American Polity Research Articles

Race, the Ballot, and Hegemony: What the Struggle over Immigrant Voting Teaches Us About Rightwing Mobilization in the U.S.

While there has been an increase in rhetoric and efforts to block expanding voting rights to noncitizens around the United States, there is a relative lack of academic research examining the ideology, political actors, and strategy behind such efforts. In addressing this gap, we explore anti-immigrant voting rights campaigns as they relate to broader rightwing mobilization and voter suppression efforts. We draw upon the literature on Gramsci’s conception of hegemony to document and analyze efforts to use state power to change constitutions and election laws in ways that politically disenfranchise working class people of color in order to institutionalize white minority rule. We explore the nature of this political project and how more conventional rightwing actors dovetail with grassroots extremism by examining both historical and contemporary cases. We show how these networks have employed a mix of legal, administrative, and violent tactics during the turn of the twentieth century as well as in the contemporary period to politically realize a common, exclusionary ideology to shape the electorate and polity. We argue struggles over noncitizen voting rights reflect debate about distinct visions of who properly constitutes “the people,” and what is and should be the nature of the American polity: are we a white Anglo Christian republic or a multiracial egalitarian democracy? In so doing, we argue the rise and fall – and reemergence – of noncitizen immigrant voting rights in the U.S. represents a microcosm of the broader “voting wars” embroiling the nation.

Anti-Black Political Violence and the Historical Legacy of the Great Replacement Conspiracy

Racial violence is central to the American polity. We argue that support for violence, specifically anti-Black violence, has a long historical arc in American politics dating back to chattel slavery. In this paper, we argue that the racial violence associated with the “great replacement” conspiracy is much more pervasive among the white American public because of the historical legacy of anti-Black violent sentiment. To investigate the prevalence of this idea, we conducted a preregistered simple priming experiment aimed to tap into top-of-mind ideas about racial demographic change. Our experimental design spans multiple data sources, including two probability samples, over the course of a year. We ultimately find that simply priming attitudes about racial demographic change through a single open-ended question consistently leads to increased support for political violence, increasing racial resentment, and expressed anti-Black views. Our approach allows us to test this question through variant methodological means, all of which confirm strong associations Americans have between racial demographic change, anti-Blackness, and violence. Our findings demonstrate that Black threat is an important driver of democratic backsliding in the realm of political violence that requires further attention.

Listen to Me: Quality of Communication and Intergenerational Political Socialization

Intergenerational political socialization is alive and well in the polarized American polity. But, by what mechanism do parental views transmit to children? We develop a theory ( dyadic social learning theory) which posits the importance of dyadic familial communication in facilitating attitudinal concordance between parents and children. Using original survey data of 1,048 dyadic pairs of American parents and middle school-aged children, we develop a novel measure of political perception that combines the perceptive accuracy of parents with the perceptive accuracy of their children. This measure of parent-child alignment, which we argue signals quality communication in families, is a powerful determinant of parent-child congruence on political views and emotions, particularly polarization. When a dyadic pair accurately perceives each other politically, the likelihood of congruent views and shared polarization increases. This research has implications for how we understand political transference of polarized views, and for broader theories of how children are socialized into the political world. It also suggests that solutions to polarization will have to address the role of parents in initiating polarization.

Serialization, Solipsism, and Swarming: American Politics and the Graphic Novel in the 1970s

AbstractRichard Howell’s Glamazon’s Burden, a graphic novel initially serialized between 1977 and 1979, makes a wry allusion to midcentury literary critic Leslie Fiedler in the shape of a book that never existed: Love and Death in the Comic Novel. Prompted by this subtle aside, which implies that the comic or graphic novel might be the vessel for anxious reflection on the state of American democracy, this article explores what the development of long-form comics in the 1970s meant for the articulation of political possibilities. This was the decade when American public commentators—not least President Carter—lamented the narcissism and self-interest of fellow citizens, and many of the era’s graphic novels depict rallies, fundraisers, and election campaigns, emphasizing a political system riddled with corruption and inertia. But if some graphic novels identified a democratic deficit in the American polity, Lee Marrs’s The Further Fattening Adventures of Pudge, Girl Blimp (1973–1978) tacked in a different direction, offering a reinvigorated confidence in the ability to achieve progressive goals through political reform, a hope expressed through expansive formal strategies such as swarming panels.“I am prompted by Howell’s wry suggestion of Love and Death in the Comic Novel to explore what the development of long-form comics meant for the articulation of democratic possibilities and dread in 1970s America.”

