American Ideology

Political violence rips apart several towns in southwest Texas. A far-right militia plots to kidnap the governor of Michigan and try her for treason. An armed mob of Trump supporters and conspiracy theorists storms the U.S. Capitol. Are these isolated incidents? Or is this the start of something bigger? Barbara F. Walter has spent her career studying civil conflict in places like Iraq, Ukraine, and Sri Lanka, but now she has become increasingly worried about her own country.

Written with bracing wit and intelligence, Rachel Maddow's Drift argues that we've drifted away from America's original ideals and become a nation weirdly at peace with perpetual war, with all the financial and human costs that entails. To understand how we've arrived at such a dangerous place, Maddow takes us from the Vietnam War to today's war in Afghanistan.

For all the attempts to understand the state of American politics and the blue/red divide, we've ignored what economic and cultural loss can do to pride. What happens, Arlie Russell Hochschild asks, when a proud people in a hard-hit region suffer the deep loss of pride and are confronted with a powerful political appeal that makes it feel "stolen"? Hochschild's research drew her to Pikeville, Kentucky, in the heart of Appalachia, within the whitest and second-poorest congressional district in the nation.

Irresistible Revolution is a timely and bold contribution from an active-duty Space Force lieutenant colonel who sees the impact of a neo-Marxist agenda at the ground level within our armed forces. In it, author Matthew Lohmeier provides answers to many important questions that Americans are currently asking.

For much of American history, evangelicalism was aligned with progressive political causes: nineteenth-century evangelicals fought for the abolition of slavery, universal suffrage, and public education. But contemporary conservative activists have defaulted on this majestic legacy, embracing instead an agenda virtually indistinguishable from the Republican Party platform.

Black Americans have long been shackled to the Democrats. Seeing no viable alternative, they have watched liberal politicians take the Black vote for granted without pledging anything in return. In Blackout, Owens argues that this automatic allegiance is both illogical and unearned. She contends that the Democrat Party has a long history of racism and exposes the ideals that hinder the Black community’s ability to rise above poverty, live independent and successful lives, and be an active part of the American dream.

Thirty years ago, Tucker Carlson got his first job out of college fact-checking for a quarterly magazine, and he went on to write for many other publications before becoming the primetime Fox News host he is today. In The Long Slide, Tucker delivers a few of his favorite pieces - annotated with new commentary and insight - to memorialize the tolerance and diversity of thought that the media used to celebrate instead of punish.

Republicans are in a losing period. The last election should have been a wake-up call for the current moment. If the GOP wants to turn its luck around, it’s time to toss the old playbook and find new ways to win elections and attract enthusiastic voters. Like a well-timed coaching hire, Clay Travis is here to break down exactly how the Republican party can turn a few losing seasons into a championship run, and provides a surefire gameplan inspired by winning strategies in sports that will finally give conservatives an edge over the competition.

The problem isn’t that liberal authors present their opinions or interpretations of history from an obvious left-wing bias. Students learn, for example, that the Founding Fathers were elitists who drafted the Constitution in order to protect their own economic interests; that Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation only because he needed black soldiers; that racist groups such as the KKK represented our society in the early twentieth century.

In this powerful, sweeping history and analysis of American democracy, Thom Hartmann shows how democracy is the one form of governance most likely to produce peace and happiness among people. With the violent exception of the Civil War, American democracy resisted the pressure to disintegrate into factionalism for nearly two centuries, and now our very system of democratic elections is at stake. So how do we save our democracy?

On January 6, 2021, Donald Trump incited a violent mob to storm the US Capitol in attempts to overturn the presidential election. It was a betrayal of our Constitution, and one of the darkest days in recent history. Yet to former congressman Adam Kinzinger it was also the culmination of a cultural and political rupture he’d long seen coming. Constructive criticism from within the Republican Party was no longer enough. It was time to stand up, even if it meant betraying his own party.

From the heterodox right wing of the 1940s to the Buchanan/Rothbard alliance of 1992 and all the way through to what he witnessed personally in Charlottesville, The New Right is a thorough firsthand accounting of the concepts, characters and chronology of this widely misunderstood sociopolitical phenomenon. Today’s fringe is tomorrow’s orthodoxy. As entertaining as it is informative, The New Right is required listening for every American across the spectrum who would like to learn more about the past, present and future of our divided political culture.

Since the liberal revolution of the '60s and '70s, American history books have been biased toward the negative. They overemphasize America's racism, sexism, and bigotry while downplaying the greatness of her patriots. As a result, more emphasis is placed on Harriet Tubman than on George Washington, more on the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II than on D-day or Iwo Jima. This book offers a long-overdue acknowledgment of America's true and proud history.

American Political Parties is a core textbook on political parties in the United States that places the US party system into a framework designed around the disagreements between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. White and Kerbel argue that the two-party system in the United States began with a common agreement on the key values of freedom, individual rights, and equality of opportunity, but that Hamilton and Jefferson disagreed—often vehemently—over how to translate these ideals into an acceptable form of governance.

For three crucial years in the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War dominated headlines in America and around the world as volunteers flooded to Spain to help its democratic government fight off a fascist uprising led by Francisco Franco and aided by Hitler and Mussolini. Today we're accustomed to remembering the war through Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and Robert Capa's photographs. But Adam Hochschild has discovered some less familiar yet far more compelling characters who reveal the full tragedy and importance of the war.

For the past 30 years, David Mamet has been a controversial and defining force in theater and film, championing the most cherished liberal values along the way. In some of the great movies and plays of our time, his characters have explored the ethics of the business world, embodied the struggles of the oppressed, and faced the flaws of the capitalist system. But in recent years Mamet has had a change of heart.

At the height of the John Birch Society’s activity in the 1960s, critics dismissed its members as a paranoid fringe. After all, “Birchers” believed that a vast communist conspiracy existed in America and posed an existential threat to Christianity, capitalism, and freedom. But as historian Matthew Dallek reveals, the Birch Society’s extremism remade American conservatism. Most Birchers were white professionals who were radicalized as growing calls for racial and gender equality appeared to upend American life.

Best-selling author, former White House speechwriter, and Atlantic columnist and media commentator David Frum explains why President Trump has undermined our most important institutions in ways even the most critical media has missed, in this thoughtful and hard-hitting book that is a warning for democracy and America's future. Quietly, steadily, Trump and his administration are damaging the tenets and accepted practices of American democracy, perhaps irrevocably.

Acclaimed historian Rick Perlstein chronicles the rise of the conservative movement in the liberal 1960s. At the heart of the story is Barry Goldwater, the renegade Republican from Arizona who loathed federal government, despised liberals, and mocked "peaceful coexistence" with the USSR. Perlstein's narrative shines a light on a whole world of conservatives and their antagonists, including William F. Buckley, Nelson Rockefeller, and Bill Moyers. Vividly written, Before the Storm is an essential book about the 1960s.

In The Revolution, Texas congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul has exposed the core truths behind everything threatening America, from the real reasons behind the collapse of the dollar and the looming financial crisis, to terrorism and the loss of our precious civil liberties. In this book, Ron Paul provides answers to questions that few even dare to ask.