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The election of Donald J. Trump to the presidency shocked the political establishment, triggering a wave of hysteria among the bicoastal elite that may never subside. The biggest shockwaves of all, however, were felt not in the progressive parishes of Manhattan or San Francisco, but in the halls of the political elite’s cherished and oft-overlooked center of power—Washington, DC’s sprawling “administrative state”—for President Trump represented an existential threat to its denizens, who came to be known as “swamp creatures.” How did it come to pass that the “draining of the swamp” would become a core aim of the Trump administration, impacting everything from judicial appo...
Donald Trump promised to “Drain the Swamp,” by which he originally meant lobbyists. When he got in, he found an entirely different Swamp—a Deep State that had grown, layer upon layer, within the government. But he wasn’t the first to encounter entrenched Swamp opposition. Abraham Lincoln had to battle the “Slave Power Conspiracy”; Grover Cleveland was the most successful of three presidents to fight the spoils Swamp. Theodore Roosevelt found a new iteration of the Swamp awaiting him: Trusts. After World War II, John F. Kennedy discovered that he had little control over the Central Intelligence Agency, and even found he needed the CIA for his own purposes. Despite promising to shrink the bureaucracy Swamp, Ronald Reagan found himself helpless to even make a dent in it. And Trump soon learned that the Deep State could ensure no one ever brought any of its own to justice. Dragonslayers explains why these Swamps exist, and why they were—and remain—so hard to defeat.
"In this work of intellectual history, the author identifies four transformations in federal goverrnment that followed the New Deal: the rise of the administrative state, the erosion of federalism, the ascendance of the modern presidency, and the development of modern judicial review. He then considers how schools of conservative thought (traditionalists, neoconservatives, libertarians, Straussians) responded to each transformation"--
This controversial, convincing, and highly original book is important reading for everyone concerned about the origins, present, and future of the American experiment in self-government.
How a concentrated attack on political institutions threatens to disable the essential workings of government In this unsettling book, Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum trace how ungoverning—the deliberate effort to dismantle the capacity of government to do its work—has become a malignant part of politics. Democracy depends on a government that can govern, and that requires what’s called administration. The administrative state is made up of the vast array of departments and agencies that conduct the essential business of government, from national defense and disaster response to implementing and enforcing public policies of every kind. Ungoverning chronicles the reactionary moveme...
This history of presidential studies surveys the views of leading thinkers and scholars about the constitutional powers of the highest office in the land from the founding to the present.
The new conservatism in America is not easy to define, having as it does many strands and many leading proponents. This volume explores the ideas that unite Paul Wolfowitz, Condoleeza Rice, Jeanne Kirkpatrick and other US notables.
Ordering America, painting a felicitous portrait of Western civilization, shows that its defining ideals--rooted in man ́s common human nature, a perception newly substantiated by modern evolutionary psychology--were best fulfilled by realization of the American founding order. Twentieth-century progressivism and postmodern multiculturalism detoured America down the way of social constructionism--human nature and equality are produced by culture and the state, through groups. The book sets a course to revive the Western ideals and return to an opportune center-right American order, applying latest scientific insights and restoring individual responsibility and reciprocity under more limited, still energetic government befitting our century.
A landmark work on how the Progressive Era redefined the playing field for conservatives and liberals alike. During the 1912 presidential campaign, Progressivism emerged as an alternative to what was then considered an outmoded system of government. A century later, a new generation of conservatives criticizes Progressivism as having abandoned America’s founding values and miring the government in institutional gridlock. In this paradigm-shifting book, renowned contributors examine a broad range of issues, including Progressives’ interpretation of the Constitution, their expansion and redistribution of individual rights, and reforms meant to shift power from political parties to ordinary citizens.