Review: Reckoning: Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements, by Deva Woodly

Review: <i>Reckoning: Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements</i>, by Deva Woodly

“The Walls Have Fallen”

In 2021, June 19 (Juneteenth) became a federal holiday commemorating the emancipation of enslaved people of African descent in the United States. Prior to Juneteenth gaining official status, January 1 (Emancipation Day) was the de facto national holiday on which African Americans celebrated the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of slavery. From 1863 until the late twentieth century, African Americans throughout the nation celebrated what the black-owned journal The Elevator called “the greatest event in the history of the Colored people of America.” While several scholarly works focus on Emancipation Day celebrations throughout the United States, these studies have largely ignored how black westerners celebrated what was essentially “independence day” for African Americans. This essay examines Emancipation Day celebrations in the African American communities of San Francisco, Sacramento, and Los Angeles. Emancipation Day celebrations illustrate how black Californians in the state’s largest African American communities used ritualized celebration and public dialogue to construct their new civic identities as free black men and women. Emancipation Day celebrations provided black Californians opportunities to testify to their aspirations as members of the American polity, and to their vision of themselves as upholders of liberty and beacons of freedom in post–Civil War America. Black Californians forthrightly used public commemorations of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation to illustrate black community consciousness through the spirit of public festivals and civic celebrations, otherwise known as “public festive culture.” These public rituals did more than celebrate liberty: they legitimated black freedom and citizenship, honored the memory of Abraham Lincoln as God’s servant, and elaborated a political ethos powerful enough to unify African Americans as members of the American polity.

The undelivered dream: Policing, administrative rules and social equity

The overly aggressive use of force by police on African Americans illustrates a fundamental dissonance within the American polity. The ideal of justice and liberty juxtaposed with the reality of suffering and death at the hands of frontline law enforcement. This paper considers the relationship between administrative rules, policing, and racial disparities in the application of the use of force in the United States through the lens of social equity. The article details the racialized nature of use of force and suggests a possible way forward for administrators to address the unequal application of force by police in their encounters with African Americans. Specifically, the creation of processes that limit discretion related to the use of force, the establishment of uniform licensing standards, and the implementation of a database that tracks all incidents when force is used.

The Trump Era Legacy of Partisanism

Abstract What did Trump’s four years do to our mass politics? Partisanism—a blind, often unyielding loyalty to one’s own party—has come to define much of our political discourse, very much to the detriment of the American polity. Both the literature and the data on party evaluations confirm that people are behaving in ways that display not just consistent polarization but a deeper level of partisan bias, despite their lack of ideological consistency. Political science should respond to these developments with increased focus on the negative aspects of partisanship that can lead to this form of partisanism so dangerously exhibited in the Capitol riot, among other events, as well as a thoughtful classroom critique of these habits.

The Transition of the Presidency, 2020-2021

The peaceful transition of power from one set of rulers to another is the essence of democracy. The United States has enjoyed the consensus that elections are the means to change leadership of the country for more than two centuries. The 2020-2021 transition of the presidency marks an exception to that consensus. President Trump refused to accept the reality of his 2020 defeat at the polls, despite the fact that Joe Biden won more than 7 million more votes than Trump and won the electoral college by a vote of 306 to 232. Trump declared that he had won the election and that his opponent, Joseph Biden, had conspired to steal the election through fraudulent ballots. This paper will briefly characterize the development of presidential transitions over the past half century. It will then examine the extensive efforts of President Trump to overturn the 2020 election that culminated in the volent attack on the United State Capitol on January 6, 2021. Finally, it will show how Trump tried to thwart the incoming Biden administration. It will conclude that Trump’s actions in 2020 and 2021 presented a serious threat to the American polity.

