Chapter 13 focuses on sustainable development in contemporary Latin America and, more specifically, on the impact of neoextractivism–the exploitation of primary products–on the quality of life of the communities where this economic activity is based. It shows that, although neoextractivism has led to short-term economic growth, it has also created environmental damage that has been especially detrimental to indigenous peoples and the rural poor. It explores protests against neoextractivism through case studies of Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru, and shows that affected communities had some success in ameliorating the negative consequences of neoextractivism only in Bolivia. Finally, to explain the impact of protests it highlights several factors. Democratic institutions and decentralization create incentives for greater accountability at the local level. Moreover, in some cases, the mobilizational strength and political coordination of local communities leads to collective action. However, the impact of protests is reduced most critically because leaders across the political spectrum have been committed to neoextractivism and have co-opted the mechanism of prior consultation.

Chapter 5 describes and explains the state of democracy in contemporary Latin America. It shows that the most common problem of democracy is that democracies are low-quality or medium-quality ones. It stresses that even though Latin America has achieved and stabilized democracy, a notable success, it has not democratized fully. It also notes that democracy has broken down in some countries (e.g., Honduras, Venezuela). It argues that multiple factors account for the state of democracy in contemporary Latin America. Ideological differences over neoliberal economic policies have fueled some problems of democracy, as is shown in the cases of Honduras and Venezuela. Changes in various aspects of the international context have helped to stabilize democracies. Additionally, the region’s problems of democracy are also explained by some enduring features of Latin American politics: the exploitation of advantages that accrue to incumbency in political office, the influence of economic power, and the weakness of the state.

Chapter 3 explains how the conventional crisis-oriented approach in the literature cannot explain variation in efforts to involve elites in the state-building enterprise. Instead, it argues that both demand and supply factors must be taken into account and disaggregates the components of each, including whether elites can satisfy their demand for public goods in the private market, the ideology of the government, and the extent to which linkages between business elites and the government exist. Chapter 3 also evaluates alternative explanations, including the availability of nonfiscal resources such as oil rents and foreign aid and the degree of inequality in society.

This chapter focuses on the ideology of Dominicanization in the postgenocide period. It explains the state’s project to erase the ethnic Haitian cultural, economic, and demographic presence after 1937–1938. This project to root out the Haitian presence involved surveillance and forced relocation. The regime espoused an ideal of Hispanidad that denied the Haitian and African presence in the country. Dominicanization involved the regime’s vision for both the economic and cultural development of the border provinces. The chapter explores official correspondence to consider the politicization of language, foodways, construction methods, religious practices, as well as such symbolic material embodiments of modernity as radios, billiard tables, and zinc roofing. The chapter also highlights civilian resistance and the maintenance of old border lifeways. New levels of draconian control over culture and economic activity could not fully eradicate illegal crossing, smuggling, agricultural relations, and kinship. Though Trujillo’s government demonstrated that it had the power to kill large groups of people, it did not have the power to fully control large areas of rugged territory. The aspects of border society that Trujillo’s officials considered obstacles to their Dominicanization campaign help to both reconstruct aspects of the pre-1937 border society and further explain the 1937 Genocide.

Chapter 14 focuses on the role of social policy and, more specifically, of conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs, in contemporary Latin America. It first shows that CCTs, a Latin American invention, have been a striking success story and have overcome some historical obstacles to inclusive social policies. In particular, it argues that CCTs have become somewhat of a basic income support that has reduced poverty and helped historically disadvantaged groups, such as single mothers and indigenous peoples. The chapter then explores the causes of CCTs through case studies of Mexico and Brazil and briefer discussions of other countries. It analyzes a confluence of factors that explain the emergence of CCT programs. Increased electoral competition helped to channel popular demands for social inclusion. Political ideology facilitated the international diffusion of CCTs and determined the degree of universalism of social policies. Additionally, CCTs were effective because they were designed and implemented in a way that circumvented public administrators traditionally prone to patrimonial and clientelistic practices.

Chapter 7 explores the labels associated with mental illness in more detail, specifically through naming analysis. I discuss prescribed forms for referring to people with mental illness (such as person-first language) and explore the frequency of such prescribed forms in the corpus. In addition, salient naming strategies in the corpus, particularly the labels ‘patient’, ‘sufferer’ and ‘victim’ are investigated. Using corpus evidence, I show that these labels are patterned to specific illness types. Furthermore, I argue that the tendency in the corpus to refer to people as quantities and statistics depersonalises people with mental illness. I argue that the ‘rhetoric of quantification’ (Fowler, 1991: 166) provides a way for the press to sensationalise news events related to mental illness which in turn constitutes the representation of mental illness as a ‘moral panic’ (Cohen, 1973).

Chapter 4 provides an overview of Analytical Methods in Critical Discourse Analysis, covering the early manifestations of linguistic inquiry into ideology in texts such as that of the East Anglia School (Fowler et al., 1979) to contemporary research into corpus-assisted discourse analysis that combines these early principles of CDA with computational methods. The notion that the automation of textual analysis offered by corpus linguistics provides a magic bullet for objectivity in CDA is discussed and contested. The different CDA methods used in the book are outlined. Specifically, Halliday’s transitivity model, taken from his model of Systemic Functional Linguistics (2003 [1973]), and naming analysis are discusssed and exemplified using relevant data.

