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Donald Trump's presidency has raised a question that many of us never thought we'd be asking: Is our democracy in danger? Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have spent more than twenty years studying the breakdown of democracies in Europe and Latin America, and they believe the answer is yes. Democracy no longer ends with a bang--in a revolution or military coup--but with a whimper: the slow, steady weakening of critical institutions, such as the judiciary and the press, and the gradual erosion of long-standing political norms.
This groundbreaking book from Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Frances FitzGerald is the first to tell the powerful, dramatic story of the Evangelical movement in America - from the Puritan era to the 2016 presidential election. Evangelicals have, in many ways, defined the nation. They have shaped our culture and our politics. Frances FitzGerald's narrative of this distinctively American movement is a major work of history, piecing together the centuries-long story for the first time.
The incredible, harrowing account of how American democracy was hacked by Moscow as part of a covert operation to influence the US election and help Donald Trump gain the presidency.
Why is America living in an age of profound economic inequality? Why, despite the desperate need to address climate change, have even modest environmental efforts been defeated again and again? Why have protections for employees been decimated? Why do hedge-fund billionaires pay a far lower tax rate than middle-class workers? The conventional answer is that a popular uprising against "big government" led to the rise of a broad-based conservative movement.
No working journalist knows Donald Trump better than David Cay Johnston, who first met the 45th president in 1988 and has tracked him ever since. Featuring Johnston's renowned skill in bringing government policy to life, this crucial book explains how our daily lives will be affected by the actions of the Trump Administration. This book is essential listening for all Americans.
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.
Donald Trump's presidency has raised a question that many of us never thought we'd be asking: Is our democracy in danger? Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have spent more than twenty years studying the breakdown of democracies in Europe and Latin America, and they believe the answer is yes. Democracy no longer ends with a bang--in a revolution or military coup--but with a whimper: the slow, steady weakening of critical institutions, such as the judiciary and the press, and the gradual erosion of long-standing political norms.
This groundbreaking book from Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Frances FitzGerald is the first to tell the powerful, dramatic story of the Evangelical movement in America - from the Puritan era to the 2016 presidential election. Evangelicals have, in many ways, defined the nation. They have shaped our culture and our politics. Frances FitzGerald's narrative of this distinctively American movement is a major work of history, piecing together the centuries-long story for the first time.
The incredible, harrowing account of how American democracy was hacked by Moscow as part of a covert operation to influence the US election and help Donald Trump gain the presidency.
Why is America living in an age of profound economic inequality? Why, despite the desperate need to address climate change, have even modest environmental efforts been defeated again and again? Why have protections for employees been decimated? Why do hedge-fund billionaires pay a far lower tax rate than middle-class workers? The conventional answer is that a popular uprising against "big government" led to the rise of a broad-based conservative movement.
No working journalist knows Donald Trump better than David Cay Johnston, who first met the 45th president in 1988 and has tracked him ever since. Featuring Johnston's renowned skill in bringing government policy to life, this crucial book explains how our daily lives will be affected by the actions of the Trump Administration. This book is essential listening for all Americans.
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.
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.
Russia expert Luke Harding lays out the most in-depth look to date at the Trump campaign's dealings with Russia. Beginning with a meeting with Christopher Steele, the man behind the shattering dossier that first brought the allegations to light, Harding probes the histories of key Russian and American players with striking clarity and insight. Harding exposes the disquieting details of the Trump-Russia story - a saga so huge it involves international espionage, offshore banks, sketchy real estate deals, mobsters, money laundering, disappeared dissidents, and more.
With extraordinary access to the West Wing, Michael Wolff reveals what happened behind-the-scenes in the first nine months of the most controversial presidency of our time in Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House. Since Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th President of the United States, the country—and the world—has witnessed a stormy, outrageous, and absolutely mesmerizing presidential term that reflects the volatility and fierceness of the man elected Commander-in-Chief.
With the warmth and lucidity that have made him one of our most important public voices, Robert B. Reich makes the case for a generous, inclusive understanding of the American project, centering on the moral obligations of citizenship. Rooting his argument in everyday reality and common sense, Reich demonstrates the existence of a common good, and argues that it is this that defines a society or a nation. Societies and nations undergo virtuous cycles that reinforce and build the common good, as well as vicious cycles that undermine it. Over the past five decades, Reich contends, America has been in a slowly accelerating vicious cycle.
