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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political ideologies > Conservatism & right-of-centre democratic ideologies
THE TIMES, SUNDAY TIMES, FINANCIAL TIMES and EVENING STANDARD BOOKS
OF THE YEAR 2018 Whiteshift tells the most important political
story of the 21st century: how demographic change is transforming
Western politics and how to think about the future of white
majorities 'Powerful and rigorously researched. . . this is a book
that speaks to the most urgent and difficult issues of our time' -
John Gray, author of Seven Types of Atheism This is the century of
whiteshift. As Western societies are becoming increasingly
mixed-race, demographic change is transforming politics. Over half
of American babies are non-white, and by the end of the century,
minorities and those of mixed race are projected to form the
majority in the UK and other countries. The early stages of this
transformation have led to a populist disruption, tearing a path
through the usual politics of left and right. One of the most
crucial challenges of our time is to enable conservatives as well
as cosmopolitans to view whiteshift as a positive development. In
this groundbreaking book, political scientist Eric Kaufmann
examines the evidence to explore ethnic change in Western Europe
and North America. Tracing four ways of dealing with this
transformation - fight, repress, flight and join - he charts
different scenarios and calls for us to move beyond empty talk
about national identity. If we want to avoid more radical political
divisions, he argues, we have to open up debate about the future of
white majorities. Deeply thought provoking, Whiteshift offers a
wealth of data to redefine the way we discuss race in the
twenty-first century.
In the name of protecting Americans from Soviet espionage, the
post-1945 Red Scare curtailed the reform agenda of the New Deal.
The crisis of the Great Depression had brought into government a
group of policy experts who argued that saving democracy required
attacking economic and social inequalities. The influence of these
men and women within the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, and
their alliances with progressive social movements, elicited a
powerful reaction from conservatives, who accused them of being
subversives. Landon Storrs draws on newly declassified records of
the federal employee loyalty program--created in response to claims
that Communists were infiltrating the U.S. government--to reveal
how disloyalty charges were used to silence these New Dealers and
discredit their policies. Because loyalty investigators rarely
distinguished between Communists and other leftists, many
noncommunist leftists were forced to leave government or deny their
political views. Storrs finds that loyalty defendants were more
numerous at higher ranks of the civil service than previously
thought, and that many were women, or men with accomplished leftist
wives. Uncovering a forceful left-feminist presence in the New
Deal, she also shows how opponents on the Right exploited popular
hostility to powerful women and their supposedly effeminate
spouses. The loyalty program not only destroyed many promising
careers, it prohibited discussion of social democratic policy ideas
in government circles, narrowing the scope of political discourse
to this day. Through a gripping narrative based on remarkable new
sources, Storrs demonstrates how the Second Red Scare repressed
political debate and constrained U.S. policymaking in fields such
as public assistance, national health insurance, labor and consumer
protection, civil rights, and international aid.
Best known for his notorious 'Rivers of Blood' speech in 1968 and
his outspoken opposition to immigration, Enoch Powell was one of
the most controversial figures in British political life in the
second half of the twentieth century and a formative influence on
what came to be known as Thatcherism. Telling the story of Powell's
political life from the 1950s onwards, Paul Corthorn's intellectual
biography goes beyond a fixation on the 'Rivers of Blood' speech to
bring us a man who thought deeply about - and often took highly
unusual (and sometimes apparently contradictory) positions on - the
central political debates of the post-1945 era: denying the
existence of the Cold War (at one stage going so far as to advocate
the idea of an alliance with the Soviet Union); advocating
free-market economics long before it was fashionable, while
remaining a staunch defender of the idea of a National Health
Service; vehemently opposing British membership of the European
Economic Community; arguing for the closer integration of Northern
Ireland with the rest of the UK; and in the 1980s supporting the
campaign for unilateral nuclear disarmament. In the process, Powell
emerges as more than just a deeply divisive figure but as a seminal
political intellectual of his time. Paying particular attention to
the revealing inconsistencies in Powell's thought and the
significant ways in which his thinking changed over time, Corthorn
argues that Powell's diverse campaigns can nonetheless still be
understood as a coherent whole, if viewed as part of a
long-running, and wide-ranging, debate set against the backdrop of
the long-term decline in Britain's international, military, and
economic position in the decades after 1945.
For more than four decades, George F. Will has attempted to discern
the principles of the Western political tradition and apply them to
America's civic life. Today, the stakes could hardly be higher.
