New Books in American Politics

In early June 2020, Christina Gessler and Zerlina Maxwell met remotely to discuss Maxwell’s soon-to-be-released book. This episode is an encore presentation of that discussion. As we watch the race to the 2024 United States presidential election, we revisit this conversation from four years ago to reconsider lessons learned and those ignored in the race to the 2020 presidential election. Today’s b...

In our latest podcast episode, we sat down with historian Miles Smith, who teaches at Hillsdale College, to discuss his new book, Religion and Republic: Christian American from the Founding to the Civil War (Davenant Press, 2024). In this insightful conversation, we explored the book's themes, which examine the complex relationship between religion and politics in shaping the American republic. Sm...

America is undergoing a massive experiment: It is moving, in fits and starts, toward a multiracial democracy, something few societies have ever done. But the prospect of change has sparked an authoritarian backlash that threatens the very foundations of our political system. Why is democracy under assault here, and not in other wealthy, diversifying nations? And what can we do to save it? With the...

Over the last two decades, the United States has supported a range of militias, rebels, and other armed groups in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Critics have argued that such partnerships have many perils, from enabling human rights abuses to seeding future threats. Policy makers, however, have sought to mitigate the risks of partnering with irregular armed groups. Militia group leaders in far-flun...

There is racial inequality in America, and some people are distressed over it while others are not. Some White Folks: The Interracial Politics of Sympathy, Suffering, and Solidarity (University of Chicago Press, 2024) by Dr. Jennifer Chudy is a book about white people who feel that distress. For decades, political scientists have studied the effects of white racial prejudice, but Dr. Chudy shows t...

Who controls what is taught in American universities – professors or politicians? The answer is far from clear but suddenly urgent. Unprecedented efforts are now underway to restrict what ideas can be promoted and discussed in university classrooms. Professors at public universities have long assumed that their freedom to teach is unassailable and that there were firm constitutional protections sh...

Democracy is struggling in an age of populism and post-truth. In a world swirling with competing political groups stating conflicting facts, citizens are left unsure whom to trust and which facts are true. The role of honesty in civic life is in jeopardy. When we lose sight of the importance of honesty, it hampers our ability to solve pressing problems. Teaching Honesty in a Populist Era: Emphasiz...

When U.S. presidents clash with corporate titans, what tips the balance of power? In The Power and the Money: The Epic Clashes Between Commanders in Chief and Titans of Industry (Regnery History, 2024), acclaimed presidential historian Tevi Troy takes readers on a riveting journey through the biggest battles between CEOs and the nation's commander in chief. He unearths the untold stories - both po...

In the latest episode of Madison’s Notes, we sit down with Dr. Paul DeHart, professor of Political Science at Texas State University and author of The Social Contract in the Ruins:  Natural Law and Government by Consent (University of Missouri Press, 2024). In this illuminating discussion, Dr. DeHart challenges the prevailing belief that social contract theory and classical natural law are fundame...

Dan La Botz's book Riding with the Revolution: The American Left in the Mexican Revolution, 1900-1925 (Brill, 2024) tells the story of Americans who from 1900 to 1925 became involved with the Mexican Revolution. John Reed actually saddled up and rode with Pancho Villa. Later, American war resisters crossed the Rio Grande into Mexico, where they helped found the Communist Party, the Industrial Work...

Over the past decades, under the cover of "innovation," technology companies have successfully resisted regulation and have even begun to seize power from governments themselves. Facial recognition firms track citizens for police surveillance. Cryptocurrency has wiped out the personal savings of millions and threatens the stability of the global financial system. Spyware companies sell digital int...

In the US we are nearing four million road deaths since we began counting them in 1899. The numbers are getting worse in recent years, yet we continue to accept these deaths as part of doing business. There has been no examination of why we engineer roads that are literally killing us. In Killed by a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion that Science Underlies our Transportation System (Island...

