Five Books to Understand the Right
We asked scholar Dylan Riley what to read about our political foes.
The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany
Leon Trotsky
This book contains a series of essays written at the height of Trotsky’s analytic powers but the nadir of his political influence. They offer both a brilliant structural analysis of the driving forces of the emergence of Nazism and an account of the Communist Party of Germany’s tactical errors.
Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy
Barrington Moore
This foundational text of modern sociology offers a striking account of the rise of fascism as the price paid for capitalist development in the absence of a bourgeois revolution.
The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite
Michael Lind
These next two books capture the Right’s self-understanding. This one is a sharp, politically ambiguous text eviscerating the gilded world of the US liberal elite and calling for a “democratic populism” free from the pieties and obsessions of the chattering classes.