Download or read book The Cult of the Constitution written by Mary Anne Franks and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-14 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A powerful challenge to the prevailing constitutional orthodoxy of the right and the left . . . A deeply troubling and absolutely vital book” (Mark Joseph Stern, Slate). In this provocative book, Mary Anne Franks examines the thin line between constitutional fidelity and constitutional fundamentalism. The Cult of the Constitution reveals how deep fundamentalist strains in both conservative and liberal American thought keep the Constitution in the service of white male supremacy. Franks demonstrates how constitutional fundamentalists read the Constitution selectively and self-servingly, thus undermining the integrity of the document as a whole. She goes on to argue that economic and civil libertarianism have merged to produce a deregulatory, “free-market” approach to constitutional rights that achieves fullest expression in the idealization of the Internet. The fetishization of the first and second amendments has blurred the boundaries between conduct and speech and between veneration and violence. But the Constitution itself contains the antidote to fundamentalism. The Cult of the Constitution lays bare the dark, antidemocratic consequences of constitutional fundamentalism and urges readers to take the Constitution seriously, not selectively.
Download or read book Machine That Would Go of Itself written by Michael G. Kammen and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on with total page 582 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Our Secret Constitution written by George P. Fletcher and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2003-01-16 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans hate and distrust their government. At the same time, Americans love and trust their government. These contradictory attitudes are resolved by Fletcher's novel interpretation of constitutional history. He argues that we have two constitutions--still living side by side--one that caters to freedom and fear, the other that satisfied our needs for security and social justice. The first constitution came into force in 1789. It stresses freedom, voluntary association, and republican elitism. The second constitution begins with the Gettysburg Address and emphasizes equality, organic nationhood, and popular democracy. These radical differences between our two constitutions explain our ambivalence and self-contradictory attitudes toward government. With September 11 the second constitution--which Fletcher calls the Secret Constitution--has become ascendant. When America is under threat, the nation cultivates its solidarity. It overcomes its fear and looks to government for protection and the pursuit of social justice. Lincoln's messages of a strong government and a nation that must "long endure" have never been more relevant to American politics. "Fletcher's argument has intriguing implications beyond the sweeping subject of this profoundly thought-provoking book."--The Denver Post
Download or read book The Cult of the Presidency written by Gene Healy and published by Cato Institute. This book was released on 2024-09-10 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The modern presidency has become the central fault line of polarization in America because the president, increasingly, has the power to reshape vast swaths of American life. In The Cult of the Presidency, Gene Healy argues that “We, the People” are to blame. Americans on each side of the red-blue divide demand a president who can create jobs, teach our children well, tend to the “national soul”—and vanquish their culture-war enemies. Our political culture has invested the office with preposterously vast responsibilities, and as a result, the officeholder wields powers that no human being ought to have. In a new preface to the 2024 edition, Healy argues that the rise of partisan hatred lends new urgency to the cause of re-limiting executive power. In the years since Cult was first published, politics has gone feral, with polls showing that substantial majorities of Democrats and Republicans view members of the other party as “a serious threat to the United States and its people.” At the same time, the most powerful office in the world has grown even more so. That’s raised the stakes of our political differences dramatically: the issues that divide us most are now increasingly settled by whichever party manages to seize the office. In our partisan myopia, we’ve laid down the infrastructure for autocratic rule and sectarian warfare, making the presidency powerful enough to tear the country apart. Interweaving historical scholarship, legal analysis, and trenchant cultural commentary, The Cult of the Presidency traces America’s decades‐long drift from the Framers’ vision for the presidency: a constitutionally constrained chief magistrate charged with faithful execution of the laws. Restoring that vision will require a Congress and a Court willing to check executive power, but Healy emphasizes that there is no simple legislative or judicial fix. Unless Americans change what we ask of the office—no longer demanding what we should not want and cannot have—we’ll get what, in a sense, we deserve.
Download or read book Originalism and the Good Constitution written by John O. McGinnis and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-01 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originalism holds that the U.S. Constitution should be interpreted according to its meaning at the time it was enacted. In their innovative defense of originalism, John McGinnis and Michael Rappaport maintain that the text of the Constitution should be adhered to by the Supreme Court because it was enacted by supermajorities—both its original enactment under Article VII and subsequent Amendments under Article V. A text approved by supermajorities has special value in a democracy because it has unusually wide support and thus tends to maximize the welfare of the greatest number. The authors recognize and respond to many possible objections. Does originalism perpetuate the dead hand of the past? How can following the original meaning be justified, given that African Americans and women were excluded from the enactment of the Constitution in 1787 and many of its subsequent Amendments? What is originalism’s place in interpretation of the Constitution, when after two hundred years there is so much non-originalist precedent? A fascinating counterfactual they pose is this: had the Supreme Court not interpreted the Constitution so freely, perhaps the nation would have resorted to the Article V amendment process more often and with greater effect. Their book will be an important contribution to the literature on originalism, which is now the most prominent theory of constitutional interpretation.
