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This chapter explores the left's view of the Spanish nation. It is argued that since the end of Francoism, the left has traveled a considerable distance in its complex relationship with the idea of Spain. The picture that emerges is a fragmented one. Most probably, there is no solution to the issue of solidarity versus devolution, nor is an agreement likely to be found on whether Spain is a nation of nations or a nation of citizens. Unlike thirty years ago, the debate today focuses on the meaning of Spain as a nation, though very few would deny its existence. The fact that the issue resonates so strongly among many on the left and is a matter of intense deliberation underlines the continued strength of the Spanish nation as an idea. Perhaps more crucially, the left has created a new national mythology that is shared by the vast majority of the citizens. There can be few doubts that in the past thirty years the left has reinvented the Spanish nation in the minds of millions of Spaniards.

This chapter focuses on the theories of Ernst Fraenkel, one of the most important Socialist intellectuals in postwar Germany. In the 1950s, the German left transformed from a class-based party of international neutrality into a broad-tent party of Cold War conviction. This shift by the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) has its roots in intellectual projects in the Weimar period. No one represents this continuity better than Fraenkel, a member of a unique intellectual school that sought to fuse Socialist and bourgeois theories of law, politics, and democracy. In this line of thought, it was incumbent on Socialists and middle-class liberals to join together in building a new kind of democratic regime, premised on equal respect for individual rights and social welfare. According to Fraenkel, the SPD had to renounce its belief that only the nationalization of the economy would bring about “true” democratic equality. Instead, Socialists had to embrace democratic visions that centered on individual rights, reach out to the middle class, and focus on welfare programs. In Fraenkel's mind, the true threat to this progressive vision was not the middle classes and industrialists, as many Socialists claimed, but ultimately communism.

This chapter considers the extreme Left of the French Revolution led by an obscure journalist who called himself “Gracchus” Babeuf and his co-worker Philippe Buonarroti, a French citizen of Italian birth, and their Conspiracy of Equals of 1796. The Conspiracy of Equals has always been looked back on with respectful interest by partisans of the modern Left, as the first manifestation of the revolutionary movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. How far the Conspiracy was “communistic” remains uncertain. But even the inner leadership had diverse aims, and the whole movement was so secret and so short-lived that the secondary organizers, not to mention the ordinary followers, never knew who the leaders were or what their purposes might be.

This chapter reflects on the possibilities for reclaiming and rethinking progressive utopian thought in light of the experiences of both Amish and Salvadoran experiences in creating environmentally sustainable and socially just communities. The distinctive contributions of religion to these experiences are explored, as well as the significance of recent changes in the political left, in the nature of progressive social movements, and in religious and cultural life in the Americas.

This chapter examines the trajectories of revolutionary activities in 1789 France, 1917 Russia, 1979 Iran, and 1932–1933 Germany. It reveals that the first act of major revolutions typically saw more moderate forces in the ascendant. In France, Russia, and Iran these were liberal reformers. A quite different example was Germany, when most thought that a right-wing, nationalist army was about to take control with the aim of restoring something close to the pre-1918 conservative imperial regime. Instead, a much more radical, genuinely revolutionary Nazi Party took power. However distinct this was from other revolutions, it was similar in this respect: it took an unanticipated extreme form that very few had foreseen. Adolf Hitler changed Germany in ways unsought by either the left, the moderate center, or the incompetent conservatives who had lost control.

This chapter chronicles the tensions that would eventually give rise to the Spanish Civil War. It argues that these enmities had been steadily developing since the fall of the Monarchy and the proclamation of the Republic in April 1931 and, with increasing intensity, since the victory of the Popular Front—the left coalition—in the February 1936 elections. Labor unrest in the rural and urban sectors was only the beginning—the 1934 repression of the Socialists, along with the animosity felt between the political left and right, led to continued episodes of provocation and retaliations that only grew worse following the victory of the Popular Front. All these, coupled with a beleaguered government unsuccessfully attempting to quell the growing unrest, would eventually result in a military revolt that broke out in Spanish Morocco on July 17, 1936, initiating the Civil War.

Analyses of party manifestos, of expert judgements on party positions, and of parties’ actual behaviour when voting on military missions all show that party-political contestation is structured along the left/right dimension. Support for the military and its interventions is systematically related to the left/right dimension in a skewed inverted U-curve: support is weakest at the far left and increases as one moves along the left/right axis to the centre right where it reaches its peak. The far right is less supportive then the centre right but less opposed than the far left. The relation to the ‘new politics’ dimension is shaped very similarly but is generally weaker. Party-political contestation of military missions in the post-Communist party systems in Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe follows a different pattern than elsewhere. In the post-Communist party systems, the relationship between left/right and support of military interventions is weaker, and the relationship with the ‘new politics’ dimension is either weak or even points in the opposite direction as in Western Europe. It is important to note, however, that the influence of the left/right dimension is not limited to Western Europe. As the manifestos of various non-European countries show, the correlation can also be found in Asia, Oceania, Africa, and Latin America.

The aim of this chapter is to elaborate on the processes that contributed to the rise and consolidation of the parliamentary left in this southern state of India. By concentrating on the evolution of the constitutional left in the state, the chapter provides a useful account of how Marxism–Leninism remains an effective ideology for political mobilization amidst competing ideologies, upheld by various political parties and outfits. Over nearly seven decades the parliamentary left has undergone significant transformation in Kerala in response to the changing socio-economic environment in which the social left has overtaken the political left in importance. That is, ideological claims are no longer an effective instrument for political mobilization but rather undergird political processes that are focused on sustaining the prevalent political institutions. These institutions are, at least in popular perception, effective instruments for meaningful socio-economic changes at the grassroots.

This chapter focuses on Mills' book The New Men of Power (1948), his first major study after his dissertation. It argues that study should be understood as the opening salvo in his long journey from a left-leaning member of the liberal intelligentsia to his standing as perhaps the country's leading radical social critic. Under the patronage of Dwight Macdonald from Politics, Mills honed his journalistic skills and analytic political perspective as well as his knowledge and views on labor. From Macdonald and others associated with the independent Left he formulated the concept of the “third camp,”that is, the view that neither the Western capitalist powers, especially the United States, nor the Soviet Union represented the hope for freedom and democracy that each so aggressively espoused. With this idea of a third camp, the independent Left looked forward to what Mills was to term, in The New Men of Power, a new “power bloc” capable of instituting a variation of democratic socialism that would not rely on state domination but would invent novel forms of workers' control as well as ownership of the productive powers of society.

This chapter focuses on Mills's place among the circle of New York intellectuals. Their common ground was initially a shared dissident leftist politics that challenged not only the mainstream but also the prevailing communist-controlled and communist-inspired cultural apparatus that dominated the putative opposition to American and world capitalism during the 1930s. By the 1950s, however, nearly all in this group were reconciled to mainstream American culture, political institutions, and governmental policies. Mills was associated with a small fraction of intellectuals and activists who refused to join the American celebration. He was almost singular in his refusal to fit neatly into the folds of either the pro- or anti-Soviet camp. He did not permit anticommunism to be radical. Consequently, he called for a New Left that would relegate the Russian question to the margins of radical thought and action and instead dedicate itself to the discovery of a distinctly American radical tradition.

This chapter discusses the views of Jim Wallis and Sojourners regarding the full inclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Christians within churches. It also examines gay liberation and the different Christian responses to it. For Wallis, every Christian has the obligation to defend the lives, dignity, and civil rights of gay and lesbian people. On the other hand, Sojourners considered same-sex sexuality as immoral. During the 1960s, gays and lesbians pushed movements to end legal and social discrimination against them. As a result, in 1973, the American Psychiatric Association overturned its classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder and removed therapies to “cure” gays. Most Protestant and Catholic leaders strove to support civil rights of gays while maintaining their stand that a same-sex relationship is immoral. The responses of evangelicals to same-sex marriage demonstrates the conflict in their positions to both the political left and the Religious Right.

This introductory chapter considers the causes for the sharp increase in inequality, weakened labor and left movements, and the resulting dominance of the corporate agenda following the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. Several trends have converged to define this moment. First, neoliberalism dominates the global economy. The neoliberal approach rejects the historical role of the government in overseeing the economy, which had been in place since the New Deal. The second trend is the process of globalization. Markets, finance, and production chains are not national but rather international, with capital and resources originating in different countries and crossing national borders. The third force is financialization. Financial interests increasingly dominate manufacturing and service industries.

This introductory chapter discusses how nostalgia is commonly understood as the opposite of utopia. Whereas utopia is the projection of a better world in the future, nostalgia is a longing for something in the past; yet there is a strong affinity between the two—a common rejection of the present. The image of nostalgia has remained amnesiac and reactionary, as it keeps circulating in art history and theory, demonstrated by the “historiographic” turn in contemporary art. Over time, negative evaluations of nostalgia have been developed by intellectuals from both the political Left and the political Right, with both sides stating that nostalgia acts as a screen for anxieties about emergent political trends. The chapter examines two influential indictments of nostalgia: Pierre Nora’s Lieux de Memoire (1984–1992), which represents right-wing conservativism, and Frederic Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), which offers a Marxist version of the nostalgia critique.

This chapter details Mills's political radicalization during the last decade of his life. Although he had been an opponent of perhaps the most popular war in U.S. history and always harbored deep suspicions of the powers that be, until the early 1950s it is fair to say that despite his adherence to a “third camp” politics he was far more tolerant of the United States as a liberal democracy than he was of Stalinist regimes. His main political ties were with labor progressives such as J. B. S. Hardman, social democrats such as Hans Gerth, and mildly dissident liberal academics such as Richard Hofstadter, Irving Howe, and Daniel Bell. However, from the publication of The Power Elite in 1956 to his last book, The Marxists, published posthumously in 1962, Mills' project looked forward to the creation of a new Left, one nestled deeply in the American grain of populism—a more egalitarian society marked by radical democracy—but not the American celebration to which many 1930s radicals had given their enthusiastic approbation.

This chapter challenges conventional liberal views of Tea Party supporters around race and fiscal conservatism. It argues that Tea Partiers are neither simply racist nor strictly libertarian nor straight-up fiscal conservatives. They are a constituency formed by the powerful framework for in-group/out-group politics that is an inheritance of liberal social welfare policy, and that has grouped individuals by race. The point of this argument is not to indict New Deal public policy. It is, rather, to hold liberals accountable for their share in the Tea Party phenomenon. Liberal social policy has a share in constituting the Tea Party, not just by provoking its backlash, but also by helping to define the terms in which Tea Party supporters recognize themselves. The Tea Party movement belongs to liberal America even as Tea Party rhetoric denounces liberalism and liberals denounce Tea Partiers.

This chapter traces the development of anti-immigrant legislation in Arizona, highlighting the steady, organized movement from the initial introduction of anti-immigrant legislation to the passage of SB 1070, the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act, and beyond. The evolution shows that Arizona's strategic movement from introduction of ideas to the passage of legislation was carefully crafted and executed by a coalition of state-elected officials and national activists, with the intent to utilize Arizona as a model for other states' actions. The chapter also reflects on the political left's failure to accurately gauge the seriousness of anti-immigrant proposals and the lack of strategic response to the steady progression of such legislation. Finally, it evaluates the impact of Arizona's anti-immigration laws on other states and looks ahead to the movement's next steps in Arizona and beyond.