Where has liberalism gone wrong? Douglas Massey says it veered off course with a broad emphasis on symbolic politics—rather than what is needed: concrete reasons why it is in American’s economic as well as moral interest to support the liberal cause. According to Massey, what liberals have long suffered from is the lack of a consistent ideology. So back in 2005 when he published Return of the “L” Word, his call for a liberal realignment, he set forth a clear set of liberal principles to explain how markets work in society, and applied them to liberal policies. Recently I caught up with him to find out to what extent he thinks the Obama administration has offered the public the consistent liberal vision that was needed. Read on…

Do citizens value compromise? Americans are ambivalent about it. That is the most striking pattern revealed in surveys of public opinion in recent years. The ambivalence shows itself in public attitudes toward politicians who compromise and also toward compromise itself. In a typical survey, the vast majority of Americans said they prefer leaders willing to compromise, but at the same time two-thirds of all the respondents also said that they “like politicians who stick to their positions, even if unpopular.”

For the complete excerpt, please visit Salon.com

Are these conflicted feelings about compromise to blame for Senator Lugar’s upset in Indiana?

Some news reports have suggested that Lugar’s openness to compromise may have played a factor in his stunning loss to challenger Richard Mourdock (“Mr. Mourdock’s campaign was fueled by Tea Party groups and national conservative organizations that deemed Mr. Lugar too willing to compromise…” writes the New York Times).

And Mourdock, for his part, is already trumping his unwillingness to compromise in places like The Hill:

Mourdock, who won in part on the strength of the Tea Party, also predicted there won’t be much compromise in the next Senate.

“I recognize that this is one of those times where there is great polarization between the two parties, and frankly the ideas for which the parties are working are really at opposite ends of the spectrum — I don’t think there’s going to be a lot of successful compromise,” Mourdock said on CNN’s “Starting Point” Wednesday.

…

“You never compromise on principles — if people on the far left have a principle they want to stand by, they should never compromise. Those of us on the right should not either,” he said.

Yet, history tells us that successful government requires compromise, so where does this leave us?

For a more circumspect take on the role of compromise in government, check out this exclusive excerpt at Salon.com from The Spirit of Compromise: Why Governing Demands It and Campaigning Undermines It by Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson.

The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking publishes in September 2012 and you can find more information about it (including a Q&A with the authors) on our site.

“I remember as a kid in school being told by teachers to think harder and having no idea what to do. This book solves that once and for all. We now have a guide for people of all ages to learn how to think more effectively. I highly recommend this book.”–Jack Canfield, cocreator of the New York Times best-selling Chicken Soup for the Soul® series and The Success Principles

Columbine

Photo credit, C Gracie.

We have few red-flowered plants in the eastern United States, most likely due to our paucity of hummingbird species as compared to other parts of the country. Red is a color known to be attractive to hummingbirds, but not as much so to other potential pollinators. The blooming of columbine coincides with the return of ruby-throated hummingbirds from their winter locales and provides them with a welcome source of nectar after their long journeys. The nectar is held at the tips of the long spurs, where it is accessible only to hummingbirds and some bumblebees. Columbine is frequently found growing on rocky ledges and cliff faces.   For a high-res version of this image, please contact blog@press.princeton.edu.     Read more in Spring Wildflowers of the Northeast by Carol Gracie Wildflower Wednesday

David Vogel, whose book The Politics of Precaution: Regulating Health, Safety, and Environmental Risks in Europe and the United States was published this Spring, will be in the UK on 10 May and will be speaking at the Said Business School, Oxford at 11.30am, and the London School of Economics at 6.30pm.

Please follow links to sign up for either of these events or contact Julia Hall jhall@pupress.co.uk for more information.

FACT: “First used in 1948, the American National Election Study (ANES) has been in the field in every presidential election and nearly every congressional election since. It is supported by the National Science Foundation as one of its three ‘big social science’ projects (the other two are the General Social Survey [GSS] and the Panel Study of Income Dy­namics [PSID]).”

Improving Public Opinion Surveys: Interdisciplinary Innovation and the American National Election Studies
Edited by John H. Aldrich & Kathleen M. McGraw

The American National Election Studies (ANES) is the premier social science survey program devoted to voting and elections. Conducted during the presidential election years and midterm Congressional elections, the survey is based on interviews with voters and delves into why they make certain choices. In this edited volume, John Aldrich and Kathleen McGraw bring together a group of leading social scientists that developed and tested new measures that might be added to the ANES, with the ultimate goal of extending scholarly understanding of the causes and consequences of electoral outcomes.

The contributors—leading experts from several disciplines in the fields of polling, public opinion, survey methodology, and elections and voting behavior—illuminate some of the most important questions and results from the ANES 2006 pilot study. They look at such varied topics as self-monitoring in the expression of political attitudes, personal values and political orientations, alternate measures of political trust, perceptions of similarity and disagreement in partisan groups, measuring ambivalence about government, gender preferences in politics, and the political issues of abortion, crime, and taxes.

Did you know that May is Zombie Awareness Month? We’re celebrating by offering one lucky winner a copy of Zombie Economics! In the graveyard of economic ideology, dead ideas still stalk the land. . .

Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk among Us
by John Quiggin
With a new chapter by the author

The recent financial crisis laid bare many of the assumptions behind market liberalism—the theory that market-based solutions are always best, regardless of the problem. For decades, their advocates dominated mainstream economics, and their influence created a system where an unthinking faith in markets led many to view speculative investments as fundamentally safe. The crisis seemed to have killed off these ideas, but they still live on in the minds of many—members of the public, commentators, politicians, economists, and even those charged with cleaning up the mess. In Zombie Economics, John Quiggin explains how these dead ideas still walk among us—and why we must find a way to kill them once and for all if we are to avoid an even bigger financial crisis in the future.

