Histories of American radical left groups abound. The Communist party, the tiny Trotskyist movement, and the New Left have all been abundantly chronicled. Very little information has been available, however, about the radical left today. "Far Left of Center "remedies that deficit. Many people erroneously assume that with the collapse of the New Left in the early 1970s, American radicalism disappeared. It is true that the 1980s have not been good years for radicals. Their ideologies, particularly Marxism-Leninism, have been discredited, their tactics and visions have been repudiated, and they have been plagued by internal problems. Even so, the history of American radicalism suggests that such movements have rebounded in the past; and in any event, Marxist-Leninist groups have often had an impact far out of proportion to their size. Part One deals with the Communist party of the United States, the largest and most influential Marxist-Leninist group in the United States. Its membership is only about 15,000, but it has been growing steadily in recent years. This section also discusses a variety of front groups which the party has created to facilitate work and to garner support from people who would not otherwise cooperate with Communists. Part Two deals with Trotskyist, Maoist, and other Marxist-Leninist organizations in the United States. Far more militant than the CPUSA, these sects are usually quite small, often under a thousand members. They include the tiny offshoots of the New Left. Part Three deals with organizations that eschew formal ties to Marxist-Leninist parties and are not under the control of these parties, although they may work with them toward some of the same objectives. Many of these have especially targeted Israel as a danger to world peace and security. They are also hostile to American foreign policy and support Marxist revolutionary regimes abroad. The basic premise of "Far Left of Center "is that these far-left groups support and defend oppressive and totalitarian regimes, and cooperate with those dedicated to the destruction of democracy and intellectual freedom. The author is careful to distinguish these groups from democratic socialists in the United States, who have vigorously and continuously denounced Marxism-Leninism and those regimes founded on its principles. This book is not about these organizations. The focus is, instead, on groups whose denunciations of American society and political life go hand-in-hand with testimonials to some of the most repressive regimes in the world. Klehr has written a sober, well documented, comprehensive account of the radical left in the United States today.

“Fascists,” “Brownshirts,” “jackbooted stormtroopers”—such are the insults typically hurled at conservatives by their liberal opponents. Calling someone a fascist is the fastest way to shut them up, defining their views as beyond the political pale. But who are the real fascists in our midst? Liberal Fascism offers a startling new perspective on the theories and practices that define fascist politics. Replacing conveniently manufactured myths with surprising and enlightening research, Jonah Goldberg reminds us that the original fascists were really on the left, and that liberals from Woodrow Wilson to FDR to Hillary Clinton have advocated policies and principles remarkably similar to those of Hitler's National Socialism and Mussolini's Fascism. Contrary to what most people think, the Nazis were ardent socialists (hence the term “National socialism”). They believed in free health care and guaranteed jobs. They confiscated inherited wealth and spent vast sums on public education. They purged the church from public policy, promoted a new form of pagan spirituality, and inserted the authority of the state into every nook and cranny of daily life. The Nazis declared war on smoking, supported abortion, euthanasia, and gun control. They loathed the free market, provided generous pensions for the elderly, and maintained a strict racial quota system in their universities—where campus speech codes were all the rage. The Nazis led the world in organic farming and alternative medicine. Hitler was a strict vegetarian, and Himmler was an animal rights activist. Do these striking parallels mean that today’s liberals are genocidal maniacs, intent on conquering the world and imposing a new racial order? Not at all. Yet it is hard to deny that modern progressivism and classical fascism shared the same intellectual roots. We often forget, for example, that Mussolini and Hitler had many admirers in the United States. W.E.B. Du Bois was inspired by Hitler's Germany, and Irving Berlin praised Mussolini in song. Many fascist tenets were espoused by American progressives like John Dewey and Woodrow Wilson, and FDR incorporated fascist policies in the New Deal. Fascism was an international movement that appeared in different forms in different countries, depending on the vagaries of national culture and temperament. In Germany, fascism appeared as genocidal racist nationalism. In America, it took a “friendlier,” more liberal form. The modern heirs of this “friendly fascist” tradition include the New York Times, the Democratic Party, the Ivy League professoriate, and the liberals of Hollywood. The quintessential Liberal Fascist isn't an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore. These assertions may sound strange to modern ears, but that is because we have forgotten what fascism is. In this angry, funny, smart, contentious book, Jonah Goldberg turns our preconceptions inside out and shows us the true meaning of Liberal Fascism.

