Eight Ways to Run the Country: A New and Revealing Look at Left and Right

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Bloomsbury Academic, 2007 - Political Science - 161 pages

Political partisans want you to choose only between Left and Right, Red and Blue, Us and Them. But the reality is that Americans are deeply divided in more ways than one, and the savvy voter, no less than the savvy politician, must make more sense of things. Eight Ways to Run the Country explains what conventional political theory cannot, offering a profoundly illuminating look at our political past and our present differences.

Eight Ways doesn't do away with Left and Right, but it defines them in better terms and adds a whole new dimension to explain what Left and Right can't. It correctly pegs the ideological poles and thus brings easy-to-understand order to the dizzying diversity of political perspectives. It places neoconservatives into historical context, illuminating both what they share with other conservatives and how their differences have wrought a change in the character of the Right. It explains the recurring attempts to define an independent, non-ideological center. It provides the best definition of populism to be found. Finally, it relates the political heritage of the American Founders to the politics of today.

About the author (2007)

Brian Patrick Mitchell is the former Washington Bureau Chief of Investor's Business Daily. As a veteran political reporter and author, Mitchell has appeared on dozens of television and radio shows, including Face the Nation, Larry King Live, Today, Crossfire, and Nightline. He also has been a guest speaker at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Connecticut, and Catholic University of America.

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