American Liberalism Research Articles

Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism

Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism

Paul Sabin. Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism.

Paul Sabin. <i>Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism</i>.

On Fukuyama’s New Book ‘Liberalism and its Discontents’: What About The End of History?

Sovyetler Birliği’nin yıkılmasıyla birlikte gündeme gelen Francis Fukuyama ve Samuel P. Huntington’ın çalışmaları bir kırılma yaşayan dünya tarihinin bundan sonra nasıl seyredeceği konusunda yaklaşımlar sunuyordu. Bir taraftan Fukuyama Sovyetler Birliği’in çöküşüyle birlikte Amerikan Liberalizminin zaferini ilan ediyor, öbür taraftan Huntington ise yeni dönemde çatışmaların kültürel temelli devam edeceğini söylüyordu. Her ne kadar iki çalışma birbirine zıt gibi görünse de zaman içerisinde her ikisinin de Amerikan siyasetine zemin hazırladığı görülmüştür. Fukuyama yeni eseri ‘Liberalizm ve Hoşnutsuzlukları’nda ise ilk eserinde olduğu kadar emin konuşmuyor, Liberalizmin zaferi yerine onu kurtuluş için sarılmamız gereken bir çare olarak sunuyor ve onun karşısında aşırı sağı tehdit olarak tanıtıyor. Fukuyama ilk eserinde her ne kadar Liberalizmi mutlak muzaffer olarak tanıttıysa da mikro çatışmaların süreceğini de söyleyerek çelişkili ifadelerde bulunmuştur. Çatışmaların devam ettiği günümüzde ise bu çatışmalara karşı yeni kitabını bir reçete olarak sunmaktadır. Ancak mevcut sosyolojik şartlarda reçetesinin uygulanması mümkün görünmemektedir.

Five Republics and One Tradition: A History of Constitutionalism in Chile 1810–2020 by Pablo Ruiz-Tagle

<i>Five Republics and One Tradition: A History of Constitutionalism in Chile 1810–2020</i> by Pablo Ruiz-Tagle

Darkness on the Edge: Revisionary Black Radicalism in the Depression Era

Darkness on the Edge: Revisionary Black Radicalism in the Depression Era

Jungtinių Amerikos Valstijų liberalioji spauda apie tris ultimatumus Lietuvai (1938–1940 m.)

THE US LIBERAL PRESS ABOUT THREE ULTIMATUMS TO LITHUANIA (1938–1940) The article seeks to reveal how the information about the ultimatums served to Lithuania (by Poland in 1938, by Germany in 1939, and by the Soviet Union in 1940) was reflected in the US press, how it used Lithuania’s official sources, how the American press evaluated the information, and whether the US press was on the side of Lithuania or not. Four American newspapers (The New York Times, The New York Herald Tribune, The Washington Post, and The Chicago Daily Tribune) and two American Lithuanian newspapers (Vienybė and Dirva) were selected for the study. Although the information provided in the US press was accurate, it avoided assessments of the events. Like the US government, the press pursued more isolationist policy towards Lithuania. Although the events in Lithuania received considerable attention from the local press, the US newspapers hardly ever used Lithuanian information sources officially. KEYWORDS: Polish ultimatum, German ultimatum, Soviet ultimatum, World War II, USA, press, newspapers, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New York Herald Tribune, The Chicago Daily Tribune, Vienybė, Dirva.

“Black power” and black rhetorical tradition

This essay explores some of the proverbs, sayings, and proverbialexpressions used by Stokely Carmichael (1941-1998) that are foundin writings such as: Black Power the Politics of Liberation in America(1967), Stokely Speaks: From Black Power to Pan-Africanism (1971),and his autobiography, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Times ofStokely Carmichael (2003). In the process of analyzing traditional languageused by Carmichael, this essay also: (1) seeks to identify sourcesfrom which Carmichael’s sayings are derived, (2) examine some of thecontexts in which they are used, (3) determine the extent that they illustrateCarmichael’s ever-evolving political philosophies and worldviewduring the Civil Rights Era (1954-1968) and the African IndependenceMovement (1950-1975) respectively, (4) and it also seeks to categorizeCarmichael’s proverbs, sayings, and proverbial expressions based on origin,structure, and traits (such as word count and subject matter). (5)Additionally, this essay considers the extent that his proverbial languageis used to establish, reinforce, and regulate both personal and professionalrelationships throughout his entire life.

Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical

Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical

Hemispheric alliances: liberal Democrats and Cold War Latin America

Hemispheric alliances: liberal Democrats and Cold War Latin America

Chinese Centrist Liberal Critics of Trump: A Reconsideration of Contemporary Chinese Liberalism

This article challenges the existing scholarship’s characterisation of Chinese liberal intellectuals as Trumpian intellectuals. By conducting a close reading of Chinese academic publications, lectures and opinions aired on social media, this article finds that besides Trump’s Chinese liberal fans, many leading Chinese liberal intellectuals harshly criticised Trump. However, they do not align themselves with American liberals in making all-out partisan criticisms of Trump and American right-wing politics. Instead, their criticisms are mostly centrist. This article argues that Chinese liberal intellectuals’ centrist criticisms of Trump reflect their Confucian, egalitarian and moderate nationalist sympathies, dimensions of their thoughts which have been ignored by existing scholarship regarding them. By exploring Chinese centrist liberal critics of Trump, this article brings to light the ideological heterogeneity within the Chinese liberal camp previously lumped together under the umbrella of “anti-authoritarianism.”

Containing the Wonder Doctor: Sidney Poitier, the Cold War, and Liberal Reformation

This article examines Sidney Poitier's role as a black male cultural icon during the Cold War, arguing that his Cold War context both restricted and enabled Poitier's career as a black American actor. By analyzing four of his films, All the Young Men (dir. Hall Bartlett, 1960), Lilies of the Field (dir. Ralph Nelson, 1963), The Bedford Incident (dir. James B. Harris, 1965), and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (dir. Stanley Kramer, 1967), the article concludes that Poitier was an American cultural symbol whose films were a form of soft propaganda that simultaneously upheld a positive international image of American democracy while also challenging American domestic racial discrimination in the film industry. Poitier's role as an image-builder for American liberalism is testified to by the aesthetic choices of the films and the history of their being screened among international audiences. The article also contextualizes these films within Cold War cultural discourse by looking at their production and reception histories and by examining Poitier's own reflections on his acting career.

The People's Revolt: Texas Populists and the Rise of American Liberalism

The People's Revolt: Texas Populists and the Rise of American Liberalism

Bound to Preserve the White Self: Speculative Frenzy and the Patriarchal Right to Self-Defense in John Locke and Ida B. Wells

Debates about policing and gun violence often break down to conversations about the violence of either “private” white men engaged in vigilantism or “public” police misconduct. I argue, however, that this split misses the way that patriarchal power structures the American state across public and private spheres by uniting the police with white citizens. I make this argument through a novel juxtaposition of John Locke’s liberal theorizing of patriarchy and self-defense with Black feminist Ida B. Wells’s critiques of how American liberalism disavows Black people’s own right to defend themselves. Reading these theorists together, I diagnose how American liberalism justifies the patriarchal basis of white democracy, even as Black people refused to accept their status as objects of patriarchal power with no right to resist. By centering patriarchal power, I also argue then that the abolition of white democracy best directly responds to the contemporary crises of both policing and white masculinity.

College and University Instructional Physical Activity Programs, as Relevant Now as Ever

ABSTRACT In one form or another, College and University Instructional Physical Activity Programs (C/UIPAP) have been a part of American higher education for 160 years. This essay highlights the history of this evolution, as well as the ongoing need for C/UIPAP. In doing so, it sets the stage for the thematic issue of the International Journal of Kinesiology and Higher Education devoted to C/UIPAP. It further identifies advocacy strategies and tactics that align with both the Association of American Colleges and Universities’ Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) educational reform initiative, and federal government declarations aimed at improving the health and well-being of college and university students. Finally, while primarily focused on the situation in the United States, select research from the countries of Poland, Russia, and South Korea is introduced, along with a call for more international contributions about C/UIPAP.

Culture Wars in Gothic Mode: The Example of HBO’s Miniseries Sharp Objects

Cultural and political polarization in The United States has been a prominent topic both in social sciences and the media since the beginning of the 1990s. Whether the polarization is understood as a deep moral divide among Americans, i.e., as the culture war between liberals and conservatives, or as a superficially maintained political hostility, i.e., as party sorting between Democrats and Republicans, most scholars agree that the media sphere is deeply polarized, especially since 2016 when Donald Trump emerged as a political figure and then the U.S. president. HBO, known for its progressive cultural capital and liberal ethos, distinguishes itself in the daring narrative productions which often tackle polarizing themes of race, gender, sexuality, etc. Gothic mode or genre is among the often-employed narrative styles of its productions. American gothic, also the subject of increasing academic interest in recent decades, has been largely considered within its cultural and historical context and interpreted as a site where the nation’s historical benighted ghosts disrupt and challenge official enlightened national narratives. As HBO’s original production told in a gothic mode, Sharp Objects (2018) will be contextualized within the U.S. culture wars and analyzed as a Southern Gothic tale told from the liberal progressive perspective. The show’s narrative will be seen as a gothic journey deep into the South by a liberal heroine haunted by her conservative ghosts, who attempts to face and settle them. The paper explores the thesis that the gothic disruptive potential is of a conditional and limited impact on liberal America’s Enlightenment narrative.

Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism by Paul Sabin

Undeniably, the public-interest movement fundamentally altered American politics, but calibrating its precise impact is difficult given all the cross-currents and complexities of the U.S. system of government. Such is the challenge that Sabin accepts in this book. His primary focus is on Ralph Nader since Naderism catalyzed the larger movement. With the publicity surrounding his 1965 auto safety expose, Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile (New York, 1965), Nader brilliantly crafted for himself the image of a selfless ascetic speaking out on behalf of ordinary Americans. He capitalized on his expanding notoriety by mobilizing resources that he used to commission reports about the incompetence and pro-business biases of the administrative state. His unique style of advocacy inspired a generation of political activists. Indeed, in 1970, one-third of the students at Harvard Law School applied to work as summer interns on Nader’s projects.Despite Nader’s centrality, Sabin correctly credits other important figures in the early public-interest movement, notably John Gardner, Mark Green, Charles Halpern, Gus Speth, Harrison Wellford, and David Zwick. Nader was considerably better at generating news coverage of policy failures than he was at building an organizational edifice that could sustain itself. The environmental movement was more successful at institutionalizing its advocacy through the creation of new organizations such as the Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council, and through the growth of existing groups like the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society. Nader’s own ideology was oddly contradictory. He excoriated administrative agencies like the Federal Trade Commission and the National Highway and Transportation Safety Administration, arguing for weakening them by bestowing a greater role on citizens in agency policymaking. Yet, he also wanted agencies to be powerful enough to effectuate his recommended policy changes.In this well-researched book, Sabin relies on a mix of historical tools, including archival work with records from some of the groups, interviews with key figures, and oral histories. The book’s time frame is largely confined to the period between the publication of Unsafe at Any Speed and the end of President Carter’s administration, with just a little coverage in the last chapter of President Reagan’s administration. But what is most conspicuous by its absence in the book is coverage of the fierce mobilization of lobbyists in Washington to combat the assault on the preeminence of big business. This effort, well underway long before Reagan was elected, was effective at checking the rising power of the public-interest movement. David Vogel’s Fluctuating Fortunes (New York, 1989) covers this part of the story in great depth.The best part of Public Citizens is its chapter about Carter’s appointment of sixty public-interest movement leaders to positions in his administration. Nader, however, quickly concluded that Carter was disingenuously trying to coopt the progressive side of the Democratic Party. In Nader’s mind any compromise that the administration made to move policy forward was an abdication of principle. His vitriol aimed at former colleagues was shocking and, ultimately counterproductive, as it altered his image from crusader to loose cannon. Nader’s petulance aside, the conflict between principle and pragmatism is a familiar one in both U.S. political parties. Sabin details how this dynamic involving the public-interest movement frequently divided the Democrats during this period, though he showed little interest in trying to tie this movement to larger currents in the evolution of liberalism between the Great Society and Reagan’s election. As conservatives began leaving the Democrats in a backlash against the Civil Rights movement, the Party was transformed, becoming at once more diverse and more dominated by liberals.Although more definitive judgments await, Nader’s legacy is twofold. First, he and other progressives succeeded in gaining passage of groundbreaking legislation to promote consumer protection and to enhance environmental protection. Second, Nader’s belief that the parties were similar—“Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee” (157)—led him to run as the Green Party candidate for president in 2000. As a result, he threw Florida to the Republicans and thus the election to George W. Bush. Nader made an unconscionable choice, one that worked against everything for which he had fought.

