THE SOCIALIST AWAKENING: What's Different Now About the Left, & THE POLITICS OF OUR TIME: Populism, Nationalism, Socialism

THE SOCIALIST AWAKENING: What's Different Now About the Left (Columbia Global Reports series)
JOHN B. JUDIS
Columbia University Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$12.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: John Judis is the author of one of the seminal books about the 2016 election, The Populist Explosion, which has sold 38,000 copies and was named One of six books to help understand Trump's win by The New York Times and The Economist called it "Well-written and well-researched, powerfully argued and perfectly timed." Judis is also the author of The Nationalist Revival, published in 2018, which was highly acclaimed and has sold over 9,000 copies. EJ Dionne in The American Prospect called it essential reading.

Both titles have been popular as course adoptions Judis is a veteran political reporter who examines national and global political trends through a nonpartisan lens. He specializes in speaking truth to liberals, wrote EJ Dionne in The Washington Post. Through his long career in progressive journalism, Judis has made a habit of seeing things that others were missing. With his new book examining the new socialism of the left, he once again provides a clarifying look at one of the biggest political trends of our time. Completes Judis's political trilogy explaining the Trump era.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I read this book, and I believed it was true. I do not now know if its analysis of Millennials is accurate, and thus what happened in November 2024 was an anomaly of some sort...read "the results were manipulated like they were in 2016"...or if Author Judis is just like the rest of us elitists on the left who just want to believe as much as Fox Mulder wanted to believe.

Maybe I'm an idiot (stop snickering) but I choose door number optimism.

My generation, like the one before us and the one immediately after, fell for the capitalist lies about socialism = totalitarianism, thus flat refused to see the way socialism rescued capitalism from a full-on leftist rebellion during the Great Depression, and created the most powerful economy in the history of the planet, and reduced immiseration on a scale so epic that the Economic Royalists have spent forty-five years fighting back all the gains made so their power will once again be unchallenged and unshared.

I am deeply distressed that the plan is succeeding still, accelerating even, as they roll out the fascist facets of their controlling regime. All it took was repeating the old lies about Others that regularly succeed in scaring the crap out of the delicate little manbabies who can't tolerate anyone not looking/acting/thinking exactly like them.

So reading this book felt a little like masochism. It also felt a lot like a call to arms, a path marked towards reclaiming the future from the tech scum of the Nerd Reich before it becomes nigh-on impossible.

Don't shirk your part in the battle for the future. #ReadingIsResistance

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THE POLITICS OF OUR TIME: Populism, Nationalism, Socialism (Columbia Global Reports)
JOHN B. JUDIS
Columbia University Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$19.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The distinguished political analyst John Judis has brought out a book with Columbia Global Reports during each of the last three national political seasons: The Populist Explosion in 2016, The Nationalist Revival in 2018, and The Socialist Awakening in 2020. Together, these books chart the rise during the second decade of the twenty-first century of new and unexpected political movements in the United States and Europe that arose in the wake of the Great Recession, the conflict with al-Qaeda and ISIS, and encroaching climate change.

Judis has revised and updated these three books, and written a new introductory essay that seeks to explain the tumultuous last decade—most notably, Donald Trump's presidency and the response to a global pandemic and recession. This volume is an indispensable guide to understanding the deeply rooted disenchantment that gave rise to populist parties and politicians on the right and left—and to the global changes that have transformed the politics of our time.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Tendentious revisions and introductory essays, all with a cautiously hopeful tone.

Might shoulda waited until 2025 to assess the project in either its success or its failure.

Necessary reading...this omnibus edition is very useful indeed. I'm not at all sure Author Judis is related to Cassandra; I'm thinking more Pandora. But let's look at this editorial project for what it offers: Hope, faith in the malleability of the politically naïve in our direction not just theirs.

John B. Judis is able to point to the reasons for why we are where we are. That is an excellent starting point to get onto a new path.