Download or read book Constitution Cafe written by Christopher Phillips and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2011-08-22 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas Jefferson proposed that we revise the Constitution every so often, not just to reflect the changing times but to revive and perpetuate our original revolutionary spirit. Could it be that the Constitution itself is part of the reason that our democracy is on life support, our government gone haywire? To find out, the author, originator of the Socrates Café dialogues, sets off on a cross-country junket to engage Americans of all stripes in an offbeat constitutional convention. Given the opportunity to rewrite the Constitution, a diverse bunch from Burning Man die hards to army veterans, Tea Party acolytes to Orange County slackers, weighs in with some really wild and worthwhile ideas about how our nation should be governed. With Jefferson as his iconoclastic and visionary guide, the author moderates these discussions and complements his participants' ideas by relating them to Jefferson's own experiences with governance and to his great expectations for our democracy. This book is an account of how we might draw from our rebellious past to incite meaningful change today; it is a map for inspiring Jeffersonian activism by tapping into our timely (and timeless) concerns about the need to give our country's democratic framework a makeover.
Download or read book The Problem of Democracy written by Nancy Isenberg and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Told with authority and style. . . Crisply summarizing the Adamses' legacy, the authors stress principle over partisanship."--The Wall Street Journal How the father and son presidents foresaw the rise of the cult of personality and fought those who sought to abuse the weaknesses inherent in our democracy. Until now, no one has properly dissected the intertwined lives of the second and sixth (father and son) presidents. John and John Quincy Adams were brilliant, prickly politicians and arguably the most independently minded among leaders of the founding generation. Distrustful of blind allegiance to a political party, they brought a healthy skepticism of a brand-new system of government to the country's first 50 years. They were unpopular for their fears of the potential for demagoguery lurking in democracy, and--in a twist that predicted the turn of twenty-first century politics--they warned against, but were unable to stop, the seductive appeal of political celebrities Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. In a bold recasting of the Adamses' historical roles, The Problem of Democracy is a major critique of the ways in which their prophetic warnings have been systematically ignored over the centuries. It's also an intimate family drama that brings out the torment and personal hurt caused by the gritty conduct of early American politics. Burstein and Isenberg make sense of the presidents' somewhat iconoclastic, highly creative engagement with America's political and social realities. By taking the temperature of American democracy, from its heated origins through multiple upheavals, the authors reveal the dangers and weaknesses that have been present since the beginning. They provide a clear-eyed look at a decoy democracy that masks the reality of elite rule while remaining open, since the days of George Washington, to a very undemocratic result in the formation of a cult surrounding the person of an elected leader.
Download or read book Alexander Hamilton and the Constitution written by Clinton Rossiter and published by New York : Harcourt, Brace & World. This book was released on 1964 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Terror of Natural Right written by Dan Edelstein and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-10-15 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Natural right—the idea that there is a collection of laws and rights based not on custom or belief but that are “natural” in origin—is typically associated with liberal politics and freedom. In The Terror of Natural Right, Dan Edelstein argues that the revolutionaries used the natural right concept of the “enemy of the human race”—an individual who has transgressed the laws of nature and must be executed without judicial formalities—to authorize three-quarters of the deaths during the Terror. Edelstein further contends that the Jacobins shared a political philosophy that he calls “natural republicanism,” which assumed that the natural state of society was a republic and that natural right provided its only acceptable laws. Ultimately, he proves that what we call the Terror was in fact only one facet of the republican theory that prevailed from Louis’s trial until the fall of Robespierre. A highly original work of historical analysis, political theory, literary criticism, and intellectual history, The Terror of Natural Right challenges prevailing assumptions of the Terror to offer a new perspective on the Revolutionary period.
Download or read book The Constitution as Social Design written by Gretchen Ritter and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on gender and civic membership in American constitutional politics from the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment through Second Wave Feminism. It examines how American civic membership is gendered, and how the terms of civic membership available to men and women shape their political identities, aspirations, and behavior. The book also explores the dynamics of American constitutional development through a focus on civic membership--a legal and political construct at the heart of the constitutional order. This is a book about gender politics and constitutional development, and about what each of these can tell us about the other. It considers the options and choices faced by womens rights activists in the United States as they voiced their claims for civic inclusion from Reconstruction through Second Wave Feminism, and it makes evident the limits of liberal citizenship for women.
