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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Legislating Against Liberties: Congress And The Constitution In The Aftermath Of War, Harry Blain
Legislating Against Liberties: Congress And The Constitution In The Aftermath Of War, Harry Blain
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
How far can a democracy go to protect itself without jeopardizing the liberties upon which democracy depends? This dissertation examines why wartime restrictions on civil liberties outlive their original justifications. Through a comparative historical analysis of five major American wars, it illustrates the decisive role of the U.S. Congress in preserving these restrictions during peacetime. This argument challenges the prevailing consensus in the literature, which identifies wartime executive power as the main threat to postwar freedoms. It also reveals broader narratives of American constitutional development, including the rise and fall of intrusive congressional investigations, the decline of sedition legislation since …
Ascriptive Nationalism, Demagoguery, And The Modern Presidency: A Case Study In Constitutional Decay, Christopher J. Putney
Ascriptive Nationalism, Demagoguery, And The Modern Presidency: A Case Study In Constitutional Decay, Christopher J. Putney
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This study is an account of the modern presidency as a source––and under Donald Trump, an accelerant––of systemic problems in American politics. Against the prevailing scholarly view of the Trump presidency as an unqualified aberration, I argue that the signal features of his efforts at governance are actually the product of converging patterns of political and institutional order. Building on seminal (but previously disjointed) work on ascriptive Americanism and the rhetorical presidency, I show that Trump represents the political synthesis of America’s ascriptive tradition and a form of presidential leadership inaugurated more than a century ago by Woodrow Wilson. Moreover, …