Download or read book Reconstructing Conservatism written by Richard Hayton and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did it take the Conservative Party so long to recover power? After the landslide defeat in 1997, why was it so slow to adapt, reposition itself and rebuild its support? How did the party leadership seek to reconstruct Conservatism and modernise its electoral appeal? Of vital interest to anyone interested in British politics, this highly readable book addresses these questions through a contextualised assessment of Conservative Party politics between 1997 and 2010. It traces debates over strategy amongst the party elite and scrutinises the actions of the leadership. It also considers four particular dilemmas for contemporary Conservatism: European integration; national identity and the ‘English Question’; social liberalism versus social authoritarianism; and the problems posed by a neo-liberal political economy. The book argues that the ideological legacy of Thatcherism played a central role in framing and shaping these intraparty debates, and that an appreciation of this is vital for explaining the nature and limits of the Conservatives’ renewal under Cameron.
Download or read book Reconstructing Conservatism written by Richard Hayton and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Considers in depth four particular dilemmas for contemporary Conservatism: European integration; national identity and the 'English Question'; social liberalism versus social authoritarianism; and the problems posed by a neo-liberal political economy.
Download or read book Christian Reconstruction written by Michael J. McVicar and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2015-04-27 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first critical history of Christian Reconstruction and its founder and champion, theologian and activist Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001). Drawing on exclusive access to Rushdoony's personal papers and extensive correspondence, Michael J. McVicar demonstrates the considerable role Reconstructionism played in the development of the radical Christian Right and an American theocratic agenda. As a religious movement, Reconstructionism aims at nothing less than "reconstructing" individuals through a form of Christian governance that, if implemented in the lives of U.S. citizens, would fundamentally alter the shape of American society. McVicar examines Rushdoony's career and traces Reconstructionism as it grew from a grassroots, populist movement in the 1960s to its height of popularity in the 1970s and 1980s. He reveals the movement's galvanizing role in the development of political conspiracy theories and survivalism, libertarianism and antistatism, and educational reform and homeschooling. The book demonstrates how these issues have retained and in many cases gained potency for conservative Christians to the present day, despite the decline of the movement itself beginning in the 1990s. McVicar contends that Christian Reconstruction has contributed significantly to how certain forms of religiosity have become central, and now familiar, aspects of an often controversial conservative revolution in America.
Download or read book The Corrosion of Conservatism Why I Left the Right written by Max Boot and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2018-10-09 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “must read” (Joe Scarborough) by a New York Times– best- selling author, The Corrosion of Conservatism presents a necessary defense of American democracy. Praised on publication as “one of the most impressive and unfl inching diagnoses of the pathologies in Republican politics that led to Trump’s rise” (Jonathan Chait, New York), The Corrosion of Conservatism documents a president who has traduced every norm and the rise of a nascent centrist movement to counter his assault on democracy. In this “admirably succinct and trenchant” (Charles Reichman, San Francisco Chronicle) exhumation of conservatism, Max Boot tells the story of an ideological dislocation so shattering that it caused his courageous transformation from Republican foreign policy advisor to celebrated anti- Trump columnist. From recording his political coming- of- age as a young émigré from the Soviet Union to describing the vitriol he endured from his erstwhile conservative colleagues, Boot mixes “lively memoir with sharp analysis” (William Kristol) from its Reagan-era apogee to its corrosion under Donald Trump.
Download or read book Conservatives and the Constitution written by Ken I. Kersch and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-28 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recovers a contested, evolving tradition of conservative constitutional argument that shaped the past and is bidding to make the future.
Download or read book Mothers of Conservatism written by Michelle M. Nickerson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-09-07 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mothers of Conservatism tells the story of 1950s Southern Californian housewives who shaped the grassroots right in the two decades following World War II. Michelle Nickerson describes how red-hunting homemakers mobilized activist networks, institutions, and political consciousness in local education battles, and she introduces a generation of women who developed political styles and practices around their domestic routines. From the conservative movement's origins in the early fifties through the presidential election of 1964, Nickerson documents how women shaped conservatism from the bottom up, out of the fabric of their daily lives and into the agenda of the Republican Party. A unique history of the American conservative movement, Mothers of Conservatism shows how housewives got out of the house and discovered their political capital.
