The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York Metropolis, and the Daybreak of the White Working-Class Revolution

One of many New York Instances “100 Notable Books of 2020.”
“Maybe the most effective ebook ever on how Democrats misplaced the white working class.” 

–James Carville

In Could 1970, 4 days after Kent State, development staff chased college students via downtown Manhattan, beating scores of protesters bloody. As hardhats clashed with hippies, it quickly turned clear that one thing bigger was underway–Democrats had been at struggle with themselves. In
The Hardhat Riot
, David Paul Kuhn tells the fateful story of when the white working class first turned towards liberalism, when Richard Nixon seized the breach, and America was ceaselessly modified. It was unthinkable one era earlier than: FDR’s “forgotten man” siding with the get together of Large Enterprise and, in the end, paving the way in which for presidencies from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.

That is the story of the schism that tore liberalism aside. Within the shadow of the half-built Twin Towers, on the identical day the Knicks rallied towards the percentages and received their first championship, we expertise the tumult of Nixon’s America and John Lindsay’s New York Metropolis, as festering division explodes into violence and Nixon’s advisors notice that the Democratic coalition has collapsed, that that is their likelihood, as a result of “these, fairly candidly, are our folks now.”
On this riveting story–rooted in meticulous analysis, together with hundreds of pages of never-before-seen records–we return to a harrowing day that explains the politics of right this moment. We expertise an rising class battle between two newly polarized Americas, and the way it all boiled over on one brutal day, when the Democratic Social gathering’s future was bludgeoned by its previous.

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