Jeffrey Lazarus and Amy Steigerwalt, “Gendered Vulnerability: How Women Work Harder to Stay in Office” (U Michigan Press, 2018)
Research has demonstrated that women legislators face tougher re-election campaigns, often confronting stiff general election and primary competition. They typically received less favorable media coverage and get less support from their parties. How do they respond to this very different electoral context? In Gendered Vulnerability: How Women Work Harder to Stay in Office (University of Michigan Press, 2018), Jeffrey Lazarus and Amy Steigerwalt say that they work harder. Lazarus is associate professor of political science at Georgia State University; Steigerwalt is professor of political science at Georgia State University. Lazarus and Steigerwalt show that in a number of areas, women members of Congress simply do more. They introduce more bills and bring more money back to their districts. They spend more time on constituent services than men and are more responsive to their constituents’ policy preferences. The authors attribute this in part to the disproportionate level of vulnerability that women legislators feel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
17 Touko 201826min
Amanda Carpenter, “Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us” (Broadside, 2018)
CNN commentator Amanda Carpenter was an early conservative critic of Donald Trump when she was targeted in a smear campaign falsely accusing her of an extramarital affair with Trump’s 2016 Republican primary rival Sen. Ted Cruz. In her words, she was “gaslit,” driven crazy by bald-faced lies. In Gaslighting America:... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
16 Touko 201841min
Stephen E. Strang, “God and Donald Trump” (Frontline, 2017)
Those looking for deeper understanding of why the socially conservative, evangelical Christian community has been so loyal of Donald Trump will find answers in the book God and Donald Trump (Frontline, 2017). Author Stephen Strang provides an insider’s perspective on how evangelical leaders who initially backed Sen. Ted Cruz for Senate... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
11 Touko 201850min
Jesse Berrett, “Pigskin Nation: How the NFL Remade American Politics” (U Illinois Press, 2018)
Today we are joined by Jesse Berrett, author of Pigskin Nation: How the NFL Remade American Politics (University of Illinois Press, 2018). Berrett is a high school history teacher at University High School in San Francisco. He earned a PhD in History at the University of California, Berkeley, and has... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
9 Touko 201854min
Jeanine Kraybill, “Unconventional, Partisan, and Polarizing Rhetoric: How the 2016 Election Shaped the Way Candidates Strategize, Engage, and Communicate” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017)
In Unconventional, Partisan, and Polarizing Rhetoric: How the 2016 Election Shaped the Way Candidates Strategize, Engage, and Communicate (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), Jeanine Kraybill, assistant professor of political science at Cal State University, Bakersfield, has edited a timely book on the 2016 election. From all accounts, the 2016 election was unusual, and the role of political communication was no different. Using a variety of methods, the chapter authors examine how rhetoric and political communication shaped the tone of campaigns and ultimate outcomes of the election. They study how candidates primed voters for an anti-establishment candidate. They also examine how political communication influenced key campaign issues such as climate change, immigration, national security, religion, and gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
3 Huhti 201822min
Jesse Rhodes, “Ballot Blocked: The Political Erosion of the Voting Rights Act” (Stanford UP, 2017)
Voting rights are always in the news in American politics, and recent court decisions and an upcoming election in 2018 make this especially true today. Most discussions come back to the Voting Rights Act (VRA) and whether it will continue to provide the voting rights protections it has in the past. In Ballot Blocked: The Political Erosion of the Voting Rights Act (Stanford University Press, 2017), Jesse Rhodes, associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, places the VRA into a political context. He aims to figure out the political puzzle of the VRA: Why, for fifty years, have both Democrats and Republicans in Congress consistently voted to expand the protections offered by the VRA, yet the act remains vulnerable? Why have Republicans consistently adopted administrative and judicial decisions that undermine legislation they repeatedly back? Rhodes argues that conservatives have pursued a paradoxical strategy which takes advantage of high and low salience. The conservative strategy, according to Rhodes, is to accept expansive voting rights protections in highly visible votes in Congress while simultaneously narrowing the scope of federal enforcement in low visibility administrative and judicial maneuvers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
19 Maalis 201826min
Matt K. Lewis, “Too Dumb to Fail: How the GOP Went from the Party of Reagan to the Party of Trump” (Hachette, 2016)
Political commentator Matt K. Lewis warns his fellow conservatives that their movement is going off the rails in Too Dumb to Fail: How the GOP Went from the Party of Reagan to the Party of Trump (Hachette, 2016). Lewis chafes at the populist, protectionist and nativist elements that have come... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
16 Maalis 201842min
Arlie Russell Hochschild, “Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right” (New Press, 2016)
Since it was published in 2016, Arlie Russell Hochschild‘s Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (The New Press, 2016) has been many times heralded as necessary reading for our current political moment. For her perceptive and dramatic account of a Berkeley sociologist’s exploration of Tea Party enthusiasm in coastal Louisiana, Dr. Hochschild received honors and awards from many directions, including a spot as a finalist for the national book award. Now released in paperback in January 2018, Dr. Hochschild’s book includes a new afterword, and continues to stand as both a moving narrative portrait of a political community and a strong example of scholarly work at the crossroads of academic research and public discourse. Using environmental policy as her keyhole issue, Dr. Hochschild articulates the logic that structures a “great paradox”: states which receive the highest levels of financial support from the federal government are also home to the deepest wells of resentment against government intervention in private life. Dr. Hochschild’s work discloses an emotional “deep story” that shapes the political imagination of her Tea Party interlocutors, the feeling that deserving Americans are pushed to the back of the line for the American Dream. Tracing the open rhetoric and the social silences that reveal the shape of a community’s political imagination, Dr. Hochschild’s research speaks to the roles of race and religion in forming the foundation of American politics. Her interviewees were mostly white, and mostly Christian. In exploring the ways in which the Tea Party deep story manifests a resentment against government work to curb irresponsible private power and provide public support for disadvantaged Americans, Strangers in Their Own Land chronicles Dr. Hochschild’s attempts to climb the “empathy walls” that surround and isolate communities sharply defined by ideological allegiance and disavowed histories of misused power. Along the way, Strangers in Their Own Land recounts the intellectual, political, and economic history that lies behind the great paradox of our current political crisis, and profiles figures who may offer us a way out of the bind. For this interview, I asked Dr. Hochschild to speak to the process of writing a book for multiple audiences in a partisan climate. When researching and writing this book in the years leading up to the 2016 election, who did she imagine as her readers and what did she hope they would take away from her project? Our conversation covers the place of this book in the trajectory of her career, the difficulty of turning off the ethical “alarm system” while conducting interviews, structuring an academic book to capture the drama of a research question, and the principles that Dr. Hochschild believes activists can use to build momentum in the coming months. Carl Nellis is an academic editor and writing instructor who researches contemporary American community formation around appropriations of medieval European culture. You can learn more about Carl’s work and request an editorial consultation at carlnellis.wordpress.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
15 Maalis 201826min
