All-American Rebels

This book was marked “history” and I mistook the blurb to mean that it was a pro-democracy, scholarly book. It is neither. It pretends to be both but the array of slurs leveled at every politician who does not show a friendly face to Marxist thought (xenophobe, homophobe, inept, lame, ineffective, inflammatory, etc) along with unsupported phrases like “everybody knows ___” instead of quoting from true scholarly works meant I could not read every nasty word in this book.

The work does not give an honest analysis of the ideologies and thought processes that drive the movements mentioned in the blurb, and it does not compare and contrast and show strengths and weaknesses by actual data. It gives no footnotes with actual quotes; if you are interested in looking up a certain claim, then you would have to read the entirety of a handful of books that are quoted as further reading for each chapter. And yet they had time and space to create a diligent topical index that takes up over 5% of the book; why not a regular system of footnotes? Surely, as a professor, the author is fully adept at their use.

The book's message in a nutshell: “Sure, we have radicals in our group. We like democracy, but its exercise in politics leads us to name calling and free-speech-shaming. We may have a few nuts in our bunch, but honestly we're better than the opposition because they are all nuts. Need facts? Oh, everyone knows it. Hey, my friend wrote a book. Go read his book.”

Unscholarly, hateful, and misinformed.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a free reading copy. A favorable review was not required.