US Political Eras

Fred Siegel of Cooper Union really liked this book that proposes that we analyze US political history in three eras.  The current era is one in which political affairs are defined by voices outside the parties.

Here is what the Oxford University Press wrote about this book:
"Hailed in The New York Times Book Review as "the single best book written in recent years on the sweep of American political history," this groundbreaking work divides our nation's history into three "regimes," each of which lasts many, many decades, allowing us to appreciate as never before the slow steady evolution of American politics, government, and law."

Here is the book:

America's Three Regimes

A New Political History

Morton Keller

Teapot Dome

Why does corruption in American Government persist notwithstanding the lesson that the country should have learned from the Teapot Dome Scandal?  See The Teapot Dome Scandal: How Big Oil Bought the Harding White House and Tried to Steal the Country, by Laton McCartney.  Click  here. Or here   Here's the review in The New York Times.

Al Capone

Recently, I finished the Kindle version of Get Capone: The Secret Plot That Captured America's Most Wanted Gangster, by Jonathan Eig.  Here's the link to the web page.  Like so many books, the book is longer than the really meaty material.  The author obviously found some interesting material in the records, and the author works hard to show how there's a secret plot.  But modern Americans know that when government fixates on a target----like terrorists today---the government has lots of weapons at its disposal that may bypass the normal limits that the government usually observes.

The author was able to show how what we think of as modern political attitudes such as "law and order" and anti-immigrant prejudice have roots that run way back in American politics.  

Oh, and it portrays Elliot Ness in a whole new way.  Myth-making about law enforcement has a long history.

Political Upheavals

Conservative David Frum noted these five books in the WSJ March 28, 2009. These are all controversial books, but maybe that was the point. Former Bush speechwriter David Frum admonishes the Republican party to stop using gimmicks. Frum appeared on The Daily Show in January 2008. He wrote Comeback:Conservativism that Can Win Again.

The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788–1800, by
Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick (1993) Publisher's Summary Abebooks has it.

Abraham Lincoln, Redeemer President, by Allan C. Guelzo, 1999: Out of Print
Guelzo has a religious tinge to his work. He wrote Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President. His current book on Lincoln is Lincoln: Man of Ideas. Dr. Allen C. Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era, Director of Civil War Era Studies, and Associate Director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. He holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania. Abebooks has it.


The Winning of the Midwest: Social and Political Conflict, by Richard J. Jensen, 1971: Out of Print See this site for for this book priced at $135 for a copy.
No wonder Amazon suggests that it is hard to get. Abebooks has it.

Richard J. Jensen, professor emeritus of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is the author of several books, including Grass Roots Politics: Parties, Issues, and Voters, 1854-1983.

Our Country: The Shaping of America from Roosevelt to Reagan, by Michael Barone.
Free Press. 805 pp. $29.95, 1990. Abebooks has it.

This comes from a review in Commentary magazine: "This book is mislabeled. The title promises that it will do for 1932-88 what Mark Sullivan's Our Times did for 1900-25 and Frederick Lewis Allen's Only Yesterday did for 1920-30. Barone's book is even longer than theirs, but his focus is much narrower: it is essentially an electoral history, an account of the presidential and congressional campaigns and elections from the launching of the New Deal to the end of Reagan's second term." Barone works for American Enterprise Institute, US News & World Report and Fox News.

Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn against Liberalism by Jonathan Rieder (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985) From a review: "The product of Rieder's time in this neighborhood is an ethnographic study of the residents that attempts to explain why a once liberal community turned its back on the Democratic Party in favor of staunch conservatism." The review says, " Rieder fills his book with interviews with the angriest residents of Canarsie." Canarsie is a part of Brooklyn. Here's the google.com reproduction of this book. Rieder is apparently a professor at Barnard College. Abebooks has it.

Frum picked these books because they're about upheavals, he said. Interesting choices.

Henry Fairlie

BITE THE HAND THAT FEEDS YOU: Essays and Provocations (New Republic/Yale University, $30)


Here's what Christopher Hitchens wrote about Fairlie:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/books/review/Hitchens-t.html

Quote from Fairlie:

The foundation of humility is truth. The humble man sees himself as he is. If his depreciation of himself were untrue,... it would not be praiseworthy, and would be a form of hypocrisy, which is one of the evils of Pride. The man who is falsely humble, we know from our own experience, is one who is falsely proud.
http://www.poemhunter.com/quotations/famous.asp?people=Henry%20Fairlie

Amazon has a Henry Fairlie page:
http://www.amazon.com/Henry-Fairlie/e/B001ITWUQE/ref=ep_sprkl_at_B001ITWUQE?pf_rd_p=479564851&pf_rd_s=auto-sparkle&pf_rd_t=301&pf_rd_i=henry%20fairlie&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=0C8JMB4H0QMDGGMH8C9G

http://www.amazon.com/Bite-Hand-That-Feeds-You/dp/0300123833/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1245207964&sr=1-1

Partisanship

Allen Brinkley writes: " "Voters have not changed their ideology very much. Most evidence suggests that a majority of Americans remain relatively moderate and pragmatic. But many have lost interest, and confidence, in the political system and the government, leaving the most fervent party loyalists with greatly increased influence on the choice of candidates and policies." He was reviewing Ronald Brownstein's The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America in tomorrow's New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/books/review/Brinkley-t.html?ref=books

http://premierespeakers.com/ronald_brownstein

Takeover

Takeover - Return of the Imperial Presidency

http://www.charliesavage.com/

All about "information suppression, warrantless wiretapping, torture memos, treaty violations, detention, rendition, a compliant Supreme Court and a supine Congress"

Ron Suskind lecture

Here's what the announcement to Columbia Journalism School alums said:

Suskind '83 Delivers Annual Poliak Lecture

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind '83, author of several books, including "The Price of Loyalty," and "The One Percent Doctrine," implored journalism students to remain committed to truth and disclosure despite resistance from the administration and the public, saying “Each of you has to be an avatar, a champion and a guardian of truth.” To listen:

http://www.journalism.columbia.edu/cs/ContentServer/jrn/1165270114892/page/1165270114875/simplepage.htm

I've had "The One Percent Doctrine" sitting on the night table beside the bed waiting for me to read it. I bought it at Costco, but here's the Amazon link:
http://www.amazon.com/One-Percent-Doctrine-Americas-Pursuit/dp/0743271106/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2/104-0587870-2020724?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1191502974&sr=8-2

Here's the link for "The Price of Loyalty":
http://www.amazon.com/Price-Loyalty-George-Education-ONeill/dp/B0008EH6KA/ref=pd_bbs_sr_3/104-0587870-2020724?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1191502974&sr=8-3

Paul Krugman

The Conscience of a Liberal, by Paul Krugman
http://www.amazon.com/Conscience-Liberal-Paul-Krugman/dp/0393060691/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-1473323-0180867?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1190859915&sr=1-1

"stimulating manifesto aims to galvanize today's progressives"

From Paul Krugman's blog:

The great divergence: Since the late 1970s the America I knew has unraveled. We’re no longer a middle-class society, in which the benefits of economic growth are widely shared: between 1979 and 2005 the real income of the median household rose only 13 percent, but the income of the richest 0.1% of Americans rose 296 percent.

Most people assume that this rise in inequality was the result of impersonal forces, like technological change and globalization. But the great reduction of inequality that created middle-class America between 1935 and 1945 was driven by political change; I believe that politics has also played an important role in rising inequality since the 1970s. It’s important to know that no other advanced economy has seen a comparable surge in inequality – even the rising inequality of Thatcherite Britain was a faint echo of trends here.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/

Heinlein and Conservative Sci-Fi

http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/2007/06/sort/time_rev/page/1/entry/18:108/20070626070637:4EFF21BE-23D5-11DC-856D-E08126AECBE6/

Conservative science fiction is described in this obituary for Robert Heinlein.

Amazon's review says about Heinlein's Starship Troopers: "Many consider this Hugo Award winner to be Robert Heinlein's finest work, and with good reason." It's #5,788 on Amazon's best-seller list.

Stranger in Strange Land is # 15,963. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is #7,761. That's pretty good for 50 year old books.

The Arms Race

Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race, By Richard Rhodes

Here's what it says at Amazon:
"Rhodes reveals the early influence of neoconservatives and right-wing figures such as Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Paul Wolfowitz. We see how Perle in particular sabotaged the Reykjavik meeting by convincing Reagan that mutual nuclear disarmament meant giving up his cherished dream of strategic defense (the Star Wars system). Rhodes’s detailed exploration of these and other events constitutes a prehistory of the neoconservatives, demonstrating that the manipulation of government and public opinion with fake intelligence and threat inflation that the administration of George W. Bush has used to justify the current “war on terror” and the disastrous invasion of Iraq were developed and applied in the Reagan era and even before."

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0375414134/ref=pe_pe_5050_6735740_pe_snp_134

Liberalism

Freedom's Power: The True Force of Liberalism, by Paul Starr, Basic Books

Michael Lind called it "an impressive achievement" in the NYT

Here's the book's own page: http://www.perseusbooksgroup.com/basic/book_detail.jsp?isbn=046508186X


"George W. Bush's presidency is another era of overreaction at the expense of constitutional rights, but the prospects for a quick correction are not auspicious. Nothing has helped end earlier bouts of repression so much as the fact that the wars themselves came to a close, and nothing has so exposed our liberties to indefinite jeopardy as the conception of a "war on terrorism" with no end." - http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/02/21/opinion/main1334435.shtml

Starr is Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, and Stuart Professor of Communications and Public Affairs, Princeton University; Co-editor, The American Prospect -
http://www.prospect.org/web/index.ww


Here's Starr's home page:http://www.princeton.edu/~starr/