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War on the American Republic: How Liberalism Became Despotism Spiral-Bound | March 21, 2023

Kevin Slack

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Kevin Slack sounds the alarm on how America's failed neoliberal regime has given way to a woke oligarchy that has deployed a radical toolkit to rapidly strip away the rights of citizens.

Americans often use the words progressive, liberal, and radical more or less interchangeably without understanding their place in American history. Kevin Slack 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.  

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. 

Publisher: Ingram Publisher Services
Original Binding: Hardcover
Pages: 456 pages
ISBN-10: 1641773030
Item Weight: 2.31 lbs
Dimensions: 6.0 x 1.5 x 9.0 inches

“Kevin Slack’s War on the American Republic is outstanding. It blends strong moral seriousness with impressive scholarly analysis. Slack both explains and responds to the relentless attack on the manly, Christian republicanism of the older America by successive waves of liberalism, each one more radical than the last. This book is the best available panoptic view of the transformations in America’s moral-political orientation over the course of its history.”

—Thomas G. West, professor at Hillsdale College, author of The Political Theory of the American Founding

“This is a thoughtful and interesting book, to be read by scholars and students alike, that corrects the record of generations of popularized and fake concepts describing how America got to its rotten state, predicts where things may go from here, and shows how to correct our trajectory. This learned book should be read by people on both left and right.”

—Arthur Milikh, executive director of the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life

 

“Finally, a comprehensive treatment of the American left. A thoughtful, immensely well-researched, and spirited intellectual history of American decline.”

—David Azerrad, assistant professor at Van Andel Graduate School of Government in Washington, D.C. 

 

“This is a powerful book, exhaustive without being exhausting. Kevin Slack offers a bold new history of American society and politics, ranging from the founding all the way to our current despotic kleptocracy and beyond.  If you want clarity about what lies ahead, understanding the past is essential, and there is no better place to start than this book.”

—Charles Haywood, editor of The Worthy House

KEVIN SLACK is a professor of politics at Hillsdale College, where he teaches political philosophy and American political thought, including classes on American progressivism, liberalism, and radicalism. He is a founding member of the Ciceronian Society. He published his first book, Benjamin Franklin, Natural Right, and the Art of Virtue, with the University of Rochester Press. His scholarly articles have appeared in journals such as American Political Thought, New England Quarterly, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Church History, and American Thinker. Dr. Slack earned his PhD from the University of Dallas in 2009.