Andrew Johnson. Richard Nixon. Donald Trump. These three presidents were often compared on the basis of their character and confrontations with the Constitutional limitations of the presidency. Yet they also shared a different, less frequently explored, feature: they each followed racially transformative presidencies. Abraham Lincoln’s presidency guided the nation through the Civil War and ended decades of political stalemate over the slavery issue. Lyndon Johnson signed civil rights legislation that, similarly, marked the end of decades of impasse and reinvigorated the promise of multi-racial democracy in the United States. Barack Obama, as the nation’s first African American president, changed the symbolism associated with the presidency and challenged the implied whiteness of the office. This talk, based on a forthcoming book with Princeton, will examine how the dynamics of each of these presidencies unsettled political norms and long-term compromises, creating political opportunities for populist successors. Each of the impeachment crises — the Tenure of Office Act, Watergate, and both Trump impeachments — can be traced to the racial politics ignited by their predecessors.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Julia Azari is Professor of Political Science at Marquette University. An active public-facing scholar, she has published commentary on presidential and party politics in FiveThirtyEight, Politico, Vox, The New York Times, The Washington Post, MSNBC, and The Guardian. Her scholarly work has appeared in journals such as The Forum, Perspectives on Politics, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Foreign Affairs, and Social Science History. She has contributed invited chapters to books published by the University Press of Kansas, University of Pennsylvania Press, Cambridge University Press, and University of Edinburgh Press. Azari is the author of Delivering the People’s Message: The Changing Politics of the Presidential Mandate (Cornell, 2014), coeditor of The Presidential Leadership Dilemma (SUNY, 2013), and co-editor of The Trump Legacy (under contract, University Press of Kansas).

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to William J. Perry Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person.