I have a leftist friend who's a historian writing a paper on how the right is so successful at organizing and why the left sucks at it. Trying to help them gather sources. The more scholary the better.
She's particularly looking at right wing paramilitary organizations (proud boys, 3%s ect) And why the left has trouble forming their own.
Edit: question might have been a bit ambiguous, we all know a lot of the basic reasons for this, what I need is the type of thing that can be used for an academic research paper. Interesting discussion is still good though so have at it.
Same!🙌
I like it that Dark Money describes the funding apparatus (Koch and Scaife) for the ideology laundering and cadre formations that Democracy In Chains gets into (James Buchanan and the various think tanks).
Yeah, I read Democracy in Chains a few years after reading Dark Money, so it was a bit like reading a prequel.😂 Fascinating stuff, especially the background on using Chile as a testing ground. I usually recommend the two along with Listen, Liberal by Thomas Frank as a kind of speedrun to understanding the current states of the two parties and why neither one gives a shit about us.
I feel like these 3 books taken together plus The Reactionary Mind by Corey Robin probably lay out some of the best non-Marxist analyses of the material and ideological conditions of the modern US. I would probably add The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein and The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins for the international/imperialist criticism.
I've added The Reactionary Mind to my list, thanks. Already got Shock Doctrine on there.👍 The Jakarta Method, fuckin A!I just read that a few months ago and that's the book that really cemented in my head that Nazis vs Communists are the epitome of the class war; With Nazis fighting for the rich and Communists fighting for each other. Like I was aware of most of those "Operations" and whatnot, but Bevins did such an amazing job of laying out how actions in the US led to slaughter across the globe. Thanks to JM I've really made a lot of headway with people by explaining to them that, in our history books, "Anti-Communists" forces are code for Nazis (or local equivalents) and the scary "Communist Revolutionaries" are just uprising workers. It really connects with libs when they're seeing all this shit go down nowadays and realizing that the media and DC are fucking them over. Obviously not enough to radicalize them or anything, but it's gotten my foot in the door for attacking the the other US history myths.