Colloquium Series: Doug McAdam, Stanford University, Stanford, CA

“Racial Politics and Social Movements in the Origins of Today’s Divided America.”

By any measure the United States has not been more divided politically or economically in the last hundred years than it is now. How have we gone from the striking bipartisanship and relative economic equality of the post-war period to the extreme inequality and savage partisan divisions of today?

In his talk, Stanford sociologist, Doug McAdam, will seek to answer this question. He will argue that party politics alone is not responsible for the mess we find ourselves in. Instead, it was the ongoing interaction of social movements and parties that, over time, pushed Democrats and Republicans toward their ideological margins, undermining the post-war consensus in the process. The Civil Rights struggle and the white backlash it provoked reintroduced the centrifugal force of social movements into American politics, ushering in an especially active and sustained period of movement/party dynamism. Today’s tug of war between the Tea Party and Republican establishment for control of the GOP is only the most recent example of this process.