Accessible and clearly argued throughout, an excellent primer on the history of American neoliberalism and those who have found ways to challenge that history.
Bill Ayers,author of Fugitive Days, Public Enemy, and Demand the Impossible:
Here is an indispensable manual for the defiant onesthe organizers and the activists, the rebels and resisters, the dissidents and the disobedientand, in fact, for anyone paying attention to the gathering catastrophe, dreaming of a more just and joyful world, and willing to step into history now as an actor on behalf of humanity. The Defiant is a book of the resistancewhere to find it and how to organize it. Its an antidote to cynicism and despair, a map toward building our own agency, and a crucial companion to carry along to the militant blockade or the picket line, into the classroom or onto the barricades.
Stephen Duncombe,New York University:
Dawson Barrett has written an important book for our times. The Defiant reads like a continuation of Howard Zinns A Peoples History of the United States, picking up where Zinn left off. Anyone interested in the resistance that led to 'The Resistance' today should read this book.
Frances Fox Piven,author of Challenging Authority and Poor Peoples' Movements:
Can insurgency from below change American politics? The question has never been more important, and Dawson Barrett helps us to answer that question with a penetrating series of case studies of contemporary protests from the margins of American society.
Andrew Cornell,author of Unruly Equality: U.S. Anarchism in the 20th Century:
The Defiant is both a jargon-free primer on the politics of neoliberalism and a critical consideration of the panoply of social movements from punk squatters to immigrant farmworkers and anti-imperialist veterans that have resisted neoliberal threats to justice and well-being at every turn. It is a valuable contribution to the urgent task of mapping and assessing the fragmented post-1960s American Left.
CHOICE:
This is a short survey of post-1960s leftist social movements in the US. It is part straightforward scholarly study and part unabashed movement manual. … An informative read.
Labor:
Histories of our long era of neoliberal/conservative ascendancy have tended to overlook
or at least to undervalue stories of resistance to that new order of things. The great virtue of Dawson Barrett’s book is that it helps right that balance. The Defiant encompasses a great range of protest movements.
Journal of American History:
In The Defiant Dawson Barrett offers a sweeping narrative of protest movements in the neo-liberal era United States… by routing The Defiant’s narrative of the era through unruly protest, rather than through ideological projects of the ruling class, Barrett has performed his own intellectual act of defiance. To be sure, he freely acknowledges that during the neoliberal years protest has often failed to win specific gains, but, he argues, protest remains necessary even when things are not going well because, without it, things would quickly get much worse.
Its...strength lies in the author's ability to weave policies and actions across political parties to reveal how neoliberalism echoes the Gilded Age with the same predictable, at times, devastating outcomes...A perfectly timed history of resistance.
