Suchergebnisse

Lessons from the early republic -- Adaptation -- How political parties change: lessons from the last century -- Challenging the two-party system -- The Wilson years -- The Republicans' return, the Democrats' wilderness years -- Democrats ascend -- A natural majority? -- The postwar attempt to produce ideologically polarized politics -- How the Republican party sloughed off its liberals, beginning when it was considered advantageous to be liberal -- How the Democratic party sloughed off its conservatives, even became less conservative, even when it was thought to be advantageous to be conservative -- How partisan polarized parity came into being -- The South -- The surprising new political battleground: the midwest.

It is often said that America has become culturally diverse only in the past quarter century. But from the country's beginning, cultural variety and conflict have been a centrifugal force in American politics and a crucial reason for our rise to power. The peopling of the United States is one of the most important stories of the last five hundred years, and in Shaping our Nation, bestselling author and demographics expert Michael Barone illuminates a new angle on America's rise, using a vast array of political and social data to show America is the product of a series large, unexpected mass movements-both internal and external-which typically lasted only one or two generations but in that time reshaped the nation, and created lasting tensions that were difficult to resolve. Barone highlights the surprising trends and connections between the America of today and its migrant past, such as how the areas of major Scots-Irish settlement in the years leading up to the Revolutionary War are the same areas where John McCain performed better in the 2008 election than George W. Bush did in 2004, and how in the years following the Civil War, migration across the Mason-Dixon line all but ceased until the annealing effect that the shared struggle of World War II produced. Barone also takes us all the way up to present day, showing what the surge of Hispanic migration between 1970 and 2010 means for the elections and political decisions to be made in the coming decades. Barone shows how, from the Scots-Irish influxes of the 18th century, to the Ellis Island migrations of the early 20th and the Hispanic and Asian ones of the last four decades, people have moved to America in part in order to make a better living-but more importantly, to create new communities in which they could thrive and live as they wanted. And the founders' formula of limited