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This is a book about the necessity of political ambition for the success of American democracy. Democracies face an enduring problem encouraging, harnessing, and inevitably restraining the passions citizens have to wield political power in a civic forum. This book describes how evolving American political institutions and forms of association struggle to inspire, guide, and constrain the ambition of citizens to rule within American politics. This book sheds light on the way power seeking behavior in America ends up transforming—and often undermining—the ways democracies attempt to hold the socially and politically powerful accountable. Ambition—the desire to rule—while often seen as a threat to the stability of republican self-government, actually plays a vital, though previously underexplored, role in sustaining a healthy polity. This book explores how relationships between the mechanisms of restraint and the ambitions of specific public figures and movements enhance or undermine the possibility of self-government.

Is the United States Congress dead, alive, or trapped in a moribund cycle? When confronted with controversial policy issues, members of Congress struggle to satisfy conflicting legislative, representative, and oversight duties. These competing goals, along with the pressure to satisfy local constituents, cause members of Congress to routinely cede power on a variety of policies, express regret over their loss of control, and later return to the habit of delegating their power. This pattern of institutional ambivalence undermines conventional wisdom about congressional party resurgence, the power of oversight, and the return of the so-called imperial presidency. This book examines Congress's frequent delegation of power by analyzing primary source materials such as bills, committee reports, and the Congressional Record. The book demonstrates that Congress is caught between abdication and ambition and that this ambivalence affects numerous facets of the legislative process. Explaining specific instances of post-delegation disorder, including Congress's use of new bills, obstruction, public criticism, and oversight to salvage its lost power, the book exposes the tensions surrounding Congress's roles in recent hot-button issues such as base-closing commissions, presidential trade promotion authority, and responses to the attacks of September 11. It also examines shifting public rhetoric used by members of Congress as they emphasize, in institutionally self-conscious terms, the difficulties of balancing their multiple roles.

This book is about political change as it evolved in one of America's largest and most important states during the tumultuous seventeen-year period between John F. Kennedy's assassination in Dallas and Ronald Reagan's ascension to the presidency in 1980. Partisan realignment is the most obvious aspect of that change. Texas was once as solidly Democratic as any state in the nation. By the end of the twentieth century, it was among the most solidly Republican. A simplistic analysis of this transformation based in large part on the perception that Texas has always been a conservative place, might suggest that—as Ronald Reagan, the preeminent icon of modern conservatism, once similarly quipped—Texas didn't leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left Texas. However, the political changes that gripped Texas during the last decades of the twentieth century resulted from a more complex mélange. This book analyses this in detail.

The main argument is that President Obama’s foreign and national security policy reflects a coherent set of assumptions and premises constituting a Doctrine. The book argues further that the Obama Doctrine dangerously repudiates the legacy of robust internationalism that has successfully guided American foreign policy since World War II. It argues the Obama Doctrine has made matters significantly worse in the world’s three most important geopolitical regions: Europe; the Middle East, and East Asia. It advocates some version of moral democratic realism, most characteristic of the presidencies of Harry Truman, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush, as the most prudent alternative that is consistent with American ideals and self-interest.

Elected officials, and especially presidential candidates, are increasingly asked to define their relationships to special interest groups. Such special, or private, interests play a disproportionate role in politics and legislation, whether in the form of large commercial or ethnic lobbies or in the shadowy realm of backroom dealmaking. This book argues that widespread public disinterest in global affairs, a prevailing characteristic of American political culture, has given private interest groups a paramount influence over the formulation and implementation of U.S. foreign policy. These well-organized, well-funded groups affect all levels of government, disguising their own interests as vital national interests. The book draws from numerous historical examples, dating from America's founding to the present, to examine the causes and the serious consequences of Americans' apathy toward foreign policy. This unique historical analysis of our increasingly privatized system of government offers compelling evidence that the United States is a democracy not of individuals, but of competing and powerful private groups.

Containing Communism was the primary goal of American foreign policy for four decades, allowing generations of political leaders to build consensus atop a universally accepted foundation. This book dissects numerous attempts, after the collapse of Communism, to devise a new grand strategy that could match containment's moral clarity and political efficacy. In the 1990s, the Bush and Clinton administrations eventually acknowledged that they could not reduce America's multifaceted post-Cold War objectives to a single fundamental precept. After 9/11, George W. Bush promoted the war on terror as America's new global mission, but this potential successor to containment lost much of its strength as conflicts in the Middle East weakened public morale. This book aims to shed new light on America's search for purpose in the politically volatile new world of the twenty-first century.

