If there’s one thing most Americans can agree on, it’s that everyone hates white liberals. Conservatives hate them for being culturally tolerant and threatening to usher in communism. Libertarians hate them for believing in the power of the state. Socialists hate them for serving as capitalism’s beard. Even liberals hate liberals-either because they can’t manage to overcome their own prejudices, or precisely because they’re so self-hating. This is the starting point for Kevin M. Schultz’s lively new history of white liberals in the United States. He efficiently lays out the array of objections to liberals-ineffective, spineless, judgmental, authoritarian, and more-in a historical frame that shows how protean the concept has been throughout the past hundred years. It turns out, he declares, that how you define a "white liberal" is less a reflection of reality and more a Rorschach test revealing your own anxieties.