The first Introduction to Part I defines the book’s three central concepts of the political, the aesthetic, and the utopian and shows a Shakespearean trajectory within the sequence of plays about power that grows more and critical before turning to utopian alternatives to power politics. It then reviews the history of how Shakespearean critics have framed and conceptualized the theme of power in Shakespeare, with emphasis on the second half of the twentieth century up to recent decades to provide context for what follows. Finally, the last section takes up the issue of how Shakespeare’s approach to politics evolves and changes over the approximately twenty years of his writing career, from an initial period of political eclecticism in the early histories and Titus, to a period of the acceptance of amoral power in the second Henriad and Julius Caesar, to the tragic period, which turns to indictments of political cruelty and immorality, and finally to a late period of utopian alternatives to politics.

Chapter 1 frames the main empirical question of The Everyday Crusade. By explaining the importance of myth in nation-making and the role of these myths in establishing American nationalism, this chapter explores how the religiously nationalistic ideology of American religious exceptionalism developed and embedded itself in American political and social culture. The authors delineate the ideology’s rich history and its link to restrictive and illiberal attitudes. This chapter reveals the power and persistence of national origin myths, their linkage to ideas about the specialness of America, and how over time they become a banal part of everyday American society.

Is America a chosen city on a hill? What does that commonly used phrase even mean and how does it shape Americans’ understandings of themselves, their neighbors, and their nation’s role in the world? The Everyday Crusade argues that Americans’ answers to these questions are rooted in a national myth that the authors call American religious exceptionalism. This chapter introduces the core questions of this book and provides a preview of the argument and research methodology employed.

Chapter 3 re-examines the “ascent” of the United States within the 19th century’s Eurocentric international order, retracing its special path from a fledgling and vulnerable republic to the status of an exceptional and exceptionalist world power. It focuses on the evolution of American ideas and ideologies in the sphere of international affairs, the rise of distinctive forms of US imperialism and unilateralism, and the emergence of core maxims of US international conduct such as those embodied in the ever more expansively defined Monroe Doctrine and the Open Door Doctrine. It then casts new light on ephemeral aspirations to establish a modern Atlantic order of empires – led by the United States and the British Empire – that were pursued after the Spanish-American war of 1898 and in the era of Theodore Roosevelt.

In offering a context for Benjamin Britten, we approached his milieu from vantage points that could adequately represent the fullness of his position in England and in the twentieth century. We were rewarded by the richness of Britten’s engagement with his contemporaries in music, art, literature, and film, British musical institutions, royal and governmental entities, and the church. Equally, his ground-breaking projects that intersected across diverse entities and explored his philosophical and ideological tenets provided food for thought.

The relation between Britten’s sexuality and his music has been an abiding fascination for biographers and music scholars in recent decades. The fact that homosexuality was illegal in the UK until 1967, and that he and his long-term partner, Peter Pears, therefore had to live a homosexual life as an ‘open secret’ for most of their lives, often lends this critical emphasis a kind of heroic poignancy. This chapter contrasts Britten and Pears’s upper-middle-class experience of forbidden sexuality with that of the overwhelming majority of twentieth-century British men and women, to paint a more rounded picture of the politics of the closet. It shows how early twenty-first-century ideas about sexual ‘identity’ obscure the differences between class experience, and distort our understanding of the issue.

Auden’s poetry and ideology were shaped by each era and circumstance in which he lived and worked and by those by whom he was surrounded. His early views on politics, religion, sexuality, and the importance of art, music, and poetry to society – all of which defined the poet as Britten knew him in the 1930s and early 1940s – underwent some form of revision thereafter, providing fodder for those critics who sought to conscript him to the turbulent period leading up to and including the Second World War, hailed by many as the ‘golden age’ of his poetry. In England, particularly, some scholars have posited that Auden’s rejection of his ‘age’ – and his country in 1939 – did damage to both his contemporary and posthumous reputations, going so far as to posit that he had squandered his opportunity to be considered that nation’s greatest poet of the twentieth century. As this chapter explores, Auden’s outlook on the varying matters that crept into his poetry was complex and often contradictory.

In this chapter, I review current research on the relationship between personality and political preferences, with an eye to its complexities and the ways in which it is conditioned on other variables – including the contextual factors mentioned at the outset. To provide context, I briefly review research on the structure of political preferences. Next, I summarise a now-substantial body of work suggesting a relationship between rigidity in personality and right-wing political preferences, and then describe moderators of and boundary conditions to this relationship. Finally, in an effort to reconcile increasingly varied findings on political differences in cognition and motivation, I offer an integrative perspective on when the relationship between rigidity and political differences will be ideologically asymmetric and when it will be symmetric.

When visited by the British trade mission led by Lord George Macartney, who aimed to show off the best of Western trade and technology, the Qianlong Emperor of Qing China was known to have famously replied in 1792, “Our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its borders. There is therefore no need to import the manufactures of outside barbarians in exchange for our own produce.” Qianlong’s statement came at the height of Qing’s glory, overseeing a remarkable tripling of population and a doubling of territory between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. No single political entity at the time achieved such size in both geography and population under such stability and durability.

Collective action is a pervasive aspect of political life in the 21st century. In the past 20 years, it has also been increasingly studied as a psychologically mediated and consequential form of political behaviour. Initial research focused primarily on the collective organisation of action. This was appropriate: collective action is inherently a group phenomenon. However, this chapter adapts the framework provided by Duncan (2012) to take a broader perspective to examine contemporary scholarship in relation to the individual, group, and contextual factors shaping collective action and its outcomes. We review literature emphasising a key role for individual differences in ideological beliefs and moral conviction, in shaping engagement in collective action. Life experiences such as contact with members of disadvantaged groups, and mobilising interactions (online and offline) have allowed people to co-act across ostensible category boundaries. The depth and breadth of the contemporary literature suggests the need for a broader meta-theory, drawing on the principles of dynamic interactionism, to allow us to more fully articulate what kinds of situations elicit mobilisation potential, and for whom.