9 results for "American History"

Liberal fascism: the secret history of the American left, from Mussolini to the politics of meaning

Goldberg, Jonah
“Fascists,” “Brownshirts,” “jackbooted stormtroopers”—such are the insults typically hurled at conservatives by their liberal opponents. Calling someone a fascist is the fastest way to shut them up, defining their views as beyond the political pale. But who are the real fascists in our midst? Liberal Fascism offers a startling new perspective on the theories and practices that define fascist politics. Replacing conveniently manufactured myths with surprising and enlightening research, Jonah Goldberg reminds us that the original fascists were really on the left, and that liberals from Woodrow Wilson to FDR to Hillary Clinton have advocated policies and principles remarkably similar to those of Hitler's National Socialism and Mussolini's Fascism. Contrary to what most people think, the Nazis were ardent socialists (hence the term “National socialism”). They believed in free health care and guaranteed jobs. They confiscated inherited wealth and spent vast sums on public education. They purged the church from public policy, promoted a new form of pagan spirituality, and inserted the authority of the state into every nook and cranny of daily life. The Nazis declared war on smoking, supported abortion, euthanasia, and gun control. They loathed the free market, provided generous pensions for the elderly, and maintained a strict racial quota system in their universities—where campus speech codes were all the rage. The Nazis led the world in organic farming and alternative medicine. Hitler was a strict vegetarian, and Himmler was an animal rights activist. Do these striking parallels mean that today’s liberals are genocidal maniacs, intent on conquering the world and imposing a new racial order? Not at all. Yet it is hard to deny that modern progressivism and classical fascism shared the same intellectual roots. We often forget, for example, that Mussolini and Hitler had many admirers in the United States. W.E.B. Du Bois was inspired by Hitler's Germany, and Irving Berlin praised Mussolini in song. Many fascist tenets were espoused by American progressives like John Dewey and Woodrow Wilson, and FDR incorporated fascist policies in the New Deal. Fascism was an international movement that appeared in different forms in different countries, depending on the vagaries of national culture and temperament. In Germany, fascism appeared as genocidal racist nationalism. In America, it took a “friendlier,” more liberal form. The modern heirs of this “friendly fascist” tradition include the New York Times , the Democratic Party, the Ivy League professoriate, and the liberals of Hollywood. The quintessential Liberal Fascist isn't an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore. These assertions may sound strange to modern ears, but that is because we have forgotten what fascism is. In this angry, funny, smart, contentious book, Jonah Goldberg turns our preconceptions inside out and shows us the true meaning of Liberal Fascism.
Doubleday 2007 487 pages

Don't burn this country: surviving and thriving in our woke dystopia

Rubin, Dave
"A guide for anyone who wants to revive the American dream while the woke mob tries to burn down the country. You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to see that something dark is happening in America. Just look around: Massive corporations monitor our every move. The Thought Police stand ready to cancel any who dare think for themselves. Brainwashed activists openly attack the American experiment. The dystopian future we've been warned of is here. Dave Rubin has been on the front lines of the culture wars for years. Now, he offers tactics you can use to protect yourself from today's authoritarian rule-from resisting the grip of Big Tech to staying sane in a post-truth world. What's more, he offers a vision for the next generation of patriots who will need to face the future head-on, holding fast to their values and creating a meaningful life no matter how frenzied and fabricated the news of the day is. In order for free-thinking people to thrive in this era of woke lunacy, we need to step up and create freedom for ourselves. While exposing Progressive lies and offering practical advice you can employ right now, this book is a call for Americans to live the freest life possible-and a roadmap for saving the greatest country in the history of the world"--
Sentinel 2022-04-12 219 pages

The next republic: the rise of a new radical majority

Guttenplan, D. D
What will the post-Trump return to democracy in America look like, and what are its historical antecedents? National political correspondent and award-winning author D. D. Guttenplan’s The Next Republic is an extraordinarily intense and wide-ranging exploration of how democracy rises and falls in America. The Next Republic introduces us to some of the organizers and politicians who are helping to bring about change in America, like new labor activist JANE McALEVEY; racial justice campaigner (and mayor of Jackson, Mississippi) CHOKWE ANTAR LUMUMBA; environmental activist (and chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party) JANE KLEEB; Chicago’s first openly gay Latino public official, CARLOS RAMIREZ-ROSA; Justice Democrats communications director WALEED SHAHID; communications director for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 2020 campaign CORBIN TRENT; and anti-corruption crusader ZEPHYR TEACHOUT. Guttenplan juxtaposes this new social movement with chapters on key transitions in our nation’s history: the Whiskey Rebellion, the Lincoln Republic, and the Roosevelt Republic. Altogether, Guttenplan deeply fathoms the great American problem that is our democracy, and the prospects for its resurgence. Both unyielding and resoundingly hopeful, The New Republic foresees the post-Trump era as one that may not only restore American values, but also see a radical new transformation of them to match the new challenges we face as a nation.
Seven Stories Press 2019-12-10 232 pages

Quest for inclusion: Jews and liberalism in modern American

Dollinger, Marc
For over sixty years, Jews have ranked as the most liberal white ethnic group in American politics, figuring prominently in social reform campaigns ranging from the New Deal to the civil rights movement. Today many continue to defy stereotypes that link voting patterns to wealth. What explains this political behavior? Historians have attributed it mainly to religious beliefs, but Marc Dollinger discovered that this explanation fails to account for the entire American Jewish political experience. In this, the first synthetic treatment of Jewish liberalism and U.S. public policy from the 1930s to the mid-1970s, Dollinger identifies the drive for a more tolerant, pluralistic, and egalitarian nation with Jewish desires for inclusion in the larger non-Jewish society. The politics of acculturation, the process by which Jews championed unpopular social causes to ease their adaptation to American life, established them as the guardians of liberal America. But, according to Dollinger, it also erected barriers to Jewish liberal success. Faced with a conflict between liberal politics and their own acculturation, Jews almost always chose the latter. Few Jewish leaders, for example, condemned the wartime internment of Japanese Americans, and most southern Jews refused to join their northern co-religionists in public civil rights protests. When liberals advocated race-based affirmative action programs and busing to desegregate public schools, most Jews dissented. In chronicling the successes, limits, and failures of Jewish liberalism, Dollinger offers a nuanced yet wide-ranging political history, one intended for liberal activists, conservatives curious about the creation of neo-conservatism, and anyone interested in Jewish communal life.
Princeton University Press 2000-07-23 296 pages

