About me
I am a blogger and leader writer for both the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Telegraph. That means I write the editorials, although not under my own name. Additionally, I'm still a research and teaching fellow at the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University.
I took a PhD in history at Trinity College, Cambridge in 2008. My latest book is a biography of the conservative polemicist Pat Buchanan. You can also find my writing in History Today Magazine, The American Conservative (LOVE IT) and The Spectator. I’ve also cropped up in Red Pepper and the wonderful Dazed and Confused. My next project is a history of politics in Hollywood. I can do and have done lots of TV, radio and guest columns. You can reach my agent in the contacts section.
My writing is split between history and politics. On the history side, my specialism is postwar US politics with a particular fascination for grassroots liberal and conservative movements. I tend to write biographies of eye-catching individuals (Kennedy, Buchanan) but really my interest is in how ordinary activists use them to get what they want.
I divide my time between London, Oxford and Los Angeles, with the occasional weekend in Washington DC. I define my politics as Anarcho-Catholic – an eclectic kind of pacifistic, red meat eating, gun loving, tax hating, Buddha hugging voodoo. I’m temperamentally conservative, but neither a Tory nor a Republican. I love America deeply and I suspect she is the last hope for mankind (I really don’t want to have to learn Chinese).
I took a PhD in history at Trinity College, Cambridge in 2008. My latest book is a biography of the conservative polemicist Pat Buchanan. You can also find my writing in History Today Magazine, The American Conservative (LOVE IT) and The Spectator. I’ve also cropped up in Red Pepper and the wonderful Dazed and Confused. My next project is a history of politics in Hollywood. I can do and have done lots of TV, radio and guest columns. You can reach my agent in the contacts section.
My writing is split between history and politics. On the history side, my specialism is postwar US politics with a particular fascination for grassroots liberal and conservative movements. I tend to write biographies of eye-catching individuals (Kennedy, Buchanan) but really my interest is in how ordinary activists use them to get what they want.
I divide my time between London, Oxford and Los Angeles, with the occasional weekend in Washington DC. I define my politics as Anarcho-Catholic – an eclectic kind of pacifistic, red meat eating, gun loving, tax hating, Buddha hugging voodoo. I’m temperamentally conservative, but neither a Tory nor a Republican. I love America deeply and I suspect she is the last hope for mankind (I really don’t want to have to learn Chinese).
Kennedy vs Carter: the 1980 Battle for the Democratic Party's Soul
My first book was an academic analysis of the 1980 primaries fight between liberal senator Edward Kennedy and the incumbent Democratic president, Jimmy Carter. The blurb and some nice comments can be found below:
"Most accounts of modern U.S. politics view Ronald Reagan’s landslide election in 1980 as a conservative realignment of the American public—and Kennedy’s defeat in the Democratic primaries as the last hurrah of New Deal liberalism. Now an astute observer of the American scene reexamines those primary battles to contend that Kennedy’s insurgent campaign was more popular than historians have presumed and was defeated only by historical accident and not by its perceived radicalism. Timothy Stanley takes a new look at how Jimmy Carter alienated his own supporters, why Ted Kennedy ran against him, what the Kennedy campaign has to say about America in the 1970s, and whether or not the 1980 election really was a turning point in electoral history. He tells the story of a struggle for the soul for a party bitterly divided over how to respond to economic decline, cultural upheaval, and humiliation overseas. And in the telling, he offers both a comprehensive narrative of the primaries and a joint biography of the two men who struggled for their party’s leadership.Stanley’s comprehensive research draws on more than a dozen archives as well as interviews with nearly thirty key historical players—including George McGovern, Walter Mondale, Gary Hart, and Mike Dukakis—and also makes creative use of polling data to recreate the ebb and flow of the election season. What emerges is not only the story of a campaign but also a revisionist history of a misunderstood decade—one most often defined by religious reawakening, chronic inflation, and the tax revolt that revived Republican fortunes. Yet Kennedy’s crusade to rebuild the ailing New Deal coalition of ethnic minorities, blue-collar conservatives, and firebrand liberals was popular enough to suggest that Americans were neither liberal nor conservative but, instead, anxious, angry, and desperate for leadership from any direction.Kennedy vs. Carter provides a unique analysis of how support shifted from Carter to Reagan right up to election day, with Reagan elected largely because he was not the unpopular incumbent. By showing how Kennedy was a far more popular politician than orthodox historiography has suggested, Stanley argues for a more nuanced understanding of what really determines political outcomes and a greater appreciation for the enduring popularity of American liberalism."
“A fresh, engaging, and insightful account of Ted Kennedy and American liberalism at a turning point. At the heart of Stanley’s book is a startling thesis: our standard accounts of contemporary American politics, in which Ronald Reagan was bound to rise as liberalism fell, have it wrong.”--Bruce Miroff, author of The Liberals’ Moment: The McGovern Insurgency and the Identity Crisis of the Democratic Party
“An excellent and ambitious study that illuminates a key moment in the history of the Democratic Party.” --Lewis L. Gould, author of The Modern American Presidency
Amongst others, Kennedy vs. Carter received a favorable review in The Washington Times.
You can buy the book here.
"Most accounts of modern U.S. politics view Ronald Reagan’s landslide election in 1980 as a conservative realignment of the American public—and Kennedy’s defeat in the Democratic primaries as the last hurrah of New Deal liberalism. Now an astute observer of the American scene reexamines those primary battles to contend that Kennedy’s insurgent campaign was more popular than historians have presumed and was defeated only by historical accident and not by its perceived radicalism. Timothy Stanley takes a new look at how Jimmy Carter alienated his own supporters, why Ted Kennedy ran against him, what the Kennedy campaign has to say about America in the 1970s, and whether or not the 1980 election really was a turning point in electoral history. He tells the story of a struggle for the soul for a party bitterly divided over how to respond to economic decline, cultural upheaval, and humiliation overseas. And in the telling, he offers both a comprehensive narrative of the primaries and a joint biography of the two men who struggled for their party’s leadership.Stanley’s comprehensive research draws on more than a dozen archives as well as interviews with nearly thirty key historical players—including George McGovern, Walter Mondale, Gary Hart, and Mike Dukakis—and also makes creative use of polling data to recreate the ebb and flow of the election season. What emerges is not only the story of a campaign but also a revisionist history of a misunderstood decade—one most often defined by religious reawakening, chronic inflation, and the tax revolt that revived Republican fortunes. Yet Kennedy’s crusade to rebuild the ailing New Deal coalition of ethnic minorities, blue-collar conservatives, and firebrand liberals was popular enough to suggest that Americans were neither liberal nor conservative but, instead, anxious, angry, and desperate for leadership from any direction.Kennedy vs. Carter provides a unique analysis of how support shifted from Carter to Reagan right up to election day, with Reagan elected largely because he was not the unpopular incumbent. By showing how Kennedy was a far more popular politician than orthodox historiography has suggested, Stanley argues for a more nuanced understanding of what really determines political outcomes and a greater appreciation for the enduring popularity of American liberalism."
“A fresh, engaging, and insightful account of Ted Kennedy and American liberalism at a turning point. At the heart of Stanley’s book is a startling thesis: our standard accounts of contemporary American politics, in which Ronald Reagan was bound to rise as liberalism fell, have it wrong.”--Bruce Miroff, author of The Liberals’ Moment: The McGovern Insurgency and the Identity Crisis of the Democratic Party
“An excellent and ambitious study that illuminates a key moment in the history of the Democratic Party.” --Lewis L. Gould, author of The Modern American Presidency
Amongst others, Kennedy vs. Carter received a favorable review in The Washington Times.
You can buy the book here.