Adoption has always been viewed as a beloved institution for building families, as well as a mutually agreeable common ground in the otherwise partisan abortion debate. Little attention, however, has been paid to the lives of mothers who relinquish their infants for private adoption. Through the lens of reproductive justice, Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Moth...

How is popular knowledge of war shaped by the stories we consume, what are the boundaries of this knowledge, and how are these boundaries policed or contested by journalists producing knowledge from war zones?  Based on years of fieldwork in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Ukraine, Conflicted: Making News from Global War (Stanford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Isaac Blacksin challenges nor...

In 1997, a group of white pro-life evangelical Christians in the United States created the nation’s first embryo adoption program to “save” the thousands of frozen human embryos remaining from assisted reproduction procedures, which they contend are unborn children. While a small part of US fertility services, embryo adoption has played an outsized role in conservative politics, from high-profile...

“It’s a free country.” Many of us recall saying that as children as we learned that we were American citizens who were endowed with certain rights—such as free speech. We would use those words when we wanted to assert our own rights when we were being bullied or chastised. We would use them to let others know that even if we did not agree with what they were saying or doing, they were within their...

What threatens American democracy and the rule of law? In her new book, Corporatocracy: How to Protect Democracy from Dark Money and Corrupt Politicians (NYU Press, 2024), legal scholar and campaign spending expert Ciara Torres-Spelliscy argues that the USA’s privately-funded campaign finance system – combined with corporate greed and antidemocratic strains in the modern Republican Party – endange...

Why liberalism is all you need to lead a good, fun, worthy, and rewarding life—and how you can become a better and happier person by taking your liberal beliefs more seriously Where do you get your values and sensibilities from? If you grew up in a Western democracy, the answer is probably liberalism. Conservatives are right about one thing: liberalism is the ideology of our times, as omnipresent...

Law professors Jon Michaels and David Noll use their expertise to expose how state-supported forms of vigilantism are being deployed by MAGA Republicans and Christian nationalists to roll back civil, political, and privacy rights and subvert American democracy. Beyond identifying the dangers of vigilantism, Vigilante Nation: How State-Sponsored Terror Threatens Our Democracy (Atria/One Signal, 202...

A question has long hung over the the United States regarding the proper role of religion in public life. Those who long for a Christian America claim that the Founders intended a nation with political values and institutions shaped by Christianity. Secularists argue that those same Founders designed an enlightened republic where church and state should be kept separate.  American Heretics: Religi...

We commonly think of democracy as a social order governed by the people’s collective will. Given the size of the modern states, this picture is typically adjusted to say that democracy is a system of representative government, where elected officials are tasked with governing in ways that reflect the collective will of their constituents. Although it is familiar, this way of depicting democracy in...

The image of the sheriff is deeply embedded in American culture – from pacifist Jimmy Stewart in Destry Rides Again and gun averse Roy Scheider in Jaws to those more comfortable wielding power like Gene Hackman in Unforgiven, Tommy Lee Jones in No Country for Old Men, and Gary Cooper in High Noon.  In the United States, more than 3,000 sheriffs occupy a unique position in the political and legal s...

The campus protests over conflict in Israel and Gaza have engulfed universities, and led to the resignation of several university presidents. In this podcast, recorded live at the New York Institute of the Humanities, Michael S. Roth, the long-time President of Wesleyan College, explains how he navigates sharp disagreements on campus, what he means by “safe enough spaces,” and how to understand wh...

How the CIA used American unions to undermine workers at home and subvert democracy abroad. Blue Collar Empire: The Untold Story of U.S. Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade (Verso, 2024) tells the shocking story of the AFL-CIO's global anticommunist crusade--and its devastating consequences for workers around the world. Unions have the power not only to secure pay raises and employee benefits but...

Remember the bleach drinking episode? Remember ‘alternative facts’? Remember ‘I have the best words’? These elements of the Trump presidency spoke to a fundamental part of his politics: truth and science were not prime among his considerations. Given this, one may assume that academics would have been especially unlikely to be drawn to the Trump presidency.  Yet, in his fascinating book The Academ...