front cover of American Multiculturalism and the Anti-Discrimination Regime
American Multiculturalism and the Anti-Discrimination Regime
The Challenge to Liberal Pluralism
Thomas F. Powers
St. Augustine's Press, 2023
Wokeness, cancel culture, identity politics, political correctness, multiculturalism—terms unsettling but also somehow inescapable. Thomas F. Powers shows how these are all one thing, elements of one broad political phenomenon—the anti-discrimination regime—–that has since 1964 been working to challenge and undermine America’s defining liberal democratic tradition (the tradition of the Declaration and the Constitution). The many deep lines of tension between the old and the new, presented here with arresting clarity, allow us to grasp the new order in its distinctiveness. Novel imperatives to regulate private life (behavior, speech, thought) begin to come to sight in the new order’s many laws and institutions. Attentive to the crucial role of law, the main focus of this book is nevertheless on the ideas, especially the moral ideals, thrust upon us by the new regime. This study examines theorists of multicultural education (non-postmodernist and postmodernist) who, without hesitation, set forth a new civic education and a new form of democratic pluralism for America. When a country has a new civic education, a new pluralism, and a new morality, these are signs of fundamental change not to be ignored. The book culminates in a direct critical examination of the new logic of group politics and the new morality of the anti-discrimination regime. In embarking on this new chapter of democratic life, do we know what we are doing?
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front cover of A Monument to Deceit
A Monument to Deceit
Sam Adams and the Vietnam Intelligence Wars
C. Michael Hiam
University Press of New England, 2014
It was an enigma of the Vietnam War: American troops kept killing the Viet Cong—and being killed in the process—and yet their ranks continued to grow. When CIA analyst Sam Adams uncovered documents suggesting a Viet Cong army more than twice as large as previously reckoned, another war erupted, this time within the ranks of America’s intelligence community. Although originally clandestine, this conflict involving the highest levels of the U.S. government burst into public view during the acrimonious lawsuit Westmoreland v. CBS. The central issue in the suit, as in the war itself, was the calamitous failure of U.S. intelligence agencies to ascertain the strength of the Viet Cong and get that information to troops in a timely fashion. The legacy of this failure—whether caused by institutional inertia, misguided politics, or individual hubris—haunts our nation. In the era of Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden, Sam Adams’ tireless crusade for “honest intelligence” resonates strongly today.
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