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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political ideologies > Conservatism & right-of-centre democratic ideologies
Dr. Thayer, who was American press attache in Tokyo from 1962 to
1965, presents a detailed account of conservative politics in
Japan. Although he makes some historical comparisons, Dr. Thayer's
main focus is on the contemporary workings of the Liberal
Democratic Party, the ruling party in Japan. He identifies the
political elements: the men are the Dietmen, the bureaucrats, the
businessmen, the regional politicians, and the people; the
institutions are the factions, the regional organizations of the
Dietmen, the economic community and the various party organs. He
shows how these elements work: how the Prime Minister is elected,
how the cabinet is chosen, how party and government posts are
filled, how policy is made, how a political decision is reached,
and how the party is run. Contents: I. Introduction.; II. The
Factions.; III. The Economic Community.; IV. The Party, the
Prefectures, and the People.; V. The Elections.; VI. Choosing the
President.; VII. Making a Cabinet.; VIII. Formulating Policy.; IX.
Reaching a Decision.; X. Running the Party.; XI. Conclusions.;
Index. Originally published in 1969. The Princeton Legacy Library
uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available
previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of
Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original
texts of these important books while presenting them in durable
paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy
Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage
found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University
Press since its founding in 1905.
Few question the right turn America took after 1966, when
liberal political power began to wane. But if they did, No Right
Turn suggests, they might discover that all was not really right
with the conservative golden age. A provocative overview of a half
century of American politics, the book takes a hard look at the
counterrevolutionary dreams of liberalism s enemies to overturn
people s reliance on expanding government, reverse the moral and
sexual revolutions, and win the Culture War and finds them largely
unfulfilled.
David Courtwright deftly profiles celebrated and controversial
figures, from Clare Booth Luce, Barry Goldwater, and the Kennedy
brothers to Jerry Falwell, David Stockman, and Lee Atwater. He
shows us Richard Nixon s keen talent for turning popular anxieties
about morality and federal meddling to Republican advantage and his
inability to translate this advantage into reactionary policies.
Corporate interests, boomer lifestyles, and the media weighed
heavily against Nixon and his successors, who placated their base
with high-profile attacks on crime, drugs, and welfare dependency.
Meanwhile, religious conservatives floundered on abortion and
school prayer, obscenity, gay rights, and legalized vices like
gambling, and fiscal conservatives watched in dismay as the bills
mounted.
We see how President Reagan s melange of big government, strong
defense, lower taxes, higher deficits, mass imprisonment, and
patriotic symbolism proved an illusory form of conservatism.
Ultimately, conservatives themselves rebelled against George W.
Bush s profligate brand of Reaganism. Courtwright s account is both
surprising and compelling, a bracing argument against some of our
most cherished cliches about recent American history.
"From Subject to Citizen" offers an original account of the
Second Empire (1852-1870) as a turning point in modern French
political culture: a period in which thinkers of all political
persuasions combined forces to create the participatory democracy
alive in France today. Here Sudhir Hazareesingh probes beyond
well-known features of the Second Empire, its centralized
government and authoritarianism, and reveals the political, social,
and cultural advances that enabled publicists to engage an
increasingly educated public on issues of political order and good
citizenship. He portrays the 1860s in particular as a remarkably
intellectual decade during which Bonapartists, legitimists,
liberals, and republicans applied their ideologies to the pressing
problem of decentralization. Ideals such as communal freedom and
civic cohesion rapidly assumed concrete and lasting meaning for
many French people as their country entered the age of
nationalism.
With the restoration of universal suffrage for men in 1851,
constitutionalist political ideas and values could no longer be
expressed within the narrow confines of the Parisian elite. Tracing
these ideas through the books, pamphlets, articles, speeches, and
memoirs of the period, Hazareesingh examines a discourse that
connects the central state and local political life. In a striking
reappraisal of the historical roots of current French democracy, he
ultimately shows how the French constructed an ideal of citizenship
that was "local in form but national in substance."
