New Books in American Politics

Today, gun control is one of the most polarizing topics in American politics. However, before the 1960s, positions on firearms rights did not necessarily map onto partisan affiliation. What explains this drastic shift? Patrick J. Charles charts the rise of gun rights activism from the early twentieth century through the 1980 presidential election, pinpointing the role of the 1968 Gun Control Act. Gun rights advocates including the National Rifle Association had lobbied legislators for decades, but they had cast firearms control as a local issue. After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 spurred congressional proposals to regulate firearms, gun rights advocates found common cause with states' rights proponents opposed to civil rights legislation. Following the enactment of the Gun Control Act, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle began to stake out firm positions. Politicians including Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan recognized the potential of gun control as a wedge issue, and gun rights became increasingly tied to the Republican Party. Drawing on a vast range of archival evidence, Charles offers new insight into the evolution of the gun rights movement and how politicians responded to anti-gun control hardliners. He examines in detail how the National Rifle Association reinvented itself as well as how other advocacy groups challenged the NRA's political monopoly. Offering a deep dive into the politicization of gun rights, Vote Gun: How Gun Rights Became Politicized in the United States (Columbia University Press, 2023) reveals the origins of the acrimonious divisions that persist to this day.Patrick J. Charles is senior historian and archivist for the United States Air Force.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is feminism compatible with progress? Reactionary feminist Mary Harrington thinks not. In this interview, she discusses the history of feminism, her own journey from proponent to radical opponent of progress, the impact of technology on women and society, and, of course, her new book, Feminism Against Progress (Regnery, 2023).Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd and widely-published essayist. You can her book, Feminism Against Progress here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Epidemiologists and national security agencies warned for years about the potential for a deadly pandemic, but in the end global surveillance and warning systems were not enough to avert the COVID-19 disaster. In The COVID-19 Intelligence Failure: Why Warning Was Not Enough (Georgetown UP, 2023), Erik J. Dahl demonstrates that understanding how intelligence warnings work--and how they fail--shows why the years of predictions were not enough.In the first in-depth analysis of the topic, Dahl examines the roles that both traditional intelligence services and medical intelligence and surveillance systems play in providing advance warning against public health threats--and how these systems must be improved for the future. For intelligence to effectively mitigate threats, specific, tactical-level warnings must be collected and shared in real time with receptive decision makers who will take appropriate action. Dahl shows how a combination of late and insufficient warnings about COVID-19, the Trump administration's political aversion to scientific advice, and decentralized public health systems all exacerbated the pandemic in the United States. Dahl's analysis draws parallels to other warning failures that preceded major catastrophes from Pearl Harbor to 9/11, placing current events in context.The COVID-19 Intelligence Failure is a wake-up call for the United States and the international community to improve their national security, medical, and public health intelligence systems and capabilities.Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As the United States transformed into an industrial superpower, American socialists faced the vexing question of how to approach race. Lorenzo Costaguta balances intellectual and institutional history to illuminate the clash between two major points of view. On one side, some believed labor should accept and apply the ascendant tenets of scientific theories of race. But others stood with International Workingmen's Association leaders J. P. McDonnell and F. A. Sorge in rejecting the idea that racial and ethnic division influenced worker-employer relations, arguing instead that class played the preeminent role.In Workers of All Colors Unite: Race and the Origins of American Socialism (U Illinois Press, 2023), Costaguta charts the socialist movement's journey through the conflict and down a path that ultimately abandoned scientific racism in favor of an internationalist class-focused American socialism. As he shows, the shift had a paradoxical effect: while distancing American socialism from the most hideous forms of white supremacism, it made the movement blind to the racist nature of American capitalism. The position that emerged out of the Gilded Age became American socialism's most common approach to race in the twentieth century and beyond.Omari Averette-Phillips is a History educator and independent scholar based in Southern California. