As Americans prepare to head into one of the most contentious presidential election seasons in recent history, experts are looking 200 years into the past to the heated election between John Q. Adams and Andrew Jackson for insight and answers as to what may lie ahead. Several important questions concerning the similarity of the election […]
Democracy
Slavery, Disunion, and the Violent Election of 1856
The election of 1856 was the most violent peacetime election in American history. For the first time, a national political party with a legitimate chance to win the presidency campaigned on an anti-slavery platform, putting a fright into Southern politicians, the slave owners they represented, and their Northern sympathizers. After decades of blustering about secession […]
A Defense of American Constitutionalism
The following is a review of Dennis Hale and Marc Landy, Keeping the Republic: A Defense of American Constitutionalism (University Press of Kansas, 2024). In one of the less-noticed aspects of his State of the Union address, President Biden announced his elimination of the requirement that Federally-backed mortgages be accompanied by title insurance. Instead […]
Plato’s Legacy in Eighteenth-Century Western Politics
“. . . I amused myself with reading seriously Plato’s republic. I am wrong however in calling it amusement, for it was the heaviest task-work I ever went through. I had occasionally before taken up some of his other works, but scarcely ever had patience to go through a whole dialogue. while wading thro’ the […]
Tocqueville on the Road to Despotism
“Providence has not created the human race either entirely independent or perfectly slave. It traces, it is true, a fatal circle around each man that he cannot leave; but within its vast limits man is powerful and free; so too with peoples.” Thus mused Alexis de Tocqueville in the closing pages of his magnum opus, […]