Returning to the Enlightenment ideals of Founding Fathers like James Madison to understand the stakes in the current illiberal political climate.
O’Leary—a research fellow at the Center for the Study of Democracy at University of California, Irvine, and former reporter for the Los Angeles Times and TIME—has been an observer of the political scene for three decades, and he cares deeply about the recent drift toward “reactionary” politics in the U.S. Noting that “for two centuries, [America] has been the modern Athens for those seeking a society that values democracy, equality, and freedom,” he is appalled by the Trump administration’s seeming determination to “reject that legacy, preferring instead the ancient authoritarian principles of privilege, hierarchy, inequality, and exclusion that divides societies into winners and losers based on ethnic identity, gender, social status, and economic power.” As other historians have documented, O’Leary points out the moment when classic conservative principles turned reactionary: the ugly 1964 compromise between Barry Goldwater and the white supremacist South, represented by segregationist George Wallace. To tell the unsettling story of the nation’s continued drift into Trumpism and its many attendant ills, O’Leary plunges back into the historical record, showing the strenuous adherence to individual autonomy that the Enlightenment authors espoused despite the illiberality of their own era. The author cogently breaks down the writings of Locke, Paine, and others, showing the terrible compromises the early founders had to make in securing constitutional ratification by the slave states. Moving into the recent past and present, O’Leary cleanly melds historical research with his own personal outrage. “Donald Trump stands as the embodiment of reactionary America,” he writes. “He is both a hard-right capitalist and a man who believes that his whiteness and his maleness give him the right to hold others who are neither in contempt.”
A highly opinionated yet accessible work of history and current affairs.
(16 pages of color photos)