Despite the appearance of familiar faces in both Bush administrations, significant differences existed between the foreign policies of George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. The Gulf refers to these differences and argues that they can be explained by the personal beliefs and styles of each George Bush. Describing George H.W. Bush as an “enlightened” realist and George W. Bush as a “cowboy” liberal, the book begins by exploring the life experiences that contributed to each president’s belief system. Comparing and contrasting each president throughout, it focuses on each administration’s policy in the Middle East, with specific attention given to the Persian Gulf War, Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Madrid Peace Conference, and the Road Map for peace. The book suggests that presidents rarely fit into a realist or liberal model and combines the two approaches to explain presidential worldviews. George H.W. Bush’s emphasis on defensive rather than offensive strategies, and international organizations rather than the power of democracy to foster peace and stability, combine to create an “enlightened” realist worldview. George W. Bush’s emphasis on offensive strategies and the power of democracy to foster peace and stability combine to create the “cowboy” liberal worldview. The book concludes by offering general and specific lessons illuminated by the cases. Suggesting that the study is more than an isolated comparison of the Bushes, the book offers examples of the importance of understanding presidential leadership styles and worldviews.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, shattered the prevalent optimism in the United States that had blossomed during the tranquil and prosperous 1990s, when democracy seemed triumphant and catastrophic wars were a relic of the past. President George W. Bush responded with a bold and controversial grand strategy for waging a preemptive Global War on Terror, which has ignited passionate debate about the purposes of American power and the nation's proper role in the world. This book offers a vigorous argument for the principles of moral democratic realism that inspired the Bush administration's policy of regime change in Iraq. The Bush Doctrine rests on two main pillars—the inadequacy of deterrence and containment strategies when dealing with terrorists and rogue regimes, and the culture of tyranny in the Middle East, which spawns aggressive secular and religious despotisms. Two key premises shape the book's case for the Bush Doctrine's conformity with moral democratic realism. The first is the fundamental purpose of American foreign policy since its inception: to ensure the integrity and vitality of a free society “founded upon the dignity and worth of the individual.” The second premise is that the cardinal virtue of prudence (the right reason about things to be done) must be the standard for determining the best practicable American grand strategy. This book provides a broader historical context for the post-September 11 American foreign policy that will transform world politics well into the future. The book connects the Bush Doctrine and current issues in American foreign policy, such as how the U.S. should deal with China, to the deeper tradition of American diplomacy. Drawing from positive lessons as well as cautionary tales from the past, the book concludes that moral democratic realism offers the most compelling framework for American grand strategy, as it expands the democratic zone of peace and minimizes the number and gravity of threats the United States faces in the modern world.

Following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, America's political institutions underwent radical changes as they adapted to comprehensive security reforms. While the media exhaustively covered new security protocols in the executive office, little attention was paid to other federal agencies and branches that overhauled their systems to accommodate heightened security requirements. As a congressional fellow living in Washington, the author of this book was an eyewitness to the institutional culture of Capitol Hill before and after the 9/11 terrorist attacks as well as during the subsequent anthrax scare. This book uses personal experiences as the foundation for a richly researched analysis of how Congress changed as an institution and a national symbol in the wake of 9/11. The book reveals not only physical transformations but also internal policy shifts that threaten democracy by limiting citizens' access to their elected leaders.

Literary critics and historians have long studied Frederick Douglass’s impact on American literature and history, yet surprisingly few scholars have analyzed his influence on American political thought. Political theorists have focused on the legacies of W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, but editor Neil Roberts argues that it is impossible to understand their work or Afro-modern and American political thought without understanding Frederick Douglass’s contributions. Douglass was a prolific writer and public speaker, and the contributors to this comprehensive volume examine not only his famous autobiographies but also his novels, essays, and speeches. Douglass had a genius for analyzing and articulating basic American ideals such as independence, liberation, individualism, and freedom in the particular context of American slavery. The contributors explore Douglass’s understanding of the self-made American individual and the way in which Douglass expanded the notion of individual potential, arguing that citizens have a responsibility to improve not only their own situations but also their communities’ well-being. The contributors also consider the idea of agency, investigating Douglass’s passionate insistence that every person in a democracy, even a slave, possesses an innate ability to act. Several of the volume’s essays seek to illuminate Douglass’s complex racial politics, deconstructing what seems at first to be his surprising aversion to racial pride, and others critique concepts of masculinity and gender in his oeuvre. The volume concludes with a discussion of Douglass’s contributions to pre- and post–Civil War jurisprudence.

In this text, a group of prominent scholars assesses James Baldwin’s relevance to present-day political challenges. Together, they address Baldwin as a democratic theorist, activist, and citizen, examining his writings on the civil rights movement, religion, homosexuality, and women’s rights. They investigate the ways in which his work speaks to and galvanizes a collective American polity, and explore his views on the political implications of individual experience in relation to race and gender. This volume not only considers Baldwin’s works within their own historical context, but also applies the author’s insights to recent events such as the Obama presidency and the Black Lives Matter movement, emphasizing his faith in the connections between the past and present. These incisive essays will encourage a new reading of Baldwin that celebrates his significant contributions to political and democratic theory.