Donald Trump and the Norms of the Presidency

AbstractDonald Trump was the first person to come to the presidency with no experience in government or the military. Thus, he did not absorb the values of public service or military discipline and respect for the Constitution. Most behavior that is considered central to the presidency is not spelled out in the Constitution, which lays out the formal authority of the presidency. This article begins with common civility and other customs of the presidency, then turns to major political and civil institutions of the American polity, and concludes with Trump’s unprecedented undermining of national security institutions (the military and intelligence communities).

Imagining Icarus: Edward Field, Manhood and Authenticity in Post‐war America1

ABSTRACTWhile the Second World War had profound effects on the way that American men conceived of themselves, for two groups ‐ Jewish men and men who would later identify as gay ‐ the war held a special resonance. Deborah Dash Moore has demonstrated that the Second World War allowed Jewish men to cast off stereotypes and be accepted into the larger American polity, while Alan Berube has written about the ways in which the Second World War created a space where gay men were able to understand themselves as part of a larger community. Historians have looked at the ways service affected these men during the war, however more work needs to be done understanding how these experiences affected men after the war. By examining the life of Edward Field, a Jewish and gay veteran who became a prominent poet in post‐war America, we can understand how experiences of wartime allowed men like Field to construct an alternative idea of masculinity, one based on male camaraderie and emotional authenticity. Edward Field's wartime and post‐war experiences suggest that Jewish and gay identities could intersect in ways that were mutually reinforcing and highlight the complicated nature of the Second World War experience.

The Violent Transition of the Presidency, 2020-2021

The peaceful transition of power from one set of rulers to another is the essence of democracy. The United States has enjoyed the consensus that elections are the means to change leadership of the country for more than two centuries. The 2020-2021 transition of the presidency marks an exception to that consensus. President Trump refused to accept the reality of his 2020 defeat at the polls, despite the fact that Joe Biden won more than 7 million more votes than Trump and won the electoral college by a vote of 306 to 232. Trump declared that he had won the election and that his opponent, Joseph Biden, had conspired to steal the election through fraudulent ballots. This paper will briefly characterize the development of presidential transitions over the past half century. It will then examine the extensive efforts of President Trump to overturn the 2020 election that culminated in the violent attack on the United State Capitol on January 6, 2021. Finally, it will show how Trump tried to thwart the incoming Biden administration. It will conclude that Trump’s actions in 2020 and 2021 presented a serious threat to the American polity.

Madison's Constitution Under Stress: A Developmental Analysis of Political Polarization

We present a “developmental” approach to understanding why rising polarization in the United States has not been self-correcting but instead continues to intensify. Under specified conditions, initial increases in polarization may change the meso-environment, including such features as state parties, the structure of media, and the configuration of interest groups. These shifts can in turn influence other aspects of politics, leading to a further intensification of polarization. This analysis has four important benefits: ( a) It directs our attention to the meso-institutional environment of the American polity; ( b) it clarifies the features of the polity that have traditionally limited the extent and duration of polarization, and the reasons why their contemporary impact may be attenuated; ( c) it helps us analyze asymmetrical, or party-specific, aspects of polarization; and ( d) it provides an analytic foundation that connects discussions of American politics to the comparative politics literature on democratic backsliding.

Political Responsibility in Time of Civil War

In this article I propose to do five things. First, I describe the present confusion disturbing the tranquility of the American polity. Next, I hypothesize that an important source of civil confusion is that American civildiscourse is generally conducted in two different moral languages. Neither of these is adequate to the reality of the human good, and their speakers are, perhaps increasingly, given to misunderstanding one another. Third, I propose some reasons why not only misunderstanding but even outright hostility seems to be growing. Fourth, I suggest that if we Christians are to be of genuine service to our fellow citizens, we have to begin by emancipating ourselves from inadequate moral languages and renew our capacity to function in a more properly Christian language. Finally, I suggest a possible contribution Christians might make to the renewal of civil discourse.