City on a hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli settler movement

Hirschhorn, Sara Yael
Since the June 1967 war, over 60,000 Jewish-Americans have settled in the occupied territories. Comprising 15 percent of the Israeli settler enterprise today, they have established major settlements, revolutionized the public relations of the movement and its engagement with the international community, and committed shocking acts of settler terrorism. City on a Hilltop unsettles stereotypes about Jewish-American settlers. It shatters the myth that they were messianic zealots, finding instead a group of young, highly-educated American Jews who were politically active in 1960s social movements and the Democratic Party prior to their immigration to Israel. Their generation didn't abandon their heritage when they settled over the Green Line-- rather they saw a historical opportunity to apply their liberal values to a new kind of "city on a hilltop." The story of Jewish-American settlers personifies the clash between liberal values and political realities at the heart of the crisis of liberal Zionism today.--
Harvard University Press 2017-05-22 350 pages

What was liberalism? the past, present and promise of a noble idea

Traub, James
"In the vertiginous era of Trump and Marine le Pen, liberalism's status is challenged. There is a widespread fear that liberal values, long taken for granted, are now in danger -- not only from authoritarian countries abroad, but also from a loss of faith inside the liberal world. What happened? Why did liberalism lose the majority support it once enjoyed? And what is so precious about liberalism in the first place? In What Was Liberalism?, award-winning journalist and author James Traub tackles these questions by examining the history of liberalism, from the American and French revolutions through the writings of John Stuart Mill and early-twentieth-century American progressives to liberalism's midcentury triumph in the West, its shaky present, and its uncertain future. Liberalism, Traub shows, began with a commitment to individual liberty, but it didn't end there. Over time, liberals sought to balance freedom of speech and action with goods like justice and equality, opposing both economic exploitation and totalitarianism. Partly as a result, the relationship between liberalism and democracy also evolved. Many nineteenth-century liberals were deeply worried about the democracy's illiberal effects, but by the middle of the twentieth century, liberalism had become the consensus faith of a wide swath of Americans and Europeans, both left and right. Yet even as the liberal West emerged victorious from the Cold War, liberalism's broad majoritarian foundations were crumbling, falling prey to accelerating economic inequality and the vexing challenges of race and immigration. Traub explores how illiberalism burned out of sight like an underground fire, and how it exploded into view in Europe and the United States in recent decades"--
Basic Books 2019-09-24 311 pages

The impact of the presidency of Donald Trump on American Jewry and Israel: the Jewish role in American life

Windmueller, Steven F.
"The Trump presidency has resulted in a fundamentally disruptive moment in this nation's political culture. Not only were there different policy options and directions, but the cultural artifacts of politics changed because of how this president dramatically challenged the existing norms of political behavior and action. As we have shifted from a period of American liberalism to a time of political populism, deep fissures are dividing Americans in general and Jews in particular. The Impact of the Presidency of Donald Trump on American Jewry and Israel unpacks President Donald Trump's distinctive and unique relationship with the American Jewish community and the State of Israel. Addressing the various dimensions of his personal and political connections with Jews and Israel, this publication is designed to provide an assessment of how the Trump presidency has influenced and altered American Jewish political behavior. Writers from different backgrounds and political orientations bring a broad range of perspectives designed to examine various aspects of this presidency, including Trump's particular impact on Israel-US relations, his special connection with Orthodox Jews, and his complex and uneven relationship with Jewish Republicans. For liberal American Jews, these four years represented a fundamental revolution, overturning and challenging much that a generation of activists had fought to achieve and protect. For Trump's supporters, it afforded them an opportunity to advance their priorities, while joining the forty-fifth president in changing the American political landscape. The "Trump effect" will extend well beyond his four-year tenure, creating an environment that has fomented the politics of hate and exposed a deeply embedded presence of anti-Semitism. How Americans understand this moment in time and the ways society will adapt can be reflected through the prism of the Jewish encounter with Trumpism that this volume seeks to explore"--
Purdue University Press 2021 286 pages

Learning on the left: political profiles of Brandeis University

Whitfield, Stephen J.
Brandeis University is the United States' only Jewish-sponsored nonsectarian university, and while only being established after World War II, it has risen to become one of the most respected universities in the nation. The faculty and alumni of the university have made exceptional contributions to myriad disciplines, but they have played a surprising formidable role in American politics. Stephen J. Whitfield makes the case for the pertinence of Brandeis University in understanding the vicissitudes of American liberalism since the mid-twentieth century. Founded to serve as a refuge for qualified professors and students haunted by academic antisemitism, Brandeis University attracted those who generally envisioned the republic as worthy of betterment. Whether as liberals or as radicals, figures associated with the university typically adopted a critical stance toward American society and sometimes acted upon their reformist or militant beliefs. This volume is not an institutional history, but instead shows how one university, over the course of seven decades, employed and taught remarkable men and women who belong in our accounts of the evolution of American politics, especially on the left. In vivid prose, Whitfield invites readers to appreciate a singular case of the linkage of political influence with the fate of a particular university in modern America.
Brandeis University Press 2020-09-15 581 pages