Discusses the structure of political parties in order to help understand modern American politics.

Donald Trump’s election to the U.S. presidency in 2016, which placed control of the government in the hands of the most racially homogenous, far-right political party in the Western world, produced shock and disbelief for liberals, progressives, and leftists globally. Yet most of the immediate analysis neglects longer-term accounting of how the United States arrived here. Race and America’s Long War examines the relationship between war, politics, police power, and the changing contours of race and racism in the contemporary United States. Nikhil Pal Singh argues that the United States’ pursuit of war since the September 11 terrorist attacks has reanimated a longer history of imperial statecraft that segregated and eliminated enemies both within and overseas. America’s territorial expansion and Indian removals, settler in-migration and nativist restriction, and African slavery and its afterlives were formative social and political processes that drove the rise of the United States as a capitalist world power long before the onset of globalization. Spanning the course of U.S. history, these crucial essays show how the return of racism and war as seemingly permanent features of American public and political life is at the heart of our present crisis and collective disorientation.

Fire and Forget includes the title story from Redeployment by Phil Klay, 2014 National Book Award Winner in Fiction These stories aren't pretty and they aren't for the faint of heart. They are realistic, haunting and shocking. And they are all unforgettable. Television reports, movies, newspapers and blogs about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have offered images of the fighting there. But this collection offers voices -- powerful voices, telling the kind of truth that only fiction can offer. What makes the collection so remarkable is that all of these stories are written by those who were there, or waited for them at home. The anthology, which features a Foreword by National Book Award winner Colum McCann, includes the best voices of the wars' generation: award-winning author Phil Klay's "Redeployment" Brian Turner, whose poem "Hurt Locker" was the movie's inspiration; Colby Buzzell, whose book My War resonates with countless veterans; Siobhan Fallon, whose book You Know When the Men Are Gone echoes the joy and pain of the spouses left behind; Matt Gallagher, whose book Kaboom captures the hilarity and horror of the modern military experience; and ten others.

The State of the Parties 2022 brings together leading scholars of parties, elections, and interest groups to provide an indispensable overview of American political parties today. The 2020 presidential election was extraordinary. What role did political parties play in these events? How did the party organizations fare? What are the implications for the future? Scholars and practitioners from throughout the United States explore the current state of American party organizations, constituencies and resources at the national, state and local level.

Considered the "gold standard" of political parties texts, this new, eighteenth edition of Party Politics in America moves its comprehensive and authoritative coverage into the age of deepened partisan conflict, expanded presidential power, and global health threats. Marjorie Randon Hershey builds on the book’s three-pronged coverage of party organization, party in the electorate, and party in government and integrates important developments in racial politics, social media use, and battles over access to the vote. The book uses contemporary examples to bring to life the fascinating story of how parties shape our political system. New to the eighteenth edition: • Fully updated through the 2020 election, including changes in virtually all of the boxed materials, the chapters, and the data presented. • Examines the impact of the Trump presidency on the Republican Party’s supporting coalition and issue positions, changes in party and ideological polarization, and the return to the world of campaign finance of "interested money" from big (and often anonymous) donors. • Explores political attitudes and voter turnout among college-age and other young voters in light of dramatic changes in American politics and the economy. • Expanded online Instructor’s Resources, including author-written test banks, essay questions, relevant websites with correlated sample assignments, the book’s appendix, and links to a collection of course syllabi.

This is a story of hope, but also of peril. It began when our nation’s polarized political class started conscripting everyday citizens into its culture war. From their commanding heights in political parties, media, academia, and government, these partisans have attacked one another for years, but increasingly they’ve convinced everyday Americans to join the fray. Why should we feel such animosity toward our fellow citizens, our neighbors, even our own kin? Because we’ve fallen for the false narrative, eagerly promoted by pundits on the Left and the Right, that citizens who happen to vote Democrat or Republican are enthusiastic supporters of Team Blue or Team Red. Aside from a minority of party activists and partisans, however, most voters are simply trying to choose the lesser of two evils. The real threat to our union isn’t Red vs. Blue America, it’s the quiet collusion within our nation’s political class to take away that most American of freedoms: our right to self-governance. Even as partisans work overtime to divide Americans against one another, they’ve erected a system under which we ordinary citizens don’t have a voice in the decisions that affect our lives. From foreign wars to how local libraries are run, authority no longer resides with We the People, but amongst unaccountable officials. The political class has stolen our birthright and set us at one another’s throats. This is the story of how that happened and what we can do about it. America stands at a precipice, but there’s still time to reclaim authority over our lives and communities.

A novel and powerful explanation of the social roots of American politics and the powerful forces in the background. The usual approach to political conflict is to look at policy battles inside government, then trace them back to political parties and organized interests. Yet, in The Social Roots of American Politics, Regina L. Wagner and Byron E. Shafer begin at the opposite end of the causal chain by looking at the social roots of American political conflict, how these roots produce differing policy preferences in the general public, and how those preferences get transmitted into American government. Drawing from over a half-century of public surveys of American voters, they demonstrate that class, race, religion, and gender provide the roots of these conflicts across the four primary domains of policy conflict: social welfare, civil rights, foreign affairs, and cultural values. They also factor in how regional differences affect partisan attachment, focusing on the South in particular. By turning the focus to deep-rooted social cleavages, this book provides a novel and powerful explanation of the basic forces that shape the contours of conflict in American politics.