David Buckley

Blessing America First (eBook, ePUB)

Religion, Populism, and Foreign Policy in the Trump Administration

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

How did the Trump administration change the place of religion in U.S. foreign policy? How did the guardrails of America's foreign policy bureaucracy respond to a populist president? Drawing on firsthand experience in the State Department's Office of Religion and Global Affairs during the Obama-Trump transition, David T. Buckley traces how the Trump administration's populism affected the foreign policy bureaucracy, with significant implications for U.S. domestic and international politics.

Blessing America First argues that under Trump, religion in U.S. foreign policy shifted from an implement of statecraft to a tool of populist political strategy. Populism constructs ideological bounds between "the people" and threatening outsiders, and embraces personalist governance while rejecting bureaucratic constraint. This domestic political logic, Buckley demonstrates, influenced foreign policy decisions and reshaped bureaucratic offices in the State Department and USAID. Populism also promoted international religious ties in a surprising range of settings, from Poland to India, Brazil to Russia. Buckley shows that the possibility of curbing these changes was limited by conditions in American democracy that predated the 2016 election, including norms of nonpartisanship among career officials, malleable legal institutions, and polarization in public opinion. A groundbreaking examination of Trump's State Department, blending insider experience with original quantitative and qualitative data analysis, Blessing America First draws broader lessons for understanding the relationship between religion and democracy under populist rule.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Columbia University Press
• Erscheinungstermin: 10. September 2024
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780231557016
• Artikelnr.: 70001122

Autorenporträt

David T. Buckley is the Paul Weber Endowed Chair of Politics, Science, and Religion in the Department of Political Science at the University of Louisville, where he also directs the Center for Asian Democracy. He is the author of Faithful to Secularism: The Religious Politics of Democracy in Ireland, Senegal, and the Philippines (Columbia, 2017).

Inhaltsangabe

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I. Religion and Foreign Policy: Statecraft and Populist Governance
1. What Does Populism Have to Do with Religion and Foreign Policy?
2. The Blob Gets Religion: RGA and the Prepopulist Equilibrium
Part II. The Populist Difference
3. "The Faith of the Administration": Populist Ideology, Religion, and
Foreign Policy
4. Who Needs an Office? Populist Personalism and Religion in the
Bureaucracy
Part III. Preexisting Conditions and Populist Constraint
5. Faith in a Deep State? Bureaucratic Preservation in a Populist
Transition
6. Salvation in Institutions? American Secularism, Executive Power, and
Populist Change
7. A Faithful Audience? Public Opinion and Trump's Religious Foreign Policy
Part IV. Effects Beyond the Populist
8. Faithful Partners: Religious Populism and International Ties
Conclusion: Religion and Foreign Policy After Populism
Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Index