Presidents often try to unify the nation through rhetoric but rarely succeed. Instead, presidential rhetoric often divides society and alienates people from their leaders. Is unifying presidential rhetoric possible in a pluralistic society? Can words spoken by a president hold the power to bring people together and create a sense of unity?
We were proud to partner with Baylor University, the Institute for Religion, Politics, and Culture at Washington College, and the Fund for American Studies on this event.
Our Speakers:
Yuval Levin is the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he also holds the Beth and Ravenel Curry Chair in Public Policy. The founder and editor of National Affairs, he is also a senior editor at The New Atlantis, a contributing editor at National Review, and a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times. In addition to being interviewed frequently on radio and television, Dr. Levin has published essays and articles in numerous publications, including The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and Commentary. He is the author of several books on political theory and public policy, most recently A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream (Basic Books, 2020).
Allen C. Guelzo is the Senior Research Scholar in the Council of the Humanities and Director of the Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship in the James Madison Program at Princeton University. He is the author of Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America, and Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America. His book on the battle of Gettysburg, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion, was a New York Times bestseller in 2013. His articles and essays have appeared in scholarly journals, and also in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Atlantic, and Los Angeles Times. From 2006 to 2012, he was a member of the National Council on the Humanities. His newest work on the Civil War era, Robert E. Lee: A Life, was published in September 2021.
Dana D. Nelson is a professor of English at Vanderbilt University and a prominent progressive advocate for citizenship and democracy. She is notable for her criticism—in her books such as Bad for Democracy—of excessive presidential power and for exposing a tendency by Americans towards presidentialism, which she defines as the people’s neglect of basic citizenship duties while hoping the president will solve most problems. Her scholarship focuses on early American literature relating to citizenship and democratic government.
David Corey is a professor of Political Science focusing on political philosophy in the Honors Program at Baylor University. He is also an affiliated member of the departments of Philosophy and Political Science. He was an undergraduate at Oberlin, where he earned a BA in Classics from the College and a BMus in music from the Conservatory. He studied law and jurisprudence at Old College, Edinburgh before taking up graduate work in political philosophy at Louisiana State University. He is the author of two books, The Just War Tradition (with J. Daryl Charles) (2012) and The Sophists in Plato’s Dialogues (2015). He has written more than two dozen articles and book chapters in such venues as the Review of Politics, History of Political Thought, Modern Age, Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, and the Cambridge Dictionary of Political Thought. His current projects, Rethinking American Politics, and Liberalism & The Modern Quest for Freedom, examine the loss of healthy political association in the United States and offer strategies for reform.