Political Liberalism

From public intellectual and professor Robert Boyers, “a powerfully persuasive, insightful, and provocative prose that mixes erudition and first-hand reportage” (Joyce Carol Oates) addressing recent developments in American culture and arguing for the tolerance of difference that is at the...

Just as Donald Trump's victorious campaign for the US presidency shocked the world, the seemingly sudden national prominence of white supremacists, xenophobes, militia leaders, and mysterious "alt-right" figures mystifies many. But the American extreme right has been growing steadily in number and influence since the 1990s with the rise of patriot militias. Following 9/11, conspiracy theorists found fresh life; and in virulent reaction to the first black US president, militant racists have come out of the woodwork.

The loyalty investigations triggered by the Red Scare of the 1940s and 1950s marginalized many talented women and men who had entered government service during the Great Depression seeking to promote social democracy as a means to economic reform. Their influence over New Deal policymaking and their alliances with progressive labor and consumer movements elicited a powerful reaction from conservatives, who accused them of being subversives.

Some have claimed that the neoliberal era is behind us. Baradaran shows that such thinking is misguided. Neoliberalism is a failed economic idea—it doesn't, in fact, create more wealth or more freedom. But it has been successful nevertheless, by seizing the courts and enabling our age of crypto fraud, financial instability, and accelerating inequality.

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.

Liberal democracy in America has always contained contradictions—most notably, a noble but abstract commitment to freedom, justice, and equality that, tragically, has seldom been realized in practice. While these contradictions have caused dissent and even violence, there was always an underlying and evolving solidarity drawn from the cultural resources of America’s “hybrid Enlightenment”. James Davison Hunter, who introduced the concept of “culture wars” 30 years ago, tells us in this new book that those historic sources of national solidarity have now largely dissolved.

Sinn Féin is the most popular political party in both Northern Ireland and the Republic. A movement once synonymous with a paramilitary campaign is on the brink of taking real power through purely democratic means. But if Sinn Féin has mastered the art of electoral politics, it remains strangely opaque. Who really runs the party? How is it funded? And what can we expect of it as a party of government? Aoife Moore, Irish Journalist of the Year in 2021, explores these and other burning questions in The Long Game.

Liberalism That Wins offers a way forward: a framework for democratic renewal that is morally credible, politically unifying, and strong enough to out-compete the extremes. It rejects empty nostalgia and blind technocracy in favour of a vision grounded in reality—one that can restore trust, rebuild legitimacy, and renew the democratic centre.

Final Battle exposes the real threat that Democrats pose to freedom. The rise of socialism and critical race theory, coupled with threats to the Electoral College and Senate, an independent judiciary, and the integrity of the electoral system, now threaten to destroy the traditions that bring Americans together—the heart of our democracy.

In Not a Day Care, Dr. Everett Piper, president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University and author of the viral essay, "This Is Not a Day Care. It's a University!" takes a hard look at what's happening around the country - including the demand for "safe spaces" and trigger warnings at universities like Yale, Brandeis, and Oberlin - and digs in his heels against the sad and dangerous infantilization of the American spirit.

Donald Trump isn't a despot. But he is increasingly acting like the "despot's apprentice", an understudy in authoritarian tactics that threaten to erode American democracy, including attacking the press, threatening rule of law by firing those who investigate his alleged wrongdoings, using nepotism to staff the White House, and countless other techniques. Donald Trump is borrowing tactics from the world's dictators and despots.

Liberal Christian theology is a big topic in today's churches and seminaries. But what does liberal theology really mean and why is it so controversial? What does it actually believe about truth, Scripture, and Jesus Christ? And where does it lead? The term "liberal theology" is often...

Dinesh D'Souza, the most original and controversial writer on politics and society in the U.S. today, uncovers the links between the spread of American pop culture, leftist ideas, and secular values and the rise of anti-Americanism throughout the world. In The Enemy at Home, D'Souza makes the startling claim that 9/11 and other terrorist acts can be directly traced to the ideas and attitudes perpetrated by America's cultural left.

In America and in England, faltering economies at home and failed wars abroad have generated a political and intellectual hysteria. It is a derangement manifested in a number of ways: nostalgia for imperialism, xenophobic paranoia, and denunciations of an allegedly intolerant left. These symptoms can be found even among the most informed of Anglo-America.

In The World of the John Birch Society, author D. J. Mulloy reveals the tactics of the society in a way they've never been understood before, allowing the listener to make the connections to contemporary American politics, up to and including the Tea Party. These tactics included organized dissemination of broad-based accusations and innuendo, political brinksmanship within the Republican Party, and frequent doomsday predictions regarding world events.

The story of America is the struggle between our liberal ideal and illiberal resistance. Donald Trump catalyzed a reactionary revolution by tapping into the dark, shadowy side of American democracy that embraces exclusion and inequality. Throughout American history these alarming impulses have come to the forefront of our culture — during the Civil War, the era of the Robber Barons, and the Civil Rights Movement — but have now come to fruition in the presidency of Donald Trump.

The struggle between the main political parties has been reduced to an unpopularity contest, in which voters hold their noses and sigh as they trudge to the polls. Peter Hitchens explains how and why British politics has sunk to this dreary level - the takeover of the parties and the media by conventional left-wing dogmas which then call themselves 'the centre ground'. The Tory party under David Cameron has become a pale-blue twin of New Labour, offering change without alteration.

The Three Languages of Politics is a profoundly illuminating exploration of communication in America’s political landscape. Progressives, conservatives, and libertarians are like tribes speaking different languages. This is an accessible, precise, and insightful guide to lowering the barriers coarsening our politics. This is not a book about one ideology over another. Instead, it is a book about how we communicate issues and ideologies and how language intended to persuade instead divides.

At long last, America’s most notorious political operative has released his operating manual! A freedom fighter to his admirers, a dirty trickster to his detractors, the flamboyant, outrageous, articulate, and extraordinarily well-dressed Roger Stone lays out Stone’s Rules - the maxims that have governed his legendary career as a campaign operative for four American presidents, from Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.

In this profoundly important reassessment of constitutional interpretation, the eminent legal philosopher Hadley Arkes argues that "originalism" alone is an inadequate answer to the judicial activism of the left. Without recourse to "mere Natural Law"—the moral principles knowable by all—our legal and constitutional system is doomed to incoherence. Brilliant in its analysis, essential in its argument, Mere Natural Law is a must-listen for everyone who cares about the Constitution, morality, and the rule of law.