More Equal Than Others
America from Nixon to the New Century
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- $32.99
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- $32.99
Publisher Description
During the past quarter century, free-market capitalism was recognized not merely as a successful system of wealth creation, but as the key determinant of the health of political and cultural democracy. Now, renowned British journalist and historian Godfrey Hodgson takes aim at this popular view in a book that promises to become one of the most important political histories of our time. More Equal Than Others looks back on twenty-five years of what Hodgson calls "the conservative ascendancy" in America, demonstrating how it has come to dominate American politics.
Hodgson disputes the notion that the rise of conservatism has spread affluence and equality to the American people. Quite the contrary, he writes, the most distinctive feature of American society in the closing years of the twentieth century was its great and growing inequality. He argues that the combination of conservative ideology and corporate power and dominance by mass media obsessed with lifestyle and celebrity have caused America to abandon much of what was best in its past. In fact, he writes, income and wealth inequality have become so extreme that America now resembles the class-stratified societies of early twentieth-century Europe.
More Equal Than Others addresses a broad range of issues, with chapters on politics, the new economy, immigration, technology, women, race, and foreign policy, among others. A fitting sequel to the author's critically acclaimed America In Our Time, More Equal Than Others is not only an outstanding synthesis of history, but a trenchant commentary on the state of the American Dream.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hodgson sets out to say some things outside "the two ruling narratives of American history over the past three decades: the liberal recessional or conservative triumphalism." Above all, he observes, "Great and growing inequality has been the most salient social fact about the America of the conservative ascendancy. It is hard not to ask whether that was not one of the conservatives' strategic goals." Yet inequality is mentioned more than discussed, while conservative mechanisms that may increase it are barely even mentioned until 100 pages later. Despite occasional flashes of insight, Hodgson, biographer of Daniel Patrick Moynihan and a scholar at the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University, repeatedly muddles matters with generous dollops from those ruling narratives such as the Democratic Leadership Council's analysis of what ailed the Democrats in the 1980s regurgitated as gospel. Similarly, he attributes white backlash to "the noisy claims of radical black leadership" in his chapter on race, while his chapter on women blames articulate feminists not so much for antagonizing men and conservative women but for letting their middle-class "cultural" movement get in the way of a second, "primarily economic" women's movement, "silent and largely the sum of private decisions." He rightly notes that the Internet boom was built on decades of government-funded, university-nurtured research, then says, "he legendary entrepreneurs deserve every bit of their fame and fortune." Hodgson inadvertently demonstrates what he seeks to explain: how inequality can grow so sharply, yet be marginalized in political discourse.
