Ronald J Pestritto

In many respects the Barack Obama presidency has become a unifying force for both conservatives and liberals. Conservatives seem united in looking aghast at what they consider to be the radical and comprehensive remaking of American national government—a remaking that seems to reject not only the American constitutional order, but to exceed even the ambitions of the New Deal and Great Society in its extension of governmental authority into the private sphere. Yet the developments since 2009 have been in the making for the better part of the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries, as the Constitution appears to have

Among the many contributions of Herman Belz, perhaps the most meaningful from the perspective of a political theorist is Belz’s artful weaving of history and ideas in his many great works. Belz is among the very best historians of the United States, and he has achieved this accomplishment without suffocating the great, transcendent ideas of the American regime with the methodological assumptions of historicism. He has enlightened those of us in political science with the critical context of American history that we are prone to forget, yet has done so in a way that enhances our ability to talk about