Robert A. Caro: The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power (New York: Knopf, 2012) ("The inefficiency of Congress was nothing new, of course--the only period since the Civil War that the pattern had been broken in the Senate, the principal logjam, was the six years of Lyndon Johnson's leadership--but now, in both houses of Congress, it was escalating to a new level, a level at which some analysts were questioning the efficiency of the governmental framework of which Congress was so pivotal a part. In a book, The Deadlock of Democracy, published earlier in the year [1963], the distinguished historian--and an abashed Kennedy admirer--James McGregor Burns said that 'we are at the critical stage of a somber and inexorable cycle that seems to have gripped the public affairs of the nation, . . . mired in governmental deadlock, as Congress blocks or kills not only' Kennedy's programs but Republican programs as well. Concluding that 'We . . . underestimate the extent to which our system was designed for deadlock and inaction,' he said perhaps the system would have to be changed." Id. at 346-347. Sound familiar?).
Jefferson Cowie, The Great Exception: The New Deal and The Limits of American Politics (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2016) ("My argument can be stated boldly and succinctly: the political era between the 1930s and the 1970s marks what might be called a 'great exception'--a sustain deviation, an extended detour--from some of the main contours of American political practice, economic structure, and cultural outlook. During this period, the central government used its considerable resources in a systematic, if hardly consistent, fashion on behalf of the economic interest of nonelite Americans in ways that it had not done before or since. The depth of the Depression and the crisis of World War II forced clear realignments of American politics and class relations, but those changes were less the linear triumph of the welfare state, than the product of very specific, and short-lived, historical circumstances. American liberalism has had many 'protean' forms, but the version generated by the trauma of the Depression and World War II proved extraordinary because it was not about morality or individual rights or regulation alone, but about collective economic rights." Id. at 9. "I argue that the New Deal can more accurately be understood as a positive but unstable experiment. The New Deal was a triumph of redistributive policy, not the failure that the New Left would have it. It was hardly the unnecessary intervention that the conservative right claims, since fostered what many still still see as a model of our own time. Yet the New Deal was also far from being a revolution that permanently vanquished the savageries of the labor market, as old-school liberals would have it. The New Deal reforms played a transformative role in working people's lives, fostering what many call the 'golden age' of American capitalism for the white, male industrial working class." Id. at 15 (italics added). That is, those who have abandoned the Democratic Party to embrace Nixon's, than Reagan's, etc., Republican Party. "The sixth and final theme is the ideology, through hardly the reality, of an American individuals that served as a key foil to the entire New Deal story. For centuries, Americans embraced a reflexive, complicated, and ongoing commitment to various incarnations of Jeffersonian individualism even in the face of a bureaucratized, corporate world, This preindustrial ideology has proven as archaic as it has enduring. The collective dimensions of the New Deal, however limited they hay have been to begin with, were never able to take root in the uniquely challenging ideological soils of the United States where 'individualism for the masses' remained one its most powerful contradictions." Id. at 26. It is truly amazing that, in a nation of compulsive conformists, we delude (or brand) ourselves as individualists. We are all, in some form or another, 'The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit'. "In the long arc of the twentieth century, the 1970s stand as a sort of 'anti-1930s' bookend tot he New Deal order. Labor declined, the ideology of individualism became central to all things, race divided politics, tensions over immigration returned, and the state flipped back to being hostile to workers; rights. Inequality of the type many believed long since vanquished returned with a vengeance. After 1978, economic gains became concentrated at the top in a sustained way, limited benefits and raises accrued to the nonrich incline flat-lined for working people, and the promise of upward mobility stagnated. Workers turned to two-income households, then borrowing on credit, to fill the void. The efforts of New Deal liberal descended into defensive battles, trying to shield and protect Social Security from attack, while the National Labor Relations Act withered further in relevance. Democrats have since surrendered issues of collective economic justice in order to focus on their commitment to progressive pushes for social issues and the expansion and democratization of individual rights. The dual movement of the 1970s-the rise of the new social movements and the decline of lobar--meant that those lift out of the original New Deal package, women and moonrise, south their citizenship outside of the realm of collective economic rights." Id. at 27-28. "By my values, the thesis of this book is an American tragedy. [] The themes of this this book connect with a roach tradition of American letters that struggles with the distance between the promise and the disappointments of American democracy. [] The Unites States is a complex and conservative place. As much as I would wish to lighten the load of the American past for those looking tom ways toward a better future, it cannot be easily done. There is no 'magic door,' leading to a 'lost Kingdom of peace' as [Eugene] O'Neill told us. We can only struggle forth, feeling or way, charting anew, with a clearer map of where we have been." Id. at 32-33.).
