This book is an eye-opening account of transnational advocacy, not by environmental and rights groups, but by conservative activists. Mobilizing around diverse issues, these networks challenge ...progressive foes across borders and within institutions. In these globalized battles, opponents struggle as much to advance their own causes as to destroy their rivals. Deploying exclusionary strategies, negative tactics and dissuasive ideas, they aim both to make and unmake policy. In this work, Clifford Bob chronicles combat over homosexuality and gun control in the UN, the Americas, Europe and elsewhere. He investigates the 'Baptist-burqa' network of conservative believers attacking gay rights, and the global gun coalition blasting efforts to control firearms. Bob draws critical conclusions about norms, activists and institutions, and his broad findings extend beyond the culture wars. They will change how campaigners fight, scholars study policy wars, and all of us think about global politics.
Across the West, hard-right leaders are surging to power on platforms of ethno-economic nationalism, Christianity, and traditional family values. Is this phenomenon the end of neoliberalism or its ...monstrous offspring? In the Ruins of Neoliberalism casts the hard-right turn as animated by socioeconomically aggrieved white working- and middle-class populations but contoured by neoliberalism's multipronged assault on democratic values. From its inception, neoliberalism flirted with authoritarian liberalism as it warred against robust democracy. It repelled social-justice claims through appeals to market freedom and morality. It sought to de-democratize the state, economy, and society and re-secure the patriarchal family. In key works of the founding neoliberal intellectuals, Wendy Brown traces the ambition to replace democratic orders with ones disciplined by markets and traditional morality and democratic states with technocratic ones. Yet plutocracy, white supremacy, politicized mass affect, indifference to truth, and extreme social disinhibition were no part of the neoliberal vision. Brown theorizes their unintentional spurring by neoliberal reason, from its attack on the value of society and its fetish of individual freedom to its legitimation of inequality. Above all, she argues, neoliberalism's intensification of nihilism coupled with its accidental wounding of white male supremacy generates an apocalyptic populism willing to destroy the world rather than endure a future in which this supremacy disappears.
Details the achievements of left-wing politics in the USA, from effective opposition to militarism to the winning of racial justice and from the socialists of the 1960s to President Barack Obama.
During recent decades, radical right parties have been surging in popularity in many nations, gaining legislative seats, enjoying the legitimacy endowed by ministerial office, and striding the ...corridors of government power. The popularity of leaders such as Le Pen, Haider, and Fortuyn has aroused widespread popular concern and a burgeoning scholarly literature. Despite the interest, little consensus has emerged about the primary factors driving this phenomenon. The puzzle is to explain why radical right parties have advanced in a diverse array of democracies - including in Austria, Canada, Norway, France, Italy, New Zealand, Switzerland, Israel, Romania, Russia, and Chile - while failing to make comparable gains in similar societies elsewhere, such as in Sweden, Britain, and the United States. This book, first published in 2005, expands our understanding of support for radical right parties through presenting an integrated new theory which is then tested systematically using a wealth of cross-national survey evidence covering almost forty countries.
Although politics at the elite level has been polarized for some time, a scholarly controversy has raged over whether ordinary Americans are polarized. This book argues that they are and that the ...reason is growing polarization of worldviews - what guides people's view of right and wrong and good and evil. These differences in worldview are rooted in what Marc J. Hetherington and Jonathan D. Weiler describe as authoritarianism. They show that differences of opinion concerning the most provocative issues on the contemporary issue agenda - about race, gay marriage, illegal immigration, and the use of force to resolve security problems - reflect differences in individuals' levels of authoritarianism. Events and strategic political decisions have conspired to make all these considerations more salient. The authors demonstrate that the left and the right have coalesced around these opposing worldviews, which has provided politics with more incandescent hues than before.
Few notions are as universal as the idea of a left-right divide in politics. Despite its death being frequently foretold, the left-right metaphor remains the most common lens through which to ...interpret political life locally, nationally and globally. Left and Right in Global Politics argues that the left-right divide connects these different levels into a world political debate. Interpreting the left-right dichotomy as an enduring debate about equality, Noël and Thérien analyse opinion polls and social discourses to demonstrate how this debate shapes both individual and collective views of public affairs. Setting their findings in a historical perspective, they then show that for more than two centuries the conflict between progressives and conservatives has structured both domestic and international politics. They conclude by discussing the implications of their argument for the analysis of world politics, and contend that the left-right opposition is here to stay.
The Rise of Illiberalism explores the philosophical
underpinnings of a toxic political ideology and documents how it
has infiltrated the mainstream of political discourse in the United
States. By the ...early twenty-first century, Main writes, liberal
democracy's failure to deal adequately with social problems created
a space illiberal movements could exploit to promote their
particular brands of identity politics as an alternative.
A critical need thus is for what the author calls "positive
identity politics," or a widely shared sense of community that
gives a feeling of equal importance to all sectors of society.
Achieving this goal will, however, be an enormous challenge. In
seeking actionable remedies for the broken political system of the
United States, this book makes a major scholarly contribution to
current debates about the future of liberal democracy.
How a more positive form of identity politics can
restore public trust in government
Illiberalism, Thomas Main writes, is the basic repudiation of
liberal democracy, the very foundation on which the United States
rests. It says no to electoral democracy, human rights, the rule of
law, toleration. It is a political ideology that finds expression
in such older right-wing extremist groups as the Ku Klux Klan and
white supremacists and more recently among the Alt-Right and the
Dark Enlightenment. There are also left-of-center illiberal
movements, including various forms of communism, anarchism, and
some antifascist movements.
The Rise of Illiberalism explores the philosophical
underpinnings of this toxic political ideology and documents how it
has infiltrated the mainstream of political discourse in the United
States. By the early twenty-first century, Main writes, liberal
democracy's failure to deal adequately with social problems created
a space illiberal movements could exploit to promote their
particular brands of identity politics as an alternative.
A critical need thus is for what the author calls "positive
identity politics," or a widely shared sense of community that
gives a feeling of equal importance to all sectors of society.
Achieving this goal will, however, be an enormous challenge.
In seeking actionable remedies for the broken political system
of the United States, this book makes a major scholarly
contribution to current debates about the future of liberal
democracy.
