Search Results: Returned 2 Results, Displaying Titles 1 - 2
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2021., Random House Call No: NEW 330.973 A547e Edition: Random House Trade Paperback Edition. Availability:0 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: Americans have disabled the government's ability to solve even basic problems, making us vulnerable to the most dangerous demagogue ever to pretend to the White House. Kurt Andersen shows how the masterminds of the economic right rode an unprecedented wave of nostalgia by dressing up their harsh new rich-get-richer system in patriotic old-time drag, making it their mission to take over the government for their purposes alone and convincing the country that the mid-century consensus about the function of the American government was all wrong. Only a writer with Andersen's crackling energy, deep intelligence, and ability to see complex systems with clarity could make such a vital book both intellectually formidable and completely entertaining. In his diagnosis of what happened and what it means for us today, Andersen spares no one, committing to a pinpointing of his own boomer generation as accessories to the great dismantling of the American experiment.
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2023., Hurst & Company Call No: NEW 321.8 N331l Availability:0 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: A specter is haunting Europe and the specter of anti-democratic, right-wing nationalism. This has finally exposed as ill-based the astonishingly widely shared belief that unleashing capitalism will, sooner or later, lead societies to democratic politics. It's nothing more than the big liberal myth. Krishnan Nayar explores the history of six major pioneers of modernity--Britain, America, France, Germany, Russia and Japan-- from the seventeenth century's Cromwellian revolution to Donald Trump's election, via the Age of Darwinian the pre-Second World War, pre-consumerist, pre-welfare state capitalism of severe economic instability and a penurious working class. Nayar shows that, in this period, capitalist industrialization was far more likely to lead to modernized right-wing autocracy than democracy, which got a chance thanks simply to fortunate circumstances in a few countries. Capitalism only underpinned democracy in the post-war period due to transient the existence and character of the post-1945 Western welfare systems owed far more than is admitted by most historians to the challenge posed by the Russian and Chinese revolutions. The return of large-scale, extremist right-wing politics should not, therefore, come as a surprise. As autocratic China grows in strength, and Russia returns to expansionism, can democracy be rescued from a capitalism of dire instability and inequality?