Unsettling the West: Violence and State Building in the Ohio Valley

Rob Harper’s new work, Unsettling the West, is a welcome entry in the literature that examines early modern state building. Focusing on the eighteenth century Ohio Valley, Harper explores the interconnections between violence, state building, and colonialism. American state building in Ohio, Harper argues, challenges both top-down and bottom-up interpretations of the subject, and particularly disputes long-standing assumptions that only minimal violence accompanied American state formation. Classic Weberian models of orderly top-down state formation did not occur, nor was the Ohio Valley a region where individualistic Turnerian settlers, disdaining established political authority, developed a state-building process that was both democratically bottom-up and violence free. Harper emphasizes that the Turnerian interpretation, by skimming lightly over the violence that accompanied what used to be disingenuously termed “American westward movement,” missed an important opportunity to analyze the centrality of violence to American state formation, not to mention Native dispossession.Violence in the Ohio Valley also owed much to the region’s long history as contested colonial space. The French and British empires, British settlers from the seaboard colonies, and Shawnees, Delawares, Wyandots, and Haudenosaunees, all jockeyed for control of the region in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. None completely succeeded, making the Ohio Valley a place where multiple representatives of multiple polities sought to exercise power, including British imperial agents and military commanders, Indigenous diplomats and political leaders, and colonial officials ranging from governors and influential legislators to local militia officers and traders. In response, Ohio’s tribal nations and settler colonists made selective, opportunistic alliances, with each other as well as among themselves. Through these interethnic and intercultural coalitions and the patronage networks they created, Ohio’s inhabitants attempted to manipulate multiple sources of governmental power in pursuit of locally desired objectives. One of their major concerns was containing intercommunity violence. Individual mediators or larger coalitions strove, often successfully, to prevent violent encounters between small parties of Native peoples and colonists from spiraling into general warfare.Engaging with colonial governments was risky business, however. State officials sought to bolster their feeble authority by extending state power into the Ohio country, frequently by force of arms. Government-supplied weapons and soldiers destabilized the painstakingly constructed local coalitions, allowing Native peoples and land-hungry colonists the means to wage renewed war while, in Harper’s words, “leaving their respective peoples desperate for state protection” (20). Each outbreak of organized violence drove Ohio Valley residents into closer alliances with emergent state power in an attempt to restrain the violence that state officials (possibly even the same ones now being incorporated into a reconstituted coalition) had unleashed in the first place. The result remained a complex political landscape of negotiation and networking in which Native nations, colonists, and government officials participated in remaking the political order after the collapse of the British colonial system in the 1780s.A new American “imperial republic” (176) fitfully emerged by the 1790s. Harper emphasizes that both Native peoples and settlers participated in the creation of this state, though with diametrically opposed expectations of their place in it. Harper claims that Native peoples remained a recognized component within the new American polity, an analysis that seems to rely on present-day legal understandings of Native nations as third sovereign spaces. This assessment seems dubious; the immediate reality of the early American state was an unwelcoming one for Native peoples. Settlers would continue forcing Native peoples from the Ohio Valley, by fair means and foul, using the legal mechanism of treaty-based land cessions but also through all-too-familiar acts of violence.

Securing Social Security Solvency Addressing an important social determinant of the health of seniors and the American polity.

Adequate income is a social determinant of health. In the United States, only Social Security beneficiaries receive inflation-protected guaranteed income. Social Security needs another 1983 compromise in which stakeholders accepted "shared pain" to avoid insolvency. We propose indexing the benefit using the chained consumer price index (CPI) for all urban consumers and providing a one-time bonus of 8% to 10% for beneficiaries in their mid-80s, when needs become greater. The chained CPI has little impact when beneficiaries start receiving benefits, but older beneficiaries need protection. The estimated 75-year savings from this restructured benefit amount to 14.2% to 18% of Social Security deficits. Modest increases in payroll taxes and maximum earnings taxed should make up most of the shortfall. Including unearned income with wages and salaries subject to the 6.2% individual tax would produce much more revenue. The discussion explores the proposal's political feasibility, grounding in current policy and political science literature, and the role of income as a social determinant of health.

Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture by Britt Rusert

Reviewed by: Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture by Britt Rusert Douglas A. Jones (bio) Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture britt rusert New York: New York University Press, 2017 320 pp. In a 2016 essay entitled "Disappointment in the Archives of Black Freedom" (Social Text 33.4 [2016]: 19-33), Britt Rusert attempts to come to terms with antebellum black women' s absorption in sentimentalism. Rusert describes her encounter with these women' s friendship albums from the 1830s to the 1880s as one wracked with disappointment since some of these materials are not immediately recognizable as black cultural objects. They share many formal and thematic similarities with white women' s friendship albums, and the flowery rhetoric and emphasis on love and friendship do not immediately lend themselves to an understanding of the machinations of racism, state power, resistance, and other master narratives that structure our understanding of the black past. (quotation on 23) [End Page 252] Rather than strive to "excavate some oblique point of agency or subversion" from such objects, Rusert proposes that twenty-first-century scholars embrace disappointment as an affective relation to the archive as well as a way to conceptualize the "frustration[s] that surely shaped the expressions of free women of color" from the period ("Disappointment" 22, 27). Notwithstanding the arrogant presentism one must have to reproach antebellum African Americans for producing ways and means of living that "do not live up to what [a contemporary scholar has] in mind," it' s curious one would be "disappointed" in African Americans' participation in dominant mores such as sentimentalism: all evidence demonstrates social belonging in the American polity was the prevailing ethos of free black people' s cultural and intellectual productions. Nevertheless, how disappointment shapes Rusert' s Fugitive Science—a study of antebellum African Americans' "engagements with, critiques of, and responses to racial science [e.g., ethnology and phrenology], as well as other forms of natural science [e.g., astronomy]" (4)—remains an essential question in determining the book' s contributions. Indeed, Rusert refers to what would become Fugitive Science in "Disappointment," hence the connection is hers, not mine. In short, the forms of disappointment that essay describes play no role in Fugitive Science' s methodology or analyses; two interrelated reasons account for their absence. The first concerns an underlying conceptual fixation: to map ideologies and politics from the mid-twentieth century to the present onto every nineteenth-century act, figure, and strategy that Rusert considers. As she writes in the book' s final two sentences, From Frederick Douglass' radical repurposing of scientific texts to Sarah Mapps Douglass' s health activism in Philadelphia, the literary, cultural, and performative histories of fugitive science reveal that the twentieth- and twenty-first century struggle against racist science, medical exploitation, and health disparities has roots in the long nineteenth century. Fugitive science thus anticipates negotiations of science in the contemporary moment, even as its legacy refuses to be captured and contained in the present. (229-30) Early black thinkers and cultural producers don' t disappoint if they "anticipate" better politics, which is to say, one' s own politics. Such "anticipations" emerge in Fugitive Science from ideology rather historiographical reasoning. For instance, in a chapter that centers on the pedagogical [End Page 253] work of reformer Sarah Mapps Douglass, Rusert argues that in Mapps Douglass' s offering of "medical and health education to black women of different social status and class in Philadelphia," thus serving "a community that was often barred from access to city hospitals and doctors," "we see Douglass engaging in something like the Black Panther Party' s health activism" (200). The leap from an elite, bourgeois free person of color of antebellum Philadelphia like Mapps Douglass to the Black Panther Party will strike many readers as jarring. Why wouldn' t Mapps Douglass "anticipate," say, the groundbreaking medical practice and scholarship of Rebecca Lee Crumpler, the first African American woman to become a physician in the United States and author of A Book of Medical Discourses in Two Parts (1883)? Crumpler, who does not appear in Fugitive Science, will not do because she was too nineteenth century and therefore does not...