Vital questions about the nature of man, of rights, of equality, of
majority rule are bubbling just beneath the surface of daily events
in America. The Founders' vision, articulated first in the
Declaration of Independence and carried out in the Constitution,
gave the new republic a framework for government unique in world
history. Their beliefs in natural rights, limited government,
religious freedom, and in human virtue and dignity ushered in two
centuries of American prosperity. Now, as Will shows, America has
become an administrative state, just as destructive trends have
overtaken family life and higher education. Semi-autonomous
executive agencies wield essentially unaccountable power. Congress
has failed in its duty to exercise its legislative powers. And the
executive branch has slipped the Constitution's leash. In the
intellectual battle between the vision of Founding Fathers like
James Madison, who advanced the notion of natural rights that
pre-exist government, and the progressivism first advanced by
Woodrow Wilson, the Founders have been losing. It's time to reverse
America's political fortunes. Expansive, intellectually thrilling,
and written with the erudite wit that has made Will beloved by
millions of readers, The Conservative Sensibility is an
extraordinary new book from one of America's most celebrated
political writers.
For more than a millennium, beginning in the early Middle Ages,
most Western Christians lived in societies that sought to be
comprehensively Christian--ecclesiastically, economically, legally,
and politically. That is to say, most Western Christians lived in
Christendom. But in a gradual process beginning a few hundred years
ago, Christendom weakened and finally crumbled. Today, most
Christians in the world live in pluralistic political communities.
And Christians themselves have very different opinions about what
to make of the demise of Christendom and how to understand their
status and responsibilities in a post-Christendom world. Politics
After Christendom argues that Scripture leaves Christians
well-equipped for living in a world such as this. Scripture gives
no indication that Christians should strive to establish some
version of Christendom. Instead, it prepares them to live in
societies that are indifferent or hostile to Christianity,
societies in which believers must live faithful lives as sojourners
and exiles. Politics After Christendom explains what Scripture
teaches about political community and about Christians'
responsibilities within their own communities. As it pursues this
task, Politics After Christendom makes use of several important
theological ideas that Christian thinkers have developed over the
centuries. These ideas include Augustine's Two-Cities concept, the
Reformation Two-Kingdoms category, natural law, and a theology of
the biblical covenants. Politics After Christendom brings these
ideas together in a distinctive way to present a model for
Christian political engagement. In doing so, it interacts with many
important thinkers, including older theologians (e.g., Augustine,
Aquinas, and Calvin), recent secular political theorists (e.g.,
Rawls, Hayek, and Dworkin), contemporary political-theologians
(e.g., Hauerwas, O'Donovan, and Wolterstorff), and contemporary
Christian cultural commentators (e.g., MacIntyre, Hunter, and
Dreher). Part 1 presents a political theology through a careful
study of the biblical story, giving special attention to the
covenants God has established with his creation and how these
covenants inform a proper view of political community. Part 1
argues that civil governments are legitimate but penultimate, and
common but not neutral. It concludes that Christians should
understand themselves as sojourners and exiles in their political
communities. They ought to pursue justice, peace, and excellence in
these communities, but remember that these communities are
temporary and thus not confuse them with the everlasting kingdom of
the Lord Jesus Christ. Christians' ultimate citizenship is in this
new-creation kingdom. Part 2 reflects on how the political theology
developed in Part 1 provides Christians with a framework for
thinking about perennial issues of political and legal theory. Part
2 does not set out a detailed public policy or promote a particular
political ideology. Rather, it suggests how Christians might think
about important social issues in a wise and theologically sound
way, so that they might be better equipped to respond well to the
specific controversies they face today. These issues include race,
religious liberty, family, economics, justice, rights, authority,
and civil resistance. After considering these matters, Part 2
concludes by reflecting on the classical liberal and conservative
traditions, as well as recent challenges to them by nationalist and
progressivist movements.
Often considered a lost decade, a pause between the liberal Sixties
and Reagan's Eighties, the 1970s were indeed a watershed era when
the forces of a conservative counter-revolution cohered. These
years marked a significant moral and cultural turning point in
which the conservative movement became the motive force driving
politics for the ensuing three decades.
