Having read your recommendation I've ordered and received the book from Amazon.  

I've spent some time in Brazil and would not categorize them as ahead on racial matters, just different.

I like how convenient and, for the most part, less expensive, common things have gotten - food, appliances, electronics and the stuff of everyday life.

I like that baseball stats are available real-time instead of a narrow subsection of them being published weekly in the newspapers. 

I don't know if it is the best Ike bio but I recently read and enjoyed Ike's Bluff by Evan Thomas.  It focuses on the Presidential years and emphasizes foreign policy and also provides some interesting insights into his temperment and health.  It's also a useful reminder of how much political alignments have changed - Thomas notes that the CIA Operations Directorate was dominated by liberal Democrats who thought Ike was too reluctant to intervene in third world countries!

Lincoln ran on a platform of opposing the expansion of slavery and did not believe he had the Constitutional authority to end slavery where it already existed.  It was the South's aggressiveness in trying to expand slavery (see, for instance, the Dred Scott decision) and thru federalizing the judicial system via the Fugitive Slave Act to deputize Northerners into enforcing slaveowners rights that triggered the final crisis.  Once a President was elected on a platform of opposing that expansion, the South felt it could only preserve its peculiar institution via secession.  See comments 23 & 24.

Happy birthday!   What a combo the two of you make.

To return to the original question posed by viruscop - The McPherson book is a terrific one volume study of the causes and course of the Civil War but like many modern liberal historians his attempts to extend this analysis to current politics is flawed.

Today's political alignments are unrecognizable in the context of the politics of 1789-1865.  You might as well ask "what if the Confederates had AK-47s?" as try to figure out how people today would have acted in 1861.

Hostility to Lincoln today exists across the political spectrum.  You have Southern Heritage folks who insist the war was not about slavery and that Lincoln was a dictator.  A subset of Libertarians who think that he was the father of big government (see the Lew Rockwell Institute for collections of one-sided quotes ripped out of historical context to support this view).  A subset of OWS which sees Lincoln as a representative of oligarchial monopolists and a subset of African American historians who see him as a fraud.  These come together sometimes in interesting ways - I recently came across an Afro-American high school studies course which uses the Lew Rockwell quotes as its main source.

You are confusing the cause of the war with what people fought for.  The cause was slavery.  The original seven seceding states did so before Ft Sumter and the secession resolutions and the negotiations in DC to prevent secession were focused on slavery, not on the tarriff or anything else.

Yes, individual soldiers fought for many different things but the reason for secession was to preserve the South's "peculiar institution".

VP Stephens then went on to say in the same speech:

The prevailing ideas entertained by him [Thomas Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away... Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. . .

Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition.

Slavery was the cause of the civil war.  The South seceded in order to preserve it and the North fought to preserve the Union (not to abolish slavery).  Confederate VP Alexander Stephens best expressed this in his Cornerstone speech of March 1861:

The new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions—African slavery as it exists among us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. . . .

One of the difficulties in finding what you are looking for is that as liberalism/progressivism (or whatever it calls itself now) has mutated over the past 40 years so that the categories you use to describe it are unrecognizable to them (though accurate from our perspective).

The primary screen through which they evaluate everything is via race, gender, ethnicity and class which they believe are the underlying determinants of society structure and thus require proper alignment.  Anything, including a constitution based on checks and balances and distributed power, individual enterprise and liberty etc is simply not relevant if it 0bstructs this alignment.  It's why conservative arguments bounce off them;  our terms of reference are completely different.

In light of this I suggest books by two non-liberals in which you might find references to books with what you are seeking:  Bruce Bawer's recent book, The Victims' Revolution which reports on the academic theory behind area studies and Never Enough by William Voegeli which is about the unwillingness of liberals to state any defined limits on the state they wish to build.  As others have mentioned Liberal Fascism is also a good reference source.

One of the reasons you may have trouble finding books where liberals define themselves using the categories you describe is that liberals like to think of themselves as "pragmatists" and not "theorists".  Even those progressives who were more theoretical, like Wilson and Croly, are not read by liberals today. 

Even some of the categories change over time.  Wilson (and Teddy Roosevelt) and other early 20th century progressives believed in the power of the administrative state but were definitely not cultural or moral relativists - in fact, I don't think this category of liberalism arose until the 1960s.

John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, and other writings.

The Caro books are like reading a "how-to" on the effective wielding of political power.  The portion of The Passage To Power covering Nov 22, 1963 to mid-Jan 1964 is particularly instructive in that regard.

I differ with you a bit on LBJ's motivations on the War on Poverty and Civil Rights.  Based on Caro's book (and he clearly dislikes LBJ personally) my takeaway is that he was driven by personal beliefs primarily although his timing was based on opportunistic politics.

What is striking, particularly about the War on Poverty, is the degree of hubris and lack of detailed thought about the linkage between legislation and actual effectiveness.  It was more like our intentions are good and so if we spend a lot of money on what the "experts" tell us we should we can end poverty without breaking a sweat.  It's as though the passage of the legislation proves we are good people so we don't need to be concerned about whether it actually works.  Hey, sounds like Obamacare and Dodd-Frank!

Looks like we are in agreement.  That's why the WH announcement doesn't make sense the way they are using the terms since Tsarnaev is apparently being questioned as an enemy combatant although the timeframe over which this may be being done is unclear.

According to the Wittes article:

"Under the AUMF as interpreted by the courts, and under the NDAA as passed by Congress, the administration is authorized to hold in military detention only those who are “part of” or “substantially supporting” Al Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces."

That's why it would be interesting for Prof Yoo to weigh in with his take.  I find this a very confusing area of law.

Interesting article.  I read Lawfare frequently and learn quite a bit from its discussions.

I'll add to the unanswered (so far) questions I've asked of Prof Yoo - I've now read that despite the announcements about Tsarnaevs' status that he will be interrogated by the High Value Interrogation Team.  How does this fit into your analysis on the Administration's approach towards him?