Subtitle: A Short History of
the Conservative Mind in Postwar America Author:
Kevin Mattson Subject:
American Studies /
Politics / Current Events Cloth ISBN 978-0-8135-4343-7 Pages:
176 pages Series:
Ideas in Action Publication Date: August 2008
"Mattson has pulled off a difficult task: a highly
readable, concise yet meaty analysis of the conservative
ascendancy focusing on the style and arguments of its
public intellectuals."—San
Francisco Chronicle
"A slim, scathing
study...passionate, incendiary...like the
conservatives he so effectively skewers, Mattson is best on the
offensive."
—Publishers Weekly
Harvard Coop
Cambridge, MA
Thursday, September 11, 7 pm
For more information,
contact: Jeremy Wang-Iverson, jwi at rutgers.edu,
(732) 445-7762 x626
Praise
for Rebels All!
"This is a brilliantly
irreverent study of a shrewdly irreverent movement. Kevin Mattson, one
of our finest historians of liberalism, captures the ties that bind
William F. Buckley to Ann Coulter, and he does so with a light touch
that even his subjects should admire."
"In this splendid little book, Kevin Mattson shows how mindless
postmodernism meets populist bravado in the bullying yawps of so-called
conservatives, how the barbaric yawps of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter
are rooted in the rebellious vituperations and mannerly
sneers of the late William F. Buckley, Jr. An essential contribution to
the anatomy of the American Right."
"There are many books on conservatism, but none of them gives
us exactly what Rebels All! does: a somewhat irreverent
account of
postwar conservatism delivered with Mattson's trademark sharp
interpretive point of view."
"Bright,
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."
"I look forward to all of
Kevin Mattson's works of history and I've not been disappointed yet. Upton Sinclair and the Other American Century
is a thoughtful, well-researched, and extremely eloquently told
excavation of the history of the American left and, indeed, the
American nation, as well as a testament to the power of one man to
influence his times. Well done."
Do you ever wonder why
conservative pundits drop the word
"faggot" or talk about killing
and then Christianizing Muslims abroad?
Do you wonder why the right's spokespeople seem so confrontational, rude, and over-the-top recently? Does it seem
strange that conservative
books have such apocalyptic titles? Do you marvel at why
conservative
writers trumpeted the "rebel" qualities of George W. Bush just a few
years back?
There is no doubt that the style of the political right today is tough,
brash, and by many accounts, not very conservative sounding. After all,
isn't conservatism supposed to be about maintaining standards,
upholding civility, and frowning upon rebellion? Historian Kevin
Mattson explains the apparent contradictions of the party in this fresh
examination of the postwar conservative mind. Examining a big cast of
characters that includes William
F. Buckley, Whittaker
Chambers, Norman
Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, Kevin Phillips, David Brooks, and others,
Mattson shows how right-wing intellectuals have always, but in
different ways, played to the populist and rowdy tendencies in
America's political culture. He boldly compares the conservative
intellectual movement to the radical utopians among the New Left of the
1960s and he explains how conservatism has ingested central features of
American culture, including a distrust of sophistication and
intellectualism and a love of popular culture, sensation, shock, and
celebrity.
Both a
work of history and political criticism, Rebels
All!
shows how the conservative mind made itself appealing, but also points
to its endemic problems. Mattson's conclusion outlines how a recast
liberalism should respond to the conservative ascendancy that has
marked our politics
for the last thirty years.
A volume
in the Ideas in Action series, edited by George Cotkin, Professor of History, California
Polytechnic University
