"American values are quite complex," writes Seymour Martin Lipset, "particularly because of paradoxes within our culture that permit pernicious and beneficial social phenomena to arise simultaneously from the same basic beliefs."Born out of revolution, the United States has always considered itself an exceptional country of citizens unified by an allegiance to a common set of ideals, individualism, anti-statism, populism, and egalitarianism. This ideology, Professor Lipset observes, defines the limits of political debate in the United States and shapes our society.American Exceptionalism explains why socialism has never taken hold in the United States, why Americans are resistant to absolute quotas as a way to integrate blacks and other minorities, and why American religion and foreign policy have a moralistic, crusading streak.

How did we get into this mess? Every morning, many Americans ask this as, with a cringe, they pick up their phones and look to see what terrible thing President Trump has just said or done. Regardless of what he’s complaining about or whom he’s attacking, a second question comes hard on the heels of the first: How on earth do we get out of this? Alan Wolfe has an answer. In The Politics of Petulance he argues that the core of our problem isn’t Trump himself—it’s that we are mired in an age of political immaturity. That immaturity is not grounded in any one ideology, nor is it a function of age or education. It’s in an abdication of valuing the character of would-be leaders; it’s in a failure to acknowledge, even welcome the complexity of government and society; and it’s in a loss of the ability to be skeptical without being suspicious. In 2016, many Americans were offered tantalizingly simple answers to complicated problems, and, like children being offered a lunch of Pop Rocks and Coke, they reflexively—and mindlessly—accepted. The good news, such as it is, is that we’ve been here before. Wolfe reminds us that we know how to grow up and face down Trump and other demagogues. Wolfe reinvigorates the tradition of public engagement exemplified by midcentury intellectuals such as Richard Hofstadter, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Lionel Trilling—and he draws lessons from their battles with McCarthyism and conspiratorial paranoia. Wolfe mounts a powerful case that we can learn from them to forge a new path for political intervention today. Wolfe has been thinking and writing about American life and politics for decades. He sees this moment as one of real risk. But he’s not throwing up his hands; he’s bracing us. We’ve faced demagogues before. We can find the intellectual maturity to fight back. Yes we can.

A "lively" memoir by the Hollywood legend about the making of Spartacus , with a foreword by George Clooney ( Los Angeles Times ). One of the world's most iconic movie stars, Kirk Douglas has distinguished himself as a producer, philanthropist, and author of ten works of fiction and memoir. Now, more than fifty years after the release of his enduring epic Spartacus , Douglas reveals the riveting drama behind the making of the legendary gladiator film. Douglas began producing the movie in the midst of the politically charged era when Hollywood's moguls refused to hire anyone accused of Communist sympathies. In a risky move, Douglas chose Dalton Trumbo, a blacklisted screenwriter, to write Spartacus . Trumbo was one of the "Unfriendly Ten," men who had gone to prison rather than testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee about their political affiliations. Douglas's source material was already a hot property, as the novel Spartacus was written by Howard Fast while he was in jail for defying HUAC. With the financial future of his young family at stake, Douglas plunged into a tumultuous production both on- and off-screen. As both producer and star of the film, he faced explosive moments with young director Stanley Kubrick, struggles with a leading lady, and negotiations with giant personalities, including Sir Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton, Peter Ustinov, and Lew Wasserman. Writing from his heart and from his own meticulously researched archives, Kirk Douglas, at ninety-five, looks back at his audacious decisions. He made the most expensive film of its era--but more importantly, his moral courage in giving public credit to Trumbo effectively ended the notorious Hollywood blacklist. A master storyteller, Douglas paints a vivid and often humorous portrait in I Am Spartacus! The book is enhanced by newly discovered period photography of the stars and filmmakers both on and off the set.

'Truly eye-opening . . . The most accessible and coherent introduction to Chomsky's ideas' Irish TimesThe land of the free. The home of the brave. But what has America achieved in the aim of 'spreading democracy' - except wreak havoc across the globe and establish a reckless foreign policy that serves the interest of few and has endangered all too many?In t[Bokinfo]

Enough of lunatics like Rosie O'Donnell who think "Radical Christianity" is "as big a threat to America as Radical Islam." Enough of the hyperbolic liberal rhetoric comparing Bush to Hitler and Abu Ghraib to a Saddam Hussein torture chamber. And please, enough of the military-hating crazies who run San Francisco! But Goldberg doesn't stop with the crazies on the Left; he also goes after the wimps on the Right—the gutless wonders in Washington who sold out their principles for power. In his most personal, provocative book yet, Bernard Goldberg argues that while conservatives still believe in important things, the jury is out on Republicans. The 2006 election was a wake-up call, he warns, and if the wimps on the Right fail to regain their courage, recover their principles, and reclaim their sense of fiscal responsibility, the crazies on the Left just might win the White House in 2008.

Looks at how the office of the presidency has changed, argues that the president has become too central to national politics, and suggests ways to restore the constitutional balance.

