The Change We Want.

POLITICAL attitudes; POWER (Social sciences); POLITICAL participation; ELECTIONS; POLITICAL science; POLITICAL science education

BOOKS & the ARTS IN 1948, A YOUNG HISTORIAN NAMED RICHARD HOFSTADter published The American Political Tradition, a critical look at the country's politics that marked a sharp break from the accepted wisdom among historians of the time. For Shenk, the very vision that allowed the Republicans to build an antislavery majority before the war also limited their capacity to guarantee the creation of democratic institutions after it was over. nother theme running through Realigners is the ambivalent streak in American politics toward the entire project of electoral democracy. Shenk's selection is far more eclectic and idiosyncratic than Hofstadter's was; it includes Charles Sumner, Phyllis Schlafly, Walter Lippmann, W.E.B. Du Bois, the Republican Party strategist Mark Hanna, and Hanna's daughter Ruth Hanna McCormick. Shenk's best chapter is his profile of Charles Sumner, which dramatizes the rise (and fall) of a more radical Republican Party. [Extracted from the article]

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