Neoliberalism - the doctrine that market exchange is an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for all human action - has become dominant in both thought and practice throughout much of the world since 1970 or so. Writing for a wide audience, David Harvey, author of The New Imperialism and The Condition of Postmodernity, here tells the political-economic story of where neoliberalization came from and how it proliferated on the world stage.
A razor-sharp thinker offers a new understanding of our post-truth world and explains the American instinct to believe in make-believe, from the Pilgrims to P. T. Barnum to Disneyland to zealots of every stripe...to Donald Trump. In this sweeping, eloquent history of America, Kurt Andersen demonstrates that what's happening in our country today - this strange, post-factual, "fake news" moment we're all living through - is not something entirely new, but rather the ultimate expression of our national character and path.
The world is in turmoil. From India to Turkey and from Poland to the United States, authoritarian populists have seized power. As a result democracy itself may now be at risk. Two core components of liberal democracy―individual rights and the popular will―are iat war with each other. As the role of money in politics soared and important issues were taken out of public contestation, a system of "rights without democracy" took hold. Populists who rail against this say they want to return power to the people. But in practice they create a system of "democracy without rights."
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.
The Doomsday Machine is Ellsberg's hair-raising insider's account of the most dangerous arms buildup in the history of civilization, whose legacy - and renewal under the Obama administration - threatens the very survival of humanity. It is scarcely possible to estimate the true dangers of our present nuclear policies without penetrating the secret realities of the nuclear strategy of the late Eisenhower and early Kennedy years, when Ellsberg had high-level access to them.
At the end of the 1980s, when the Cold War ended, many, including former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, believed that democracy had triumphed politically once and for all. Yet nearly 30 years later, the direction of history no longer seems certain. A repressive and destructive force has begun to re-emerge on the global stage - sweeping across Europe, parts of Asia, and the United States - that to Albright, looks very much like fascism.
In The Reactionary Mind, Robin traces conservatism back to its roots in the reaction against the French Revolution. He argues that the right was inspired, and is still united, by its hostility to emancipating the lower orders. Some conservatives endorse the free market; others oppose it. Some criticize the state; others celebrate it. Underlying these differences is the impulse to defend power and privilege against movements demanding freedom and equality - while simultaneously making populist appeals to the masses.
American democracy was never supposed to give the nation a president like Donald Trump. We have never had a president who gave rise to such widespread alarm about his lack of commitment to the institutions of self-government, to the norms democracy requires, and to the need for basic knowledge about how government works. We have never had a president who raises profound questions about his basic competence and his psychological capacity to take on the most challenging political office in the world.
An explosive exposé of the right's relentless campaign to eliminate unions, suppress voting, privatize public education, and change the Constitution.
Behind today's headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. Democracy in Chains names its true architect - the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan - and dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed over six decades to alter every branch of government to disempower the majority.
In a brilliant and engrossing narrative, Nancy MacLean shows how Buchanan forged his ideas about government in a last-gasp attempt to preserve the white elite's power in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. In response to the widening of American democracy, he developed a brilliant, if diabolical, plan to undermine the ability of the majority to use its numbers to level the playing field between the rich and powerful and the rest of us.
Corporate donors and their right-wing foundations were only too eager to support Buchanan's work in teaching others how to divide America into "makers" and "takers". And when a multibillionaire on a messianic mission to rewrite the social contract of the modern world, Charles Koch, discovered Buchanan, he created a vast, relentless, and multiarmed machine to carry out Buchanan's strategy.
Without Buchanan's ideas and Koch's money, the libertarian right would not have succeeded in its stealth takeover of the Republican Party as a delivery mechanism. Now, with Mike Pence as vice president, the cause has a longtime loyalist in the White House, not to mention a phalanx of Republicans in the House, the Senate, a majority of state governments, and the courts, all carrying out the plan. That plan includes harsher laws to undermine unions, privatizing everything from schools to health care and Social Security, and keeping as many of us as possible from voting. Based on 10 years of unique research, Democracy in Chains tells a chilling story of right-wing academics and big money run amok. This revelatory work of scholarship is also a call to arms to protect the achievements of 20th-century American self-government.
