War on the American Republic By Kevin Slack

 

WAR ON THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC

How Liberalism Became Despotism

By Kevin Slack

With the unprecedented ways in which the radical Left is changing America and attempting to cancel long standing American traditions, we must ask ourselves - what more do they have in store for us? Americans often use the words progressive, liberal, and radical more or less interchangeably without understanding their place in American history. Kevin Slack, PhD, in his new book, WAR ON THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC: How Liberalism Became Despotism, describes the distinct aims of the movements they represent and weighs their consequences for the American republic.

Each of the three movements rejected older republican principles of governance in favor of an administrative state, but there were substantial differences between Teddy Roosevelt's Anglo-Protestant progressive social gospelers, who battled trusts and curbed immigration; Franklin Roosevelt's and Lyndon Johnson's secular liberals, who forged a government-business partnership and promoted a civil rights agenda; and the 1960s radicals, who protested corporate influence in the Great Society, liberal hypocrisy on race and gender, and the war in Vietnam. Each sought to overturn what came before.

In WAR ON THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC, you'll learn:

• How the original Progressives of 1880-1920 broke with the older constitutional order;
• How we can understand the break between the midcentury American liberalism of the 1950s and the 1960s radicals;
• What marks the new politics of the neoliberal period (late 1970s-2008), and why young conservatives have abandoned the "movement conservatism" that hearkens back to the Reagan era;
• What happened in the "Great Awokening" from 2011-2015 and why America's corporate oligarchy sided with the identity politics priesthood; and
• What the 2020 COVID-19 lockdowns and George Floyd riots tell us about what the Left has in store for traditional Americans, and what we can do about it.

Following the revolution of the 1960s, elites on both left and right turned against the industrial middle class to erect an oligarchy at home and advance globalization abroad. Each side claimed to serve the interests of disadvantaged or underrepresented groups. Radicals ensconced themselves in bureaucracy and academia to advance their vision of social justice for women and minorities, while neoliberal elites promoted monopoly finance, open borders, and the outsourcing of jobs to benefit consumers.

The administrative state became a global American empire, but the neoliberals' economic and military failures precipitated a crisis of legitimacy. In the "Great Awokening" that began under Barack Obama, neoliberal elites, including establishment conservatives, openly broke with the populist base of the Republican Party, embraced identity politics, and used COVID-19 and a myth of insurrection to strip away the rights of American citizens. Today, an incompetent kleptocracy is draining the wealthiest and most powerful people in history, thus eroding the foundations of its own empire.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: KEVIN SLACK is a professor of politics at Hillsdale College, where he teaches political philosophy and American political thought, including American progressivism, liberalism, and radicalism.