Defending White Democracy

Defending White Democracy PDF

Author: Jason Morgan Ward

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2011-11-21

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 0807869228

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After the Supreme Court ruled school segregation unconstitutional in 1954, southern white backlash seemed to explode overnight. Journalists profiled the rise of a segregationist movement committed to preserving the "southern way of life" through a campaign of massive resistance. In Defending White Democracy, Jason Morgan Ward reconsiders the origins of this white resistance, arguing that southern conservatives began mobilizing against civil rights some years earlier, in the era before World War II, when the New Deal politics of the mid-1930s threatened the monopoly on power that whites held in the South. As Ward shows, years before "segregationist" became a badge of honor for civil rights opponents, many white southerners resisted racial change at every turn--launching a preemptive campaign aimed at preserving a social order that they saw as under siege. By the time of the Brown decision, segregationists had amassed an arsenal of tested tactics and arguments to deploy against the civil rights movement in the coming battles. Connecting the racial controversies of the New Deal era to the more familiar confrontations of the 1950s and 1960s, Ward uncovers a parallel history of segregationist opposition that mirrors the new focus on the long civil rights movement and raises troubling questions about the enduring influence of segregation's defenders.

Defending Politics

Defending Politics PDF

Author: Matthew Flinders

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2012-04-26

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 019964442X

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Citizens around the world have become distrustful of politicians, skeptical about democratic institutions, and disillusioned about the capacity of democratic politics to resolve pressing social concerns. Many feel as if something has gone seriously wrong with democracy. Those sentiments are especially high in the U.S. as the 2012 election draws closer. In 2008, President Barack Obama ran--and won--on a promise of hope and change for a better country. Four years later, that dream for hope and change seems to be waning by the minute. Instead, disillusionment grows with the Obama adminstration's achievements, or depending where you fall on the spectrum, its lack thereof. Defending Politics meets this contemporary pessimism about the political process head on. In doing so, it aims to cultivate a shift from the negativity that appears to dominate public life towards a more buoyant and engaged "politics of optimism." Matthew Flinders makes an unfashionable but incredibly important argument of utmost simplicity: democratic politics delivers far more than most members of the public appear to acknowledge and understand. If more and more people are disappointed with what modern democratic politics delivers, is it possible that the fault lies with those who demand too much, fail to acknowledge the essence of democratic engagement, and ignore the complexities of governing in the twentieth century? Is it possible that the public in many advanced liberal democracies have become "democratically decadent," that they take what democratic politics delivers for granted? Would politics appear in a better light if we all spent less time emphasizing our individual rights and more time reflecting on our responsibilities to society and future generations? Democratic politics remains "a great and civilizing human activity...something to be valued almost as a pearl beyond price," Bernard Crick stressed in his classic In Defense of Politics fifty years ago. By returning to and updating Crick's arguments, this book provides an honest account of why democratic politics matters and why we need to reject the arguments of those who would turn their backs on "mere politics" in favor of more authoritarian, populist or technocratic forms of governing.

Holding the Line

Holding the Line PDF

Author: Ronny Jackson

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2022-07-26

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 1637580215

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A behind-the-scenes political memoir written by a prominent White House physician. I would talk to the president before the chief of staff even saw the president in the morning. I walked into work, and I was already in the Oval Office talking to President Trump. It was rarely medical, to be honest with you; it was whatever was going on in the news. I’d be the first person he’d see in the morning. The president was completing tasks two to three hours before anybody else showed up in the West Wing to work. He’d get up at five o’clock in the morning and would be watching TV, tweeting, making phone calls, and doing all types of other tasks. President Trump would poke his head into my office or I’d walk out, and we would say, “Good morning. Did you see this or that?” He was always asking me about things on TV and what was going on, from Iran to Stormy Daniels. He’d say, “Walk with me.” So I’d walk him to the Oval Office, and we’d talk about everything. I’d walk out through the outer Oval Office and the chief of staff, national security advisor, and even the CIA briefer would be standing there, waiting to get in and talk to him. I’d walk out, they’d walk in, and his day would start. I was the first person he saw every morning and the last person he saw every evening when he went to bed.

Defending Democracy

Defending Democracy PDF

Author: Giovanni Capoccia

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2007-09-01

Total Pages: 366

ISBN-13: 0801893283

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Winner, Best Book on European Politics, 2005, European Politics and Society Section, American Political Science Association How does a democracy deal with threats to its stability and continued existence when those threats come from political parties that play the democratic game? In Defending Democracy, political scientist Giovanni Capoccia studies key European nations between World Wars I and II which survived such democratic crises. A comprehensive and thoughtful historical analysis of the democracies of interwar Europe, Defending Democracy provides a unique perspective on the many lessons to be learned from their successes and failures. With this exclusively empirical investigative approach, Capoccia develops a methodology for analyzing contemporary democracies—such as Algeria, Turkey, Israel, and others—where similar political conditions are present. Given the rise of terrorism and the persistence of extremism in both established and new democracies today, continued research and dialogue on the defense of democracy are necessary for its preservation.

