"If there's one thing most Americans can agree on, it's that everyone hates white liberals. Conservatives hate them for being culturally tolerant and threatening to usher in communism. Libertarians hate them for believing in the power of the state. Socialists hate them for serving as capitalism's beard. Even liberals hate liberals—either because they can't manage to overcome their own prejudices, or precisely because they're so self-hating.
This is the starting point for Kevin M. Schultz's lively new history of white liberals in the United States. He efficiently lays out the array of objections to liberals—ineffective, spineless, judgmental, authoritarian, and more—in a historical frame that shows how protean the concept has been throughout the past hundred years. It turns out, he declares, that how you define a 'white liberal' is less a reflection of reality and more a Rorschach test revealing your own anxieties.
Sharply assessing how decades of attacks on liberals and liberalism have steadily hollowed out the center of American political life, Schultz also explains precisely what needs to be done to avoid digging ourselves even further into the hole of polarization. The ultimate goal, he argues, is to achieve political fragmentation that will fuel the rise of a true multiparty system, where ideology will matter more, not less."
"A lively chronicle of the 1960's through the incredibly contentious and surprisingly close friendship of its two most colorful characters.
Norman Mailer and William F. Buckley, Jr., were towering figures who argued publicly about every major issue of the 1960s: the counterculture, Vietnam, Feminism, civil rights, the Cold War. Behind the scenes, the two were close friends and trusted confidantes who lived surprisingly parallel lives. In Buckley and Mailer, historian Kevin M. Schultz delves into their personal archives to tell the rich story of their friendship, arguments, and the tumultuous decade that did so much to shape. From their Playboy-sponsored debate before the Patterson-Liston heavyweight fight in 1962 to their campaigns for mayor of New York City to their confrontations at Truman Capote's Black-and-White Ball, over the March on the Pentagon, and at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Schultz delivers a fresh chronicle of the '60s and its long aftermath as well as an entertaining work of narrative history that explores these extraordinary figures' contrasting visions of America and the future."
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