American Politics/Bankard Speaker Series 2019-2020

James Morone is the John Hazen White Professor of Political Science and Public Policy and director of the the A. Alfred Taubman Center for American Politics and Policy. He grew up in Rio de Janeiro and New York, received his BA from Middlebury College and his PhD at the University of Chicago. Morone has been a visiting professor at Yale University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Bremen, Germany. The Brown University classes of 1993, 1999, 2001, 2007, and 2008 voted him the Hazeltine Citation as the teacher that most inspired them. Morone has served as chair of the political science department and currently chairs the faculty executive committee, which is responsible for faculty governance at Brown. Morone has written ten books and more than 150 articles, reviews, and essays on American political history, health care policy, and social issues. His first book, The Democratic Wish, was named a “notable book of 1991” by The New York Times and won the American Political Science Association’s Gladys M. Kammerer Award for the best book on US national policy. His Hellfire Nation: the Politics of Sin in American History was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and named a top book of 2003 by numerous newspapers and magazines. His The Heart of Power: Health and Politics in the Oval Office (co-authored with David Blumenthal, MD) was featured on the cover of The New York Times Book Review. According to unreliable sources, President Obama was seen reading the book at Camp David. Morone’s most recent book, The Devils We Know, was published by University Press of Kansas in November 2014.

It is commonplace to equate the arrival of a new conservative administration in Washington, DC with the “rolling back” of the federal activities. . We disagree with this conventional perspective, and seek to demonstrate that the equation of conservative Republicanism and retrenchment elides a critical change in the relationship between party politics and State power – a relationship that Donald Trump seems determined to nurture. Drawing on primary research, we argue that partisanship in the United States is no longer a struggle over the size of the State; rather it is a contest to control national administrative power. Since the late 1960s, conservative administrations have sought to redeploy rather than dismantle or roll back state power. Through “redeployment,” conservative presidents have sustained previous levels of State spending or State activity, but in a way reflecting a new administration’s ideology.