Bill Kauffman, a self-proclaimed "placeist" who believes that things urban are homogenizing our national scene, returned to his roots after a bumpy ride on the D.C. fast track. Rarely has he ventured forth since. Here he illuminates the place he loves, traveling from Batavia's scenic vistas to the very seams of its grimy semi-industrial pockets, from its architecturally insignificant new mall to the pastoral grounds of its internationally known School for the Blind. Not one to shy from controversy, Kauffman also investigates his town's efforts to devastate its landmarks through urban renewal, the passions simmering inside its clogged political machinery, and the sagging fortunes of its baseball heroes, the legendary Muckdogs.
Barber B. Conable, Jr.—perhaps the most respected member of Congress of his era—kept a frank, insightful, revealing journal available now for the first time thanks to the efforts of editor Bill Kauffman in The Congressional Journal of Barber B. Conable, Jr., 1968–1984. The journal is an honest, searching, sometimes humorous, occasionally cutting, and always fascinating look inside Congress. Conable, a Republican member of the House from upstate New York, wrote perceptively about Presidents Nixon, Ford, H. W. Bush, and the leading congressional figures of the day. For seventeen years he wrote about the big events as well as daily political life in an era that included Vietnam, Watergate, political realignment, and major changes in entitlements and taxes, where he played a key role. Displaying his gift for clear expression and astute insight, Conable narrates the machinations of major tax measures, trade bills, and such special interests of his as public financing of congressional campaigns. While he is never shy about expressing personal judgments, he revels in the give and take of legislative politics. Conable had an acute sense of the human dynamics of legislating: In addition to the tax bills he shaped and struggled with as the leading Republican on the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, his work with the 1982–1983 Social Security Commission, led by Alan Greenspan, is a classic exercise. Conable thought a deal was critical for the solvency of the Social Security Trust Fund but politically almost impossible given the differing priorities of the chief protagonists, President Reagan and House Speaker Tip O’Neill. In the journal Conable pronounces the effort doomed on January 13, 1983. Two days later he marvels at the political and personal dexterity and skill that ended up producing a deal. The journal illuminates Conable’s intellect, his commitment to his constituents, and his appreciation of principled pragmatism; his writings are in real time, not rendered retrospectively to make himself look better, a rarity among political legacies.
In Look Homeward, America, Bill Kauffman introduces us to the reactionary radicals, front-porch anarchists, and traditionalist rebels who give American culture and politics its pith, vim, and life. Kauffman limns an alternative America that draws its breath from local cultures, traditional liberties, small-scale institutions, and neighborliness. There is an America left that is worth saving: these are its paragons, its poets, its pantheon.
The political right is at an inflection point. The policies that have guided the conservative movement for decades are no longer relevant to the problems we face. Donald Trump's election exposed the vast chasm between the priorities of the conservative professional class, and those of the voters it purportedly serves. But this chasm existed long before it was exposed in 2016, and as we move further into the post-Trump era, these issues aren't going away. The right must contend with the forces that drove Trump to power. The American Conservative has been contending with those very forces for two decades. Launched in 2002 to reignite conversations conservatives had neglected for too long, the magazine has emerged as the best explainer of our present discontents—and the distinct “Main Street” conservatism that it forms as the best path forward. Main Street Conservatism: The Future of the Right takes seminal essays from TAC's robust back catalog and presents them in four broad topic areas that are driving our ongoing political realignment: foreign policy, political economy, American culture, and faith & family. TAC's prescience on these issues creates an anthology that is very much relevant to the issues we now face. The magazine was founded in opposition to the Iraq war, and has been a consistent proponent of a foreign policy fit for a republic, not an empire, ever since. Long before the 2008 financial crisis, the magazine warned of the pitfalls of globalization and an over-financialized economy. On immigration, TAC's prescience on these issues creates an anthology that is very much relevant to the issues we now inaugural editorial took seriously the challenge of assimilation, and placed the issue in the context of defending and defining a uniquely American culture. And all the while, the magazine has been mindful to robustly defend the bedrock of our society: faith and family. With essays from leading conservatives like Patrick J. Buchanan, Sir Roger Scruton, Walter McDougall, Robert W. Merry, Rod Dreher, and many more, Main Street Conservatism: The Future of the Right is far more than a disjointed anthology. The book, like the magazine from which it is taken, is indispensable for understanding American conservatism in our current moment.
