Featured Faculty: Doug Harris

Description

In his upcoming book (co-authored with Amy Fried from the University of Maine) called At War with Government: How Conservatives Weaponized Distrust from Goldwater to Trump (Columbia University Press), Doug Harris (Ph.D. ′98) addresses the question of rising public distrust in the American government.

Whereas a great deal of literature holds that distrust is a by-product of governance problems, economic downturns, or long-standing cultural suspicions of the state, Fried and Harris argue that it also has been a strategy of a conservative movement that consciously seized on—and then stoked—extant distrust in government because it provided organizational, electoral, institutional, and policy benefits to them. This talk will outline these four benefits and tracing their evolution since the 1960s and consider some of their ramifications.

This event is hosted by the MA in Government program.