Political Ideologies

Two months before the 2016 presidential election, an anonymously published essay titled "The Flight 93 Election" rallied conservatives to charge the cockpit by voting for Trump. Michael Anton, the author of that controversial viral essay, now says that the last few years have only served to prove his Flight 93 thesis: The left has become more aggressive, more vindictive, and more dangerous - and the stakes have never been higher.

Early Americans were suspicious of centralized authority and executive power. Casting away the yoke of England and its king, the founding fathers shared in this distrust as they set out to pen the Constitution. Weighing a need for consolidated leadership with a demand for states' rights, they established a large federal republic with limited dominion over the states. This Very Short Introduction audiobook provides a concise overview of federalism, from its origins and evolution to the key events and constitutional decisions that have defined its framework.

No one is above the law. This belief is as American as freedom of speech and turkey on Thanksgiving - held sacred by Democrats and Republicans alike. But as celebrated Supreme Court lawyer and former Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal argues in Impeach, if President Trump is not held accountable for repeatedly asking foreign powers to interfere in the 2020 presidential election, this could very well mark the end of our democracy. To quote President George Washington's Farewell Address: "Foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government."

Just six weeks apart in the spring of 1981, Pope John Paul II and President ­Ronald Reagan took bullets from would-be assassins. Few realized at the time how close both men came to dying. Surviving these near-death experiences created a singular bond between the pope and the president that ­historians have failed to appreciate. When John Paul II and Reagan met only a year later, they confided to each other a shared conviction: that God had spared their lives for a ­reason. That reason? To defeat Communism. In private, Reagan had a name for this: “The DP” - the Divine Plan.

From Phyllis Schlafly, the woman whose celebrated classic, A Choice, Not an Echo, upended the 1964 Republican Convention, comes a persuasive new argument for a surprising conservative choice: Donald Trump. For the first time since 1980, a significant number of Republicans are considering abandoning their party's nominee. This is a grave mistake, Schlafly says, because a Donald Trump "radical redirection" could actually set America back on the path of Reagan's conservative revolution.

The bastard step-child of Milton Friedman and Anthony Bourdain, Socialism Sucks is a bar crawl through former, current, and wannabe socialist countries around the world. Free-market economists Robert Lawson and Benjamin Powell travel to countries like Venezuela, Cuba, Russia, and Sweden to investigate the dangers and idiocies of socialism - while drinking a lot of beer.

Frustrated and feeling betrayed, Americans have come to loathe politics with disastrous results, argues Peter Wehner. In this timely manifesto, the veteran of three Republican administrations and man of faith offers a reasoned and persuasive argument for restoring “politics” as a worthy calling to a cynical and disillusioned generation of Americans.

In The Republican Noise Machine, David Brock skillfully documents perhaps the most important but least understood political development of the last 30 years: how the Republican Right has won political power and hijacked public discourse in the United States. Brock, a former right-wing insider and the author of the New York Times best seller Blinded by the Right, uses his keen understanding of the strategies, tactics, financing, and personalities of the American right wing to demonstrate how right-wing media has all but subsumed the regular media conversation.

In 1848, THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO was published by two émigrés from Germany. Marx and Engels' apocalyptic vision of an insatiable system that penetrates every corner of the world reduces every relationship to that of profit, and burst asunder the old forms of production and of politics. It is still a recognisable picture of our world–the vampiric energy of the system being once again highly contentious.

The award-winning producer of The Rachel Maddow Show exposes the Republican Party as a gang of impostors, meticulously documenting how they have abandoned their duty to govern and are gravely endangering America.

A journalist and author of The Influence of Soros examines the history of Jewish people in America and explores their ever-evolving relationship to the nation’s culture and identity—and each other. What does it mean to be a Bad Jew? Many Jews use the term “Bad Jew” as a weapon against other members of the community or even against themselves. You can be called a Bad Jew if you don’t keep kosher; if you only go to temple on Yom Kippur; if you don’t attend or send your children to Hebrew school; if you enjoy Christmas music; if your partner isn’t Jewish; if you don’t call your mother often enough. The list is endless.

In his previous book, Thomas Frank explained why working America votes for politicians who reserve their favors for the rich. Now, in The Wrecking Crew, Frank examines the Washington those politicians have given us, showing why, no matter what happens in November 2008, we're stuck with it for the foreseeable future.

Democratic Ideals and Reality, which was first published in 1919, represents a post-World War I worldview that would become the template for future geopolitical movements. As well as the UK, USA, and Europe, there is a focus on Russia, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Some of Mackinder's predictions would come to pass later in the century with the outbreak of World War II and the political consequences this would bring in the aftermath.

Karl Rove, the man who masterminded the rise of George W. Bush from governor of Texas to the presidency, who advised Bush during two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, who some claim helped seize the 2004 election for Bush, and who was at the center of the Bush administration's two biggest scandals - is back. Since exiting the Bush administration, Rove has quietly become the country's greatest Republican power broker. This up-to-the-minute journalistic report sheds crucial light on Rove's vital behind-the-scenes role.

In Fueling Freedom, energy experts Stephen Moore and Kathleen Hartnett White make an unapologetic case for fossil fuels, turning around progressives' protestations to prove that if fossil fuel energy is supplanted by "green" alternatives for political reasons, humanity will take a giant step backwards and the planet will be less safe, less clean, and less free.

The 2015 winner of the Brown Democracy Medal, Joan C. Tronto, argues in Who Cares? that we need to rethink American democracy, as well as our own fundamental values and commitments, from a caring perspective. Asserting that Americans are facing a "caring deficit" - that there are simply too many demands on our time to care adequately for children, elderly people, and ourselves - she asks us to reconsider how we allocate care responsibilities.

In this dispatch from exile, Hong Kong political activist Nathan Law explores the meaning of freedom - and shows how easily freedoms can be eroded or dismantled. Freedom is fragile - it is not a given, and each generation must fight to protect it, whether in emerging democracies or in the Western world, where freedom is too often taken for granted.

What Is to Be Done? by Vladimir Lenin is a seminal work that outlines the revolutionary strategy and organizational principles for the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Written in 1902, this influential text serves as a cornerstone in the development of Leninist thought. Lenin addresses the challenges facing the working class movement, particularly the lack of revolutionary consciousness among the proletariat. He argues for the necessity of a vanguard party composed of professional revolutionaries who possess the political knowledge to guide the working class towards socialist revolution.

America is great for a reason. Built on principles of freedom, rugged individualism, and self-sufficiency, no country has ever accumulated more power and wealth, abused it less, or used that power more to advance the human condition. And yet, as America blossomed, left-wing radicalism and resentment festered beneath the surface, threatening to undermine democracy in the form of social justice warriors, the deep state, and compromised institutions like academia and the mainstream media.

Democracy is in trouble. Populism is a common scapegoat, but not the root cause. More basic are social and economic transformations eroding the foundations of democracy, ruling elites trying to lock in their own privilege, and cultural perversions like making individualistic freedom the enemy of democracy's other crucial ideals of equality and solidarity. In Degenerations of Democracy, three of our most prominent intellectuals investigate democracy gone awry, locate our points of fracture, and suggest paths to democratic renewal.