Recent years have witnessed a growing affinity between increasingly radicalized right-wing movements in the United States and Russia, countries that only recently viewed each other as intractable foes. In Illiberal Vanguard: Populist Elitism in the United States and Russia, Alexandar Mihailovic untangles this confluence, considering ethnonationalist movements in both countries and their parallel approaches to gender, race, and performative identity. Rather than probe specific points of possible contact or political collusion, Mihailovic unveils the mirrored styles of thought that characterize far-right elitism in two erstwhile enemy nations. Mihailovic investigates notable right-wing actors like Steve Bannon and Alexander Dugin and targets of right-wing ire such as globalization, LGBTQ+ activism, and mobilizations to remove controversial statues (that honor Confederate generals and Soviet leaders, for instance), but the argument extends beyond the specifics. How and why are radical right-wing movements developing along such similar trajectories in two nominally oppositional countries? How do religious sectarianism, the construction of whiteness, and institutionalized homophobia support each other in this transnational, informal, but powerful allegiance? Despite their appeals to populism and flamboyant theatrics, Mihailovic argues, much of the answer can be found in the mutual desire to justify and organize an illiberal vanguard of elite intellectuals, one that supports and advocates for a new authoritarianism.

" How a more positive form of identity politics can restore public trust in government Illiberalism, Thomas Main writes, is the basic repudiation of liberal democracy, the very foundation on which the United States rests. It says no to electoral democracy, human rights, the rule of law, toleration. It is a political ideology that finds expression in such older right-wing extremist groups as the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacists and more recently among the Alt-Right and the Dark Enlightenment. There are also left-of-center illiberal movements, including various forms of communism, anarchism, and some antifascist movements. The Rise of Illiberalism explores the philosophical underpinnings of this toxic political ideology and documents how it has infiltrated the mainstream of political discourse in the United States. By the early twenty-first century, Main writes, liberal democracy’s failure to deal adequately with social problems created a space illiberal movements could exploit to promote their particular brands of identity politics as an alternative. A critical need thus is for what the author calls “positive identity politics,” or a widely shared sense of community that gives a feeling of equal importance to all sectors of society. Achieving this goal will, however, be an enormous challenge. In seeking actionable remedies for the broken political system of the United States, this book makes a major scholarly contribution to current debates about the future of liberal democracy. "

In Illiberal Reformers, Thomas Leonard reexamines the economic progressives whose ideas and reform agenda underwrote the Progressive Era dismantling of laissez-faire and the creation of the regulatory welfare state, which, they believed, would humanize and rationalize industrial capitalism. But not for all. Academic social scientists such as Richard T. Ely, John R. Commons, and Edward A. Ross, together with their reform allies in social work, charity, journalism, and law, played a pivotal role in establishing minimum-wage and maximum-hours laws, workmen's compensation, progressive income taxes, antitrust regulation, and other hallmarks of the regulatory welfare state. But even as they offered uplift to some, economic progressives advocated exclusion for others, and did both in the name of progress. Leonard meticulously reconstructs the influence of Darwinism, racial science, and eugenics on scholars and activists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, revealing a reform community deeply ambivalent about America's poor. Economic progressives championed labor legislation because it would lift up the deserving poor while excluding immigrants, African Americans, women, and 'mental defectives, ' whom they vilified as low-wage threats to the American workingman and to Anglo-Saxon race integrity. Economic progressives rejected property and contract rights as illegitimate barriers to needed reforms. But their disregard for civil liberties extended much further. Illiberal Reformers shows that the intellectual champions of the regulatory welfare state proposed using it not to help those they portrayed as hereditary inferiors, but to exclude them. -- Provided by publisher.

This book is the first systematic analysis of the efforts of a broad range of contemporary far-right thinkers to popularize their critiques of liberal-democratic norms and institutions and make their ideas the subjects of sustained political and academic debate. The book focuses on outspoken thinkers in western and eastern Europe, Russia, the United States, Canada, and Australia. They include Alain de Benoist, Guillaume Faye, Götz Kubitschek, Pat Buchanan, Fróði Midjord, Jason Jorjani, contributors to the online magazine Quillette, and the elusive personality known as the Bronze Age Pervert. The book explores the diverse intellectual foundations of these thinkers’ positions, the similarities and differences in their ideas, and their prospects for influencing attitudes about democratic politics within their respective countries. It examines diverse movements and schools of thought, including the European New Right, Paleoconservatism, the Alt-right, Identitarianism, White nationalism, and antifeminism. Providing a much-needed global perspective, this book will be of considerable interest to students and scholars of populism, right-wing extremism, identity politics, fascism, racism, and conservatism.

In the second half of the twentieth century, the United States engaged in the most ambitious and far-reaching liberal order building the world had yet seen. This liberal international order has been one of the most successful in providing security and prosperity to more people, but in the last decade the American-led order has been troubled. Some argue that the Bush administration undermined it. Others argue that we are witnessing he end of the American era. In Liberal Leviathan G. John Ikenberry argues that the crisis that besets the American-led order is a crisis of authority. The forces that have triggered this crisis have resulted from the successful functioning and expansion of the postwar liberal order, not its breakdown.

Providing an innovative conceptualization to extremist political movements founded upon "world-historic" populations and vanguard party organizations, Vanguardism sets out a new path in investigating the intellectual and historical influences that created extremist politics, the totalitarian movements and regimes of the twentieth century, and a framework for interpreting extremism in the present. Expanding its view across the turbulent intellectual currents of the nineteenth century, Philip W. Gray illustrates how these ideas shaped the shared ideational and organizational structures that would develop into Leninism, Fascism, and Nazism in the early twentieth century. Moving beyond the Second World War, the book explicates how vanguardism did not vanish with the war’s conclusion, but was modified throughout the period of national liberation movements and Western extremist groups over the ensuing decades. Concluding in the present with an eye to the future, Gray presents a framework for comprehending the extremist movement of today, and how organizational shifts can give us clues to the forms of totalitarian politics of tomorrow. Original and provocative, Vanguardism will become essential reading for everyone looking to understand totalitarianism and extremist politics of our time.

Civil Rights and the Crisis of Liberalism: The Democratic Party, 1945-1976 is about ideology and politics. It focuses on the civil rights issue in Democratic party politics from 1945 to 1976 but glances at a longer history to describe American liberalism.