Defending the Republic

Defending the Republic

Author: Bruce Frohnen

Publisher: Intercollegiate Studies Institute

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13:

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"This collection of essays, intended to honor the work of one of the nation's foremost constitutional scholars - Georgetown University's George W. Carey - analyzes the origins of public order in America and in constitutional government more generally."--BOOK JACKET.


France 1940

France 1940

Author: Philip Nord

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2015-03-01

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0300190689

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In this revisionist account of France’s crushing defeat in 1940, a world authority on French history argues that the nation’s downfall has long been misunderstood. Philip Nord assesses France’s diplomatic and military preparations for war with Germany, its conduct of the war once the fighting began, and the political consequences of defeat on the battlefield. He also tracks attitudes among French leaders once defeat seemed a likelihood, identifying who among them took advantage of the nation’s misfortunes to sabotage democratic institutions and plot an authoritarian way forward. Nord finds that the longstanding view that France’s collapse was due to military unpreparedeness and a decadent national character is unsupported by fact. Instead, he reveals that the Third Republic was no worse prepared and its military failings no less dramatic than those of the United States and other Allies in the early years of the war. What was unique in France was the betrayal by military and political elites who abandoned the Republic and supported the reprehensible Vichy takeover. Why then have historians and politicians ever since interpreted the defeat as a judgment on the nation as a whole? Why has the focus been on the failings of the Third Republic and not on elite betrayal? The author examines these questions in a fascinating conclusion.


Preserving the White Man's Republic

Preserving the White Man's Republic

Author: Joshua A. Lynn

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2019-04-10

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0813942519

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In Preserving the White Man’s Republic, Joshua Lynn reveals how the national Democratic Party rebranded majoritarian democracy and liberal individualism as conservative means for white men in the South and North to preserve their mastery on the eve of the Civil War. Responding to fears of African American and female political agency, Democrats in the late 1840s and 1850s reinvented themselves as "conservatives" and repurposed Jacksonian Democracy as a tool for local majorities of white men to police racial and gender boundaries by democratically withholding rights. With the policy of "popular sovereignty," Democrats left slavery’s expansion to white men’s democratic decision-making. They also promised white men local democracy and individual autonomy regarding temperance, religion, and nativism. Translating white men’s household mastery into political power over all women and Americans of color, Democrats united white men nationwide and made democracy a conservative assertion of white manhood. Democrats thereby turned traditional Jacksonian principles—grassroots democracy, liberal individualism, and anti-statism—into staples of conservatism. As Lynn’s book shows, this movement sent conservatism on a new, populist trajectory, one in which democracy can be called upon to legitimize inequality and hierarchy, a uniquely American conservatism that endures in our republic today.


A Republic, If You Can Keep It

A Republic, If You Can Keep It

Author: Neil Gorsuch

Publisher: Crown Forum

Published: 2019-09-10

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0525576797

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Justice Neil Gorsuch reflects on his journey to the Supreme Court, the role of the judge under our Constitution, and the vital responsibility of each American to keep our republic strong. As Benjamin Franklin left the Constitutional Convention, he was reportedly asked what kind of government the founders would propose. He replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” In this book, Justice Neil Gorsuch shares personal reflections, speeches, and essays that focus on the remarkable gift the framers left us in the Constitution. Justice Gorsuch draws on his thirty-year career as a lawyer, teacher, judge, and justice to explore essential aspects our Constitution, its separation of powers, and the liberties it is designed to protect. He discusses the role of the judge in our constitutional order, and why he believes that originalism and textualism are the surest guides to interpreting our nation’s founding documents and protecting our freedoms. He explains, too, the importance of affordable access to the courts in realizing the promise of equal justice under law—while highlighting some of the challenges we face on this front today. Along the way, Justice Gorsuch reveals some of the events that have shaped his life and outlook, from his upbringing in Colorado to his Supreme Court confirmation process. And he emphasizes the pivotal roles of civic education, civil discourse, and mutual respect in maintaining a healthy republic. A Republic, If You Can Keep It offers compelling insights into Justice Gorsuch’s faith in America and its founding documents, his thoughts on our Constitution’s design and the judge’s place within it, and his beliefs about the responsibility each of us shares to sustain our distinctive republic of, by, and for “We the People.”


Four Threats

Four Threats

Author: Suzanne Mettler

Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Published: 2020-08-11

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 9781250244420

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An urgent, historically-grounded take on the four major factors that undermine American democracy, and what we can do to address them. While many Americans despair of the current state of U.S. politics, most assume that our system of government and democracy itself are invulnerable to decay. Yet when we examine the past, we find that to the contrary, the United States has undergone repeated crises of democracy, from the earliest days of the republic to the present. In The Four Threats, Robert C. Lieberman and Suzanne Mettler explore five historical episodes when democracy in the United States was under siege: the 1790s, the Civil War, the Gilded Age, the Depression, and Watergate. These episodes risked profound, even fatal, damage to the American democratic experiment, and on occasion antidemocratic forces have prevailed. From this history, four distinct characteristics of democratic disruption emerge. Political polarization, racism and nativism, economic inequality, and excessive executive power – alone or in combination – have threatened the survival of the republic, but it has survived, so far. What is unique, and alarming, about the present moment is that all four conditions are present in American politics today. This formidable convergence marks the contemporary era as an especially grave moment for democracy in the United States. But history provides a valuable repository from which contemporary Americans can draw lessons about how democracy was eventually strengthened — or in some cases weakened — in the past. By revisiting how earlier generations of Americans faced threats to the principles enshrined in the Constitution, we can see the promise and the peril that have led us to the present and chart a path toward repairing our civic fabric and renewing democracy.


The Federalist Papers

The Federalist Papers

Author: Alexander Hamilton

Publisher: Read Books Ltd

Published: 2018-08-20

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 1528785878

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Classic Books Library presents this brand new edition of “The Federalist Papers”, a collection of separate essays and articles compiled in 1788 by Alexander Hamilton. Following the United States Declaration of Independence in 1776, the governing doctrines and policies of the States lacked cohesion. “The Federalist”, as it was previously known, was constructed by American statesman Alexander Hamilton, and was intended to catalyse the ratification of the United States Constitution. Hamilton recruited fellow statesmen James Madison Jr., and John Jay to write papers for the compendium, and the three are known as some of the Founding Fathers of the United States. Alexander Hamilton (c. 1755–1804) was an American lawyer, journalist and highly influential government official. He also served as a Senior Officer in the Army between 1799-1800 and founded the Federalist Party, the system that governed the nation’s finances. His contributions to the Constitution and leadership made a significant and lasting impact on the early development of the nation of the United States.


American Reboot

American Reboot

Author: Will Hurd

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2023-03-14

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1982160772

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From former US Congressman and CIA Officer Will Hurd, a “how-to guide with a prescription for getting the nation on the right footing” (Politico) and “a clarion call for a major political pivot” (San Antonio Report) rooted in the timeless ideals of bipartisanship, inclusivity, and democratic values. “Hurd has the biography and the charisma and the God-given political chops to put the Republican Party—and the rest of the country—on notice.” —THE ATLANTIC It’s getting harder to get big things done in America. The gears of our democracy have been mucked up by political nonsense. To meet the era-defining challenges of the 21st century, our country needs a reboot. In American Reboot, Hurd, called “the future of the GOP” by Politico, provides a “detailed blueprint” (Robert M. Gates, Secretary of Defense, 2006–2011) for America grounded by what Hurd calls pragmatic idealism—a concept forged from enduring American values to achieve what is actually achievable. Hurd takes on five seismic problems facing a country in crisis: the Republican Party’s failure to present a principled vision for the future; the lack of honest leadership in Washington, DC; income inequality that threatens the livelihood of millions of Americans; US economic and military dominance that is no longer guaranteed; and how technological change in the next thirty years will make the advancements of the last thirty years look trivial. Hurd has seen these challenges up close. A child of interracial parents in South Texas, Hurd survived the back alleys of dangerous places as a CIA officer. He carried that experience into three terms in Congress, where he was, for a time, the House’s only Black Republican, representing a seventy-one percent Latino swing district in Texas that runs along 820 miles of the US-Mexico border. As a cyber security executive and innovation crusader, Hurd has worked with entrepreneurs on the cutting edge of technology to anticipate the shockwaves of the future. Hurd, who the Houston Chronicles calls “a refreshing contract to the panderers, petty demagogues, and political provocateurs who reign these days,” draws on his remarkable experience to present “a call to Americans to consider the most contentious issues of our times more holistically” (The Atlantic). He outlines how the Republican party can look like America by appealing to the middle, not the edges. He maps out how leaders should inspire rather than fearmonger. He forges a domestic policy based on the idea that prosperity should be a product of empowering people, not the government. He articulates a foreign policy where our enemies fear us and our friends love us. And lastly, he charts a forceful path forward for America’s technological future. We all know we can do better. It’s time to hit “ctrl alt del” and start the American Reboot.


The Presidential Republic

The Presidential Republic

Author: J. Blondel

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2015-12-05

Total Pages: 567

ISBN-13: 1137482494

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This book is about a variety of national arrangements and practices, whose common characteristics are to constitute 'presidential republics' and which as such have become the main form of government in the contemporary world.


The Republic in Crisis, 1848-1861

The Republic in Crisis, 1848-1861

Author: John Ashworth

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-08-27

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 1107024080

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Meticulously analyses the political climate in the years leading up to the American Civil War and the causes of that conflict.


A Commercial Republic

A Commercial Republic

Author: Mike O'Connor

Publisher: University Press of Kansas

Published: 2014-06-21

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0700619712

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As recently as 2008, when Presidents Bush and Obama acted to bail out the nation’s crashing banks and failing auto companies, the perennial objection erupted anew: government has no business in . . . business. Mike O’Connor argues in this book that those who cite history to decry government economic intervention are invoking a tradition that simply does not exist. In a cogent and timely take on this ongoing and increasingly contentious debate, O’Connor uses deftly drawn historical analyses of major political and economic developments to puncture the abiding myth that business once operated apart from government. From its founding to the present day, our commercial republic has always mixed—and battled over the proper balance of—politics and economics. Contesting the claim that the modern-day libertarian conception of U.S. political economy represents the “natural” American economic philosophy, O’Connor demonstrates that this perspective has served historically as only one among many. Beginning with the early national debate over the economic plans proposed by Alexander Hamilton, continuing through the legal construction of the corporation in the Gilded Age and the New Deal commitment to full employment, and concluding with contemporary concerns over lowering taxes, this book demonstrates how the debate over government intervention in the economy has illuminated the possibilities and limits of American democratic capitalism.