This chapter offers an interpretation of Ursula K. Le Guin’s award-winning work of feminist science fiction, The Left Hand of Darkness, from the standpoint of a Hegelian understanding of the politics of recognition. It identifies three approaches to the politics of recognition, associated with the ideas of the politics of difference, the politics of identity, and the politics of identity-and-difference. The first is based on the notion of order, hierarchy status, and relationships between those who consider themselves to be unequals. The second is based on the notion of dialogue and communication between those who consider themselves to be equals. It sets aside all differences as being morally irrelevant. As such, it is associated with the notion of strong cosmopolitanism. The third attaches importance to both the similarities and the differences that exist between individuals. Le Guin’s commitment to feminism in the novel is sometimes associated with the second of these approaches. She is thought to be a strong cosmopolitan thinker. The chapter argues that Le Guin is in fact an advocate of the third approach. She is best thought of as a weak cosmopolitan thinker.

Chapter 9 observes that scholars routinely use empirical research to challenge Stories. The problem there is that people need some Stories in their lives, wherefore, if those Stories will not endure over time, they will not be able to hold communities together. That is, a scholarly churn of constant inquiry and encouraging doubt creates a danger that conservatives -- such as Andrew Bacevich -- justly warn against, of random momentum in scholarly fashions where the sum total of constantly changing theories can imperil the community’s welfare.

Chapter 3 describes how the Constitution created a system for control of factions. But when those factions more and more polarized around the issue of slavery, the Northern and Western national majority was unable to rule and eventually had suppress the Southern minority in the Civil War. In recent decades, much Black migration out of the South and some White migration into the Republican Party have again polarized voter sentiment into red and blue states, or two tribes. This gridlock in the national government has again created a national majority which cannot rule (see the Senate cloture procedure), in which case a new political crisis plagues the country.

Moving from the more explicitly political fiction of the 1930s and 1940s to the critiques of neoliberalism that emerged at the end of the century, this chapter traces how American realist writers engaged with the political questions that challenged and transformed the United States in the twentieth century. Despite realism’s association with progressive politics during the first half of the century, this chapter explores how American writers did not present a unified political voice; the views expressed in realistic fiction were as wide-ranging as the writers who produced them. The central part of this chapter considers how midcentury writers – a group that includes Ralph Ellison, J. D. Salinger, Philip Roth, John Updike, Ann Beattie, Raymond Carver, John Cheever, and Richard Yates – embraced new forms of realism to engage with and critique the shifting political realities of American life. The chapter concludes by exploring how Chang-rae Lee and Jonathan Franzen employed realism as way of chronicling the questions and challenges that the nation faced at the end of the millennium.

This chapter focuses on eclecticism as a face of political moderation. Starting from the definition of eclecticism given by Michel de Montaigne in his Essays, it shows that eclecticism has important implications for the ways in whicb we conceive of our political attachments. It then considers the justification of eclecticism given by Daniel Bell in his book The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976) and compares it to the eclecticism at the heart of the fusionist movement initiated by Frank Meyer in the 1960s. Finally, it presents eclecticism as a way to avoid any form of “blueprint thinking.”

This chapter examines the prospects of moderation in America today. Conceived as a form of lively dialogue with the two imaginary interlocutors, it examines concrete solutions for empowering moderates’ voice in contemporary America. Special attention is paid to organizations like Braver Angels and More in Common that seek to build civic bridges to narrow ideological divides.

Often focused on the rapid development of technologies (both scientific and social) and their dangers, American science fiction (SF) novels have highlighted how the twentieth century is characterized by truly global crises and possibilities, from the mass migrations and their various exploitations in the early twentieth century, to the Cold War and the direct threat of global nuclear destruction, to giving voice to those denied rights and silenced both in the earlier SF canon and in the larger body politic, and to the climate emergency. Distancing these political issues from the real, twentieth-century SF novels may risk making specific political moments seem fantastic, but they can simultaneously enable new forms of global and communal visions that are (increasingly) necessary to political action. To discuss these visions, the chapter discusses a range of different traditions running through SF and parallel forms of work throughout the twentieth century, with a particular focus on the role of Black and Afrofuturist writers in the period.

The progressive thinkers of the Enlightenment rejected Christian Europe’s standard Stories which justified rule by monarchs, aristocrats, and clergy. They promoted instead reason rather than tradition and science rather than theology. Their faith in human agency, as expressed by thinkers such as Voltaire, Diderot, Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton, amounted to a project based on Humanism. Later, Max Weber pointed out that this part of the Enlightenment amounted to an onset of disenchantment.

As I was rereading the last exchanges, I realized that an important idea had been left out of our conversation. It is possible to think of moderation as expressing a genuine and firm commitment to an inclusive vision of a decent society, with its own values, rules, procedures, and institutions. It is this sense of moderation that I seek to outline in the following pages. Yet, before I attempt to describe the political vision and ethos of moderation, it is important to explore what kind of virtue the latter is, so that we can better understand its underlying philosophy and institutional implications that often go unnoticed.

All the King’s Men is one of the most significant political novels in US literature. Based on the career of Louisiana governor and senator Huey Long, the novel follows the rise and fall of the fictional Willie Stark. This chapter traces Stark’s development as a populist, using the work of Michael Kazin and others to argue that populism must be defined by its rhetorical characteristics. We know that a political actor is populist not necessarily by their policy proposals, but always by the way they talk. Populism is performed in a language of grievance. The populist uses an emotive rhetoric that invokes a binary of “the people” against an “elite” above them and a racialized poor below them. The populist politician positions himself as “the people’s” representative, the only one who can speak and act on their behalf. This chapter analyzes speeches in All the King’s Men, demonstrating how they embody the populist binary and its rhetorical moves. Ultimately, the chapter considers the economic and social conditions that can allow a demagogue to rise in fiction and in real life.

Chapter 7 says that if scholars will pay more attention to political Stories, they still have to consider how to proceed. The marketplace for ideas is full of Stories, and the epistemological crisis is well funded in every direction. Therefore, Max Weber’s advice is entirely relevant: we must “choose” between Stories (or “causes,” in his term). And we must do that while critics like Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Paul Kahn, and Stephen Smith warn us that we should reject old-time Stories only if we can replace them with new ones that are equally effective.

This brief chapter introduces the topic of radical moderation and highlights the core beliefs at the heart of the book.

This chapter offers a schematic overview of the many different ways in which scholars and theorists have thought about what exactly makes literature neoliberal. After introducing several representational and heuristic models, the chapter summarizes the economic and theoretical history of neoliberalism in the United States and then introduces a four-phase approach to conceptualizing the relationship between neoliberalism and literature. Identifying economic, political, sociocultural, and ontological features of neoliberalism, it offers brief readings of three US novels that foreground these distinct features. Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, which explores the intersection of finance capital and racial politics in 1980s New York City, helps us see neoliberalism as an economic and political phenomenon. Dana Spiotta’s Eat the Document, which worries about the aesthetic representation of revolutionary politics, reveals neoliberalism’s intrusion into the cultural domain. And Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad asks where meaning and value might be found in a world where art, language, and being have been captured by neoliberalism’s for-profit technologies. These three texts are exemplary neoliberal novels, but the differences among them also provide a fuller picture of the neoliberal novel as a literary phenomenon of the past four decades.

Chapter 4 moves between the era of classic capitalism (up to the Great Crash), and the present era of neoliberal capitalism. The first was somewhat reined in by the New Deal and the second is still generating the One Percent condition of enormous inequalities. Symptomatic of economic derangement during neoliberalism is the growing impact of financial institutions, which produce little but profit greatly.