Acknowledgments -- Illiberalism in American Political Culture Today -- What Is Illiberalism? What Is Liberal Democracy? -- The Audience for Illiberalism Today -- Identity -- Ideas -- Irony -- Interests -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Index.
Summary:
"Illiberalism, 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, and 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. Main 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, he writes, liberal democracy's failure to deal adequately with social problems created a space that 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 U.S. political system, this book makes a major scholarly contribution to current debates about the future of liberal democracy"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.