Stunning. Terrifying. Eye-opening. The revelations in this book left me both furious and energized. How an economist trying to justify school segregation in the 1950s became the brains behind today's Koch Brothers juggernaut to transform America into a repressive oligarchy is a story every citizen needs to know. Can't recommend this book more highly.
8 of 8 people found this review helpful
If you value the spirit of democracy be well informed. This book is very informative.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful
Now I understand what is going on with the Republican Party. This is a must read for everyone.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful
Don’t be put off by some of the criticism of this book that challenges its historical accuracy. I have read commentary and it doesn’t hold up. Good to read opponents too to put this in perspective but does not change the fact that so called “political choice” theory is a stealth move to help the rich and powerful. This book reveals a dangerous line of thought and policy that will harm our democracy if we don’t heed this information. Also the narrator is great.
7 of 8 people found this review helpful
This book helped me greatly to understand today's political climate in America writ large. I always struggled to understand what those on the right meant when they spoke of freedom, as their concept of that idea seemed to be the opposite of mine. This book helped me understand that difference. If you have a cognitive dissonance with people on the right, this book is well worth your time.
9 of 11 people found this review helpful
9 years after the Great Ressesion (which is really a depression) Charles Koch continues to push economic liberty. This is essentially pure, unregulated capitalism, where the enviornment, human health, the planet and ones own civil liberties are externalities that get in the way of "progress".
In the book, Charles Koch comes across as someone suffering from Asperger Syndrome. His obsessive interest in destroying democracy, liberty for himself, lack of empathy and social awkwardness all meet the classic symptoms. It certainly puts things in perspective when one considers the possibility that underlying Charles ideology and lack of compromise is a mental illness.
6 of 8 people found this review helpful
I read and listened to this book twice. Excellent read.
The author put together the wiring diagram that my news reading, intuitive leaps and sociopolitical observation feared.
This should be a must read for anyone wanting a better understanding of how we got to where we are and if we are not careful - where we are going.
The bottom line - the message is frightening. If you are interested in freedom and democracy associated with equality - give it a read - or Two.
If you are a libertarian, suspend your strongly help beliefs and give it a read. It will test the basis of your libertarianism and the internal consistency of your logic.
I see this book as a wake up call...a clarion call to look deeply into what you believe and at what you think makes a desirable future for the nation
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
This book is a great companion to Jane Mayer's Dark Money. It looks at the Libertarian movement, its roots and contributions on economist James Buchanan and Charles Koch. Well researched, using Buchanan's personal documents. The performance is excellent, easy to listen to.
7 of 10 people found this review helpful
Excellent examination of how economic idealogues funded by extremist billionaires who see mass democracy as antithetical to their personal political views have weaponized economic and legal theory and institutions in an effort to fundamentally and radically restructure public discourse and institutions. Their utopian vision is frightening in its mass disenfranchisement and lack of basic compassion and in how successful they have been in promoting policies and debate in favor of it. This is a powerful argument for political engagement and the danger to democracy of unlimited concentrated capital.
Excellent research and writting, well delivered.
6 of 9 people found this review helpful
People who want to believe that behind all of the world's problems there is always a secret group of evil men pulling strings of a master strategy, will love this book. MacLean's story is indeed entertaining, but it is not the serious historical work I was expecting. Rather, it is what Michael Munger called 'speculative historical fiction'. She clearly cherry picks bits and pieces and tries to knit together an outrageous story with easy-to-despise villains. The worst is that, in order to construct these nefarious movie characters, MacLean horribly manipulates their quotes, twisting the original meanings entirely. This is an intellectually dishonest tactic, as well as an insult to the readers and obviously to those that she misrepresent and demonize.
What bothered me the most is that MacLean usually does not grapple with the complicated philosophical challenges that cross through this story. Specially the perennial issue of balancing the will of majorities vs the rights of minorities in a democracy. Rather, she chooses to skip over any argument, and simply appeal to the currently widespread contempt for the rich, triggering an intuitive (lazy) judgement by the readers.
After listening to the book I read a review by Mike Munger, which not only delves into these points much more eloquently, but also provides a useful account of Public Choice theory. I would recommend it for anyone interested in this topic: www.independent.org/issues/article.asp?id=9115
12 of 20 people found this review helpful