Explore the vast range of titles available.

Upon taking office, President tfarack Obama celebrated the apparent end of ideology in American politics. He celebrated too soon. Despite Obama's own disavowal of ideology, and the substantial continuities between his response to economic crisis and that of his Republican predecessor, ideology came roaring back into American public life in the remarkable 2009 Summer of Hate. Since then, anti-Statist crusaders on the right have forced the president, despite reelection, to the defensive, and presumably stale debates over the size of government and the sanctity of the market have once again figured prominently in national debate. This article explores the resurgence of anti-Statist ideology, arguing that the interventionist policies of Obama and George W. Bush constituted a regime crisis for the modern Republican Party and its allied extrapartisan institutions, which helps to explain the depth as well as breadth of recent efforts to reassert the relevance of free-market principles. Unlike franklin Roosevelt, Obama's partisan forefather to whom he is frequently compared, Obama's freedom to maneuver has been seriously constrained by a network of \"neoliberal\" institutions and norms that was momentarily shaken, but not forsaken, in the financial crisis and ensuing recession.

In this article, a theoretically informed and historically grounded perspective on ideology and ideologues is developed to address a paradox: while presidents play a central role in articulating socially diffuse ideologies, such as the sofi-Statism of the New Deal or the anti-Statism championed by today's Republican Party, few administrations have been hospitable to ideologues, the True Believers who develop ideologies in the first place and are dedicated to their implementation. While institutional inducements to the presidential employment of ideologues have grown throughout the modern presidential era, differential inducements to their influence have been critical in explaining when, and how, both ideologues and ideology have intersected with the modern presidency. These differential inducements are exogenous crises, the regime characteristics of each presidency, and the personal traits of presidents. The interplay of these factors is charted from Franklin Delano Roosevelt (or FDR) through the Obama administration.

This article is an extended review essay that classifies the main literatures on American politics, somewhat unconventionally, in terms of four distinct narrative modes: comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony. The four modes are differentiated by their internal construction and external social message. The central assertion is that there are standardized trajectories inherent to many of the empirical analyses we advance, which can be used to understand ongoing debates in the field. Perceiving inherent harmony or discord, emphasizing the exalted or the mundane, projecting achievement or frustration, the various narratives of American politics present contrasting interpretations regarding regime tensions and prospects. The more that political scientists become conscious of the forms and limits of the models employed, the more sophisticated we can be at developing and debating them.

In the first book to focus on civil-military tensions after American wars, Thomas Langston challenges conventional theory by arguing that neither civilian nor military elites deserve victory in this perennial struggle. What is needed instead, he concludes, is balance. In America's worst postwar episodes, those that followed the Civil War and the Vietnam War, balance was conspicuously absent. In the late 1860s and into the 1870s, the military became the tool of a divisive partisan program. As a result, when Reconstruction ended, so did popular support of the military. After the Vietnam War, military leaders were too successful in defending their institution against civilian commanders, leading some observers to declare a crisis in civil-military relations even before Bill Clinton became commander-in-chief. Is American military policy balanced today? No, but it may well be headed in that direction. At the end of the 1990s there was still no clear direction in military policy. The officer corps stubbornly clung to a Cold War force structure. A civilian-minded commander-in-chief, meanwhile, stretched a shrinking force across the globe. With the shocking events of September 11, 2001, clarifying the seriousness of the post-Cold War military policy, we may at last be moving toward a true realignment of civilian and military imperatives.