New Books in American Politics

Charles Blaha, a former State Department expert on the vetting of U.S. weapons transfers to other countries, helps us understand this important moment in the Israel-Hamas conflict. After an extended period of tension between U.S President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Biden has decided to freeze some transfers of weapons to Israel, at least temporarily. In his conversation with RBI director John Torpey, Blaha explains United States law and policy governing weapons transfers, which imposes stringent controls to avoid the misuse of U.S. weaponry. Blaha also discusses the role of the protests on campuses and their doubtful effects on changing American or Israeli policy. Finally, the conversation delves into the overall posture of the United States vis-à-vis arms transfers to Israel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Natural disasters and the dire effects of climate change cause massive population displacements and lead to some of the most intractable political and humanitarian challenges seen today. Yet, as Maria Cristina Garcia observes in State of Disaster: The Failure of U. S. Migration Policy in an Age of Climate Change (UNC Press, 2022), there is actually no such thing as a "climate refugee" under current U.S. law. Most initiatives intended to assist those who must migrate are flawed and ineffective from inception because they are derived from outmoded policies. In a world of climate change, U.S. refugee policy simply does not work.Garcia focuses on Central America and the Caribbean, where natural disasters have repeatedly worsened poverty, inequality, and domestic and international political tensions. She explains that the creation of better U.S. policy for those escaping disasters is severely limited by the 1980 Refugee Act, which continues to be applied almost exclusively for reasons of persecution directly related to politics, race, religion, and identity. Garcia contends that the United States must transform its outdated migration policies to address today's realities. Climate change and natural disasters are here to stay, and much of the human devastation left in their wake is essentially a policy choice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cecily N. Zander’s The Army under Fire: The Politics of Antimilitarism in the Civil War Era (LSU Press, 2024) is a pathbreaking study focusing on the fierce political debates over the size and use of military forces in the United States during the mid-nineteenth century. It examines how prominent political figures, especially in the new Republican Party, interacted with the professional army and how those same leaders misunderstood the value of regular soldiers fighting to reunify the fractured nation and to extend it westward across the continent. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gender Revolution: How Electoral Politics and #MeToo are Reshaping Everyday Life (Routledge, 2023) by Dr. Pamela Aronson and Matthew R. Fleming carefully examines the profound transformations happening in both public and private arenas of gender relations. It also draws critical attention to the simultaneous and potent challenges that have risen in response.The authors look to large-scale phenomena in this contemporary study and address how electoral politics and the #MeToo movement are reshaping everyday life. This gender revolution has led to a culture in which women, and increasing numbers of men, refuse to accept traditional gender norms and gender inequalities. People of all genders no longer tolerate abuses of power in politics or in their interpersonal relationships. Despite vigorous resistance, women are seizing power and refusing to back down, in ways both large and small. The authors note on the one hand that people of all genders in support of these transformations are voting for progressive candidates, engaging on social media, and making their interpersonal relationships more equal. On the other hand, they document considerable backlash and contestation, as some people are resisting these changes and creating adversarial gender divisions. Probing across these issues, the book develops an analysis of gendered social and cultural change that reveals how movement ideas diffuse into broader culture.Gender Revolution presents a vibrant and essential study for a moment marked by significant changes to attitudes, beliefs, and views surrounding gender and gender relations and will appeal to readers interested in the scholarly study of gender, society, politics, media, law, and culture.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The promise that you can "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" is central to the story of the American Dream. It's the belief that if you work hard and rely on your own resources, you will eventually succeed. However, time and again we have seen how this foundational myth, with its emphasis on individual determination, brittle self-sufficiency, and personal accomplishment, does not help us. Instead, as income inequality rises around us, we are left with shame and self-blame for our condition.Alissa Quart argues that at the heart of our suffering is a do-it-yourself ethos, the misplaced belief in our own independence and the conviction that we must rely on ourselves alone. Looking at a range of delusions and half solutions--from "grit" to the false Horatio Alger story to the rise of GoFundMe--Quart reveals how we have been steered away from robust social programs that would address the root causes of our problems. Meanwhile, the responsibility for survival has been shifted onto the backs of ordinary people, burdening generations with debt instead of providing the social safety net we so desperately need.Insightful, sharply argued, and characterized by Quart's lively writing and deep reporting, and for fans of Evicted and Nickel and Dimed, Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream (Ecco Press, 2023) is a powerful examination of what ails us at a societal level and a plan for how we can free ourselves from these self-defeating narrativesAcclaimed journalist Alissa Quart is a contributor to The Washington Post and New York Times and the author of several nonfiction works including Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers and Squeezed: Why our Families Can’t Afford America, as well as works of poetry like Thoughts and Prayers. Alissa Quart is the executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and the editor with David Wallis of Going for Broke: Living on the Edge in the world’s richest country which we discussed on this podcast in February. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Veteran and entrepreneur Tim Sheehy has led an action-packed life: a 2008 graduate of the Naval Academy, as a Navy SEAL he completed deployments in Iraq, Afghanistan, South America, and the Pacific region, where he earned him multiple combat decorations, including the Bronze Star with Valor for Heroism in Combat and the Purple Heart Medal. After being wounded in combat, he moved to Montana where he founded Bridger Aerospace, an aerial firefighting and aerospace services company based in Belgrade, Montana, which specializes in applying military tools and training to fight wildfires. He recounts the story of his foray into aerial firefighting in his recent book Mudslingers: A True Story of Aerial Firefighting (Permuted Press, 2023). In January 2023, Bridger Aerospace went public at a valuation of $869 million. Now, Tim is running for Senate in Montana, one of the most competitive Senate races of the 2024 election. In this conversation, Tim discusses entrepreneurship, the state of our military, education, and the importance of the Constitution.Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any event does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Laying the foundation for an understanding of US-Israeli relations, this lively and accessible book provides critical background on the origins and development of the 'special' relations between Israel and the United States.Questioning the usual neo-realist approach to understanding this relationship, David Tal instead suggests that the relations between the two nations were constructed on idealism, political culture, and strategic ties.Based on a diverse range of primary sources collected in archives in both Israel and the United States, The Making of an Alliance: The Origins and Development of the US-Israel Relationship (Cambridge UP, 2022) discusses the development of relations built through constant contact between people and ideas, showing how presidents and Prime Ministers, state officials, and ordinary people from both countries, impacted one another. It was this constancy of religion, values, and history, serving the bedrock of the relations between the two countries and peoples, over which the ephemeral was negotiated.The author, David Tal, is Professor and Yossi Harel Chair in Modern Israel Studies in the Department of History at the University of Sussex. A historian of diplomatic and military history, he has published extensively on Israeli diplomatic and military history, and U.S. diplomatic history and disarmament policies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

While American television has long relied on a strategic foregrounding of feminist politics to promote certain programming's cultural value, Woman Up: Invoking Feminism in Quality Television (Wayne State University Press, 2022) by Dr. Julia Havas is the first sustained critical analysis of the twenty-first-century resurgence of this tradition. In Woman Up, Dr. Havas’ central argument is that postmillennial "feminist quality television" springs from a rhetorical subversion of the (much-debated) masculine-coded "quality television" culture on the one hand and the dominance of postfeminist popular culture on the other.Postmillennial quality television culture promotes the idea of aesthetic-generic hierarchies among different types of scripted programming. Its development has facilitated evaluative academic analyses of television texts based on aesthetic merit, producing a corpus of scholarship devoted to pinpointing where value resides in shows considered worthy of discussion. Other strands of television scholarship have criticised this approach for sidestepping the gendered and classed processes of canonization informing the phenomenon. Woman Up intervenes in this debate by reevaluating such approaches and insisting that rather than further fostering or critiquing already prominent processes of canonization, there is a need to interrogate the cultural forces underlying them. Via detailed analyses of four TV programs emerging in the early period of the "feminist quality TV" trend—30 Rock (2006–13), Parks and Recreation (2009–15), The Good Wife (2009–16), and Orange Is the New Black (2013–19)—Woman Up demonstrates that such series mediate their cultural significance by combining formal aesthetic exceptionalism and a politicised rhetoric around a "problematic" postfeminism, thus linking ideals of political and aesthetic value.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If There Is No Struggle There Is No Progress: Black Politics in Twentieth-Century Philadelphia (Temple UP, 2022) provides an in-depth historical analysis of Philadelphia politics from the days of the Great Migration to the present. Philadelphia has long been a crucial site for the development of Black politics across the nation and this volume emphasizes how Black activists have long protested against police abuse, pushed for education reform, challenged job and housing discrimination, and put presidents in the White House. If There Is No Struggle There Is No Progress demonstrates that “Philadelphia must be central to any analysis of African American political history.”But politics means more than elected office and the book highlights political strategies such as the "Don't Buy Where You Can't Work" movement and the Double V campaign. It demonstrates how Black activism helped shift Philadelphia from the Republican machine to Democratic leaders in the 1950s and highlights the election of politicians like Robert N. C. Nix, Sr., the first African American representative from Philadelphia. The book highlights grassroots movements and the intersection of race, gender, class, and politics in the 1960s and shows how African Americans from the 1970s to the present challenged (white) Mayor Frank Rizzo and helped elect (Black) Mayors Wilson Goode, John Street, and Michael Nutter.Dean James Wolfinger (he/him/his) serves as dean of the School of Education at St. John’s University in Queens, New York.Dr. Stanley Arnold (he/him/his) is an Associate Professor of American History at Northern Illinois University.Dr. Alyssa Ribeiro (she/her/hers) is the Henry A Logan, Sr, Professor of American History at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania. Ms. Daniela Lavergne at Saint Joseph’s University served as the editorial assistant for this podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Decisions to go to war are often framed in cost-benefit terms, and typically such assessments do not factor in longer term costs. However, recent dramatic improvements in American military medicine have had an unanticipated effect: saving more soldiers' lives has vastly increased long-term, downstream costs of war with profound consequences for global politics in an era of heightened great power competition.In Military Medicine and the Hidden Costs of War (Oxford UP, 2024), Tanisha Fazal traces the modern history of medical treatment and casualty rates in American conflicts from the Civil War to the more recent counterinsurgency wars. As she shows, wars became increasingly survivable for wounded troops, to the point now where a large majority of wounded soldiers survive. Yet the human and financial implications of this steep increase in the wounded-to-killed ratio are dramatic, and her powerful analysis of this shift provides a necessary corrective to how we understand the costs of war. For each major conflict, Fazal analyzes the weapons used, injuries sustained, and policies put in place for veterans' care and pensions. As she argues, these improvements have significant financial and deeply personal implications for the returned wounded and their families, as well as the US government and its citizenry. Fazal's analysis highlights the significance of policymakers underestimating the costs of war, which in turn makes it easier both to initiate and continue military action abroad, contributing to Americas' penchant for engaging in so-called "endless wars."Tanisha Fazal is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. Her scholarship focuses on sovereignty, international law, and armed conflict. In addition to her new book, she is the author of two award-winning books and numerous articles in academic and policy journals. From 2021-2023, she was an Andrew Carnegie FellowLamis Abdelaaty is an associate professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices