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This chapter introduces the themes and arguments of the book. It explains how terms such as Left and Right have changed meanings dramatically since their origin in the French Revolution. It outlines the wrong turnings taken by elements on the Left in their intellectual journeys over the last 200 years. It also outlines the contents of each chapter.

In Europe today the Holocaust (1933–45) has become a “hot potato” in the complex perceptions and relations between the Muslim and European communities. The attitudes of Muslim migrants to the Holocaust are contradictory, drawing on its lesson as a warning of their future, while simultaneously denying or distorting its historical factuality. As for Christian Europe, its present-day guilty conscience reacts to the atrocities committed against the Jews by demonstrating politically correct behaviour and excessive tolerance to Muslims reaching its shores. Socially, Muslim migrants remind themselves not to believe that Europeans will ever fully accept them however much they assimilate into European culture. Politically, the rapidly expanding European far-Right substitutes the Koran for The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and describes Muslim migrants as “the new enemy from within.” Muslims counter-claim the Arabs paid for Europe’s Holocaust atrocities with Israel’s establishment and the Palestinian’s disentitlement. In a bizarre twist to the Triangle, European right-wingers (previously Holocaust deniers and deeply anti-Jewish) are now courting Israel to gain legitimacy for their nationalist view of a shared threat in the form of Islamic world domination.

This chapter explains how the original terms Left and Right emerged in the French Revolution in 1789-1792. The Left and Right were divided primarily on the question of the legitimate source of authority for government, and secondarily on the question of universal and equal human rights. The Right defended religion and aristocratic birth as sources of authority. The Left rejected these, and sought somehow to root authority in the will of the people. The Left leaders of the French Revolution advocated an individualistic, property-owning, market economy, just as the English Levellers had done in the 1640s and the American revolutionaries in the 1770s. This chapter also contests the Marxist notion that 1789 was a ‘bourgeois revolution’. It was not primarily a victory of capitalists over feudal aristocrats.

This section introduces readers to the Coors Brewing Company, its Colorado roots, and the allure that its beer had in the 1960s and 1970s for many Americans, including the author’s family members. Yet as the brewery’s reach extended across the American West, activists of many different backgrounds began to boycott Coors’s products for reasons that included the company’s anti-union practices and discriminatory hiring, as well as the Coors family’s conservative politics. This introduction also links this history of the boycott to historical scholarship on activism and coalition-building in the late 20th century United States, as well as scholarship on consumer activism and boycotts. It argues that the history of the Coors boycott highlights the persistence of coalitional activism into the 1970s and beyond, underscores grassroots efforts to combat the rise of New Right politics, and highlights the evolution of the Coors boycott from an instrumental to an expressive, politicized tool.