Download or read book Relic written by William G. Howell and published by . This book was released on 2016-04-26 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Our government is failing us. Can we simply blame polarization, the deregulation of campaign finance, or some other nefarious force? What if the roots go much deeper, to our nation's start? In Relic, the political scientists William Howell and Terry Moe boldly argue that nothing less than the U.S. Constitution is the cause of government dysfunction. The framers came from a simple, small, agrarian society, and set forth a government comprised of separate powers, one of which, Congress, was expected to respond to the parochial concerns of citizens across the land. By design, the national government they created was incapable of taking broad and meaningful action. But a hundred years after the nation's founding, the United States was transformed into a complex, large, and industrial society. The key, they argue, is to expand the powers of the president. Presidents take a longer view of things out of concern for their legacies, and are able to act without hesitation. To back up this controversial remedy, Howell and Moe offer an incisive understanding of the Progressive Movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, one of the most powerful movements in American history. The Progressives shone a bright light on the mismatch between our constitutional government and the demands of modernity, and they succeeded in changing our government, sidelining Congress and installing a presidentially-led system that was more able to tackle the nation's vast social problems. Howell and Moe argue that we need a second Progressive Movement dedicated to effective government, above all to reforms that promote strong presidential leadership. For it is through the presidency that the American government can address the problems that threaten the very stability of our society"--
Download or read book The Constitution of the Roman Republic written by Andrew Lintott and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 1999-04-01 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is no other published book in English studying the constitution of the Roman Republic as a whole. Yet the Greek historian Polybius believed that the constitution was a fundamental cause of the exponential growth of Rome's empire. He regarded the Republic as unusual in two respects: first, because it functioned so well despite being a mix of monarchy, oligarchy and democracy; secondly, because the constitution was the product of natural evolution rather than the ideals of a lawgiver. Even if historians now seek more widely for the causes of Rome's rise to power, the importance and influence of her political institutions remains. The reasons for Rome's power are both complex, on account of the mix of elements, and flexible, inasmuch as they were not founded on written statutes but on unwritten traditions reinterpreted by successive generations. Knowledge of Rome's political institutions is essential both for ancient historians and for those who study the contribution of Rome to the republican tradition of political thought from the Middle Ages to the revolutions inspired by the Enlightenment.
Download or read book The Cult of Smart written by Fredrik deBoer and published by All Points Books. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named one of Vulture’s Top 10 Best Books of 2020! Leftist firebrand Fredrik deBoer exposes the lie at the heart of our educational system and demands top-to-bottom reform. Everyone agrees that education is the key to creating a more just and equal world, and that our schools are broken and failing. Proposed reforms variously target incompetent teachers, corrupt union practices, or outdated curricula, but no one acknowledges a scientifically-proven fact that we all understand intuitively: Academic potential varies between individuals, and cannot be dramatically improved. In The Cult of Smart, educator and outspoken leftist Fredrik deBoer exposes this omission as the central flaw of our entire society, which has created and perpetuated an unjust class structure based on intellectual ability. Since cognitive talent varies from person to person, our education system can never create equal opportunity for all. Instead, it teaches our children that hierarchy and competition are natural, and that human value should be based on intelligence. These ideas are counter to everything that the left believes, but until they acknowledge the existence of individual cognitive differences, progressives remain complicit in keeping the status quo in place. This passionate, voice-driven manifesto demands that we embrace a new goal for education: equality of outcomes. We must create a world that has a place for everyone, not just the academically talented. But we’ll never achieve this dream until the Cult of Smart is destroyed.
Download or read book Ratifying the Republic written by David J. Siemers and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2004-08-01 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explains how the United States Constitution made the transition from a very divisive proposal to a consensually legitimate framework for governing. The Federalists' proposal had been bitterly opposed, and constitutional legitimation required a major transformation. The story of that transformation is the substance of this book.
Download or read book An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States written by Charles A. Beard and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2012-03-08 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This classic study — one of the most influential in the area of American economic history — questioned the founding fathers' motivations and prompted new perceptions of the supreme law of the land.
Download or read book The Deep State written by Mike Lofgren and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-01-05 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times bestselling author of The Party Is Over delivers a no-holds-barred exposé of who really wields power in Washington Every Four years, tempers are tested and marriages fray as Americans head to the polls to cast their votes. But does anyone really care what we think? Has our vaunted political system become one big, expensive, painfully scriped reality TV show? In this cringe-inducing expose of the sins and excesses of Beltwayland, a longtime Republican party insider argues that we have become an oligarchy in form if not in name. Hooked on war, genuflecting to big donors, in thrall to discredited economic theories and utterly bereft of a moral compass, America’s governing classes are selling their souls to entrenched interest while our bridges collapse, wages, stagnate, and our water is increasingly undrinkable. Drawing on sinsights gleaned over three decades on Capitol Hill, much of it on the Budget Committee, Lofgren paints a gripping portrait of the dismal swamp on the Potomac and the revolution it will take to reclaim our government and set us back on course.
Download or read book Our Undemocratic Constitution written by Sanford Levinson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Levinson here argues that too many of our Constitution's provisions promote either unjust or ineffective government. Under the existing blueprint, we can neither rid ourselves of incompetent presidents nor assure continuity of government following catastrophic attacks. Worse, our Constitution is the most difficult to amend or update in the world. Levinson boldly challenges the Americans to undertake a long overdue public discussion on how they might best reform this most hallowed document and construct a constitution adequate to our democratic values.
