Morality Wars: How Empires, the Born Again and the Politically Correct Do Evil in the Name of Good

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Is patriotism a good thing in an empire? Did General Petraeus betray us or did moveon.org? Does morality often serve immoral purposes? This book offers a new way to approach these questions, which lie just beneath our increasingly poisoned political conversation today. Derber and Magrass show that the problem today is not just lying but immoral morality, doing evil in the name of good. America is suffering an epidemic of immoral morality where elites in a new American empire use lofty moral values and religious rhetoric to justify immoral wars and policies. This book shows how to end our disastrous politics of empire carried out in the name of goodness and God. The British preached the White Man's Burden to show empire was a moral obligation. Neoconservatives today proclaim that the United States must occupy Iraq to spread liberty. Although the right today has recrafted historic arguments that empires bring peace and that fundamentalists battle moral decay, the authors show that the Democratic Party and the left have their own IM, with the Democrats supporting empire and the left its own political correctness. America's political divide today is a backlash to the progressive revolution of the 1960s and 1970s-secular, antiwar, andfeminist-that created a radical break from traditional values and set the stage for current morality wars. In the spirit of de Tocqueville, this powerful book offers a rich and vivid portrait of the U.S. political landscape, definitively exposing American immoral morality and exploring ideas that can help move the nation to a new morality and politics.

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Charles Derber, a noted social critic, is Professor of Sociology at Boston College. He is the author of ten internationally acclaimed books,including Corporation Nation, Hidden Power, and the Wilding of America. His books have been translated into multiple languages, and he speaks on and writes for the mass media. He is a longtime social activist working for democracy and social justice. Yale R. Magrass is a Chancellor Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, where he teaches social theory, political sociology, and the social impact of science and technology. He is the author of three other books and more than thirty articles, including encyclopedia entries, served on the board of six journals, has been a recipient of several grants, and participated in numerous international forums.