Originally published in 1998.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand
technology to again make available previously out-of-print books
from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press.
These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these
important books while presenting them in durable paperback
editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly
increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the
thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since
its founding in 1905.
From the National Review to Breitbart, from Fox News to Rush
Limbaugh, conservative news is an inescapable feature of modern
politics. Since the early days of mass communication, right-wing
media producers have blended reporting with commentary, narrating
the news of the day from a perspective informed by conservative
worldviews and partisanship. News on the Right seeks to initiate a
new interdisciplinary field of scholarly research focused on the
study of right-wing media and conservative news. Editors Anthony
Nadler and A.J. Bauer gather a range of voices, presenting an
interdisciplinary investigation into the practices and patterns of
meaning-making in the production, circulation, and consumption of
conservative news. Traversing journalism, media and communication
studies, cultural studies, history, political science, and
sociology, this volume utilizes a variety of qualitative and
quantitative research methods to elucidate case studies of
conservative news cultures in the US and UK. Together, these
perspectives show that a fuller understanding of right-wing media
and its effects can be reached by treating these phenomena as
deeply interwoven into many conservatives' lives and political
sensibilities.
Realism, the dominant theory of international relations,
particularly regarding security, seems compelling in part because
of its claim to embody so much of Western political thought from
the ancient Greeks to the present. Its main challenger, liberalism,
looks to Kant and nineteenth-century economists. Despite their many
insights, neither realism nor liberalism gives us adequate tools to
grapple with security globalization, the liberal ascent, and the
American role in their development. In reality, both realism and
liberalism and their main insights were largely invented by
republicans writing about republics.
The main ideas of realism and liberalism are but fragments of
republican security theory, whose primary claim is that security
entails the simultaneous avoidance of the extremes of anarchy and
hierarchy, and that the size of the space within which this is
necessary has expanded due to technological change.
In Daniel Deudney's reading, there is one main security
tradition and its fragmentary descendants. This theory began in
classical antiquity, and its pivotal early modern and Enlightenment
culmination was the founding of the United States. Moving into the
industrial and nuclear eras, this line of thinking becomes the
basis for the claim that mutually restraining world government is
now necessary for security and that political liberty cannot
survive without new types of global unions.
Unique in scope, depth, and timeliness, "Bounding Power" offers
an international political theory for our fractious and perilous
global village.
New York Times' Top Books of 2019 Politico Magazine's chief
political correspondent provides a rollicking insider's look at the
making of the modern Republican Party-how a decade of cultural
upheaval, populist outrage, and ideological warfare made the GOP
vulnerable to a hostile takeover from the unlikeliest of
insurgents: Donald J. Trump. The 2016 election was a watershed for
the United States. But, as Tim Alberta explains in American
Carnage, to understand Trump's victory is to view him not as the
creator of this era of polarization and bruising partisanship, but
rather as its most manifest consequence. American Carnage is the
story of a president's rise based on a country's evolution and a
party's collapse. As George W. Bush left office with record-low
approval ratings and Barack Obama led a Democratic takeover of
Washington, Republicans faced a moment of reckoning: They had no
vision, no generation of new leaders, and no energy in the party's
base. Yet Obama's forceful pursuit of his progressive agenda,
coupled with the nation's rapidly changing cultural and demographic
landscape, lit a fire under the right, returning Republicans to
power and inviting a bloody struggle for the party's identity in
the post-Bush era. The factions that emerged-one led by absolutists
like Jim Jordan and Ted Cruz, the other led by pragmatists like
John Boehner and Mitch McConnell-engaged in a series of devastating
internecine clashes and attempted coups for control. With the GOP's
internal fissures rendering it legislatively impotent, and that
impotence fueling a growing resentment toward the political class
and its institutions, the stage was set for an outsider to crash
the party. When Trump descended a gilded escalator to announce his
run in the summer of 2015, the candidate had met the moment. Only
by viewing Trump as the culmination of a decade-long civil war
inside the Republican Party-and of the parallel sense of cultural,
socioeconomic, and technological disruption during that period-can
we appreciate how he won the White House and consider the
fundamental questions at the center of America's current turmoil.