"Eliminate the pressure of immigration, and we may be headed for a caste system based on ethnic diversity and mitigated to only a negligible degree by economic differences." --Horace Kallen, in Democracy versus the Melting Pot, 1915 Democracy versus the Melting Pot was published in The Nation magazine by Horace Kallen in 1915, at a time when the United States were receiving the largest influx of immigrants in history. The government tried to enable the assimilation of those diverse peoples into "American" culture through "Americanization" programs, but Kallen saw these programs as being mostly in the interest of Anglo-Saxon business classes and against the spirit of democracy. Kallen rejected the "melting pot" concept, and supported "cultural pluralism," a term he coined. Democracy versus the Melting Pot also strongly influenced Randolph Bourne, another progressive writer. Just as Kallen, Bourne was also against forcing immigrants to assimilate to the dominant Anglo-Saxon culture as he described in his famous article Trans-national America in 1916. Kallen's work is relevant as ever for students of history, political scientists, and others interested in the current discussion about immigration in America.

What does is it mean to be a citizen of the United States? Susan Griffin’s provocative investigation of that question takes us from the Declaration of Independence to the Iraq War, with many stops in between. Her conclusion: democracy is nothing less than a revolution of consciousness, and the revolution has just begun.

Fiorello LaGuardia is known best as the tempestuous mayor of New York City in the days when Franklin Delano Roosevelt sat in the White House. There had been, however, an earlier time, which matched his mayoralty years in sheer drama and perhaps surpassed them in lasting achievement-LaGuardia's years in Congress. He served in the House of Representative almost continuously from 1917 to 1933, representing two ethnically diverse congressional districts: the Fourteenth (Greenwich Village), from 1917 to 1919, and the Twentieth (East Harlem), from 1923 to 1933. Although barred from important committee posts because of his political independence and thus denied from playing a direct role in lawmaking, he was a tireless and vocal champion of Progressive causes, from allowing more immigration and removing U.S. troops from Nicaragua to speaking up for the rights and livelihoods of striking miners, impoverished farmers, oppressed minorities, and struggling families. A goad to the era's plutocrats and their enablers in government, LaGuardia fought for progressive income taxes, greater government oversight of Wall Street, and national employment insurance for workers idled by the Great Depression. In this book, first published by Cornell University Press in 1959, Howard Zinn establishes LaGuardia's tenure in Congress as a vital link between the Progressive and New Deal eras, offering a lively and informative account of his many legislative battles, his political philosophy, and the distinctly urban (specifically, New York City) sensibilities he brought to the Progressive movement.

2016 Reprint of Undated Original Edition [Circa 1965]. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. This gives a succinct account of Rothbard's view of the state. Following Franz Oppenheimer and Albert Jay Nock, Rothbard regards the state as a predatory entity. It does not produce anything but rather steals resources from those engaged in production. In applying this view to American history, Rothbard makes use of the work of John C. Calhoun How can an organization of this type sustain itself? It must engage in propaganda to induce popular support for its policies. Court intellectuals play a key role here, and Rothbard cites as an example of ideological mystification the work of the influential legal theorist Charles Black, Jr., on the way the Supreme Court has become a revered institution. A wealth of citations and references supports the basic premise.

This book offers a fresh and original analysis of the power structure of a number of societies, past and present. There are and ever have been only two essential models of government: minority rule of all types (labelled "oligocracy") and regimes in which power is concentrated in the hands of a single individual (labelled "monocracy"). The present-day "democracies" of Britain and the United States are in reality composite oligocracies made up of several disparate elements. Oligocracies are by definition regimes with a high degree of inequality, but with variable levels of liberty. Oligocracy and inequality are the "default" features of human society. Equality is unattainable except by a radical monocracy like Fidel Castro's Cuba, and then only with difficulty and at the expense of liberty and probably of lives as well. Equality of opportunity must not be equated with equality. Equality of opportunity means an equal opportunity to become unequal. For genuine freedom of expression to exist there also needs to be equality, because the little man standing on his soap-box and shouting his lungs out at Speaker's Corner in London's Hyde Park cannot compete with the media moguls -- which is why genuine freedom of expression is rare. Once these truths are recognised, it becomes clear that for a Western nation to combine "regime change" in a foreign state with an attempt to impose "democracy" and Western "liberal" values on it is likely to be doomed to failure - as is amply demonstrated by the recent history of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.

Spanning nearly one hundred years of American political history, and abounding with outsize characters—from Lindbergh to Goldwater to Gingrich to Abramoff— White Protestant Nation offers a penetrating look at the origins, evolution, and triumph (at times) of modern conservatism. Lichtman is both a professor of political history at American University and a veteran journalist, and after ten years of prodigious research, he has produced what may be the definitive history of the modern conservative movement in America. He brings to life a gallery of dynamic right-wing personalities, from luminaries such as Strom Thurmond, Phyllis Schlafly, and Bill Kristol to indispensable inside operators like financiers Frank Gannett and J. Howard Pew. He explodes the conventional wisdom that modern conservative politics began with Goldwater and instead traces the roots of today's movement to the 1920s. And he lays bare the tactics that conservatives have used for generations to put their slant on policy and culture; to choke the growth of the liberal state; and to build the most powerful media, fundraising, and intellectual network in the history of representative government. White Protestant Nation is entertaining, provocative, enlightening, and essential reading for anyone who cares about modern American politics and its history.

