In his 16 years in Congress, Republican Mickey Edwards came to a strong conclusion: Political parties are the “cancer at the heart of our democracy,” he tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross.
In his new book, The Parties Versus the People, the former Republican congressman from Oklahoma details how party leaders have too much control over who runs for office, what bills make it to the floor and how lawmakers vote.
Richard Hofstadter (1916 – 1970) was an American historian and public intellectual. Hofstadter, the DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University, became the “iconic historian of postwar liberal consensus”, largely because of his emphasis on ideas and political culture rather than the day-to-day doings of politicians. Among his most important works is The American Political Tradition (1948). Below is Chapter One of this critically acclaimed work.
Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Jr.(1917 – 2007) was an American historian, social critic, and public intellectual. Much of Schlesinger’s work explored the history of 20th-century American liberalism. In particular, his work focused on leaders such as Harry Truman, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Robert F. Kennedy. Schlesinger served as special assistant and “court historian” to President Kennedy from 1961 to 1963. He wrote a detailed account of the Kennedy Administration, from the 1960 presidential campaign to the president’s state funeral, titled A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, which won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.
Three Readings on the Functions and Dysfunctions of Political Parties