The book is about the history of the term "Liberal," which is newer than you think, and its critiques, which are older.

It is foremost a book about language, and moves biographically through different politicians and pundits to discuss how each used the label and its variations, including the curious history of "Neoliberal," one of the greatest triumphs of descriptive lexicography.

The author is not out to rehabilitate the term and suggests discarding it, contra several other books this book mentions.

The author is quick to point out how these critiques contain an element of truth, maybe even too much so.1 The critiques around race and racism remain the most trenchant, and the most emotive. Many around class have aged poorly. Consider this me sending the "and let you live in a society" meme to Tom Wolfe's grave. As to the rightward critiques, the author's thesis is that there never really was a Liberal, excluding the feverish imagination of Aaron Sorkin. Primarily a means of not saying the c-word or the s-word, it was flipped and weaponized, specifically by William F. Buckley Jr., and became the GOP's glue.

Buckley is alleged to have sanewashed the fringe Right. This is a broader project towards the same end. The Republican party should not work. It is made up of ideologically opposed entities, where no tent would be big enough. The author's premise is that Liberal, as an idea, is the spit and baling wire that got old school Libertarians and the proto- Christian Fascist into the same room.2

By extension then, there is no such thing as a Conservative. We are all anti-Liberals; some are more anti- than others. The author has great evidence here. People were brazen about it as a strategy and took notes. And while contemporary politics only gets passing mention, the thesis fits.

The book is fun. Much more that I expected. The author makes light of much of who and what he discusses. It is not snarky, more of a deadpan stares into camera at hypocrisy and craven calculations, which know neither right nor left. This is also a both-sides argument done right. Outside the sense of an extended eye-roll at the ecology of grifters on this topic in the early '00s, a Conservative remix of the text would take minimal effort.

The problem is contained within the parenthetical of the title. The book is well sourced, except when it is not. Repeatedly, I found myself looking for a footnote that was not there, usually over a credible assertion that I wanted to see the primary sources on. The particular cluster here was around the self-defeatism. Why was the line of attack so effective?

The book's answer amounts to hate more marketable than hope, which has an Occam's Razor appeal. But centering in again the Buckley moment, how he built and articulated the argument is clear and well-supported. The response to it, the flight from Liberal as a concept, is not. I infer that the Left critiques of other chapters are meant to be that. But that is not quite the same thing. The book does not require an explanation of that to still stand, but it was jarring in comparison to how it treated other points.

The book is great as a study of political language, but it fails to answer the question its title poses. It is an important history, just not as useful as I might hope.

My thanks to the author, Kevin M. Schultz, for writing the book, and to the publisher, University of Chicago Press, for making the ARC available to me.