Scan barcode
tsharris's review against another edition
4.0
Takes a little bit to really build up steam, but the last couple chapters - on how the latter-day Republican coalition came together - really make it worthwhile. She really brings home how conservative activists sought to peel off working-class whites from the New Deal coalition in order to win power (which also suggests that Trump's coalition is not all that dissimilar, just that the appeals to working-class and small-business-owning whites are more overt and the free market appeals have been downplayed). Good book to read in conjunction with Sam Rosenfeld's The Polarizers, because Phillips-Fein shows the programmatic goals of some of the same people Rosenfeld discusses (my review of Rosenfeld here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3171646854?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1).
megapolisomancy's review against another edition
4.0
There's been a lot of historical scholarship recently (Kruse, Lassiter, Crespino, etc) on the mass grassroots movements on the Right in 20th century America. Philips-Fein instead offers an examination of the behind-the-scenes backers who provided financial support and intellectual legitimacy to these movements. To that end she guides readers through the development of far right fiscal conservatism from the reaction against the New Deal through Reagan's first presidential election. This covers an impressive number of libertarian think tanks, corporate goodwill campaigns and employee politicization efforts, and good old-fashioned political campaigns (mostly in the form of Goldwater and Reagan-Nixon is oddly absent in this narrative, and while I know he wasn't a warrior of the invisible hand the way the other two were, he was still enough of a bastard to be brought up more).
It also would have been nice to get more of a feel for the way that these machinations impacted the actual policies and governance of the right once they were in power, but I guess that is outside of the scope of a single study like this (and has been covered in plenty of other works). This is a fantastic contribution to the literature, though, and I think reading this in concert with Thomas Frank's last book would be pretty enlightening (also depressing).
It also would have been nice to get more of a feel for the way that these machinations impacted the actual policies and governance of the right once they were in power, but I guess that is outside of the scope of a single study like this (and has been covered in plenty of other works). This is a fantastic contribution to the literature, though, and I think reading this in concert with Thomas Frank's last book would be pretty enlightening (also depressing).
More...