Stephen Rohde offers a review of Corey Brettschneider’s engaging new book The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It. Brettschneider offers lucid and revealing profiles of five presidents - John Adams, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Woodrow Wilson, and Richard Nixon - who “stoked the fire of a constitutional crisis” and “wielded the nation’s most powerful office to undermine a core aspect of democracy.” Given the “fragile pillars of American democracy,” Brettschneider believes each of these presidents stands “as a conspicuous example of the damage a single president can do.”
Fortunately, Brettschneider doesn’t leave it there. He also explains in vivid detail how, in each of these fraught moments, “democratic constitutional constituencies” - or, one might say, activists - fought back to ensure a “democratic recovery.” Here we can learn important lessons that make the threat posed by Trump “a time ripe for constitutional recovery.” Brettschneider sees hope for democracy in the “cycle of constitutional reckoning and recovery.”
In this conversation with Dick Price and Sharon Kyle of the LA Progressive, Constitutional scholar Stephen Rohde explains where we are headed as a nation by also discussing Mahmoud Khalil
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