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.

A rediscovery of patriotism as a virtue in line with the core values of democracy in an extremist age "Like you perhaps, I still regard myself as an extremely patriotic person. Which is why I so admired [this book]. . . . It explained my emotion to me, as it might yours to you." -David Brooks, New York Times "Smith superbly illuminates the distinctiveness of the American idea of patriotism and reminds us of how important patriotism is, and how essential to making America better."-Leslie Lenkowsky, Wall Street Journal The concept of patriotism has fallen on hard times. What was once a value that united Americans has become so politicized by both the left and the right that it threatens to rip apart the social fabric. On the right, patriotism has become synonymous with nationalism and an "us versus them" worldview, while on the left it is seen as an impediment to acknowledging important ethnic, religious, or racial identities and a threat to cosmopolitan globalism. Steven B. Smith reclaims patriotism from these extremist positions and advocates for a patriotism that is broad enough to balance loyalty to country with other loyalties. Describing how it is a matter of both the head and the heart, Smith shows how patriotism can bring the country together around the highest ideals of equality and is a central and ennobling disposition that democratic societies cannot afford to do without.

On February 19, 2009, CNBC commentator Rick Santelli delivered a dramatic rant against Obama administration programs to shore up the plunging housing market. Invoking the Founding Fathers and ridiculing "losers" who could not pay their mortgages, Santelli called for "Tea Party" protests. Over the next two years, conservative activists took to the streets and airways, built hundreds of local Tea Party groups, and weighed in with votes and money to help right-wing Republicans win electoral victories in 2010. In this penetrating new study, Harvard University's Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson go beyond images of protesters in Colonial costumes to provide a nuanced portrait of the Tea Party. What they find is sometimes surprising. Drawing on grassroots interviews and visits to local meetings in several regions, they find that older, middle-class Tea Partiers mostly approve of Social Security, Medicare, and generous benefits for military veterans. Their opposition to "big government" entails reluctance to pay taxes to help people viewed as undeserving "freeloaders" - including immigrants, lower income earners, and the young. At the national level, Tea Party elites and funders leverage grassroots energy to further longstanding goals such as tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation of business, and privatization of the very same Social Security and Medicare programs on which many grassroots Tea Partiers depend. Elites and grassroots are nevertheless united in hatred of Barack Obama and determination to push the Republican Party sharply to the right. The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism combines fine-grained portraits of local Tea Party members and chapters with an overarching analysis of the movement's rise, impact, and likely fate.

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.

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.

Over time the presidential election of 1964 has come to be seen as a generational shift, a defining moment in which Americans deliberated between two distinctly different visions for the future. In its juxtaposition of these divergent visions, Two Suns of the Southwest is the first full account of this critical election and its legacy for US politics.The 1964 election, in Nancy Beck Young's telling, was a contest between two men of the Southwest, each with a very different idea of what the Southwest was and what America should be. Barry Goldwater, the Republican senator from Arizona, came to represent a nostalgic, idealized past, a preservation of traditional order, while Lyndon B. Johnson, the Democratic incumbent from Texas, looked boldly and hopefully toward an expansive, liberal future of increased opportunity. Thus, as we see in Two Suns of the Southwest, the election was also a showdown between liberalism and conservatism, an election whose outcome would echo throughout the rest of the century. Young explores how demographics, namely the rise of the Sunbelt, factored into the framing and reception of these competing ideas. Her work situates Johnson's Sunbelt liberalism as universalist, designed to create space for all Americans; Goldwater's Sunbelt conservatism was far more restrictive, at least with regard to what the federal government should do. In this respect the election became a debate about individual rights versus legislated equality as priorities of the federal government. Young explores all the cultural and political elements and events that figured in this narrative, allowing Johnson to unite disaffected Republicans with independents and Democrats in a winning coalition. On a final note Young connects the 1964 election to the current state of our democracy, explaining the irony whereby the winning candidate's vision has grown stale while the losing candidate's has become much more central to American politics.