An International Spokesman for Chinese Nationalism

An International Spokesman for Chinese Nationalism Han Zhang (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Eric Li gives a TED Talk in 2013. (TED/YouTube) [End Page 48] In late 2019, as the first COVID-19 cases were emerging in Wuhan, the Chinese venture capitalist and media figure Eric Li went for lunch with a Financial Times correspondent in Shanghai. Over a $640, eleven-course meal, Li, who is a founder of Guancha, a leading nationalist online media outlet, took the opportunity to proclaim the end of liberalism in China. For decades, people had been “debating what kind of government and society they want,” Li said. “That debate is over.” There were “leftover liberal phrases” and “liberal thoughts” held by academics and other holdouts, but he predicted they would soon change their minds. These kinds of statements are common today in China, where anti-liberal nationalism has become increasingly mainstream. Li is a notable figure in this sphere, in part because of his deep ties to the West. A graduate of Berkeley and Stanford, he is affiliated with the Aspen Institute and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Li’s Western education and experience with elite institutions gives him a unique platform for espousing nationalist opinions outside China; he has contributed to various English-language publications, including the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, and the Economist. In a 2013 TED Talk, he delivered a full-throated defense of China’s one-party system and argued that electoral democracy doesn’t work (a point he punctuated with a photo of former President George W. Bush in front of the infamous “Mission Accomplished” banner). The talk has attracted over 3 million views. Born in the early years of the Cultural Revolution, Li was raised by his grandmother in Shanghai while his academic parents weathered the storm in the capital. He is proud of his roots in the city, which emerged as a center of modern glamor and Western sophistication in the first decades of the twentieth century. When Li moved to the United States for college in the 1980s, he became, according to his TED Talk, a “Berkeley hippie.” (If that was the case, his counterculture days were short-lived; he worked on Ross Perot’s 1992 presidential campaign.) After almost a decade in the United States, he moved back to China. In 1999, Li helped launch Chengwei [End Page 49] Capital, a venture fund that manages about $2 billion and has invested in many companies that are household names in China. The Financial Times compared Li to Steve Bannon, and over the expensive lunch Li himself expressed admiration for Trump’s crusade against “global elites.” Like Bannon, Li wears a flashy erudition on his sleeve. He likes to sprinkle quotes by John Locke, Abraham Lincoln, and Bhikhu Parekh into arguments, to contrarian effect. He has also mastered the vernacular of American liberalism, using terms like “broadening,” “pluralizing,” and “diversity” to promote authoritarianism. From Li’s perspective, if you take a big step back and squint your eyes, “autocracy” can be seen as a form of “democracy.” As he put it in the Economist, he thinks democracy should be measured “not by procedures but by outcomes.” In a conversation in Guancha, Li tried to get Francis Fukuyama to sign on to his idea that informal information collection conducted by the party as an alternative to elections “have been effective.” Fukuyama was unmoved: “It depends on your measure of effectiveness.” Since Xi Jinping took power in 2012, nationalist ideas have thrived in China. The government has encouraged a sense of national pride and tightened censorship and regulations over domestic media and the internet, suppressing any news that may reflect badly on the party-state. Xi has also pushed propagandists to publish and broadcast overseas in order to influence arguments outside the country. Li is no doubt seen as an asset in this strategy—a sleek, Western-educated capitalist as a face of the new Chinese nationalism. His success should be seen in the context of a broader effort to cement the transformation of nationalist politics from a grassroots insurgency into a state-supported ideology. From the Angry Youth to the Little Pinks...

Conscience, Consent, and a Multiplicity of Factions: Disestablishment and Free Exercise in Colonial American Constitutionalism

Taking seriously Tocqueville’s admonition that colonial experience is the proper “point of departure” for understanding the American regime and its constitution, this essay examines the development of free exercise protections and disestablishment of religion in the foundational laws of the American colonies. Like other studies of church-state relations, this examination largely bears out Madison’s pithy analysis in The Federalist. “In a free government, the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights. It consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests, and in the other, in the multiplicity of sects. The degree of security in both cases will depend on the number of interests and sects.” Growing religious diversity was a harbinger of religious liberty in early American constitutionalism. Yet the extension of free exercise protections and the curtailment of church establishments also depended on patterns of thought endemic to the theology of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Americans, shared principles that predated the proliferation of enlightenment liberalism in America. This narrative cautions against grounding religious liberty entirely in modern liberalism; colonial Americans did not adopt religious liberty as a result of secularization, but to protect their communities of faith from political threats. A conception of church-state relations that exudes hostility to faith is not likely to be durable. A robust religious liberty must thus be grounded in, or at minimum consonant with, the convictions the devoutly religious.

Rawlsian Liberalism as American Progressivism

Rawlsian Liberalism as American Progressivism

Radical Conversion: Theorizing Catholic Citizenship in the American Liberal Tradition by Christopher M. Duncan

Radical Conversion: Theorizing Catholic Citizenship in the American Liberal Tradition by Christopher M. Duncan