W.E.B. Du Bois was not a liberal, Marxist, radical, or republican—he was all of these and none. The author of more than one hundred books, hundreds of published articles, and founding editor of the NAACP’s journal Crisis, Du Bois has been widely studied, both during his life and afterward, for his profound insights into the politics of race and class in America. Throughout his work, Du Bois insisted on the importance of the local—on individual and community sovereignty—to counter domination by elites. He founded a counter tradition of African American thought that provided a new perspective on “the political,” incorporating contingency, racialized embodiment, and lived experience, engaging religion as a mode of political action and exploring the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Du Bois explored different political theories and scientific avenues, changing his political positions as his understanding of events shifted. He drew on historical events, such as Reconstruction, to explain racial inequality in the present and advocate for racial justice. He challenged the African American community to strategically accept segregation at one point, at other times encouraging internal racial uplift and external political agitation. Du Bois’s expansive views provide a historical glimpse at the changing nature of Western political theory and American democracy, even as they reveal how much we still need to consider race, its workings, and its consequences. In these pages, Du Bois emerges as an intellectual provocateur who challenged tradition and whose work and life continue to stimulate lively and constructive debate about the theory and practice of democracy in America.

Richard Wright left readers with a trove of fictional and nonfictional works about suffering, abuse, and anger in the United States and around the globe. He composed unforgettable images of institutionalized racism, postwar capitalist culture, Cold War neo-imperialism, gender roles and their violent consequences, and the economic and psychological preconditions for personal freedom. He insisted that humans unflinchingly confront and responsibly reconstruct their worlds. He therefore offered not only honest social criticisms but unromantic explorations of political options. The book is organized in five sections. It opens with a series of broad discussions about the content, style, and impact of Wright’s social criticism. Then the book shifts to particular dimensions of and topics in Wright’s writings, such as his interest in postcolonial politics, his approach to gendered forms of oppression, and his creative use of different literary genres to convey his warnings. The anthology closes with discussions of the different political agendas and courses of action that Wright’s thinking prompts—in particular, how his distinctive understanding of psychological life and death fosters opposition to neoslavery, efforts at social connectivity, and experiments in communal refusal. Most of the book’s chapters are original pieces written for this volume. Other entries are excerpts from influential, earlier published works, including four difficult-to-locate writings by Wright on labor solidarity, a miscarriage of justice, the cultural significance Joe Louis, and the political duties of black authors. The contributors include experts in Africana studies, history, literature, philosophy, political science, and psychoanalysis.

The role of law in government has been increasingly scrutinized as courts struggle with controversial topics such as assisted suicide, euthanasia, abortion, capital punishment, and torture. This book explores such issues by using classical standards of morality as a starting point for understanding them. Drawing on works of literature and philosophy, and on U.S. Supreme Court decisions, the book examines the intimate relationship between human nature and constitutional law.

An intellectual biography of Russell Kirk (1918–1994), this book offers the first full examination of his life and thought as it developed over the course of the twentieth century. As almost all would agree, Kirk served as the father of postwar conservatism, but he did so in a way that promoted the superiority of culture above politics. His conservatism attempted to save the best of the Western and humane traditions. Looking at every public writing, his complete letters, and his private journals and diaries, Russell Kirk: American Conservative considers the nuances and eccentricities of the American conservative movement during its formation and maturation. It considers the movement’s alliances, successes, and failures over half of a century. It also examines Kirk’s personal life as well as his successful career as a horror and fiction writer. In the end, though, it finds his most enduring quality to be his immense and almost saintlike charity.

This book explores the relationship between American presidential elections and US foreign policy. It argues that analysis of this relationship is currently underdeveloped (indeed, largely ignored) in the academic literature and among historians in particular and is part of a broader negligence of the influence of US politics and the public on foreign policy. It is usually taken as being axiomatic that domestic factors, especially the economy, are the most influential when people enter the voting booth. This may often be the case, but foreign policy undoubtedly also plays an important part for some people, and, crucially, it is seen to do so by presidential candidates and their advisers. Therefore, while foreign policy issues influence some voters in the way they choose to vote, the perception that voters care about certain foreign policy issues can also have a profound effect on the way in which presidents craft their foreign policies. Although we agree with those scholars who argue that it is difficult to discern the impact of domestic politics on foreign policy making, this complex relationship is one that, we feel, requires further exploration. This collection therefore seeks to understand the relative importance of US foreign policy on domestic elections and electoral positions and the impact of electoral issues on the formation of foreign policy.

The Vietnam War has been analyzed, dissected, and debated from multiple perspectives for decades, but domestic considerations—such as partisan politics and election-year maneuvering—are often overlooked as determining factors in the evolution and outcome of America's longest war. This book assesses the influence of the Republican Party—its congressional leadership, politicians, grassroots organizations, and the Nixon administration—on the escalation, prosecution, and resolution of the Vietnam War. It also sheds new light on the relationship between Congress and the imperial presidency as they struggled for control over U.S. foreign policy. Beginning the analysis in 1961 and continuing through the Paris Peace Accords of 1973, the book argues that the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations failed to achieve victory on both fronts of the Vietnam War—military and political—because of their preoccupation with domestic politics. It details the machinations and political dexterity required of all three presidents and of members of Congress to maneuver between the countervailing forces of escalation and negotiation, offering a provocative account of the ramifications of their decisions.