Lecture to explore 'Why the Left and Right Talk Past One Another'

Gerard Alexander will deliver a lecture titled, "The Constitution, and Why the Left and Right Talk Past One Another," at 12:15 p.m., Sept. 12, in Armstrong Hall 114 on Arizona State University’s Tempe campus.

“Conservatives and liberals often agree about basic rights and argue only about how exactly to define and apply them,” says Alexander, “but we are increasingly talking past each other, as we disagree over which rights even exist.”

Alexander is an associate professor at the Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics in the University of Virginia and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of "The Sources of Democratic Consolidation" (Cornell University Press, 2002), where he argued that conservative political movements made long-term commitments to democracy only when the political risk became relatively low after the left had moderated its agenda. His current research involves the role and the size of government.

This talk is co-sponsored by ASU’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law and the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies as part of an initiative led by professor Donald Critchlow for the Political Thought and Leadership program.

The School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies is an academic unit of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University.