Ken Kersch - American Political Thought

1939–1962:Civil rights movement sit-ins

1941 (December 7):Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii; US enters World War II

1941–1945:World War II

1944:Normandy Invasion

1945:US drops atomic bombs on Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

1945:Yalta Conference

1947–1991:Cold War

1947:Jackie Robinson breaks baseball color barrier

1948:Alger Hiss–Whittaker Chambers hearings

1948–1952:Chinese Communist Revolution

1949–1951 (circa):US television networks established

1950:Mattachine Society founded

1950–1953:Korean War

1950–1954:“McCarthy era” anticommunist crusade

1953:Soviets test hydrogen bomb

Chapter 7 Radical Stirrings, Civil Rights, the Contentious 1960s, and the Rise of Modern Conservatism

1954: Brown v. Board of Education

1955:Lynching of Emmitt Till

1955:Daughters of Bilitis founded

1955: National Review founded by William F. Buckley Jr.

1955–1956:Montgomery Bus Boycott

1955–1975:Vietnam Wa r

1957:Russian Sputnik 1 satellite launched

1959:Nixon–Khrushchev “Kitchen Debate”

1960:Students for a Democratic Society founded

1960:Civil rights movement sit-ins begin at Greensboro, North Carolina

1960:Young Americans for Freedom founded

1960:Christian Broadcasting Network founded

1961:Bay of Pigs invasion (failed)

1961:Freedom Rides

1962:Cuban Missile Crisis

1963:March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom

1963:Birmingham 16th Street Baptist Church bombing

1963 (November 22):John F. Kennedy assassinated, Dallas

1963–1969:Lyndon Baines Johnson presidency

1964 (June):Murder of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, Neshoba County, Mississippi

1964 (June–August):Mississippi Freedom Summer

1964:Civil Rights Act of 1964

1964:Barry Goldwater nomination

1964:UC Berkeley Free Speech movement

1964–1965:Great Society social welfare programs, including Medicare and Medicaid, launched

1965:Selma to Montgomery Voting Rights marches

1965:Voting Rights Act of 1965

1965:Delano Grape Boycott (Cesar Chavez)

1965:Malcolm X assassinated, New York City

1966:National Organization for Women founded

1966:Black Panther Party founded.

1967:Summer of Love, Haight-Asbury, San Francisco

1968 (April 4):Martin Luther King Jr. assassinated, Memphis

1968 (April–May):Urban riots

1968 (June 6):Robert F. Kennedy assassinated, Los Angeles

1968:Democratic National Convention riots, Chicago

1969:Stonewall uprising

1969 (July 20):Apollo 11 moon landing

1969 (August):Woodstock Music Festival

1969–1974:Richard M. Nixon presidency

1970:First Earth Day

1972:Eagle Forum established by Phyllis Schlafly

Chapter 8 The Identity and Post-Materialist Left, the New Right, and Third Way Liberalism

1972–1974:Watergate scandal; Nixon resigns

1973: Roe v. Wade

1973–1974:OPEC Oil Crisis

1979:Moral Majority founded

1981–1989:Ronald Reagan presidency

1982:Gay Men’s Health Crisis founded

1985:Democratic Leadership Council founded

1986:Operation Rescue founded

1987:ACT-UP founded

1990–1991:Persian Gulf War

1992:Los Angeles Riots

1992:North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)

1993:First World Trade Center bombing

1995:Oklahoma City federal building bombing

1998:Bill Clinton–Monica Lewinsky scandal

2001 (September 11):Al-Qaeda terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC

2001:US invasion of Afghanistan

2001– :“War on Terror”

2002:Department of Homeland Security founded

2003–2011:Second Iraq War

2005:Hurricane Katrina

Chapter 9 Conclusion

2008 (September):Financial Crisis/Great Recession

2008:Election of Barack Obama

2010: Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission

2010:Affordable [Health] Care Act

2011:Occupy Wall Street movement

2013:Boston Marathon bombings

2013:Black Lives Matter founded

2014:Ferguson, Missouri, uprising

2015: Obergefell v. Hodges

2016:Donald Trump elected; “American Carnage” Inaugural

2019:Green New Deal Resolution introduced

2019–2020:Donald Trump impeachment and acquittal

2020 (March)– :Coronavirus/Covid-19 pandemic

2020:George Floyd uprising against racist police violence and white supremacy

Who gets to tell you what to do? Asking that question about a group of people comprising a political community – a polis , or polity – is the foundational question of the study of politics.

The question can be considered in two senses: the positive and the normative . The first takes up the question of who gets to tell you what to do as a matter of real-world fact. As a real-world fact, it can be studied empirically by asking: “Who, in fact, has demonstrated the power to direct, or coerce, you into doing A rather than B?” Positive approaches to the exercise of political power bracket judgments about authorized or unauthorized, justified or unjustified, good and bad, right and wrong. They aspire only to accuracy: the facts of the world, as it actually works, and is. The second – the normative – sense of the question, by contrast, takes up the question of who gets to tell you what to do by asking if the person, official, or institution claiming that power has been authorized to do so, is justified in doing so, does so for good or for ill, rightly or wrongly. Normative approaches to the exercise of political power – arising out of what the sociologist Max Weber called the “fact–value” distinction in the social sciences – invite and require moral judgment either of the particular commandment issued by a political actor, or of the underlying foundations of the authorization of power to that superintending actor. Normative approaches to the exercise of political power ask questions about authority, legitimacy, legality, and justice.