“American Politics and the Lost Art of Compromise”:  View Professor Adam I.P. Smith’s lecture on-line:  https://adamipsmith.com/speaking/

If you missed Adam Smith’s lecture, presented at the University of Regina on 27 September, 2017, now you can see and hear it on-line.  Here is the link:  https://adamipsmith.com/speaking/  This lecture provides a history of what compromise has meant in American history — Madison saw it as a noble aim, essential to the running of the republic, but compromise only works if moral absolutes are kept at bay, since no one thinks it’s a good idea to compromise with evil. Professor Smith will argue that the American political system has been most functional when compromisers have been in the ascendancy and least functional when, as in the present day, they have not.

Adam Smith is an authority on American History.  He received his PhD from Cambridge University and is Senior Lecturer at University College London.  His previous books include No Party Now: Politics in the Civil War North (2006), which examines what happened to elections and partisanship in wartime, arguing that Abraham Lincoln’s political success was due to a political strategy which stigmatised political opposition and, in the process, redefined the meaning of loyalty and patriotism. He is also the author of The American Civil War (2007), and of a biography of Abraham Lincoln (2007).  A forthcoming book is The Stormy Present:  Conservatism and the Problem of Slavery in Northern Politics, 1848-1865 (2017).   This  lecture was sponsored by Luther College, Luther College High School, the Humanities Research Institute, the Department of History and Campion College.