The Last Liberal Republican is a memoir from one of Nixon’s senior domestic policy advisors. John Roy Price—a member of the moderate wing of the Republican Party, a cofounder of the Ripon Society, and an employee on Nelson Rockefeller’s campaigns—joined Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and later John D. Ehrlichman, in the Nixon White House to develop domestic policies, especially on welfare, hunger, and health. Based on those policies, and the internal White House struggles around them, Price places Nixon firmly in the liberal Republican tradition of President Theodore Roosevelt, New York governor Thomas E. Dewey, and President Dwight Eisenhower. Price makes a valuable contribution to our evolving scholarship and understanding of the Nixon presidency. Nixon himself lamented that he would be remembered only for Watergate and China. The Last Liberal Republican provides firsthand insight into key moments regarding Nixon’s political and policy challenges in the domestic social policy arena. Price offers rich detail on the extent to which Nixon and his staff straddled a precarious balance between a Democratic-controlled Congress and an increasingly powerful conservative tide in Republican politics. The Last Liberal Republican provides a blow-by-blow inside view of how Nixon surprised the Democrats and shocked conservatives with his ambitious proposal for a guaranteed family income. Beyond Nixon’s surprising embrace of what we today call universal basic income, the thirty-seventh president reordered and vastly expanded the patchy food stamp program he inherited and built nutrition education and children’s food services into schools. Richard Nixon even almost achieved a national health insurance program: fifty years ago, with a private sector framework as part of his generous benefits insurance coverage for all, Nixon included coverage of preexisting conditions, prescription drug coverage for all, and federal subsidies for those who could not afford the premiums. The Last Liberal Republican will be a valuable resource for presidency scholars who are studying Nixon, his policies, the state of the Republican Party, and how the Nixon years relate to the rise of the modern conservative movement.

As a teenager in a working-class English town, Jack Buckby found himself at the center of the biggest nationalist movement in modern British history. Looking for a political group that championed working people concerned about mass immigration, he stumbled into a world of anti-Semitism, racist paranoia, and extreme-right violence and terrorism. Through those experiences, Jack explains how both the left and the right fundamentally misunderstand what it means to be “far right” and why young men are becoming radicalized across the Western world. Through a three-pronged attack carried out by the media, negligent politicians, and far-left ideologues, the white working class is being backed into a corner and forced to either be quiet, or get radical.

In The Global Left: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow, Immanuel Wallerstein takes stock of the practices of the left, historically in the time of its great ideals and today in the midst of the global crisis of capitalism. He underlines the urgency of seeing the emergence of a global and united left that can pave the way out of the centuries-old domination of capital, considering antisystemic movements, dilemmas of the left in relation to the structural crisis of the modern world-system, and tactics and strategies for political action. The book includes new essays by Étienne Balibar, James K. Galbraith, Johan Galtung, Nilüfer Göle, Pablo González Casanova, and Michel Wieviorka in conversation with Wallerstein’s core ideas.

A groundbreaking and “affecting and powerful” (The New York Times Book Review) history of Abraham Lincoln’s plan to secure a just and lasting peace after the Civil War—a vision that inspired future presidents as well as the world’s most famous peacemakers. As the tide of the Civil War turned in the spring of 1865, Abraham Lincoln took a dangerous two-week trip to visit the troops on the front lines accompanied by his young son, seeing combat up close, meeting liberated slaves in the ruins of Richmond, and comforting wounded Union and Confederate soldiers. The power of Lincoln’s personal example in the closing days of the war offers a portrait of a peacemaker. He did not demonize people he disagreed with. He used humor, logic, and scripture to depolarize bitter debates. Balancing moral courage with moderation, Lincoln believed that decency could be the most practical form of politics, but he understood that people were more inclined to listen to reason when greeted from a position of strength. Ulysses S. Grant’s famously generous terms of surrender to General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox that April were an expression of a president’s belief that a soft peace should follow a hard war. While his assassination sent the country careening off course, Lincoln’s vision would be vindicated long after his death, inspiring future generations in their own quests to secure a just and lasting peace. As US General Lucius Clay, architect of the post-WWII German occupation said when asked what guided his decisions: “I tried to think of the kind of occupation the South would have had if Abraham Lincoln had lived.” Lincoln and the Fight for Peace reveals with “its graceful prose and wise insights” (Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Soul of America) how Lincoln’s character informed his commitment to unconditional surrender followed by a magnanimous peace. Even during the Civil War, surrounded by reactionaries and radicals, he refused to back down from his belief that there is more that unites us than divides us. But he also understood that peace needs to be waged with as much intensity as war. Lincoln’s plan to win the peace is his unfinished symphony, but in its existing notes, we can find an anthem that can begin to bridge our divisions today.

A leading political scientist provides a rigorous and revealing analysis of liberal media bias: “I’m no conservative, but I loved Left Turn” (Steven Levitt, author of Freakonomics). Dr. Tim Groseclose, a professor of political science and economics at UCLA, has spent years constructing precise, quantitative measures of the slant of media outlets. He does this by measuring the political content of news, as a way to measure the PQ, or “political quotient” of voters and politicians. Among his conclusions are: (i) all mainstream media outlets have a liberal bias; and (ii) while some supposedly conservative outlets—such the Washington Times or Fox News’ Special Report—do lean right, their conservative bias is less than the liberal bias of most mainstream outlets. Groseclose contends that the general leftward bias of the media has shifted the PQ of the average American by about 20 points, on a scale of 100, the difference between the current political views of the average American, and the political views of the average resident of Orange County, California or Salt Lake County, Utah. With Left Turn readers can easily calculate their own PQ—to decide for themselves if the bias exists. This timely, much-needed study brings fact to this often overheated debate.