Presidential Rhetoric: Its Power & Limits

Dr. 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.

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).

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.