The Postwar Moment: Progressive Forces in Britain, France, and the United States after World War II. By Isser Woloch. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019. Pp. xxii+516. $40.00.
Amid swirling talk of a “postracial” politics in the wake of Barack Obama's election as the forty-fourth president of the United States, Joseph Lowndes offers a needed reminder of the central role played by race in American political culture. Nowhere is the discourse of race more apparent, according to Lowndes, than in the supposedly “color-blind” politics of modern U.S. conservatism. Using language that fashioned New Deal liberalism as a “racial synecdoche” (p. 158) for all that conservatives reviled in the four decades following World War II, conservative strategists forged a triumphant pro-business Republican platform that could simultaneously claim to be postracial while serving as the key vote getter of closet racists throughout the nation.
Jan De Graaf. Socialism across the Iron Curtain. Socialist Parties in East and West and the Reconstruction of Europe after 1945. [New Studies in European History.] Cambridge University Press, Cambridge2019. xii, 320 pp. £75.00. (E-book: $84.00.) - Isser Woloch. The Postwar Moment. Progressive Forces in Britain, France, and the United States after World War II. Yale University Press, New Haven (CT) [etc.] 2019. xxii, 515 pp. Ill. $40.00.