Interpreting the movement as more than a backlash against the
rampant liberalization of American culture, racial conflict, the
Vietnam War, and Watergate, these provocative and innovative essays
look below the surface, discovering the tectonic shifts that paved
the way for Reagan's America. They reveal strains at the heart of
the liberal coalition, resulting from struggles over jobs, taxes,
and neighborhood reconstruction, while also investigating how the
deindustrialization of northern cities, the rise of the suburbs,
and the migration of people and capital to the Sunbelt helped
conservatism gain momentum in the twentieth century. They
demonstrate how the forces of the right coalesced in the 1970s and
became, through the efforts of grassroots activists and political
elites, a movement to reshape American values and policies.
A penetrating and provocative portrait of a critical decade in
American history, "Rightward Bound" illuminates the seeds of both
the successes and the failures of the conservative revolution. It
helps us understand how, despite conservatism's rise, persistent
tensions remain today between its political power and the
achievements of twentieth-century liberalism.
This book is a creative synthesis of the published scholarly
research on the contemporary American right wing from the rise of
Senator Joseph McCarthy to the election of Ronald Reagan as
President. Unlike most other syntheses, it directly engages that
research by critically analyzing the major explanations emerging
from it. Emphasizing neither the lives and backgrounds of the
scholars that he discusses nor paradigms within the social sciences
as a whole, William Hixson focuses on the way the concepts of
individual researchers have interacted with accumulating evidence
on the American right, and how this evidence has led to new and
more comprehensive theories. Hixson first summarizes and evaluates
the research on the major developments analyzed by scholars--the
social sources of "McCarthyism," the "radical right" of the early
1960s, George Wallace's constituency in his Presidential campaigns,
and the emerging "new right" of the late 1970s. He then compares
the interpretations of the two most influential students of the
right wing, Seymour Martin Lipset and Michael Paul Rogin. Finally,
he offers his own explanations, suggesting that the right wing is
both a mass and elite phenomenon, that its durability comes from
its appeal to the upwardly mobile, especially in economically
expanding regions, and that far from being either "traditionalist"
or reactive, it represents a proactive defense of values associated
with late nineteenth-century "modernization." Originally published
in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest
print-on-demand technology to again make available previously
out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton
University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of
these important books while presenting them in durable paperback
and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is
to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in
the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press
since its founding in 1905.
From Derek Hunter-one of the most entertaining political writers
today-comes an insightful, alarming look at how progressives have
took over academia, pop culture, and journalism in order to declare
everything liberal great, and everything great, liberal.
Progressives love to attack conservatives as anti-science,
wallowing in fake news, and culturally backwards. But who are the
real denialists here There are three institutions in American life
run by gatekeepers who have stopped letting in anyone who questions
their liberal script: academia, journalism, and pop culture. They
use their cult-like groupthink consensus as "proof" that science,
reporting, and entertainment will always back up the Democrats.
They give their most political members awards, and then say the
awards make their liberal beliefs true. Worse, they are using that
consensus to pull the country even further to the left, by bullying
and silencing dissent from even those they've allowed in. Just a
few years ago, the media pretended they were honest brokers. Now a
CNN segment is seven liberals versus a sacrificial lamb. MSNBC ate
their sacrificial lamb. Well, Chris Matthews did. Tired of being
forced to believe or else, Derek Hunter exposes the manufactured
truths and unwritten commandments of the Establishment. With
research and a biting, sarcastic wit, he explains:, â The growing
role of celebrities in the political world, and movies with a
"message" that dominate awards season, but rarely the box office.,
â The unquestioning reporting on "studies" that don't prove what
they say they prove., â The hidden bias of "fact-checking," when
the media cherry picks which facts they check., â Celebrity
scientists like Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson blending liberal
activism with pretend expertise outside their fields.Clever,
controversial, and convincing, Derek Hunter's book gets to the root
of America's biggest cultural war lies.
It is clear that the right is on the rise, but after Brexit, the
election of Donald Trump and the spike in popularity of
extreme-right parties across Europe, the question on everyone's
minds is: how did this happen? An expansive investigation of the
ways in which a newly-configured right interconnects with
anti-democratic and illiberal forces at the level of the state,
Europe's Fault Lines provides much-needed answers, revealing some
uncomfortable truths. What appear to be "blind spots" about
far-right extremism on the part of the state, are shown to
constitute collusion-as police, intelligence agencies and the
military embark on practices of covert policing that bring them
into direct or indirect contact with the far right, in ways that
bring to mind the darkest days of Europe's authoritarian past. Old
racisms may be structured deep in European thought, but they have
been revitalized and spun in new ways: the war on terror, the
cultural revolution from the right, and the migration-linked
demonization of the destitute "scrounger." Drawing on her work for
the Institute of Race Relations over thirty years, Liz Fekete
exposes the fundamental fault lines of racism and authoritarianism
in contemporary Europe.
