Political Culture

The election of Donald J. Trump sent shockwaves around the world. Shock troops were deployed along with the predictable rent-a-mob who stormed the streets of our nation’s cities. Within hours a movement was born. Stephen E. Strang explores and analyzes Trump’s effect on American culture from a Christian perspective, drawing upon interviews with many of the key players and offering insightful commentary on what the long-term prospects of the ongoing war of worldviews may portend.

The Baby Boomers are the largest and most powerful generation in American history—and they aren't going away any time soon. They dominate cultural and political institutions and make up the largest slice of the electorate. Generational conflict, with Millennials and Generation Z pitted against the aging Boomer cohort, has become a media staple. The generation gap is widening into a political fault line.

Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom explores the reach, penetration, power, and impact of Big Digital or the mega-information managers, social media platforms, Artificial Intelligence developers, providers of other web applications and functionalities, and the architects and proponents of the promised Internet of Things.

Born in a cabin deep in the backwoods of Kentucky and growing up in a family considered the poorest of the poor, Abraham Lincoln rose to become the 16th president of the United States. As president, he guided the United States through the Civil War, helped end slavery in America, and strengthened the federal government. This third installment in the Making of America series continues the story of the first 100 years of America's constitutional history, a story that began with Alexander Hamilton and Andrew Jackson.

After rising to national fame as the general who defeated the British in the Battle of New Orleans, Jackson ran for president as a political outsider, championing the interest of common farmers and frontiersmen. Determined to take down the wealthy, well-educated East Coast elites, he pledged to destroy the national bank, which he believed was an engine of corruption serving the interest of bankers and industrialists. A staunch nationalist, he sought to secure and expand the nation's borders.

With 2016 promising to be an interesting and hotly contested election year, Votes of Confidence offers young listeners an essential guide to the past, present, and future of American elections.

Bernard Goldberg takes dead aim at the America Bashers (the cultural elites who look down their snobby noses at "ordinary" Americans and detest so much of what this country is about); the Hollywood Blowhards (incredibly ditzy celebrities who think they're smart just because they're famous); the TV Schlockmeisters (including the one whose show has been compared to a churning mass of maggots devouring rotten meat); the Intellectual Thugs, and many more.

In The Leap, bestselling author Ulrich Boser shows how the emerging research on trust can improve our lives, rebuild our economy, and strengthen society. As part of this engaging and deeply reported narrative, Boser visits a radio soap opera in Rwanda that aims to restore the country’s broken trust, profiles the man who brought honesty to one of the most corrupt cities in Latin America, and explains how a college dropout managed to con his way into American high society.

Through historical newspaper accounts and the personal letters of soldiers, the events leading up to the battle and the battle itself are stunningly recreated. You will enter the mind of Robert E. Lee as he makes the fateful decision to cross the Potomac River and take the offensive. You will feel the frustration of Abraham Lincoln as he struggles to convince George McClellan to fight. And you will stand side-by-side with foot soldiers as the peaceful Maryland countryside explodes.

Wrongful intolerance has existed in American society for more than four centuries. Us and Them illuminates the shadowy corners of our national past and traces the country’s continuing efforts to measure up to its lofty ideals. Through 14 dramatic narratives, listeners witness epic struggles that shaped our collective identity. These and eight other forgotten incidents of history come to life in clear and vibrant prose.

Combining the deft social analysis of Where Good Ideas Come From with the optimistic arguments of Everything Bad Is Good for You, New York Times best-selling author Steven Johnson's Future Perfect makes the case that a new model of political change is on the rise, transforming everything from local governments to classrooms, from protest movements to health care. Johnson paints a compelling portrait of this new political worldview.

Double Luck is filled with examples of how the human spirit can triumph over adversity. In the Chinese language, the word crisis is written with two symbols: one meaning "danger" and the other meaning "opportunity". Although Chi Fa's childhood was filled with crisis, he always looked for opportunity. His successful triumph over crisis after crisis is an inspiration for all who seek hope in the face of great challenges.

Doctors at War is a candid account of a trauma surgical team based, for a tour of duty, at a field hospital in Helmand, Afghanistan. Mark de Rond tells of the highs and lows of surgical life in hard-hitting detail, bringing to life a morally ambiguous world in which good people face impossible choices and in which routines designed to normalize experience have the unintended effect of highlighting war’s absurdity. With stories that are at once comical and tragic, de Rond captures the surreal experience of being a doctor at war.

War, violence, and the disruption of social orders are critical areas of focus in mimetic theory, and a mimetic perspective applied to the study of politics illuminates social processes and phenomena over and beyond typical explanations offered by mainstream political science. Unlike traditional political science ontology, the mimetic perspective highlights neither individuals nor groups, but “doubles,” or “mimetic twins.”

In feisty prose Donohue explores our nation where a college student is threatened with expulsion because she prayed on campus, a civil rights organization protests a statue of Jesus found on the ocean floor and a housewife sues a school district to stop the singing of Rudolph The Red-nosed Reindeer at a school choral production. These are just a few examples cited that demonstrate a culture descending into madness.

Historian Doug Rossinow examines how the cooperation and the creative tension between left-wing radicals and liberal reformers advanced many of the most important political values of the 20th century, including free speech, freedom of conscience, and racial equality. Visions of Progress chronicles the broad alliances of radical and liberal figures who were driven by a particular concept of social progress - a transformative vision in which the country would become fundamentally more democratic.

Over the last 20 years, our economy and our society, from how we shop and pay our bills to how we communicate, have been completely revolutionized by technology. As Aneesh Chopra shows in Innovative State, once it became clear how much this would change America, a movement arose around the idea that these same technologies could reshape and improve government. But the idea languished, and while the private sector innovated, our government stalled, trapped in a model designed for the America of the 1930s and 1960s.

In the early 21st century, “Englishness” suddenly became a hot topic. A rash of art exhibitions, pop albums, and coffee table books arrived on the scene, all desperate to recover England’s lost national soul. But when we sweep away the patriotic stereotypes, we begin to see that England is a country that does not - and perhaps should not - exist in any essential sense. In this provocative text combining polemic and memoir, Alex Niven argues that the map of the British Isles should be torn apart completely as we look towards a time of radical political reform.

How shall we live? The answer to this question examines our culture's attitudes toward free time, home and food. Are corporate profits really the measure of success? Are increasingly long work hours productive of happiness and satisfaction? Can we lead lives devoid of spirituality?

Former high-ranking Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials, alongside an army colonel, a judge, a diplomat, a propaganda official, a secret agent, and a CCP role-model student, lift the veil on the Marxist culture that has molded the thoughts and actions of Chinese people for over 70 years. It is this culture that created China’s “Walking Dead”. Filmmaker and author, Kay Rubacek, weaves together interviews with these Chinese communist insiders with extensive research, and a sense of humor, into a rich narrative.