A Brief History of Political Cultural Change

Do you get confused by political labels? What exactly is a liberal? How is a liberal different from a socialist? Why do political philosophers call free-market ideology liberal but most Americans call it conservative instead? Why did the Tea Party call Obama a socialist and the Occupy Wall Street movement finds him too preoccupied with the interests of the highest percentile of income earners? Are there any political issues that are non-ideological? Does the number of viable political parties affect a political culture's ideological diversity? What drives political cultural change? This book answers these questions with precision and a pithy word economy; its ambition is to be as informative as possible with as few words as possible so that its reader can understand political theory in a few hours or less. Eric Shierman shows how political ideology is constantly in flux at any particular moment in time, but can still be reduced to three unchanging systems of thought. He explains the way in which these three ideologies interact over time, identifying the historical inflection points that brought about a realignment among them. Arguing that we are in one of these rare moments of change now, he maps out the political road ahead.