The Burning House: Jim Crow and the Making of Modern America by Anders Walker

Reviewed by: The Burning House: Jim Crow and the Making of Modern America by Anders Walker Erin D. Chapman The Burning House: Jim Crow and the Making of Modern America. By Anders Walker. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018. Pp. xiv, 290. $30.00, ISBN 978-0-300-22398-9.) In this interdisciplinary work, Anders Walker analyzes writer Robert Penn Warren's ambivalence about segregation and integration. Walker argues that Warren and a range of American writers, white and black, endorsed forms of "pluralism" rather than integration as they considered the American "'dilemma'" of race politics and the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education (pp. 1, 4). In chronologically organized chapters of ten to twenty pages each, Walker moves through the twentieth century, providing engaging, brief analyses of each writer's major contributions to the U.S. racial canon. Walker reads each writer, and the recurring Warren, closely and yet [End Page 198] makes some questionable assumptions and leaps of argumentation as he compares their racial politics. Throughout his analysis, Walker conflates the meanings of integration—the elimination of legal, economic, and institutional barriers to black opportunity and ambition—and cultural assimilation, by which African Americans would necessarily relinquish their ethnic particularities for the questionable privilege of full inclusion in the American polity. Walker implies that the writers he studies also conflated these terms and their implications. This conflation allows Walker to posit unlikely agreements among opposites such as William Faulkner and James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston and Flannery O'Connor, and Robert Penn Warren and Ralph Ellison. Those southern white writers who used their words to defend segregation and southern folkways apparently held views startlingly similar to those of incisive critics of mid-twentieth-century America such as the black writers James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright. At the center of Walker's analysis is his reading of Baldwin's characterization in The Fire Next Time (1963) of the United States as a "'burning house'" with which African Americans should not and did not want to integrate (p. 101). In comparing Baldwin's incisive critique of the white psyche with Martin Luther King Jr.'s concern for white people's moral deficiencies and Ralph Ellison's "notion that whites suffered a type of moral narcolepsy and needed to be shaken awake," Walker concludes, "All agreed that whites, not blacks, needed to change, and that African Americans certainly did not need to abandon their institutions and traditions to advance" (p. 100). From this argument Walker extrapolates that black writers' commitment to the maintenance of African American institutions and traditions was tantamount to their endorsement of southern racial pluralism, the notion that the races could and should coexist separately in the South and throughout the nation. In surprising agreement with his longtime intellectual antagonist William Faulkner, then, "Baldwin would seek to carve out a pluralist vision of the United States, a vision that included a heavy emphasis on the black experience as a source of truth about the nation's history, an awareness that whites lacked" (p. 103). Furthermore, "Baldwin saw [black people] playing a redemptive role in the struggle against bourgeois materialism as well, their very poverty a virtue" (p. 104). Ultimately, Walker argues, the pluralist tradition in U.S. letters has triumphed legally, and it behooves us, therefore, to remain attentive to the tradition's twentieth-century evolution and its ongoing impact. Perhaps. But we must also remain attentive to the motives and the larger meaning of cultural prophets such as King, Ellison, and Baldwin. As Baldwin admonished, "If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks … do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world" (The Fire Next Time, p. 119). [End Page 199] Erin D. Chapman George Washington University Copyright © 2019 The Southern Historical Association

Charles Mills’s Liberal Redemption Song

Charles Mills’s Liberal Redemption Song

John Locke and the Limits of Religious Liberty: Marriage License Refusal, Religious Freedom Laws, Vaccine Refusal, Contraception Mandate Exemptions, and Ultrasound Requirements

ABSTRACTNearly two hundred fifty years into its existence, the American polity faces a conundrum over a core founding principle: religious liberty. Multiple debates have emerged over the extent and limits of religious liberty, including arguments over how far any one person’s religious liberty extends into the public sphere as well as into the private lives of other citizens. Highly influential on James Madison’s crafting of the First Amendment, John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration outlines a strong conception of both religious toleration and of religious liberty. In the “Letter,” Locke’s reasoning is sympathetic to the concerns and convictions of believers while remaining cognizant of the calamities to which religious differences can give rise. Further, he provides a robust explication of the mutually exclusive domains of ecclesiastical and civil authorities, now known more colloquially as the division of church and state. In the following article, I illustrate how the principles put forth by Locke offer guidance in adjudicating religious liberty claims in the cases of Kim Davis, religious freedom laws, vaccine refusal, contraception mandate exemptions, and ultrasound requirements.