Download or read book The Conservative Sensibility written by George F. Will and published by Hachette Books. This book was released on 2019-06-04 with total page 598 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist's "astonishing" and "enthralling" New York Times bestseller and Notable Book about how the Founders' belief in natural rights created a great American political tradition (Booklist) -- "easily one of the best books on American Conservatism ever written" (Jonah Goldberg). For more than four decades, George F. Will has attempted to discern the principles of the Western political tradition and apply them to America's civic life. Today, the stakes could hardly be higher. Vital questions about the nature of man, of rights, of equality, of majority rule are bubbling just beneath the surface of daily events in America. The Founders' vision, articulated first in the Declaration of Independence and carried out in the Constitution, gave the new republic a framework for government unique in world history. Their beliefs in natural rights, limited government, religious freedom, and in human virtue and dignity ushered in two centuries of American prosperity. Now, as Will shows, conservatism is under threat -- both from progressives and elements inside the Republican Party. America has become an administrative state, while destructive trends have overtaken family life and higher education. Semi-autonomous executive agencies wield essentially unaccountable power. Congress has failed in its duty to exercise its legislative powers. And the executive branch has slipped the Constitution's leash. In the intellectual battle between the vision of Founding Fathers like James Madison, who advanced the notion of natural rights that pre-exist government, and the progressivism advanced by Woodrow Wilson, the Founders have been losing. It's time to reverse America's political fortunes. Expansive, intellectually thrilling, and written with the erudite wit that has made Will beloved by millions of readers, The Conservative Sensibility is an extraordinary new book from one of America's most celebrated political writers.
Download or read book The Reactionary Mind written by Corey Robin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now updated to include Trump's election and the rise of global populism, Corey Robin's 'The Reactionary Mind' traces conservatism back to its roots in the reaction against the French Revolution.
Download or read book The Politics of Rage written by Dan T. Carter and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2000-02-01 with total page 604 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining biography with regional and national history, Dan T. Carter chronicles the dramatic rise and fall of George Wallace, a populist who abandoned his ideals to become a national symbol of racism, and later begged for forgiveness. In The Politics of Rage, Carter argues persuasively that the four-time Alabama governor and four-time presidential candidate helped to establish the conservative political movement that put Ronald Reagan in the White House in 1980 and gave Newt Gingrich and the Republicans control of Congress in 1994. In this second edition, Carter updates Wallace’s story with a look at the politician’s death and the nation’s reaction to it and gives a summary of his own sense of the legacy of “the most important loser in twentieth-century American politics.”
Download or read book Getting Right with Reagan written by Marcus M. Witcher and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2019-11-29 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Republicans today often ask, “What would Reagan do?” The short answer: probably not what they think. Hero of modern-day conservatives, Ronald Reagan was not even conservative enough for some of his most ardent supporters in his own time—and today his practical, often bipartisan approach to politics and policy would likely be deemed apostasy. To try to get a clearer picture of what the real Reagan legacy is, in this book Marcus M. Witcher details conservatives’ frequently tense relationship with Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and explores how they created the latter-day Reagan myth. Witcher reminds us that during Reagan’s time in office, conservative critics complained that he had failed to bring about the promised Reagan Revolution—and in 1988 many Republican hopefuls ran well to the right of his policies. Notable among the dissonant acts of his administration: Reagan raised taxes when necessary, passed comprehensive immigration reform, signed a bill that saved Social Security, and worked with adversaries at home and abroad to govern effectively. Even his signature accomplishment—invoked by “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”—was highly unpopular with the Conservative Caucus, as evidenced in their newspaper ads comparing the president to Neville Chamberlain: “Appeasement is as Unwise in 1988 as in 1938.” Reagan’s presidential library and museum positioned him above partisan politics, emphasizing his administration’s role in bringing about economic recovery and negotiating an end to the Cold War. How this legacy, as Reagan himself envisioned it, became the more grandiose version fashioned by Republicans after the 1980s tells us much about the late twentieth-century transformation of the GOP—and, as Witcher’s work so deftly shows, the conservative movement as we know it now.
Download or read book Understanding Contemporary American Conservatism written by Joel Aberbach and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-08-05 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary American conservatism – a mélange of ideas, people, and organizations – is difficult to define; even conservatives themselves are unable to agree about its essential meaning. Yet the conservative movement is well financed, exerts strong influence in the Republican Party, inspires followers throughout the land, and has spawned a network of think tanks and media outlets that are the envy of its competitors. It is a powerful political force with which to be reckoned. This book examines how that has come about and what contemporary conservatism signifies for US politics and policy. It looks at the recent history of conservatism in America as well as its antecedents in the UK, traces changes over time using American National Election Study data from 1972 to the present in what it means when people say they are conservatives, and assesses the prospects for American conservatism, both in the near term electoral context and over the longer term as well.
Download or read book Reconstructing Public Reason written by Eric MacGilvray and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2004-12-30 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: MacGilvray argues that we should shift our attention away from the problem of identifying uncontroversial public ends in the present and toward the problem of evaluating potentially controversial public ends through collective inquiry over time.