Robert Dallek, Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House (New York: Harper, 2013).
Gary Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2015) (From the bookjacket: "American governance is burdened by a paradox. On the one hand, Americans don't want 'big government' meddling in their lives; on the other hand, they have repeatedly enlisted government help to impose their views regarding marriage, abortion, religion, and schooling on their neighbors. These contradictory stances on the role of public power have paralyzed policymaking and generated rancorous disputes about government's legitimate scope. How did we reach this political impasse? Historian Gary Gerstle, looking at two hundred years of U.S. history, argues that the roots of this current crisis lie in two contrasting theories of power that the Framers inscribed in the Constitution." "One Theory shaped the federal government, setting limits on its power in order to protect personal liberty. Another they molded the states, authorizing them to go to extraordinary lengths, even to the point of violating individual rights, to advance the 'good and welfare of the commonwealth.' The Framers believed these theories could coexist comfortably, but conflict between the two has largely defined American history. Gestle shows how national political leaders improvised brilliantly to stretch the power of the federal government beyond where it was meant to go--but at the cost of giving private interests and state governments too much sway over public policy. The state could be innovative, too. More impressive was their staying power. Onny in the 1960s did the federal government, impelled by the Cold War and the civil rights movement, definitively assert its primacy. But as the power of the central state expanded, its constitutional authority did not keep pace. Conservatives rebelled, making the battle over government's power dominion the defining issue of our time." "From the Revolution to today's Tea Party, and the Bill of Right to the national security state, Liberty and Coercion is a revelatory account of the making and unmaking of government in America." Gerstle ends his book with a cautious note: "Fixing the system does not mean that the paradoxes that have long shaped America's structure of public power will be resolved. The competing claims within the US state---indeed, within all liberal democratic states--to police populations, on the one hand, and create circumstances of liberty, on the other hand, run too deep. But fixing the system does mean giving Americans the tools and flexibility to fashion a government that works, and one that as members of a polity in which the people are meant to be sovereign, they deserve." Id. at 351.).
Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore & Thomas J. Sugrue, These United States: A Nation in the Making 1890 to the Present (New York & London: Norton, 2015) ("In late 1993, Clinton pushed through NAFTA, lending his support to the trade treaty that President [G. H. W.] Bush had negotiated with Mexico and Canada. Free trade had been a top priority of the DLC. Many major corporations including Wal-Mart (whose board members included Clinton's wife Hillary until she resigned before the 1992 campaign), wanted to lower trade barriers so they could import cheaply produced goods and expand their markets abroad. The Business Roundtable, a major lobbying group, mobilized 2,400 member corporations to lobby for NAFTA. Major manufacturers and retailers also joined the effort." "Most Republicans supported NAFTA, but it faced stiff opposition among Democrats, who argued that it would accelerate 'runaway jobs' to Mexico, where companies would have easy access to cheap labor without the burdens of environmental and safety regulations. Clinton countered that NAFTA would encourage American 'competitiveness' and, over time, expand American firms' market share. NAFTA passed with only 27 Democrats votes in the Senate and 102 in the House. As NAFTA's critics had feared, the treaty fueled the dramatic expansion of American firms south of the border." Id. at 577-578.).
Justin Kaplan, Lincoln Steffens: Portrait of a Great American Journalist (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks,1974, 2004) ("Richard Croker, Tammany chieftain and virtual ruler of New York City, sketched in the same connection for Steffens. 'Wall Street has its bosses just like Tammany and just like the Republican machine,' he said. Government was not a matter of statecraft at all, it was a business, like any other for when it came down to the real issues a politician might as well ask, What's the Constitution among friends? Walking through Union Square with the young reporter, Croker said, 'Everything is business.' (As he was to tell an investigating committee, 'Every man in New York is working for his pocket.') The former gangleader, who looked like Ulysses Grant and shared Grant's passion for quality horse flesh, had filled his own pocket well; he owned racing stables at home and in England, and these, like the rest of his fortune, were the rewards of what George Washington Plunkitt, the Tammany philosophy, called 'honest graft.' It was all matter of seeing opportunities and taking them, Plunkitt said. 'With all the grand opportunities all around for the man with political pull, there's no excuse for stealin' a cent.'" Id. at 64.).
