Charting worldwide disaffection with liberal democracy, the book is a deep dive into Trumpism, Macronism, Brexit and question marks over the European Union, as well as mass movements weary of voting corrupt politicos in and out of office.
This book, writes reviewer Tebble, "not only gives an account of the different meanings that have been ascribed to liberalism and evoked in its uses." It also "recovers some of those meanings that have been eclipsed, distorted and eroded."
Tracing the history of an idea, the author charts liberalism’s two century Jekyll and Hyde existence as a credo on freedom and an ill-fitting defender of mass democracy.
The author of this book, writes reviewer Quish, "makes a powerful case for a 'socialist constitutionalism' that deserves a place in contemporary debates on the Left."
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How do socialist demands become liberal common sense? The history of the New Deal offers a useful lesson. It had a recognition that a good society rests on a sense of mutuality, reciprocity, and community spoke to what was wrong with a market society
What we need is a form of political leadership that frees democracy from liberalism through supporting citizens in asserting their popular sovereignty over the conditions of material daily life by getting organised as workers, as hospital users, as teachers, as students, as parents – and as citizens capable of mutual self-government.
What an impoverished small town tells us about the dangers of not taking class seriously.
The initiatives of the New Deal and FDR's Second Bill of Rights represented less a permanent triumph of the welfare state or a model for a progressive way forward than a unique combination of non replicable circumstances, including a temporary cessation of enduring tensions involving race, immigration, culture, class, and individualism, which served to sustain a pale social democratic reform for just a few decades. What followed instead was today's new Gilded Age.
Socialism isn’t the negation of liberalism. It’s the realization of liberal values made impossible by capitalism.
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