"The Rise and Fall of Modern American Conservatism" tells the gripping story of perhaps the most significant political force of our time through the lives and careers of six leading figures at the heart of the movement. David Farber traces the history of modern conservatism from its revolt against New Deal liberalism, to its breathtaking resurgence under Ronald Reagan, to its spectacular defeat with the election of Barack Obama.

Farber paints vivid portraits of Robert Taft, William F. Buckley Jr., Barry Goldwater, Phyllis Schlafly, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush. He shows how these outspoken, charismatic, and frequently controversial conservative leaders were united by a shared insistence on the primacy of social order, national security, and economic liberty. Farber demonstrates how they built a versatile movement capable of gaining and holding power, from Taft's opposition to the New Deal to Buckley's founding of the "National Review" as the intellectual standard-bearer of modern conservatism; from Goldwater's crusade against leftist politics and his failed 1964 bid for the presidency to Schlafly's rejection of feminism in favor of traditional gender roles and family values; and from Reagan's city upon a hill to conservatism's downfall with Bush's ambitious presidency.

"The Rise and Fall of Modern American Conservatism" provides rare insight into how conservatives captured the American political imagination by claiming moral superiority, downplaying economic inequality, relishing bellicosity, and embracing nationalism. This concise and accessible history reveals how these conservative leaders discovered a winning formula that enabled them to forge a powerful and formidable political majority.

The rapid growth of the conservative movement has long fascinated historians, many of whom have focused on the grassroots efforts in the Sunbelt. Empire of Direct Mail examines how conservative operatives got their message out to their supporters through computerized direct mail, a significant but understudied communications technology. The story centers on Richard Viguerie, a pioneer of political direct mail who was known as the "Funding Father" of the conservative movement. His consulting firm established a database of conservative prospects and mailed millions of unsolicited letters. By the 1970s, Viguerie emerged as the central fundraiser in conservative politics, financing right-wing organizations and politicians such as George Wallace, Jesse Helms, and Ronald Reagan. Moriyama shows that the rise of right-wing direct mail communication in the postwar years coincided with a new strategy: the use of this new technology to stoke negative emotions, such as fury and fear, among the letter recipients. In the period of broadcasting, conservative fundraisers established the new approach of targeting individual voters and promoting negative emotions to win elections. Before Rush Limbaugh's talk show, Fox News, Twitter, and Cambridge Analytica, conservatives used direct mail to spread messages of anxiety and anger to raise funds and mobilize the grassroots. Through extensive archival research of fundraising activities in the conservative movement and key elections from 1950 to 1980, Empire of Direct Mail offers a political history of the role played by communications technology in the development of modern US conservatism.

An inside look at why the Republican Party has come to dominate the rural American South Beginning with the Dixiecrat Revolt of 1948 and extending through the 2020 election cycle, political scientists M.V. Hood III and Seth C. McKee trace the process by which rural white southerners transformed from fiercely loyal Democrats to stalwart Republicans. While these rural white southerners were the slowest to affiliate with the Grand Old Party, they are now its staunchest supporters. This transition and the reasons for it are vital to understanding the current electoral landscape of the American South, including states like Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia, all of which have the potential to exert enormous influence over national electoral outcomes. In this first book-length empirically based study focusing on rural southern voters, Hood and McKee examine their changing political behavior, arguing that their Democratic-to-Republican transition is both more recent and more durable than most political observers realize. By analyzing data collected from their own region-wide polling along with a variety of other carefully mined sources, the authors explain why the initial appeal of 1950s Republicanism to upscale white southerners in metropolitan settings took well over a half-century to yield to, and morph into, its culturally conservative variant now championed by rural residents. Hood and McKee contend that it is impossible to understand current American electoral politics without understanding the longer trajectory of voting behavior in rural America and they offer not only a framework but also the data necessary for doing so.