Mothers of Massive Resistance

Mothers of Massive Resistance PDF

Author: Elizabeth Gillespie McRae

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 019027171X

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Examining racial segregation from 1920s to the 1970s this book explores the grassroots workers who maintained the system of racial segregation. For decades white women performed duties that upheld white over black: censoring textbooks, deciding on the racial identity of their neighbors, celebrating school choice, and lobbying elected officials. They instilled beliefs in racial hierarchies in their children, built national networks, and experimented with a color-blind political discourse. White women's segregationist politics stretched across the nation, overlapping with and shaping the rise of the New Right.

The Abolition of White Democracy

The Abolition of White Democracy PDF

Author: Joel Olson

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 197

ISBN-13: 9780816642779

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Racial discrimination embodies inequality, exclusion, and injustice and as such has no place in a democratic society. And yet racial matters pervade nearly every aspect of American life, influencing where we live, what schools we attend, the friends we make, the votes we cast, the opportunities we enjoy, and even the television shows we watch. Joel Olson contends that, given the history of slavery and segregation in the United States, American citizenship is a form of racial privilege in which whites are equal to each other but superior to everyone else. In Olson's analysis we see how the tension in this equation produces a passive form of democracy that discourages extensive participation in politics because it treats citizenship as an identity to possess rather than as a source of empowerment. Olson traces this tension and its disenfranchising effects from the colonial era to our own, demonstrating how, after the civil rights movement, whiteness has become less a form of standing and more a norm that cements while advantages in the ordinary operations of modern society. To break this pattern, Olson suggests an "abolitionist-democratic" political theory that makes the fight against racial discrimination a prerequisite for expanding democratic participation.

Disenfranchising Democracy

Disenfranchising Democracy PDF

Author: David A. Bateman

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-10-25

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 110847019X

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Disenfranchising Democracy examines the exclusions that accompany democratization and provides a theory of the expansion and restriction of voting rights.

Hanging Bridge

Hanging Bridge PDF

Author: Jason Morgan Ward

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016-04-01

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 0199376573

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Lying just south of Neshoba County, where three civil rights workers were murdered during Freedom Summer, Clarke County lay squarely in Mississippi's--and America's--meanest corner. Even at the height of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, when the clarion call for equality and justice echoed around the country, few volunteers ventured there. Fewer still remained. Local African Americans knew why the movement had taken so long to reach them. Some spoke of a bottomless pit in the snaking Chickasawhay River in the town of Shubuta, into which white vigilantes dumped bodies. Others pointed to old steel-framed bridge across that same muddy creek. Spanning three generations, Hanging Bridge reconstructs two wartime lynchings--the 1918 killing of two young men and two pregnant women, and the 1942 slaying of two adolescent boys--that propped up Mississippi's white supremacist regime and hastened its demise. These organized murders reverberated well into the 1960s, when local civil rights activists again faced off against racial terrorism and more refined forms of repression. Connecting the lynchings at Hanging Bridge to each other and then to civil rights-era struggles over segregation, voting, poverty, Black Power, and Vietnam, Jason Morgan Ward's haunting book traces the legacy of violence that reflects the American experience of race, from the depths of Jim Crow to the emergence of a national campaign for racial equality. In the process it creates a narrative that links living memory and meticulous research, illuminating one of the darkest places in American history and revealing the resiliency of the human spirit.

Defending Ideals

Defending Ideals PDF

Author: Drucilla Cornell

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2004-07-15

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 1135933677

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In this book, Drucilla Cornell examines the crisis on the left and asks how we can turn back toward more left-wing ideals. She looks at the meaning of freedom through various lenses as well as the dissolution of feminism. She discusses and critiques such major thinkers as: Amartya Sen, Adorno, Martha Nussbaum, John Rawls, Richard Falk, and Paul Berman among others.

Fight for Liberty

Fight for Liberty PDF

Author: Mark Lasswell

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Published: 2018-10-16

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1541724151

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Anne Applebaum, Garry Kasparov, Richard North Patterson, and a constellation of other thinkers make the urgent case for liberal democracy---reinvigorating its central values in an age of doubt and discord. Liberal democracy is in crisis around the world, besieged by authoritarianism, nationalism, and other illiberal forces. Far-right parties are gaining traction in Europe, Vladimir Putin tightens his grip on Russia and undermines democracy abroad, and America struggles with poisonous threats from the right and left. But the defenders of democracy are strong too. Taking their cues from the 1788 Federalist Papers, the Renew Democracy Initiative is a collective of pro-democracy advocates from across the political spectrum, including Anne Applebaum, Garry Kasparov, Max Boot, Bret Stephens, Ted Koppel, and Natan Sharansky. This book is their foundational document, a collection of essays that analyze the multi-pronged threats to liberal democracy in the U.S. and abroad, and offer solutions based on fundamental democratic principles such as freedom of speech, a free press, and the rule of law. Fight for Liberty is a roadmap for the struggle against the rising tide of extremism and a cri de coeur in defense of the liberal world order, which sees itself threatened as never before today.