Features
- Cover Type: Hard Cover with 176 pages
- Published by: Rutgers University Press July 30, 2008
- Written in: English
- ISBN 10 Number: 0813543436
- ISBN 13 Number: 978-0813543437
-
Book Dimensions:
8.5 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
- Weighs: 12.8 ounces
From Publishers Weekly
This slim, scathing study of the right's trajectory argues that conservatives co-opted the utopian radicalism of the left to brilliantly position themselves as political underdogs, while efficiently consolidating power. With a little cheekiness and ample research, Mattson (
When America Was Great) contends that today's conservatives, marked by their aggressive, confrontational style, their populism, pizzazz and brashness, are the true inheritors of the '60s' rebel spirit. The author skillfully links the invasion of Iraq with the new conservative utopianism (a new city on the hill in the Middle East) and identifies conservatism's ideological family tree, detecting the echoes of Bill Buckley in Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh. He enriches his familiar analysis of the birth of the neocons by reviewing how conservatives learned to define themselves more sharply, using the radical style of their liberal counterparts, and demonstrates how populism was fused with neoconservatism to sire the politics of uncivil debate. Passionately, unapologetically partisan, the author's incendiary argument only cools when he champions liberalism as the middle of the political spectrum, perhaps proving that he—like the conservatives he so effectively skewers—is best on the offensive.
(Aug.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Product Review
"
Rebels All! is a brilliantly irreverent study of a shrewdly irreverent movement." --Michael Kazin, author of
A Godly Hero<br /><br />"In this splendid little book, Kevin Mattson shows how mindless postmodernism meets populist bravado in the bullying yawps of so-called conservativesan essential contribution to the anatomy of the American Right." --Todd Gitlin, author of
The Bulldozer and the Big Tent"In this splendid little book, Kevin Mattson shows how mindless postmodernism meets populist bravado in the bullying yawps of so-called conservativesan essential contribution to the anatomy of the American Right." --Todd Gitlin, author of
The Bulldozer and the Big TentBright, insightful, and expansive,
Rebels All! is an intelligent, provocative, and highly readable interpretation of the modern conservative movement and mind. Mattson offers the kind of broad, historically informed analysis that will reshape how readers think about the American conservative impulse that has grown so potent in recent years. --
Nelson Lichtenstein, editor of American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth Century There are many books on conservatism, but none of them gives us exactly what ,i>Rebels All! does: a somewhat irreverent account of postwar conservatism delivered with Mattson's trademark sharp interpretive point of view. --
Neil Jumonville, editor of The New York Intellectuals Reader
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