The Revolt Against The Masses

Download or read book The Revolt Against the Masses written by Fred Siegel and published by Encounter Books. This book was released on 2015-04-07 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This short book rewrites the history of modern American liberalism. It shows that what we think of as liberalism—the top-and-bottom coalition we associate with President Obama—began not with Progressivism or the New Deal but rather in the wake of WWI, in disillusionment with American society. In the 1920s, the first thinkers to call themselves liberals adopted the hostility to bourgeois life that had long characterized European intellectuals of both the left and right. The aim of liberalism’s founders—such as Herbert Croly, Randolph Bourne, H.G. Wells, Sinclair Lewis, and H.L. Mencken—was to create an American version of the aristocracy long associated with European statism. Critical of mass democracy and middle-class capitalism, liberals despised the businessman’s pursuit of profit as well as the conventional individual’s pursuit of pleasure; and in the 1950s liberalism expressed itself in the scornful critique of popular culture. It was precisely the success of a recently elevated middle-class culture that frightened the leaders of the New Class, who took up the priestly task of de-democratizing America in the name of administering newly developed rights. The neo-Malthusianism that emerged from the 1960s did not aim to control the breeding habits of the lower classes, as its eugenicist precursors had done, but to mock and restrain the buying habits of the middle class. Today’s brand of liberalism, led by Barack Obama, has displaced the old Main Street private-sector middle class with a new middle class composed of public-sector workers allied with crony capitalists and the country’s arbiters of elite style and taste.

Download or read book Fascism and the Masses written by Ishay Landa and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-01-17 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Highlighting the "mass" nature of interwar European fascism has long become commonplace. Throughout the years, numerous critics have construed fascism as a phenomenon of mass society, perhaps the ultimate expression of mass politics. This study deconstructs this long-standing perception. It argues that the entwining of fascism with the masses is a remarkable transubstantiation of a movement which understood and presented itself as a militant rejection of the ideal of mass politics, and indeed of mass society and mass culture more broadly conceived. Thus, rather than "massifying" society, fascism was the culmination of a long effort on the part of the élites and the middle-classes to de-massify it. The perennially menacing mass – seen as plebeian and insubordinate – was to be drilled into submission, replaced by supposedly superior collective entities, such as the nation, the race, or the people. Focusing on Italian fascism and German National Socialism, but consulting fascist movements and individuals elsewhere in interwar Europe, the book incisively shows how fascism is best understood as ferociously resisting what Elias referred to as "the civilizing process" and what Marx termed "the social individual." Fascism, notably, was a revolt against what Nietzsche described as the peaceful, middling and egalitarian "Last Humans."

Download or read book National Populism written by Roger Eatwell and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2018-10-25 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR A crucial new guide to one of the most urgent political phenomena of our time: the rise of national populism Across the West, there is a rising tide of people who feel excluded, alienated from mainstream politics, and increasingly hostile towards minorities, immigrants and neo-liberal economics. Many of these voters are turning to national populist movements, which have begun to change the face of Western liberal democracy, from the United States to France, Austria to the UK. This radical turn, we are told, is a last howl of rage from an aging electorate on the verge of extinction. Their leaders are fascistic and their politics anti-democratic; their existence a side-show to liberal democracy. But this version of events, as Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin show, could not be further from the truth. Written by two of the foremost experts on fascism and the rise of national populism, this lucid and deeply-researched book is a vital guide to our transformed political landscape. Challenging conventional wisdoms, Eatwell and Goodwin make a compelling case for serious, respectful engagement with the supporters and ideas of national populism - not least because it is a tide that won't be stemmed anytime soon.

