Bøger af Kenneth J. Long

America's debates over secularism are not what they seem. Far from being primarily about religion and its place in politics, these battles over ill-defined secularism are now seen as a diversion in an escalating culture war caused by incapacitated government. Government's failure to generate needed policies have made Americans angry and unkind: liberals becoming increasingly condescending while the right becomes more transparently racist. Politicians, unable to legislate, still need voters, and they succeed by swiftly changing "issues," which are often coded as religious but are mostly about everyday matters.Kenneth J. Long argues that public failure elicits personal vice. The liberal values of tolerance, acceptance, and inclusion are "virtues" of the condescending. The belief in science, a tool, is strange at best, and the disdain for the anti-scientific is likewise condescending. For the right, "Christian" is increasingly popular among those who are growing ever less religious and serves as cover for a racist white identity politics. Problems of Political Secularism: Broken Politics, Unkind Cultures illuminates the troublesome outcomes posed by "protecting" autonomy through restraint of representative government and by pitting constituency against constituency to "safeguard" faith from government and vice versa. People of goodwill, faithful and not, are needed to redirect our focus from the symptoms (cultural warfare) to the structural governmental causes.

Contemporary Anti-Muslim Politics provides a succinct but potent critique of the policies of Western nations toward Muslims, particularly the aggressive foreign policies of the United States and the exclusionary domestic policies of Europe. These policies have already claimed millions of Muslim lives. For decades, policies that rely on war, exclusion, and ghettoization have triggered conflict escalation. The actions of groups such as the Islamic State and Boko Haram are reactions to this history. Their tactics exacerbate negative stereotyping of Muslims generally and Western military strategies cause many Muslims to pursue survivalist politics that enable and strengthen such groups. Anti-Muslim politics in Western nations takes many forms beyond war and exclusion, including racialization, stereotyping, sacrilegious cultural assaults, mass media scapegoating, and even tolerance, which implies something unpalatable in need of toleration. The gridlock brought by pluralism and constitutionalism, both in Europe and the United States, serves few people well, but it has locked Muslims into an especially abusive status quo.

The Trouble with America critiques the theory and practice of American government, focusing on the fatal flaws of America's core political arrangements. Institutionalized pluralism, the structural dispersal of power, generates government too weak to solve our public problems. American constitutionalism, the limitation of government power and authority, protects property rights far better than it defends our civil liberties, and it offers little or no protection for non-citizens. Capitalism is a hyper-competitive and grossly unfair economic system, which rewards pre-existing wealth far better than hard work or talent, and encourages petty materialist consumption of mostly low-quality goods, undermining taste as well as fairness. Taken together, pluralism, constitutionalism, and capitalism in America harm our society in a myriad of ways, leaving us with inadequate representation, poor leadership, social and political paralysis and irresponsibility, unrealistic self-images, and scandalously poor domestic and foreign policies. This book will prove a valuable supplement in American government courses, an alternative to the centrist material currently dominating textbooks on this subject.