Zombie Economics takes the reader through the origins, consequences, and implosion of a system of ideas whose time has come and gone. These beliefs—that deregulation had conquered the financial cycle, that markets were always the best judge of value, that policies designed to benefit the rich made everyone better off—brought us to the brink of disaster once before, and their persistent hold on many threatens to do so again. Because these ideas will never die unless there is an alternative, Zombie Economics also looks ahead at what could replace market liberalism, arguing that a simple return to traditional Keynesian economics and the politics of the welfare state will not be enough—either to kill dead ideas, or prevent future crises.

To celebrate the 100th anniversary of renowned mathematician–and World War II hero–Alan Turing, his biographer Andrew Hodges conducted a podcast with IEEE Spectrum’s Steven Cherry for their Techwise Converstaions. To hear a lively and entertaining discussion on the man, click below. To learn more about the fascinating yet tragic life of Alan Turing, check out Andrew Hodges’s new Centenary Edition of his classic work ALAN TURING: The Enigma.

As part of Election 101, we are posting exclusive content from The Concise Princeton Encyclopedia of American Political History on subjects related to Election 2012.

“War and politics have always been entwined in American history,” writes Michael Sherry in the opening to this article that tackles among other things how war affects the presidency.

The presidency underlines how war and politics constituted each other. War or its apparent threat underwrote the presidency’s expanding powers, both legal and illegal. Major crises, none more so than 9/11, produced presidential claims that constitutional provisions, international laws, and humanitarian norms should be altered, suspended, or reinterpreted. War also brought greater power for individual presidents, though less often lasting glory. Many Americans suspected presidents of using war for political gain, but presidents usually achieved little that endured. Those who secured lasting luster— Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt— died before the emergence of the sour aftermath war usually presents. Woodrow Wilson’s presidency crumbled after World War I; Republicans seized the White House in 1921. Truman and the Democrats barely survived World War II’s aftermath and then succumbed to the Korean War; a Republican, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, became president in 1953. The Vietnam War and their handling of it destroyed the presidencies of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon (his abuse of war powers shaped the Watergate crisis of 1973– 74). Difficult wars readily damaged presidents, as George W. Bush found in the Iraq War, but even a triumphant Gulf War gave no lasting political traction to his father, defeated in 1992 by Bill Clinton. By the same token, three of the four post- 1945 presidents who served two full terms— Eisenhower, Reagan, and Clinton— avoided costly war making and remained popular. War was as fickle in its political ramifications as in its conduct and global consequences, often overwhelming the state’s ability to control it and ensnaring presidents.

Read the complete article here: http://press.princeton.edu/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/2Voting.DemocracyasNationalValue.pdf

The preceding is an excerpt from The Concise Princeton Encyclopedia of American Political History, edited by Michael Kazin, Rebecca Edwards, and Adam Rothman. To learn more about this book, please visit http://press.princeton.edu. Copyright © 2011 by Princeton University Press. No part of this text may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher.

In Praise of Moderation

By Aurelian Craiutu

Moderates have not fared well lately in American politics. Senator Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) has recently announced that she will not seek a fourth term because of the growing political partisanship in the Senate. An iconic figure of moderation in American politics, she will be remembered for having played a key role in the passing of the $787bn stimulus package proposed by the Obama administration in 2009 that was opposed by the majority of her republican colleagues on ideological grounds. In the current republican primaries, Mitt Romney has been working very hard to defend himself against accusations of being a “moderate.” This label has made him unappealing in the eyes of many Republican voters whom he has tried to sway by calling himself “a severely conservative governor.” Politicians who are running for office in the upcoming elections are strongly advised to distinguish themselves from those who practice moderation and pursue their agendas while looking to—and even drawing from—both the left and the right.

For all the strategic considerations surrounding all political campaigns, this should surprise us since political moderation is the touchstone of democracy which cannot function without compromise and bargaining. Yet moderation remains a concept that challenges our imagination and appears as a fuzzy virtue which defies universal claims and moral absolutes….

FACT: “The largest species of spiders, South American tarantulas or bird-eating spiders, reach a body length of 10cm and may have a leg span of up to 27cm. But the smallest species are really tiny—less than one millimeter body length when adult. Nevertheless all are predators. And all, with the exception of one family, use venom to paralyze their prey. Biting in self defense appears to be only a secondary purpose.”

The Private Life of Spiders
by Paul Hillyard

With more than 100 different families and 40,000 individual species, spiders are among the most successful creatures on Earth. Highly adaptable, they live almost everywhere, from equatorial rainforest to Arctic tundra. And they come in a huge range of shapes and sizes, from the tiny Patu digua, measuring less than half a millimeter, to the immense bird-eating tarantula, which can reach a span of eleven inches. In The Private Life of Spiders, spider expert Paul Hillyard takes the reader on a fascinating and richly illustrated tour of the lives of some of the world’s most remarkable spiders.

The Private Life of Spiders reveals the intriguing behaviors of these complex creatures, from their extraordinary web-spinning skills and hunting strategies to their courtship displays and devoted care for their young. The book also describes other surprising skills of some spiders, such as the ability to cross vast stretches of open water.

Virginia Bluebells

Photo credit, C Gracie.

Virginia bluebells provide an array of changing colors in spring, beginning with the deep purple of their newly emerged leaves, which soon turns to a soft green contrasting nicely with the pink flower buds. As the buds mature, they turn a clear, sky blue just before opening. The color change is caused by changes in the pH of the sap. Virginia bluebells is a perennial plant that grows well in shade and provides a lovely contrast to the many yellow-flowered species in bloom at this time.   For a high-res version of this image, please contact blog@press.princeton.edu.     Read more in Spring Wildflowers of the Northeast by Carol Gracie Wildflower Wednesday