Party Wars is the first book to describe how the ideological gulf now separating the two major parties developed and how today’s fierce partisan competition affects the political process and national policy.Barbara Sinclair traces the current ideological divide to changes in the Republican party in the 1970s and 1980s, including the rise of neoconservativism and the Religious Right. Because of these historical developments, Democratic and Republican voters today differ sub...

Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 brought with it a major shift in the composition of the U.S. Congress for the first time in several decades. The subsequent introduction of an enormous amount of new legislation sparked debate among many political observers that a new coalition was being built in American politics and that a significant change in the issues on the agenda before Congress heralded a Republican realignment.Barbara Sinclair's study is a major contribution to our underst...

This Fight Is Our Fight: Elizabeth Warren's Passionate Call to Save America's Middle ClassIn This Fight Is Our Fight, #1 New York Times bestselling author and U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren offers a candid, inspiring look at why our middle class is under siege and how we can win the battle to save it. Drawing on her own experiences growing up in Oklahoma at the ragged edge of the middle class, Warren shows how a government that once looked out for ...

"An urgent and engaging look at how American politics have become the founding fathers' worst nightmare" ( The Daily Beast).America's political system is dysfunctional. We know it, yet the problem seems intractable—after every election, voters discover yet again that political "leaders" are simply quarreling in a never-ending battle between the two warring tribes.As a former congressman, Mickey Edwards witnessed firsthand how important legislative ...

An outspoken centrist, Senator Snowe stunned Washington in February 2012 when she announced she would not seek a fourth term and offered a sharp rebuke to the Senate, citing the dispiriting gridlock and polarization. After serving in the legislative branch at the state and federal levels for 40 years, including 18 years in the U.S. Senate, she explained that Washington wasn’t solving the big problems anymore.In this timely call to action, she explores the roots of her belief in pri...

A stunning investigation of the history of organized misinformation in politics.In today’s post-truth political landscape, there is a carefully concealed but ever-growing industry of organized misinformation that exists to create and disseminate lies in the service of political agendas. Ari Rabin-Havt and Media Matters for America present a revelatory history of this industry—which they've dubbed Lies, Incorporated—and show how it has crippled legislative progress on issues includi...

Latin America’s flirtation with neoliberal economic restructuring in the 1980s and 1990s (the so-called Washington Consensus strategy) had the effect of increasing income inequality throughout the region. The aim of this economic policy was in part to create the conditions for stable democracy by ensuring efficient economic use of resources, both human and capital, but the widening gap between rich and poor threatened to undermine political stability. At the heart of the dilemma faced by t...

From the end of the New Deal until quite recently, the U.S. House of Representatives was dominated by a conservative coalition that thwarted the Democratic majority and prevented the enactment of measures proposed by a succession of liberal Presidents. Today Presidents aren't necessarily liberal and the House of Representatives is not necessarily the graveyard of presidential proposals. What happened? Congress evolved. It all began with airconditioning. In this entertaining tale of one of ...

Polarization. Partisanship. Rancor. Character assassinations. Government shutdowns. Why can't our elected officials just get along and do their jobs?The United States was once seen as a land of broad consensus and pragmatic politics. Sharp ideological differences were largely absent. But today politics in America is dominated by intense party polarization and limited agreement among legislative representatives on policy problems and solutions.Americans pride themselves on the...

Although the U.S. Constitution requires that the House of Representatives and the Senate pass legislation in identical form before it can be sent to the president for final approval, the process of resolving differences between the chambers has received surprisingly little scholarly attention. Hong Min Park, Steven S. Smith, and Ryan J. Vander Wielen document the dramatic changes in intercameral resolution that have occurred over recent decades, and examine the various considerations made ...

While the Democratic nominee for President will likely emerge from the 2008 primaries bloody and bruised, the always-smiling, confoundingly popular Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, will be front and center as the party heads to its National Convention in August. Not only has she somehow won the confidence of the boys' club of the House and returned her party to majority status after twelve years of Republican rule, but she has managed, in her first 100 hours on the job, to pass much of ...

Learn how to live on as little as possible and accept it as a way of life--then celebrate it. The inevitable economic collapse could be a year away or it could be ten years away, but if you're already living frugally, what difference does it make? Opt out as a way of life and enjoy your new-found freedom. The less hold money has on you, the less you deal with it beyond having enough for essentials, the less time you waste with it. If you buy into the world's financial basket or the Made-in...