Download or read book The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium written by Martin Gurri and published by Stripe Press. This book was released on 2018-12-04 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How insurgencies—enabled by digital devices and a vast information sphere—have mobilized millions of ordinary people around the world. In the words of economist and scholar Arnold Kling, Martin Gurri saw it coming. Technology has categorically reversed the information balance of power between the public and the elites who manage the great hierarchical institutions of the industrial age: government, political parties, the media. The Revolt of the Public tells the story of how insurgencies, enabled by digital devices and a vast information sphere, have mobilized millions of ordinary people around the world. Originally published in 2014, The Revolt of the Public is now available in an updated edition, which includes an extensive analysis of Donald Trump’s improbable rise to the presidency and the electoral triumphs of Brexit. The book concludes with a speculative look forward, pondering whether the current elite class can bring about a reformation of the democratic process and whether new organizing principles, adapted to a digital world, can arise out of the present political turbulence.

Download or read book The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy written by Christopher Lasch and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1996-01-17 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text challenges American notions of democracy and ambition, culture and civic responsibility, charting a decline in democratic values and debate. It states that this change is due to the "new elites" who, having lost their sense of communitarianism, will not accept ties to nation and to place.

Download or read book Listen, Liberal written by Thomas Frank and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2016-03-15 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling author of What's the Matter With Kansas, a scathing look at the standard-bearers of liberal politics -- a book that asks: what's the matter with Democrats? It is a widespread belief among liberals that if only Democrats can continue to dominate national elections, if only those awful Republicans are beaten into submission, the country will be on the right course. But this is to fundamentally misunderstand the modern Democratic Party. Drawing on years of research and first-hand reporting, Frank points out that the Democrats have done little to advance traditional liberal goals: expanding opportunity, fighting for social justice, and ensuring that workers get a fair deal. Indeed, they have scarcely dented the free-market consensus at all. This is not for lack of opportunity: Democrats have occupied the White House for sixteen of the last twenty-four years, and yet the decline of the middle class has only accelerated. Wall Street gets its bailouts, wages keep falling, and the free-trade deals keep coming. With his trademark sardonic wit and lacerating logic, Frank's Listen, Liberal lays bare the essence of the Democratic Party's philosophy and how it has changed over the years. A form of corporate and cultural elitism has largely eclipsed the party's old working-class commitment, he finds. For certain favored groups, this has meant prosperity. But for the nation as a whole, it is a one-way ticket into the abyss of inequality. In this critical election year, Frank recalls the Democrats to their historic goals-the only way to reverse the ever-deepening rift between the rich and the poor in America.

Download or read book Ortega's The Revolt of the Masses and the Triumph of the New Man written by Pedro Blas Gonzalez and published by Algora Publishing. This book was released on 2007 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is first and foremost a detailed and meticulous study of Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses (1930). No other up-to-date books explore this thinker and his great work. Most importantly, the author demonstrates the relevance and importance of Ortega y Gasset's thought and his The Revolt of the Masses for today's world, showing, for instance, how Ortega's categories like "mass man" and "decadence," have been vindicated by today's spiritual, moral and cultural decay. This aspect of the book will perhaps be of major interest to the reading public. What Ortega argues for in his brief history of philosophy is something that he has otherwise made explicit throughout his work, mainly his conviction that strictly speaking philosophy as an activity or manner of thinking that faces naked reality, holistically, ended long ago with the ancient Greeks. All subsequent philosophical endeavors have been merely a rehashing or an academic commentary on the pre-existing philosophical canon. This latter activity he saw as pertaining to the history of philosophy, but he did not regard it as philosophy. Philosophy, as a vital and life-forging way of life, he argued, had played out its originality, and thus had run its course, long ago. With a glossary of special terms as used by Ortega, and with references to Albert Camus, Gabriel Marcel, C.S. Lewis, Friedrich Nietzsche, Josef Pieper, and others, this work is a fundamental tool for any student of Ortega, of existentialism, and 20th-century European philosophy. * Pedro Blas Gonzalez is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Barry University in Miami. His areas of specialization include Continental philosophy, specifically Phenomenology, Existentialism, and philosophical aspects of literature. His works include Fragments: Essays In Subjectivity, Individuality And Autonomy (Algora, 2005), and Human Existence as Radical Reality: Ortega's Philosophy of Subjectivity (Paragon House, 2005). Gonzalez holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from DePaul University.