How did a party obsessed with the national debt vote for
trillion-dollar deficits and record-setting spending increases? How
did the party of compassionate conservatism become the party of
Muslim bans and walls? How did the party of family values elect a
thrice-divorced philanderer? And, most important, how long can such
a party survive? Loaded with exclusive reporting and based off
hundreds of interviews-including with key players such as President
Trump, Paul Ryan, Ted Cruz, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Jim
DeMint, and Reince Priebus, and many others-American Carnage takes
us behind the scenes of this tumultuous period as we've never seen
it before and establishes Tim Alberta as the premier chronicler of
this political era.
Along with Confederate flags, the men and women who recently
gathered before the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts carried signs
proclaiming "Heritage Not Hate." Theirs, they said, was an "open
and visible protest against those who attacked us, ours flags, our
ancestors, or our Heritage." How, Nicole Maurantonio wondered, did
"not hate" square with a "heritage" grounded in slavery? How do
so-called neo-Confederates distance themselves from the actions and
beliefs of white supremacists while clinging to the very symbols
and narratives that tether the Confederacy to the history of racism
and oppression in America? The answer, Maurantonio discovers, is
bound up in the myth of Confederate exceptionalism-a myth whose
components, proponents, and meaning this timely and provocative
book exploresThe narrative of Confederate exceptionalism, in this
analysis, updates two uniquely American mythologies-the Lost Cause
and American exceptionalism-blending their elements with discourses
of racial neoliberalism to create a seeming separation between the
Confederacy and racist systems. Incorporating several methods and
drawing from a range of sources-including ethnographic
observations, interviews, and archival documents-Maurantonio
examines the various people, objects, and rituals that contribute
to this cultural balancing act. Her investigation takes in
"official" modes of remembering the Confederacy, such as the
monuments and building names that drive the discussion today, but
it also pays attention to the more mundane and often subtle ways in
which the Confederacy is recalled. Linking the different modes of
commemoration, her work bridges the distance that believers in
Confederate exceptionalism maintain; while situated in history from
the Civil War through the civil rights era, the book brings
much-needed clarity to the constitution, persistence, and
significance of this divisive myth in the context of our time.
The Left has traditionally assumed that human nature is so
malleable, so perfectible, that it can be shaped in almost any
direction. Conservatives object, arguing that social order arises
not from rational planning but from the spontaneous order of
instincts and habits. Darwinian biology sustains conservative
social thought by showing how the human capacity for spontaneous
order arises from social instincts and a moral sense shaped by
natural selection in human evolutionary history.
In Reason, Tradition, and the Good, Jeffery L. Nicholas addresses
the failure of reason in modernity to bring about a just society, a
society in which people can attain fulfillment. Developing the
critical theory of the Frankfurt School, Nicholas argues that we
rely too heavily on a conception of rationality that is divorced
from tradition and, therefore, incapable of judging ends. Without
the ability to judge ends, we cannot engage in debate about the
good life or the proper goods that we as individuals and as a
society should pursue. Nicholas claims that the project of
enlightenment-defined as the promotion of autonomous reason-failed
because it was based on a deformed notion of reason as mere
rationality, and that a critical theory of society aimed at human
emancipation must turn to substantive reason, a reason constituted
by and constitutive of tradition. To find a reason capable of
judging ends, Nicholas suggests, we must turn to Alasdair
MacIntyre's Thomistic-Aristotelianism. Substantive reason comprises
thinking and acting on the set of standards and beliefs within a
particular tradition. It is the impossibility of enlightenment
rationality to evaluate ends and the possibility of substantive
reason to evaluate ends that makes the one unsuitable and the other
suitable for a critical theory of society. Nicholas's compelling
argument, written in accessible language, remains committed to the
promise of reason to help individuals achieve a good and just
society and a good life. This requires, however, a complete
revolution in the way we approach social life.
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