Recasting Conservatism
Title | Recasting Conservatism PDF eBook |
Author | Robert Devigne |
Publisher | Yale University Press |
Pages | 292 |
Release | 1996-08-28 |
Genre | Political Science |
ISBN | 9780300068689 |
Explores how conservative thought in the work of Oakeshott and Strauss and their followers responds to the postmodern loss of tradition, morality, and authority in contemporary British and American society. The work also compares each theory to previous political outlooks in both countries.
Conservatism
Title | Conservatism PDF eBook |
Author | Jerry Z. Muller |
Publisher | Princeton University Press |
Pages | 476 |
Release | 1997-05-04 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 9780691037110 |
History Professor Jerry Muller locates the origins of modern conservatism within the Enlightenment and distinguishes conservatism from orthodoxy. Reviewing important specimens of analysis from the mid18th century through our own day, Muller demonstrates that characteristic features of conservative argument recur over time and across national borders.
Getting Right with Reagan
Title | Getting Right with Reagan PDF eBook |
Author | Marcus M. Witcher |
Publisher | University Press of Kansas |
Pages | 440 |
Release | 2019-11-29 |
Genre | Political Science |
ISBN | 0700628770 |
Republicans today often ask, “What would Reagan do?” The short answer: probably not what they think. Hero of modern-day conservatives, Ronald Reagan was not even conservative enough for some of his most ardent supporters in his own time—and today his practical, often bipartisan approach to politics and policy would likely be deemed apostasy. To try to get a clearer picture of what the real Reagan legacy is, in this book Marcus M. Witcher details conservatives’ frequently tense relationship with Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and explores how they created the latter-day Reagan myth. Witcher reminds us that during Reagan’s time in office, conservative critics complained that he had failed to bring about the promised Reagan Revolution—and in 1988 many Republican hopefuls ran well to the right of his policies. Notable among the dissonant acts of his administration: Reagan raised taxes when necessary, passed comprehensive immigration reform, signed a bill that saved Social Security, and worked with adversaries at home and abroad to govern effectively. Even his signature accomplishment—invoked by “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”—was highly unpopular with the Conservative Caucus, as evidenced in their newspaper ads comparing the president to Neville Chamberlain: “Appeasement is as Unwise in 1988 as in 1938.” Reagan’s presidential library and museum positioned him above partisan politics, emphasizing his administration’s role in bringing about economic recovery and negotiating an end to the Cold War. How this legacy, as Reagan himself envisioned it, became the more grandiose version fashioned by Republicans after the 1980s tells us much about the late twentieth-century transformation of the GOP—and, as Witcher’s work so deftly shows, the conservative movement as we know it now.
Up from Conservatism
Title | Up from Conservatism PDF eBook |
Author | Michael Lind |
Publisher | Simon and Schuster |
Pages | 310 |
Release | 2013-08-06 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1476761159 |
For nearly a decade, Michael Lind worked closely as a writer and editor with the intellectual leaders of American conservatism. Slowly, he came to believe that the many prominent intellectuals he worked with were not the leaders of the conservative movement but the followers and apologists for an increasingly divisive and reactionary political strategy orchestrated by the Republican party. Lind's disillusionment led to a very public break with his former colleagues on the right, as he attacked the Reverend Pat Robertson for using anti-Semitic sources in his writings. In Up From Conservatism, this former rising star of the right reveals what he believes to be the disturbing truth about the hidden economic agenda of the conservative elite. The Republican capture of the U.S. Congress in 1994 did not represent the conversion of the American public to conservative ideology. Rather, it marked the success of the thirty-year-old "southern strategy" begun by Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon. From the Civil War to the civil rights revolution, the southern elite combined a low-wage, low-tax strategy for economic development with a politics of demagogy based on race-baiting and Bible-thumping. Now, Lind maintains, the economic elite that controls the Republican party is following a similar strategy on a national scale, using their power to shift the tax burden from the rich to the middle class while redistributing wealth upward. To divert attention from their favoritism toward the rich, conservatives play up the "culture war," channeling popular anger about falling real wages and living standards away from Wall Street and focusing it instead on the black poor and nonwhite immigrants. The United States, Lind concludes, could use a genuine "one-nation" conservatism that seeks to promote the interests of the middle class and the poor as well as the rich. But today's elitist conservatism poses a clear and present danger to the American middle class and the American republic.
Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy
Title | Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy PDF eBook |
Author | Daniel Ziblatt |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 448 |
Release | 2017-04-18 |
Genre | Political Science |
ISBN | 9780521172998 |
How do democracies form and what makes them die? Daniel Ziblatt revisits this timely and classic question in a wide-ranging historical narrative that traces the evolution of modern political democracy in Europe from its modest beginnings in 1830s Britain to Adolf Hitler's 1933 seizure of power in Weimar Germany. Based on rich historical and quantitative evidence, the book offers a major reinterpretation of European history and the question of how stable political democracy is achieved. The barriers to inclusive political rule, Ziblatt finds, were not inevitably overcome by unstoppable tides of socioeconomic change, a simple triumph of a growing middle class, or even by working class collective action. Instead, political democracy's fate surprisingly hinged on how conservative political parties - the historical defenders of power, wealth, and privilege - recast themselves and coped with the rise of their own radical right. With striking modern parallels, the book has vital implications for today's new and old democracies under siege.
Mothers of Conservatism
Title | Mothers of Conservatism PDF eBook |
Author | Michelle M. Nickerson |
Publisher | Princeton University Press |
Pages | 263 |
Release | 2014-09-07 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 069116391X |
Mothers of Conservatism tells the story of 1950s Southern Californian housewives who shaped the grassroots right in the two decades following World War II. Michelle Nickerson describes how red-hunting homemakers mobilized activist networks, institutions, and political consciousness in local education battles, and she introduces a generation of women who developed political styles and practices around their domestic routines. From the conservative movement's origins in the early fifties through the presidential election of 1964, Nickerson documents how women shaped conservatism from the bottom up, out of the fabric of their daily lives and into the agenda of the Republican Party. A unique history of the American conservative movement, Mothers of Conservatism shows how housewives got out of the house and discovered their political capital.
Tea Party Women
Title | Tea Party Women PDF eBook |
Author | Melissa Deckman |
Publisher | NYU Press |
Pages | 356 |
Release | 2016-05-24 |
Genre | Political Science |
ISBN | 147983713X |
In this publication, the author explores the role of women in creating and leading the movement and the greater significance of women's involvement in the Tea Party for our understanding of female political leadership and the future of women in the American Right. Based on national-level public opinion data, observation at Tea Party rallies, and interviews with female Tea Party leaders.