The Left has traditionally assumed that human nature is so
malleable, so perfectible, that it can be shaped in almost any
direction. Conservatives object, arguing that social order arises
not from rational planning but from the spontaneous order of
instincts and habits. Darwinian biology sustains conservative
social thought by showing how the human capacity for spontaneous
order arises from social instincts and a moral sense shaped by
natural selection in human evolutionary history.
In this essential manifesto of the new libertarian movement, New
York Times bestselling author and president of FreedomWorks Matt
Kibbe makes a stand for individual liberty and shows us what we
must do to preserve our freedom. Don't Hurt People and Don't Take
Their Stuff is a rational yet passionate argument that defends the
principles upon which America was founded-principles shared by
citizens across the political spectrum. The Constitution grants
each American the right to self-determination, to be protected from
others whose actions are destructive to their lives and property.
Yet as Kibbe persuasively shows, the political and corporate
establishment consolidates its power by infringing upon our
independence-from taxes to regulations to spying-ultimately eroding
the ideals, codified in law, that have made the United States
unique in history. Kibbe offers a surefire plan for reclaiming our
inalienable rights and regaining control of our lives, grounded in
six simple rules: * Don't hurt people: Free people just want to be
left alone, not hassled or harmed by someone else with an agenda or
designs over their life and property. * Don't take people's stuff:
America's founders fought to ensure property rights and our
individual right to the fruits of our labors. * Take
responsibility: Liberty takes responsibility. Don't sit around
waiting for someone else to solve your problems. * Work for it: For
every action there is an equal reaction. Work hard and you'll be
rewarded. * Mind your own business: Free people live and let live.
* Fight the power: Thanks to the Internet and the decentralization
of knowledge, there are more opportunities than ever to take a
stand against corrupt authority.
On February 19, 2009, CNBC commentator Rick Santelli delivered a
dramatic rant against Obama administration programs to shore up the
plunging housing market. Invoking the Founding Fathers and
ridiculing "losers" who could not pay their mortgages, Santelli
called for "Tea Party" protests. Over the next two years,
conservative activists took to the streets and airways, built
hundreds of local Tea Party groups, and weighed in with votes and
money to help right-wing Republicans win electoral victories in
2010. In this penetrating new study, Harvard University's Theda
Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson go beyond images of protesters in
Colonial costumes to provide a nuanced portrait of the Tea Party.
What they find is sometimes surprising. Drawing on grassroots
interviews and visits to local meetings in several regions, they
find that older, middle-class Tea Partiers mostly approve of Social
Security, Medicare, and generous benefits for military veterans.
Their opposition to "big government" entails reluctance to pay
taxes to help people viewed as undeserving "freeloaders" -
including immigrants, lower income earners, and the young. At the
national level, Tea Party elites and funders leverage grassroots
energy to further longstanding goals such as tax cuts for the
wealthy, deregulation of business, and privatization of the very
same Social Security and Medicare programs on which many grassroots
Tea Partiers depend. Elites and grassroots are nevertheless united
in hatred of Barack Obama and determination to push the Republican
Party sharply to the right. The Tea Party and the Remaking of
Republican Conservatism combines fine-grained portraits of local
Tea Party members and chapters with an overarching analysis of the
movement's rise, impact, and likely fate.
Since the nineteenth century, Greek financial and economic crises
have been an enduring problem, most recently engulfing the European
Union and EU member states. The latest crisis, beginning in 2010,
has been - and continues to be - a headline news story across the
continent. With a radically different approach and methodology,
this anthropological study brings new insights to our understanding
of the Greek crises by combining historical material from before
and after the nineteenth century War of Independence with extensive
longitudinal ethnographic research. The ethnography covers two
distinct periods - the 1980s and the current crisis years - and
compares Mystras and Kefala, two villages in southern Greece, each
of which has responded quite differently to economic circumstances.
Analysis of this divergence highlights the book's central point
that an ideology of aspiration to work in the public sector,
pervasive in Greek society since the nineteenth century, has been a
major contributor to Greece's problematic economic development.
Shedding new light on previously under-researched anthropological
and sociological aspects of the Greek economic crisis, this book
will be essential reading for economists, anthropologists and
historians.
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