U.S. Intellectual History Blog

O’Connor on Brink Lindsey’s THE AGE OF ABUNDANCE

Brink Lindsey. The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture. Collins, 2007. 978-0-06-074766-4 (hardcover).

Reviewer: Mike O’Connor

In the most recent issue of his long-running DIY journal The Baffler, Thomas Frank (of What’s the Matter With Kansas? fame) decried “the centrist fantasy” current among “Washington’s responsible non-Republican classes.” Viewing this “unthinking consensus” as little more than the doppelganger of the poisonous partisanship it opposes, Frank lists as one of the characteristic positions of this new centrism “political libertarianism, which for this particular class of people is so self-evident that it requires of its proponents not advocacy but simple assertion. (Of course free trade. …

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