This book is a dense and fascinating examination of the last 150 years of left-leaning politics in America. In my personal education, I found progressive figures markedly absent from state-endorsed texts, both at the high school and collegiate levels. I appreciated reading about the history of different progressive movements.

While I was expecting this book to be favorable to left-leaning thought (and it was), I was hoping for a historical and critical overview of the base ideologies to show how we got to where we are with those ideologies today. What I got was a very dry and superficial listing of names and dates associated with various left-leaning groups from the 1800s to today. The entire thing reads like an encyclopedia entry with no discussion or exploration of the overarching themes. The author is less an "author" and more a chronicler. Strangely for an academic leaning book, there is no regular footnote system, but rather an annotated bibliography for each chapter. While I was able to glean a few interesting nuggets for further research, any actual engagement with the material will have to come from elsewhere.

This book was marked "history" and I mistook the blurb to mean that it was a pro-democracy, scholarly book. It is neither. It pretends to be both but the array of slurs leveled at every politician who does not show a friendly face to Marxist thought (xenophobe, homophobe, inept, lame, ineffective, inflammatory, etc) along with unsupported phrases like "everybody knows ___" instead of quoting from true scholarly works meant I could not read every nasty word in this book.

The work does not give an honest analysis of the ideologies and thought processes that drive the movements mentioned in the blurb, and it does not compare and contrast and show strengths and weaknesses by actual data. It gives no footnotes with actual quotes; if you are interested in looking up a certain claim, then you would have to read the entirely of a handful of books that are quoted as further reading for each chapter. And yet they had time and space to create a diligent topical index that takes up over 5% of the book; why not a regular system of footnotes? Surely, as a professor, the author is fully adept at their use.

The book's message in a nutshell: "Sure, we have radicals in our group. We like democracy, but its exercise in politics leads us to name calling and free-speech-shaming. We may have a few nuts in our bunch, but honestly we're better than the opposition because they are all nuts. Need facts? Oh, everyone knows it. Hey, my friend wrote a book. Go read his book."

Unscholarly, hateful, and misinformed.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a free reading copy. A favorable review was not required.