological credentials had signed on to Never Trump. Never Trump examines the reasons for this widespread and unprecedented intra-party opposition to Trump, why it took the form it did, and its longer-term consequences.
A sweeping history of liberalism, from its earliest origins to its imperiled present and uncertain future Donald Trump is the first American president to regard liberal values with open contempt. He has company: the leaders of Italy, Hungary, Poland, and Turkey, among others, are also avowed illiberals. What happened? Why did liberalism lose the support it once enjoyed? In What Was Liberalism?, James Traub returns to the origins of liberalism, in the aftermath of the American and French revolutions and in the works of such great thinkers as John Stuart Mill and Isaiah Berlin. Although the first liberals were deeply skeptical of majority rule, the liberal faith adapted, coming to encompass belief in not only individual rights and free markets, but also state action to provide basic goods. By the second half of the twentieth century, liberalism had become the national creed of the most powerful country in the world. But this consensus did not last. Liberalism is now widely regarded as an antiquated doctrine. What Was LIberalism? reviews the evolution of the liberal idea over more than two centuries for lessons on how it can rebuild its majoritarian foundations.
The history of art from the early nineteenth century on- ward is commonly viewed as a succession of conflicts between innovatory and established styles that culminated in the formalism and aesthetic autonomy of high modernism. In Art and Crisis, first published in 1948, Hans Sedlmayr argues that the aesthetic disjunctures of modern art signify more than matters of style and point to much deeper processes of cultural and religious disintegration. As Roger Kimball observes in his informative new introduction, Art in Crisis is as much an exercise in cultural or spiritual analysis as it is a work of art history. Sedlmayr's reads the art of the last two centuries as a fever chart of the modern age in its greatness and its decay. He discusses the advent of Romanticism with its freeing of the imagination as a conscious sundering of art from humanist and religious traditions with the aesthetic treated as a category independent of human need. Looking at the social purposes of architecture, Sedlmayr shows how the landscape garden, the architectural monument, and the industrial exhibition testified to a new relationship not only between man and his handiwork but also between man and the forces that transcend him. In these institutions man deifies his inventive powers with which he hopes to master and supersede nature. Likewise, the art museum denies transcendence through a cultural leveling in which Heracles and Christ become brothers as objects of aesthetic contemplation. At the center of Art in Crisis is the insight that, in art as in life, the pursuit of unqualified autonomy is in the end a prescription for disaster, aesthetic as well as existential. Sedlmayr writes as an Augustinian Catholic. For him, the underlying motive for the pursuit of autonomy is pride. The lost center of his subtitle is God. The dream of autonomy, Sedlmayr argues, is for finite, mortal creatures, a dangerous illusion. The book invites serious analysis from art cri
Polling shows that since the 1950s Americans’ trust in government has fallen dramatically to historically low levels. In At War with Government, the political scientists Amy Fried and Douglas B. Harris reveal that this trend is no accident. Although distrust of authority is deeply rooted in American culture, it is fueled by conservative elites who benefit from it. Since the postwar era conservative leaders have deliberately and strategically undermined faith in the political system for partisan aims. Fried and Harris detail how conservatives have sown distrust to build organizations, win elections, shift power toward institutions that they control, and secure policy victories. They trace this strategy from the Nixon and Reagan years through Gingrich’s Contract with America, the Tea Party, and Donald Trump’s rise and presidency. Conservatives have promoted a political identity opposed to domestic state action, used racial messages to undermine unity, and cultivated cynicism to build and bolster coalitions. Once in power, they have defunded public services unless they help their constituencies and rolled back regulations, perversely proving the failure of government. Fried and Harris draw on archival sources to document how conservative elites have strategized behind the scenes. With a powerful diagnosis of our polarized era, At War with Government also proposes how we might rebuild trust in government by countering the strategies conservatives have used to weaken it.
Polarization is at an all-time high in the United States. But contrary to popular belief, Americans are polarized not so much in their policy preferences as in their feelings toward their political opponents: To an unprecedented degree, Republicans and Democrats simply do not like one another. No surprise that these deeply held negative feelings are central to the recent (also unprecedented) plunge in congressional productivity. The past three Congresses have gotten less done than any since scholars began measuring congressional productivity. In Why Washington Won’t Work, Marc J. Hetherington and Thomas J. Rudolph argue that a contemporary crisis of trust—people whose party is out of power have almost no trust in a government run by the other side—has deadlocked Congress. On most issues, party leaders can convince their own party to support their positions. In order to pass legislation, however, they must also create consensus by persuading some portion of the opposing party to trust in their vision for the future. Without trust, consensus fails to develop and compromise does not occur. Up until recently, such trust could still usually be found among the opposition, but not anymore. Political trust, the authors show, is far from a stable characteristic. It’s actually highly variable and contingent on a variety of factors, including whether one’s party is in control, which part of the government one is dealing with, and which policies or events are most salient at the moment. Political trust increases, for example, when the public is concerned with foreign policy—as in times of war—and it decreases in periods of weak economic performance. Hetherington and Rudolph do offer some suggestions about steps politicians and the public might take to increase political trust. Ultimately, however, they conclude that it is unlikely levels of political trust will significantly increase unless foreign concerns come to dominate and the economy is consistently strong.
In 2010 the Conservative Party returned to office after over a decade of largely ineffective opposition to New Labour. This book explains why it took so long to recover, and why the party was unable to win an overall majority despite the charismatic leadership of David Cameron. It covers all aspects of Conservative Party politics since 1997.