Download or read book The Doom of Reconstruction written by Andrew L. Slap and published by Reconstructing America (Hardco. This book was released on 2006 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Election of 1872 the conflict between President U. S. Grant and Horace Greeley has been typically understood as a battle for the soul of the ruling Republican Party. In this innovative study, Andrew Slap argues forcefully that the campaign was more than a narrow struggle between Party elites and a class-based radical reform movement. The election, he demonstrates, had broad consequences: in their opposition to widespread Federal corruption, Greeley Republicans unintentionally doomed Reconstruction of any kind, even as they lost the election. Based on close readings of newspapers, party documents, and other primary sources, Slap confronts one of the major questions in American political history: How, and why, did Reconstruction come to an end? His focus on the unintended consequences of Liberal Republican politics is a provocative contribution to this important debate.
Download or read book Rightward Bound written by Bruce J. Schulman and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2008-03-15 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Often considered a lost decade, a pause between the liberal Sixties and Reagan’s Eighties, the 1970s were indeed a watershed era when the forces of a conservative counter-revolution cohered. These years marked a significant moral and cultural turning point in which the conservative movement became the motive force driving politics for the ensuing three decades. Interpreting the movement as more than a backlash against the rampant liberalization of American culture, racial conflict, the Vietnam War, and Watergate, these provocative and innovative essays look below the surface, discovering the tectonic shifts that paved the way for Reagan’s America. They reveal strains at the heart of the liberal coalition, resulting from struggles over jobs, taxes, and neighborhood reconstruction, while also investigating how the deindustrialization of northern cities, the rise of the suburbs, and the migration of people and capital to the Sunbelt helped conservatism gain momentum in the twentieth century. They demonstrate how the forces of the right coalesced in the 1970s and became, through the efforts of grassroots activists and political elites, a movement to reshape American values and policies. A penetrating and provocative portrait of a critical decade in American history, Rightward Bound illuminates the seeds of both the successes and the failures of the conservative revolution. It helps us understand how, despite conservatism’s rise, persistent tensions remain today between its political power and the achievements of twentieth-century liberalism.
Download or read book Conservatism and Ideology written by Matthew Johnson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-02 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael Oakshott described conservatism as a non-ideological preference for the familiar, tried, actual, limited, near, sufficient, convenient and present. Historically, conservatives have been associated with attempts to sustain social harmony between classes and groups within an organic, hierarchical order grounded in collective history and cultural values. Yet, in recent decades, conservatism throughout the English-speaking world has been associated with radical social and economic policy, often championing free-market models which substitute the free movement of labour and forms of competition and social mobility for organic hierarchy and noblesse oblige. The radical changes associated with such policies call into question the extent to which contemporary conservatism is conservative, rather than ideological. This book seeks to explore contemporary conservative political thought with regard to such topics as, ‘One Nation’ politics and Big Society, sovereignty, multiculturalism and international blocs, paternalism and negative liberty with regard to narcotics, pornography and education, regional and international development, and public faith, establishment and religious diversity. This book will be published as a special issue of Global Discourse.
Download or read book The Roots of Modern Conservatism written by Michael D. Bowen and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1944 and 1953, a power struggle emerged between New York governor Thomas Dewey and U.S. senator Robert Taft of Ohio that threatened to split the Republican Party. In The Roots of Modern Conservatism, Michael Bowen reveals how this two-man b
Download or read book American Conservatism written by Andrew J. Bacevich and published by Library of America. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 749 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the nation stands at a crossroads, this “valuable collection” urges us to reexamine the ideas and values of the American conservative tradition—offering “a bracing tonic for the present chaos” (The Washington Post). A groundbreaking collection of mainstream conservative writings since 1900, featuring pieces by Ronald Reagan, Antonin Scalia, Joan Didion, and more What is American conservatism? What are its core beliefs and values? What answers can it offer to the fundamental questions we face in the twenty-first century about the common good and the meaning of freedom, the responsibilities of citizenship, and America’s proper role in the world? As libertarians, neoconservatives, Never Trump-ers, and others battle over the label, this landmark collection offers an essential survey of conservative thought in the United States since 1900, highlighting the centrality of four key themes: the importance of tradition and the local, resistance to an ever-expanding state, opposition to the threat of tyranny at home and abroad, and free markets as the key to sustaining individual liberty. Andrew J. Bacevich’s incisive selections reveal that American conservatism—in his words “more akin to an ethos or a disposition than a fixed ideology”—has hardly been a monolithic entity over the last 120 years, but rather has developed through fierce internal debate about basic political and social propositions. Well-known figures such as Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley are complemented here by important but less familiar thinkers such as Richard Weaver and Robert Nisbet, as well as writers not of the political right, like Randolph Bourne, Joan Didion, and Reinhold Niebuhr, who have been important influences on conservative thinking. More relevant than ever, this rich, too often overlooked vein of writing provides essential insights into who Americans are as a people and offers surprising hope, in a time of extreme polarization, for finding common ground. It deserves to be rediscovered by readers of all political persuasions.