An acclaimed journalist and novelist explores the legacy and future of American liberalism through the history of his family's politically active history George Packer's maternal grandfather, George Huddleston, was a populist congressman from Alabama in the early part of the century—an agrarian liberal in the Jacksonian mold who opposed the New Deal. Packer's father was a Kennedy-era liberal, a law professor and dean at Stanford whose convictions were sorely—and ultimately fatally—tested in the campus upheavals of the 1960s. The inheritor of two sometimes conflicting strains of the great American liberal tradition, Packer discusses the testing of ideals in the lives of his father and grandfather and his own struggle to understand the place of the progressive tradition in our currently polarized political climate. Searching, engrossing, and persuasive, Blood of the Liberals is an original, intimate examination of the meaning of politics in American lives.

Tracing the Democratic Party's dramatic shift to the left over the last thirty years and its concurrent demise, a scholar proposes that the Democrats will never be able to recapture the strength of the New Deal. "This book briskly recounts the Democratic Party's leftward lurch during the tumultuous 1960s and the subsequent decline of liberalism as a vital force in our nation's political life." —Will Marshall, President, Progressive Policy Institute.

America's current transformation from an industrial to a new information-based culture presents new challenges as well as new perspectives on old debates. This book offers a comprehensive survey of America's changing values. It examines notions of American exceptionalism and how the 'melting pot' is coping with race relations and changing demographics; it assesses the agenda of government, the domestic and global constraints, and how social exclusion can be tackled. Current changes in the US are likely to be a harbinger for other societies, and the authors examine new models of civic society, of learning and of reconfiguring social values for a fast-changing world.

This companion volume to The Roots of American Communism brings to completion what the author describes as the essence of the relationship of American Communism to Soviet Russia in the first decade after the Bolsheviks seized power. The outpouring of new archive materials makes it plain that Draper's premise is direct and to the point: The communist movement "was transformed from a new expression of American radicalism to the American appendage of a Russian revolutionary power." Each generation must find this out for itself, and no better guide exists than the work of master historian Theodore Draper. American Communism and Soviet Russia is acknowledged to be the classic, authoritative history of the critical formative period of the American Communist Party. Based on confidential minutes of the top party committees, interviews with party leaders, and public records, this book carefully documents the influence of the Soviet Union on the fundamental nature of American Communism. Draper's reflections on that period in this edition are a fitting capstone to this pioneering effort.

Ronald Radosh's earliest memory is of being trundled off to May Day celebrations by his communist parents with a Soviet flag stuck in his baby carriage. Then came education at New York's ''little red schoolhouse.'' Summers at ''commie camp.'' And college at the University of Wisconsin where he became a founding father of the New Left. Commies is a brilliant memoir of growing up in the culture of radicalism. But it also about the hard decisions faced by those professing a radical faith. For Radosh himself, the crisis came when he concluded in his authoritative book on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg that the couple (on whose behalf he had demonstrated as a boy) had indeed been guilty of spying. Attacked as a ''traitor,'' Radosh began to question his political commitments. His disillusionment climaxed in the 1980s when he traveled through Central America as a journalist and historian and ran into his old comrades there still searching for the revolution. One journalist calls Ronald Radosh ''the Zelig of the American Left, seen everywhere and knowing everyone.'' Humorous and tragic, filled with anecdote and personality, Commies is a trip log of his journey, the most intimate look yet at the experience of a radical generation.

"There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels ... upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop!" These fiery words of protest, spoken by Mario Savio during the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, became a call to action that helped galvanize an entire generation of radicals during the 1960s. Led by student politicized through the fight for Civil Rights, the movement would reshape the American left and influence a generation of protesters across the globe. In this rousing and insightful participant's account, Hal Draper recounts the now iconic events of the FSM. From the impromptu speak out atop a police car after the administration decided to clamp down on students "distributing communist literature," to the inspiring Student Strike that shut down the entire campus, Draper's narrative captures the energy and dynamism of each twist and turn in the struggle, and offers invaluable analysis along the way. Brimming with lessons still relevant for today's activists, Berkeley: The Student Revolt is a classic of on-the-ground historical reportage.

This important new study in Canadian politics discusses the role of socialism in Canada. By means of comparison between the English-Canadian and the American political importance of socialism in Canada than the United States. In this section Louis Hartz's theory of "fragment" cultures is carried forward and applied to Canada. The remainder of the book is devoted to a detailed historical study of the relationship between the labour movement and the socialist parties in Canada. It starts in the early years of the century and follows the story through to its significant conclusion—the support (and formation) by many Canadian unions of a labour party. The brilliant analysis of Canadian politics in Hartzian terms restores ideology to a place in our political culture, and the meticulous, objective recounting of labour's involved in the formation of the NDP is a timely and valuable contribution to our limited understanding of how Canadian political parties "live and move and have their being." The main sources used by the author were correspondence, minutes, and other materials in the files of the NDP and the Canadian Labour Congress, and personal interviews with labour leaders and socialist politicians. (Studies in the Structure of Power: Decision Making in Canada No. 4.)