Thomas C. Leonard, Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics and American Economics in the Progressive Era (Princeton & Oxford; Princeton U. Press, 2016) ("The Progressive Paradox[:] The economic progressives fashioned the new scenes of society, founded the modern American university, invented the tank tank, and blueprinted and framed the American administrative state. Progressives built these vital institutions of American life to carry out the twinned principles at Progressivism's core: first, modern government should be guided by science and not politics; and second, an industrialized economy should be supervised investigated, and regulated by the visible hand of a modern administrative state, In so doing, they reconstructed American liberalism." "There was a price to be paid, however . . . . Part II of Illiberal Reformers also has several acts, but each tell the same dark story--the campaign of labor reformers to exclude the disabled, immigrants, African Americans, and women from the American work force, all in the name of progress . . . ." "The progressive combined their extravagant faith in science and the state with an outsized confidence in their own expertise as a reliable, even necessary, guide to the public good. They were so sure of their own expertise as a necessary guide to the public good, so convinced of the righteousness of their crusade to redeem America, that they rarely considered the unintended consequences of ambitious but untried reforms. Even, more so, they failed to confront the reality that the experts--no less than the partisans, bosses, and industrialists they aimed to unseat--could have interest and biases of their own." Id. at xi. This book should cause some caution on the part of those who would brand themselves "progressive". There is a deep dark side to history of American progressivism. There are moments in reading this book that one might conclude that the only difference between many "Progressive Era" progressives and twenty-first century Tea Party members is that the former believed in the federal government (they wanted to expand and reform it), while the latter are pretty much nonbelievers in the federal government (they would limit, if not completely dismantle, it). Both disliked immigrants, African Americans, and women (or at least women's rights). And each had a very narrow view of who were, to borrow Sarah Palin's terminology, the "real Americans". It is more complicated than that, of course, but at times . . . And each failed to appreciate their self-serving interests and biases.).
Roger Lowenstein, America's Bank: The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve (New York: Penguin Press, 2015) ("The question of which way progressives would lean on banking reform was complicated. Progressives applauded using the tools of social science to prescribe solutions to the problems of the day. Warburg's meticulous dissection of the banking system was consistent with that approach. On the other hand, progressives were skeptical of Big Business and of Wall Street. People in the movement did not trust banks--bid banks especially--and they did not trust Senator Aldrich." Id. at 45. "Aldrich was unprepared to deal with the progressives. He did not fully appreciate that the movement was about more than just a series of laws regulating food safety and railroads fares. Progressivism embodied an attitudinal shift toward a more benevolent and representative society; it was concerned with elevating the condition of the poor and giving a greater say, and a greater role, to the swelling ranks of the middle class. Its guiding ethos was that education and empirical research could foster scientific, nonpartisan reform--although very little that progressivism achieved was actually nonpartisan. Its effects were seen over a wide range of topics: settlement houses, worker pensions, primary elections, corporate regulations, and the growth of public schools." Id. at 100.).
Lisa McGirr, The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State (New York & London: Norton, 2015) ("The generation of historian writing soon after the New Deal and World War II did not entirely ignore Prohibition but they overwhelmingly emphasized its failings. The majority shared liberal New Deal reform sensibilities, and they drew a sharp separation between the New Deal and the war on alcohol that preceded it. They found the origins of the New Deal coalition not in debates between wets and drys but in the material dislocations of the Great Depression. They linked New Deal policy makers to earlier economic regulatory efforts from the income tax to the Federal Trade Commission. . . . A later generation of historian . . . continued to marginalize [prohibition] in other ways. Convinced that the amendment was essentially dead on arrival, most scholars have focused on the struggle to pass such an impractical project, neglecting as predetermined its flawed implementation and eventual failure. . . . Filing the vacuum, there developed an entire genre of sensationalist books and movies set in the Prohibition years. . . . Taken together, they have obscured one of America's greatest experiments in state building and its lasting institutional and ideological effects. The selective focus of the chronicles on elite groups and the national level, moreover, buries the highly differential impact of the law in distinct social groups, many of which face parallel challenges to this day." Id. at xv-xvi. "This book tells a more consequential story--one closely attuned to the ways in which social class, ethnicity, race, gender, and religiosity powerfully shaped to just the passage of the Eigthteenth Amendment but also it more than decade-long unfolding across the nation. The War on Alcohol charts the battles waged over Prohibition between different social groups from its unfolding to its demise. . . . As the story unfolds, it will become clear that the war on alcohol was no mere distraction with few lasting consequences: Prohibition remade national party politics and imprinted the path of American state development into distinctive and permanent molds." Id. at xvi-xvii. One of the interesting aspects of this history is a showing of how many so-callled "progressives" were very much "anti-democratic;" not to mention Prohibitions role in the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan. "Nothing, however, helped the Klan to turn itself into a dynamic social movement more than the new opportunity provided by the war on alcohol. The Klan leveraged the broad scope of the law to pursue its anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, and white-supremacist agenda, winning two to five million American to its ranks by 1925. Already in 1920 Klan organizers broadcast a mission to 'clean up' communities by putting bootleggers, moonshiners, and 'vice operators' out of business. The Klan frequently gained a foothold in communities, and new recruits, by waving the flag or 'unearthing the bootlegger.'" Id. at 133.).
Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (New York: Doubleday, 2016) (Money may not buy you love, but it can buy you the government of your liking. Too bad most of us don't have real money.).
Ethan Michaeli, The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin harcourt, 2016).
Edward H. Miller, Nut Country: Right-Wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2015) ("The story shows how the central religious tenets of Dallas ultraconservative Republicans advanced their secular political ideology. The Republican Party's original Southern Strategy was partly grounded in a spiritual defense of segregation, which held that the Bible prohibited the integration of blacks and whites. Biblical literalism and premillennial dispensationalism fostered ultraconservative Republicans' preoccupation with eschatology and spiritual cabals, which they then projected onto the secular world of politics. Many employed apocalyptic rhetoric purporting that America was always in its death throes. Their embrace of fundamentalism undergirded an absolutist understanding of secular matters, reinforcing their devout belief in the correctness of their opinions and perception of the world as black and white. Their conviction that Satan's war against Christianity was history's biggest and longest-standing cabal also likely fed into their preoccupation with conspiracies. For ultraconservative Republicans, history was a grand plot, and conspirators were ubiquitous, omniscient, and omnipotent, random events, when closely scrutinized, were found to fit preconceived patterns that confirmed their conspiratorial worldview." Id. at 6-7.).
Kathryn S. Olmsted, Right Out of California: The 1930s and The Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism (New York: The New Press, 2015) ("In this book, I argue that modern conservatism first emerged in its fullest form in the 1930s, in reaction to the New Deal. This movement began in California, and not in the suburbs but in its fields, where racial conflict shaped political attitudes. California agribusiness leaders consciously manipulated fears of cultural change--particularly disruptions to racial segregation and traditional gender roles--to mobilize grassroots opposition to Roosevelt's labor policies." Id. at 7. "By focusing on Western agribusiness, we can see that the New Right was no neoliberal revolt against the dead hand of government intervention. Instead, twentieth-century conservatism was a reaction to the changes in the ways that government was intervening in the economy--in short, a shift form helping big business to creating a level playing field for workers. Even Ronald Reagan, despite his mythical image as a cowboy identified with the frontier, was not really a small-government conservative but a corporate conservative. Reagan's revolution did not end government intervention in the economy: it only made the government more responsive to the Americans with the most wealth and power." Id. at 243-244. Thus, one should note, Citizens United is a direct consequence of the Reagan revolution's reenergizing corporate conservatism.).
Kiran Klaus Patel, The New Deal: A Global History (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Pres, 2016) ("With regard to welfare statism, the United States seemed to do little more than catch up with other industrialized countries. [] The New Dealers' attempt to beef up the American welfare state was of global significance. While many societies had a long-standing tradition of welfare provisions, authoritarian regimes and dictatorships were frequently at the forefront of the surge to install social policies at a national level. The tendency to associate welfare statism with democracy or European-style socialism is ahistorical. Bismarck's social insurance programs in the German Kaiserreich of the 1880s with their reactionary motive exemplify the problematic roots of national social policies since the nineteenth century, as do the provisions of the Soviet Union and Italian Fascism for the interwar years. Some democracies certainly had also pursued welfare statism, but in general, they were slower to recognize the nexus between welfare and political legitimacy than authoritarian and outright dictatorial regimes. Now America was demonstrating that democracies, too, were willing and able to take care of their citizens." Id. at 117. From the book jacket: "By avoiding the distortions of American exceptionalism, Kiran Klaus Patel shows how America's reaction to the Great Depression connected it to the wider world.").
Cass R. Sunstein, Constitutional Personae (New York: Oxford U. Press, 2015) (From the bookjacket: "Since America's founding, hundreds of U.S. Supreme Court Justices have issued a vast number of decisions on a staggeringly wide variety of subjects. Yet as . . . Cass R. Sunstein shows in Constitutional Personae, constitutional law is dominated by a mere quartet of character types, regardless of ideology: the hero, the soldier, the minimalist, and the mute. . . . Many of the most important constitutional debates turn out to be contests among the four Personae. Whether the issue involves slavery, same-sex marriage, executive power, or freedom of speech, our largest debates have turned on choices made among the four Personae--choices that derive as much from psychology as constitutional theory. Sunstein himself defends a form of minimalism, arguing that it is the best approach in a self-governing society of free people.").
Melvin I Urofsky, Dissent and the Supreme Court: Its Role in the Court's History and the Nation's Constitutional Dialogue (New York: Pantheon, 2015).