The American conservative movement as we know it faces an existential crisis as the nation's demographics shift away from its core constituents—older white middle-class Christians. It is the American conservatism that we don't know that concerns George Hawley in this book. During its ascendancy, leaders within the conservative establishment have energetically policed the movement’s boundaries, effectively keeping alternative versions of conservatism out of view. Returning those neglected voices to the story, Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism offers a more complete, complex, and nuanced account of the American right in all its dissonance in history and in our day. The right-wing intellectual movements considered here differ both from mainstream conservatism and from each other when it comes to fundamental premises, such as the value of equality, the proper role of the state, the importance of free markets, the place of religion in politics, and attitudes toward race. In clear and dispassionate terms, Hawley examines localists who exhibit equal skepticism toward big business and big government, paleoconservatives who look to the distant past for guidance and wish to turn back the clock, radical libertarians who are not content to be junior partners in the conservative movement, and various strains of white supremacy and the radical right in America. In the Internet age, where access is no longer determined by the select few, the independent right has far greater opportunities to make its many voices heard. This timely work puts those voices into context and historical perspective, clarifying our understanding of the American right—past, present, and future.
Bill Kauffman has carved out an idiosyncratic identity quite unlike any other American writer. Praised by the likes of Gore Vidal, Benjamin Schwarz, and George McGovern, he has, with a distinctive and slashingly witty, learnedly allusive style, illumed forgotten corners of American history, articulated a defiant and passionate localism, and written with love and dark humor of his repatriation. Poetry Night at the Ballpark gathers the best of Bill Kauffman's essays and journalism in defense and explication of his alternative America--or Americas. Its discrete pieces are bound by a thematic unity and propulsive energy and are full of unexpected (yet startlingly apposite) connections and revelatory linkages. Whether he's writing about conservative Beats, backyard astronomers, pacifist West Pointers, or Middle America in the movies, Bill Kauffman will challenge, maybe even change, the way you look at American politics and the American provinces.
A portrait of one of America's most profound and honest thinkers, this book combines biographical sketches, personal accounts, literary criticism, and social commentary to illuminate Berry as he is: a complex man of place and community with a depth of domestic, intellectual, filial, and fraternal attributes.
This book "traces the historical roots of the secessionist spirit, and introduces us to the often radical, sometimes quixotic, and highly charged movements that want to decentralize and re-localize power"--P. [4] of cover.
Passionate and witty, Ain't my America is an eye-opening exploration of the rich, honorable, and absurdly under-known history of right-wing peace movements. Pointing toward a "Little American" alternative to the bipartisan imperialism that reigns in today's Washington, it is also a clarion manifesto for the antiwar conservatives of today. -- from dust jacket.
The Anti-Federalist Luther Martin of Maryland is known to us—if he is known at all—as the wild man of the Constitutional Convention: a verbose, frequently drunken radical who annoyed the hell out of James Madison, George Washington, Gouverneur Morris, and the other giants responsible for the creation of the Constitution in Philadelphia that summer of 1787. In Bill Kauffman's rollicking account of his turbulent life and times, Martin is still something of a fitfully charming reprobate, but he is also a prophetic voice, warning his heedless contemporaries and his amnesiac posterity that the Constitution, whatever its devisers' intentions, would come to be used as a blueprint for centralized government and a militaristic foreign policy. In Martin's view, the Constitution was the tool of a counterrevolution aimed at reducing the states to ciphers and at fortifying a national government whose powers to tax and coerce would be frightening. Martin delivered the most forceful and sustained attack on the Constitution ever levied—a critique that modern readers might find jarringly relevant. And Martin's post-convention career, though clouded by drink and scandal, found him as defense counsel in two of the great trials of the age: the Senate trial of the impeached Supreme Court justice Samuel Chase and the treason trial of his friend Aaron Burr. Kauffman's Luther Martin is a brilliant and passionate polemicist, a stubborn and admirable defender of a decentralized republic who fights for the principles of 1776 all the way to the last ditch and last drop. In remembering this forgotten founder, we remember also the principles that once animated many of the earliest—and many later—American patriots.