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Writer and educator Marcus Gilroy-Ware (After the Fact?, Filling the Void) speaks with Whitney Phillips and Ryan M. Milner about their new book You Are Here.Our media environment is in crisis. Polarization is rampant. Polluted information floods social media. Even our best efforts to help clean up can backfire, sending toxins roaring across the landscape. In You Are Here, Whitney Phillips and Ryan Milner offer strategies for navigating increasingly treacherous information flows. Using ecological metaphors, they emphasize how our individual me is entwined within a much larger we, and how everyone fits within an ever-shifting network map.Phillips and Milner describe how our poisoned media landscape came into being, beginning with the Satanic Panics of the 1980s and 1990s—which, they say, exemplify “network climate change”—and proceeding through the emergence of trolling culture and the rise of the reactionary far right (as well as its amplification by journalists) during and after the 2016 election. They explore the history of conspiracy theories in the United States, focusing on those concerning the Deep State; explain why old media literacy solutions fail to solve new media literacy problems; and suggest how we can navigate the network crisis more thoughtfully, effectively, and ethically. We need a network ethics that looks beyond the messages and the messengers to investigate toxic information's downstream effects.Produced by Sam Kelly; Mixed by Samantha Doyle; Soundtrack by Kristen Gallerneaux Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With the Supreme Court poised to potentially outlaw race-conscious admissions, Affirmative Action may soon be on the chopping block.What will be the legacy of this half-century-old policy? Jason Riley, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and columnist at the Wall Street Journal, discusses affirmative action's impact both on the black community and the broader American education system. Riley is the author of Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell and Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed.Riley's piece "Racial Preferences Harm Their Beneficiaries, Too" is here.Riley's article "The College Board's Racial Pandering" is here.Statistical evidence of the impact of racial preferences in college admissions, mentioned in the discussion is here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is the American Right, where does it come from, and how has it changed over time? Journalist and author Matthew Continetti discusses his recent book: The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism.Continetti is Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and was formerly the founding editor and the editor-in-chief of the Washington Free Beacon. Previously, he was opinion editor at the Weekly Standard. He is also a contributing editor at National Review and a columnist for Commentary magazineData on the shifting demographics of wealthiest Americans, discussed during this episode, is here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The overturning of Roe v. Wade has led to a flurry of commentary and wondering, "Where next?" But, it also begs deeper questions: what is the history of abortion and sex-positivity within the feminist movement, and how did Roe affect our views on sex? Feminist legal scholar Dr. Erika Bachiochi is the founder and director of the Wollstonecraft Project at the Abigail Adams Institute and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Here, she discusses these questions as well as her recent book on Mary Wollstonecraft, The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision.Articles referenced during the show:"Pursuing the Unification of Work and Home," American Compass."Why the Dobbs Decision Won't Imperil Pregnancy-Related Medical Care," SCOTUSblog. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Massive Resistance and Southern Womanhood: White Women, Class, and Segregation (U Georgia Press, 2021) offers a comparative sociocultural and spatial history of white supremacist women involved in massive resistance. The book focuses on segregationist grassroots activism in Little Rock, Arkansas, New Orleans, Louisiana, and Charleston, South Carolina from the late 1940s to the late 1960s. Dr. Rebecca Brückmann combines theory and detailed case studies to interrogate the “roles, actions, self-understandings, and media representations” of these segregationist women.Dr. Brückmann argues that these women – motivated by an everyday culture of white supremacy – created performative spaces for their segregationist agitation in the public sphere to legitimize their actions. Unlike other studies of mass resistance that have focused on maternalism, Dr. Brückmann argues that women’s invocation of motherhood was varied and primarily served as a tactical tool to continuously expand these women’s spaces. Her book carefully differentiates the circumstances, tactics, and representations used in the creation of performative spaces by working-class, middle-class, and elite women engaged in massive resistance. Brückmann contrasts the transgressive “street politics” of working-class female activists in Little Rock and New Orleans with the more traditional political actions of segregationist, middle-class, and elite women in Charleston. While these women aligned white supremacist agitation with long-standing experience in conservative women’s clubs (e.g., United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Daughters of the American Revolution), working-class women’s groups (who lacked the economic, cultural, and social capital) chose consciously transgressive strategies, including violence, to elicit shock value and create states of emergency to further legitimize their actions and push for white supremacy. Dr. Brückmann’s nuanced work of history uses scholarship from sociology, political science, law, and other relevant disciplines to demonstrate how “interactions between class and status concerns, race, space, and gender shaped these women’s views and actions.”Dr. Rebecca Brückmann is an Associate Professor of History at Carleton College. Her research and teachings interrogate African American history, the transnational history of the Black Diaspora, Southern US history, White Supremacy, and gender.Daniela Lavergne assisted with 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/adchoices

With the Biden Administration's student loan relief coming down the pike, Annika sits down with Dr. Beth Akers, a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who specializes in higher education finance. Beth discusses the issue of student debt, and what the Biden relief plan will and will not achieve. You can find more information about Dr. Akers and her recent writing and appearances here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices