New Books in Politics and Polemics

It has been a momentous few weeks for the Supreme Court. What better time to discuss the Court's history and future? We are therefore launching our "Summer of Law" series to shed light on the legal world .Kicking the series off is John Yoo, the Heller Professor of Law at the University of California at Berkeley. He is also a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He has written 8 books and over 100 academic articles, and is a regular contributor at a wide variety of publications including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and National Review.This episode discusses his latest book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Supreme Court (Regnery Publishing, 2023). Along the way, it unpacks legal thought on issues such as affirmative action, abortion, court-packing, the administrative state, and the unique position of the Supreme Court as an unelected institution.We have not forgotten, however, that tomorrow is our nation's birthday. At the end of the discussion, our Thomas W. Smith Distinguished Research Scholar Allen Guelzo will recite Patrick Henry's famous speech "Give Me Liberty."While this episode covers the court more broadly, here are some of Prof. Yoo's recent writings and appearances on these hot-button issues: Newsweek, "Biden's Student Loan Forgiveness Was Always a Sham" National Review, "The Supreme Court Corrects a Grievous Error" His interview on Fox News, "Supreme Court says Congress, not the president, controls power of the purse" His interview on Fox Business, "Employers should rethink race-based hiring, programs after SCOTUS affirmative action decision" His interview on Fox News, "The Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution is colorblind" Annika Nordquist is the Communications Coordinator of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and host of the Program’s podcast, Madison’s Notes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Today I talked to Ricardo Tranjan about his book The Tenant Class (Between the Lines, 2023).It’s well known and almost taken for granted that we live in the midst of a “housing crisis”—soaring rent, persistently low vacancy rate, and deteriorating quality of existing housing stock plague renters throughout Canada. But if a crisis is defined by being sudden and often short-term, by being largely incidental and without malicious intent, and by a tendency to produce broad social solidarity, Ricardo Tranjan argues that the present housing situation is anything but a “crisis.” Instead, Tranjan persuasively shows that what the tenant class—those who must rent living space from those who own it—are facing are heightened conditions of exploitation. More than this, though, Tranjan also shows how tenants are organizing in solidarity with one another and against the landlords who profit off their very existence. Towards the end of the episode, Tranjan shines a spot light on two tenant organizing campaigns in Toronto, listeners can learn more and support these tenants by following these links: York South Weston Tenant Union at 33 King Street and Thorncliffe Park Tenants’ Rent Strike: Phil Henderson is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Carleton University’s Institute of Political Economy where his research interests focus on the interrelations between Indigenous land/water defenders and organized labour in what’s presently known as Canada. More information can be found at his personal website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

John Dewey and Jane Addams are both credited with the claim that the cure for democracy’s ills is more democracy. The sentiment is popular to this day among democratic theorists and practitioners. The thought is that a democratic deficit lies at the root of any political and social problem that a democracy might confront. Accordingly, a good deal of work in democratic theory aims at designing new practices and institutions that can erase the deficit. But this raises a problem: The civic task of democratic citizenship must be manageable for ordinary citizens. And ordinary citizens are differentially busy with other pursuits, many of which are independently valuable and socially beneficial. Thus, proposals for “more democracy” tend to be exclusionary.In Democracy for Busy People (University of Chicago Press, 2023), Kevin J. Elliott addresses this difficulty head on. He devises a conception of the civic responsibilities of citizenship that is authentically democratic without being overly demanding.Robert Talisse is the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Darts and Letters is creating a new podcast, Academic Edgelords.This is a scholarly podcast about scholarly provocateurs. This is a leftist podcast that takes a second look at their peer-reviewed work, and tries to see if there’s anything we might learn from arguing with them. We are hosted by: Victor Bruzzone, Gordon Katic, Matt McManus, and Ethan Xavier (AKA “Mouthy Infidel”).On this episode, we introduce our show by reading the ultimate academic edgelord: Ted Kacynski, who just died. This domestic terrorist was also a real scholar, with a few peer-reviewed works in mathematics. We read his manifesto: Industrial Society and its Future.Why has the Kaczynski become so popular with young people? He is just one extreme proponent of an anti-civilizational political theory called anarcho-primitivism. Few call themselves anarcho-primitivists, yet the basic ideas have become widespread, thanks to worsening environmental degradation and the ongoing techlash. You probably saw some anarcho-primitive thinking on Twitter right after Kaczynski died; many people lamented his death, and praised his arguments.What makes his thinking appealing to some? What does it get right about technology, and what does it get very wrong? We also discuss the broader anarcho-primitivist tradition, with the help of Chamsy el-Ojeili and Dylan Taylor's critical but generous review article from April, 2020, “the Future in the Past”: Anarcho-primitivism and the Critique of Civilization Today," in Rethinking Marxism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Across the U.S., state legislatures-often under the cover of darkness, and usually in spite of public opposition-are passing bills that channel public dollars to private schools. These voucher schemes promise to transfer billions from state treasuries to upper-income families. But that's just the start. Opponents of public schools want to dismantle the public education system entirely. Outrageous and unfounded attacks on the schools-about Critical Race Theory, "gender ideology," and "grooming"-are all part of a broader strategy to sow doubt and distrust. This is the end game.Education historian Jack Schneider and journalist Jennifer Berkshire trace the war on public education to its origins, offering the deep backstory necessary to understand the threat presently posed to America's schools. The book also looks forward to imagine how current policy efforts will reshape the educational landscape and remake America's future. A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School (The New Press, 2023) offers readers a lively, accessible, yet scholarly view of a decades-long conservative cause: unmaking the system that serves over 90% of students in the U.S. Presenting a clear view of the ideology motivating this assault, the book also maps the future-outlining how current policy efforts will reshape the educational landscape and remake American democracy.Laura Beth Kelly is an assistant professor of Educational Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Many a scholar and policy analyst has lamented American dependence on cars and the corresponding lack of federal investment in public transportation throughout the latter decades of the twentieth century. But as Nicholas Dagen Bloom shows in The Great American Transit Disaster: A Century of Austerity, Auto-Centric Planning, and White Flight (U Chicago Press, 2023), our transit networks are so bad for a very simple reason: we wanted it this way.Focusing on Baltimore, Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Boston, and San Francisco, Bloom provides overwhelming evidence that transit disinvestment was a choice rather than destiny. He pinpoints three major factors that led to the decline of public transit in the United States: municipal austerity policies that denied most transit agencies the funding to sustain high-quality service; the encouragement of auto-centric planning; and white flight from dense city centers to far-flung suburbs. As Bloom makes clear, these local public policy decisions were not the product of a nefarious auto industry or any other grand conspiracy--all were widely supported by voters, who effectively shut out options for transit-friendly futures. With this book, Bloom seeks not only to dispel our accepted transit myths but hopefully to lay new tracks for today's conversations about public transportation funding. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

The Shaming State: How the U.S. Treats Citizens in Need (NYU Press, 2023) argues that Americans have been abandoned by a government that has relinquished its duties of care toward its citizens. Sara Salman describes a government that withholds care in times of need and instead shames the very citizens it claims to serve, both poor and middle class. She argues that the state does so by emphasizing personal responsibility, thus tacitly blaming the needy for relying on state programs. This blame is pervasive in the American cultural imagination, existing in political discourse and internalized by Americans. This book explores how shaming is exhibited by state and political institutions by showing the ways in which the state withholds care, and how people who need that care are humiliated for failing to be self-sufficient.The Shaming State investigates the vanishing horizon of social rights in the United States and the dwindling of government support to both lower- and middle-class people. Focusing on Iraqi refugees and white home-owning New Yorkers, Salman demonstrates how both groups were faced with immense difficulty and humiliation when searching for access to assistance programs maintained by the government. Looking at the long-range trends, she argues that the last forty years have made the United States a market fundamentalist country, where the government does not offer unified aid and increasingly asks citizens to assume personal responsibility in the face of uncontrollable disasters. Whether it was Hurricane Katrina almost two decades ago or the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the indifferent and stagnant response by the American government not only amplified the consequences of these disasters but also increased hostility towards the vulnerable groups who needed help. Ultimately, The Shaming State tells stories of abandonment, loss, shame, and rage experienced by Americans and how the government has let them down time and time again. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Many people are familiar with the United States Supreme Court’s merit docket. Each case follows detailed and professional proceedings that include formal written and oral arguments. The justices’ decisions provide lengthy arguments and citations. They are freely available to the public, press, policy-makers, law makers, judges, and scholars. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, they ruled publicly – and the press covered it extensively. But Professor Stephen Vladeck’s new book, The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic (Basic Books, 2023), highlights that 99% of the Court’s decisions are “unseen, unsigned, and almost always unexplained” on the “shadow docket.” State and federal policies – and constitutional rights – are affected by decisions that the Supreme Court makes behind closed doors. There are no opinions, no citations, and often observers have little idea which justices supported the action. The term ‘shadow docket’ was coined by law professor William Baude in 2015 – and Professor Vladeck sees a recent, radical, and concerning shift in how the shadow docket has been deployed in recent years. His remarkable book traces the shadow docket’s longer history to explain what is the shadow docket, where did it come from, and how the Court has radically departed from past practice to decide more and more cases out of the public eye. Professor Vladeck argues that the shadow docket has become a norm rather than an exception – and that procedural change impacts constitutional rights and public policy on a large scale including asylum eligibility, abortion, marriage equality, voting rights, and building a border wall. Professor Vladeck insists that, regardless of your individual political leanings, the Court’s increasing manipulation of the shadow docket threatens our shared constitutional system, and should alarm any American who believes in the value of the Supreme Court as an independent and legitimate institution.Professor Vladeck’s impressively researched (and remarkably accessible) book employs historical analysis and case studies in clear and precise prose. This is a book for scholars, students, – and anyone interested in policy and politics. The podcast ends with Professor Vladeck’s suggestions for how we can all change how we talk about the Court and how Congress can make the Court more accountable.Professor Stephen Vladeck holds the Charles Alan Wright Chair at the University of Texas School of Law. In addition to his extensive legal scholarship, Vladeck, has argued three cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, co-hosts the National Security Law Podcast, and is editor and author of “One First,” a popular weekly Substack newsletter about the Supreme Court.John Sebastiani served as the editorial assistant for this podcast.Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

“Only recently have scholars outside the historical profession identified progressivism for what it was and continues to be: a fundamental rupture with the roots of American order.”So writes the political scientist and theorist Bradley C. S. Watson in his 2020 book Progressivism: The Strange History of a Radical Idea (U Notre Dame Press). Watson provides an intellectual history of how historians such as Richard Hofstadter tended to underplay what a radical break the Progressive Movement was from American constitutionalism. The book shows that only in recent decades have political theorists entered the fray and rendered clear how dire the ramifications for American society and culture the views on the Constitution of such figures as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were and what a massive break they were from the legacy of the founders and such advocates of natural rights as Abraham Lincoln.Anyone interested in how American political history was written in the period of roughly 1940-1980 should read this book. So should anyone interested in the differences between the views of historians and political scientists on the same developments.And this is not just a matter of the mindsets of various fields of scholarship. These debates shaped public policy and affected a host of issues such as the rise of the administrative state and the role of expertise in governance, the place of religion (Christianity first and foremost) in American life and the ideology-dependent staffing of the ranks of college social science departments, government entities and other key institutions. All of these developments filtered out to the rest of society.Watson helps us understand what the Progressives (including politicians, academics and theologians such as Walter Rauschenbusch) of the period of roughly 1900-1930 actually said and wrote versus what historians in the decades shortly thereafter said they said.Let’s hear from Professor Watson himself.Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Do experts perform better than generalists? In the midst of the fraught 2016 Brexit campaign one of the most British senior British politicians arguing that the UK should leave the EU said “I think the people in this country have had enough of experts “– and was widely derided for doing so. Amanda Goodall thinks he was wrong, as she explains to Owen Bennett-Jones. Goodall is the author of Credible: The Power of Expert Leaders (PublicAffairs, 2023).Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics