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Prius or Pickup?
- How the Answers to Four Simple Questions Explain America’s Great Divide
- Narrated by: Scott Merriman
- Length: 9 hrs and 49 mins
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Publisher's summary
Two award-winning political scientists provide the psychological key to America’s deadlocked politics, showing that we are divided not by ideologies but something deeper: personality differences that appear in everything from politics to parenting to the workplace to TV preferences, and which would be innocuous if only we could decouple them from our noxious political debate.
What’s in your garage: a Prius or a pickup? What’s in your coffee cup: Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts? What about your pet: cat or dog? As award-winning political scholars Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler explain, even our smallest choices speak volumes about us - especially when it comes to our personalities and our politics. Liberals and conservatives seem to occupy different worlds because we have fundamentally different worldviews: systems of values that can be quickly diagnosed with a handful of simple parenting questions, but which shape our lives and decisions in the most elemental ways. If we're to overcome our seemingly intractable differences, Hetherington and Weiler show, we must first learn to master the psychological impulses that give rise to them, and to understand how politicians manipulate our mindsets for their own benefit.
Drawing on groundbreaking original research, Prius or Pickup? is an incisive, illuminating study of the fracturing of the American mind.
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- Lucas Weismann
- 03-13-19
Author can't see beyond his own bias.
The authors have some interesting ideas about what makes for different types of voters. While the conclusions make sense, they state the premise of each chapter repeatedly before adding more evidence, as if this is either a collection of essays written for a high school honors english class, or directed at senior citizens with poor memory.
I'll fully admit that I'm neither a fluid, nor fixed thinker according to his "4" questions about raising kids, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong. They talk about conservatives being conservative because they see the world as a dangerous place. This ignores the fact that the world IS a dangerous place. It's also a wonderful place to explore.
Towards the end of the book this becomes an anti-Trump screed. Which is sad. That means that as soon as "Bad Orange Man" is out of office, the book will no longer be relevant. The kernels of truth in the book deserve more fertile ground than the "current year" narrative.
They also rail against the rise of the authoritarian right, while ignoring the authoritarian left that has sprung up in the form of hecklers veto Antifa, the very real conflicts between being pro-muslim and pro-lgbt in britain and social media banning people and driving necessary conversation underground.
Basically everything that conservatives (sorry, fixed viewpoint people) do is wrong or based in fear, and everything leftists (sorry, fluid worldview) people do is right. The authors might argue that they don't say this anywhere. And that's true. Not explicitly. But, since 9 of 10 examples of "errors in thinking" come from fixed worldview people in the book and the final chapter is basically "Orange Man Bad".
It really shows what conventional wisdom and research in the last few years shows. Conservatives understand how progressives think. Progressives have no clue how conservatives think.
This is really sad. Not just because of the time I wasted listening to the book, not just because of the money I spent that I'll be getting back as a refund from audible. It's sad because if the authors had worked harder to see past their own biases and written with the future in mind, this could be a book that could provide insight for decades to people of all political stripes. Instead, it's a partisan choir-preaching sermon that's only almost-good.
tl;dr - if you have more than one NPR tote bag, you'll love this. If you have a nuanced, or rightwing worldview (not the same, believe me), you'll be disappointed.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Rebecca Rider
- 01-22-19
Good research, but liberal bias is irritating
I gave it three stars because it is more worth reading than not, but it was annoying to keep reading about how all “fixed” voters are motivated by racism. I’m a fixed person, and I vote based on my religious convictions. One possible fix to how deeply fragmented our parties have become would be for the left to stop demonizing religious people all the time. Maybe it’s ok to work at a private Christian school, even if their beliefs differ from yours. You could argue the same for Muslim schools - freedom of religion being one of the reasons our country was founded in the first place. And maybe if the left stopped threatening to tax our nation’s places of worship, fixed voters wouldn’t feel that fear anymore that made them vote for Trump - who we all knew wasn’t a Christian, and frankly we didn’t care, because we knew he would protect our urban churches from closing down and protect our freedom of religion and speech more generally. Anyway, that’s my take. But the research is excellent, so worth the read.
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- Rich Shields
- 11-16-20
The Bigotry of the Holier than Thou
These guys almost convinced me they were honest researches on a quest to expose evolutionary bias in the human species. They were doing a pretty good job until for some inexplicable reason their train went proudly off the track into the abyss of their own self righteous bigotry. Too bad, they might have actually done some good.
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- Jody
- 12-13-21
This book did not age well!
This book did not age well!
In a nutshell the book rebrands liberals and conservatives as the fluid and the fixed.
The author writes that those who are fluid have a less fearful worldview, whereas the fixed worldview is based upon fear.
If this is true (which it is not as the book is so ridiculously biased and far left) then the tables have changed and completely switched since covid.
The left is so fearful of a virus that they can’t attend places where people don’t have their faces covered or show their vaccine passports. They are even afraid of their own family and only attend family gatherings if the government tells them it is safe.
And while politics have ALWAYS been based in a worldview, not just recent as the author claims, that view for conservatives is freedom, not fear.
Freedom of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
The author mentions many times that the fluid left is more “educated” than the fixed right- but fails to mention that education does not equal intelligence or logic, nor provides common sense.
The elitist attitude of the fluid left is the reason they drink expensive coffee and beer, they have a need to feel superior to others. The right doesn’t feel the need to be superior… nor are they afraid of expensive coffee, beer or wine as the author writes.
Narration is very good. It was the only saving grace in this book marketed as research but is just ignorant opinion.
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- John Govern
- 11-16-21
Leftist talking points, not facts
The book started off balanced with jabs to all sides, but when it "cited" Trump as saying "Illegal aliens are murderers and rapists" was demonstrated as clearly taken out of context. At this point the author has lost all credibility. A partisan hack.
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- Michael
- 12-28-20
Appalling Historical and Political Ignorance
The ignorance of the authors is apparent in the opening paragraphs of the book. Jane Fonda was not labeled “Hanoi Jane” because she was a strong woman, but because she visited North Vietnam, the enemy of the USA during the Vietnam War, a small fact the authors overlook.
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- Azura S
- 11-18-18
Everyone Should Read This...
This book doesn't just explain why there's a right vs left divide opening up and the effect it has had on society. But it explains the consequences and what we might do about it. There are no judgements here. I'd guess that the authors go "left" but there's no evidence of any anger/aversion to the "right" in there. If you're tired of the constant bickering... this book may be the map to a better place for all of us. Fingers crossed.
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- Becky C
- 09-26-22
Do not waste your time or money on this book
This book purports to give you the answers to the reasons that America is dividing….all with four short, seemingly simple “do you prefer this or that” questions. What utter drivel!! The thought that the problems facing Americans can be reduced to “Do you prefer Clint Eastwood or Ellen DeGeneres?” Is very much like the hundreds of quizzes and games Facebook throws up in our faces every day - “pick which animal you like and we will tell you your personality” or “put your finger on the gemstone you prefer and we will give you your life saying”! Thanks but I’ll stick to my daily horoscope. The belief that we can “know all about” a person simply from one particular preference IS part of the problem and it is part of the problem that our children are picking up from us and THAT is one of the biggest dangers facing our country. The thought that people cannot be multifaceted and hold seemingly contradictory concepts at the same time. The fact that someone can “like John Wayne or Clint Eastwood” and still care about the environment or “like Ellen DeGeneres” and drive an SUV. This kind of thinking encourages people to only look at the surface and not dive deeper to really understand their neighbors or their coworkers. And THAT is the real problem.
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- Anonymous User
- 06-20-22
Recommended but can come across as a bit lopsided.
An intriguing listen, but I can see why supporters of President Trump aren't fans. The authors frequently use him as an example of what's wrong with the fixed (conservative) worldview without any real example of what can go wrong with the fluid (liberal) worldview (Murray's The Madness of Crowds does an excellent job of showcasing the fluid/liberal run amok). They should feel some redemption (if they stick with it) as the authors make clear that the fixed worldview is more closely aligned with "the middle", or the rest if the U.S. population, than those on the left, or the fluid. If you're interested in understanding why someone holds beliefs you might find repellant instead of ridiculing them, this book is an excellent place to start.
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- Darwood martin
- 05-26-21
Read this book to understand the world right now
The title pretty much says it all. Ignore the reviews saying this book is biased against conservatives. It's not. Those reviewers heard something they didn't like and stopped listening. The book is neutral about who is right, but if there is a bias it is that the book is written for liberals so they can understand "how did this happen!?"
Spoiler: Liberal opinions are not as common as liberals believe they are.
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Story
In 2004, journalist Bill Bishop coined the term "the big sort". Armed with startling new demographic data, he made national news in a series of articles showing how Americans have been sorting themselves into alarmingly homogeneous communities - not by region or by state but by city and even neighborhood. Over the past three decades, we have been choosing the neighborhoods (and churches and news shows) compatible with our lifestyles and beliefs.
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Build the Wall?
- By Amazon Customer on 01-23-19
By: Bill Bishop, and others
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Dog Whistle Politics
- How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class
- By: Ian Haney López
- Narrated by: Eric Yves Garcia
- Length: 12 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
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Performance
-
Story
In Dog Whistle Politics, Ian Haney Lopez offers a sweeping account of how politicians and plutocrats deploy veiled racial appeals to persuade white voters to support policies that favor the extremely rich yet threaten their own interests. Dog-whistle appeals generate middle-class enthusiasm for political candidates who promise to crack down on crime, curb undocumented immigration, and protect the heartland against Islamic infiltration, but ultimately vote to slash taxes for the rich.
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Narration like verbal water boarding
- By Mark Andreadis on 08-31-15
By: Ian Haney López
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The People vs. Democracy
- Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It
- By: Yascha Mounk
- Narrated by: Timothy Andrés Pabon
- Length: 8 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
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 at 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."
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Not worth it
- By DailyShopper on 06-07-18
By: Yascha Mounk
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Bad News
- How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy
- By: Batya Ungar-Sargon
- Narrated by: Batya Ungar-Sargon
- Length: 7 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
Today’s newsrooms are propagating radical ideas that were fringe as recently as a decade ago, including “antiracism,” intersectionality, open borders, and critical race theory. How did this come to be? It all has to do with who our news media is written by—and who it is written for. In Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy, Batya Ungar-Sargon reveals how American journalism underwent a status revolution over the twentieth century—from a blue-collar trade to an elite profession.
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Balanced, informative, and insightful
- By J. B. Eibel on 06-06-22
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American Grace
- How Religion Divides and Unites Us
- By: Robert D. Putnam, David E. Campbell
- Narrated by: Dan John Miller
- Length: 18 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
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Performance
-
Story
American Grace takes its findings from two of the largest, most comprehensive surveys ever conducted on religion and public life in America, plus in-depth studies of diverse congregations---among them a megachurch, a Mormon congregation, a Catholic parish, a reform Jewish synagogue, and an African American congregation.
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Interesting Analysis
- By Daniel on 10-08-12
By: Robert D. Putnam, and others
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Why We're Polarized
- By: Ezra Klein
- Narrated by: Ezra Klein
- Length: 8 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In Why We’re Polarized, Klein reveals the structural and psychological forces behind America’s descent into division and dysfunction. Neither a polemic nor a lament, this book offers a clear framework for understanding everything from Trump’s rise to the Democratic Party’s leftward shift to the politicization of everyday culture. America is polarized, first and foremost, by identity. Everyone engaged in American politics is engaged, at some level, in identity politics.
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Good as an intro, skip if you’re a wonk
- By Tony on 01-29-20
By: Ezra Klein
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The Big Sort
- Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart
- By: Bill Bishop, Robert G. Cushing
- Narrated by: Paul Brion
- Length: 12 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 2004, journalist Bill Bishop coined the term "the big sort". Armed with startling new demographic data, he made national news in a series of articles showing how Americans have been sorting themselves into alarmingly homogeneous communities - not by region or by state but by city and even neighborhood. Over the past three decades, we have been choosing the neighborhoods (and churches and news shows) compatible with our lifestyles and beliefs.
-
-
Build the Wall?
- By Amazon Customer on 01-23-19
By: Bill Bishop, and others
-
Dog Whistle Politics
- How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class
- By: Ian Haney López
- Narrated by: Eric Yves Garcia
- Length: 12 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Dog Whistle Politics, Ian Haney Lopez offers a sweeping account of how politicians and plutocrats deploy veiled racial appeals to persuade white voters to support policies that favor the extremely rich yet threaten their own interests. Dog-whistle appeals generate middle-class enthusiasm for political candidates who promise to crack down on crime, curb undocumented immigration, and protect the heartland against Islamic infiltration, but ultimately vote to slash taxes for the rich.
-
-
Narration like verbal water boarding
- By Mark Andreadis on 08-31-15
By: Ian Haney López
-
The People vs. Democracy
- Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It
- By: Yascha Mounk
- Narrated by: Timothy Andrés Pabon
- Length: 8 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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 at 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."
-
-
Not worth it
- By DailyShopper on 06-07-18
By: Yascha Mounk
-
Bad News
- How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy
- By: Batya Ungar-Sargon
- Narrated by: Batya Ungar-Sargon
- Length: 7 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Today’s newsrooms are propagating radical ideas that were fringe as recently as a decade ago, including “antiracism,” intersectionality, open borders, and critical race theory. How did this come to be? It all has to do with who our news media is written by—and who it is written for. In Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy, Batya Ungar-Sargon reveals how American journalism underwent a status revolution over the twentieth century—from a blue-collar trade to an elite profession.
-
-
Balanced, informative, and insightful
- By J. B. Eibel on 06-06-22
-
American Grace
- How Religion Divides and Unites Us
- By: Robert D. Putnam, David E. Campbell
- Narrated by: Dan John Miller
- Length: 18 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
American Grace takes its findings from two of the largest, most comprehensive surveys ever conducted on religion and public life in America, plus in-depth studies of diverse congregations---among them a megachurch, a Mormon congregation, a Catholic parish, a reform Jewish synagogue, and an African American congregation.
-
-
Interesting Analysis
- By Daniel on 10-08-12
By: Robert D. Putnam, and others
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Makers and Takers
- By: Peter Schweizer
- Narrated by: Johnny Heller
- Length: 5 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
In Makers and Takers, Peter Schweizer broadens his scope to examine the damaging effects of liberal philosophy on ordinary Americans. Drawing on national polls and academic studies, as well as the revealing testimony of liberals themselves, Schweizer shows that liberals are, on the whole, less honest, less generous, lazier, and more materialistic than their conservative counterparts.
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Excellent!
- By Eileen J. O'Connor on 03-08-16
By: Peter Schweizer
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Ghetto
- The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea
- By: Mitchell Duneier
- Narrated by: Prentice Onayemi
- Length: 10 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
On March 29, 1516, the city council of Venice issued a decree forcing Jews to live in il geto - a closed quarter named for the copper foundry that once occupied the area. The term stuck. In this sweeping and original interpretation, Mitchell Duneier traces the idea of the ghetto from its beginnings in the 16th century and its revival by the Nazis to the present. As Duneier shows, we cannot understand the entanglements of race, poverty, and place in America today without recalling the history of the ghetto in Europe, as well as later efforts to understand the problems of the American city.
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Impressive
- By Jean on 12-10-16
By: Mitchell Duneier
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Disintegration
- The Splintering of Black America
- By: Eugene Robinson
- Narrated by: Alan Bomar Jones
- Length: 7 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The African American population in the United States has always been seen as a single entity: a "Black America" with unified interests and needs. In his groundbreaking book Disintegration, longtime Washington Post journalist Eugene Robinson argues that, through decades of desegregation, affirmative action, and immigration, the concept of Black America has shattered.
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Written for Popular Consumption
- By Catherine S. Read on 06-03-11
By: Eugene Robinson
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The Age of American Unreason
- By: Susan Jacoby
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 14 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation, Susan Jacoby dissects a new American cultural phenomenon - one that is at odds with our heritage of Enlightenment reason and with modern, secular knowledge and science. With mordant wit, Jacoby surveys an antirationalist landscape extending from pop culture to a pseudo-intellectual universe of "junk thought".
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Interesting, but explanation by redescription
- By T. Andrew Poehlman on 07-15-08
By: Susan Jacoby
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They Don't Represent Us
- Reclaiming Our Democracy
- By: Lawrence Lessig
- Narrated by: Lawrence Lessig
- Length: 10 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In They Don’t Represent Us, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig charts the way in which the fundamental institutions of our democracy, including our media, respond to narrow interests rather than to the needs and wishes of the nation’s citizenry. But the blame does not only lie with “them” - Washington’s politicians and power brokers, Lessig argues. The problem is also “us.”
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All Americans should read/listen to this.
- By Christopher W Catron on 03-22-20
By: Lawrence Lessig
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Our Political Nature
- The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us
- By: Avi Tuschman
- Narrated by: Jay Snyder
- Length: 17 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Our Political Nature is the first book to reveal the hidden roots of our most deeply held moral values. It shows how political orientations across space and time arise from three clusters of measurable personality traits. These clusters entail opposing attitudes toward tribalism, inequality, and differing perceptions of human nature. Together, these traits are by far the most powerful cause of left-right voting, even leading people to regularly vote against their economic interests.
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A Trivial Version of Haidt's "The Righteous Mind"
- By Curt Doolittle on 10-29-13
By: Avi Tuschman
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The Long Southern Strategy
- How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics
- By: Angie Maxwell, Todd Shields
- Narrated by: Tom Parks
- Length: 16 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The Southern Strategy is traditionally understood as a Goldwater and Nixon-era effort by the Republican Party to win over disaffected white voters in the Democratic stronghold of the American South. To realign these voters with the GOP, the party abandoned its past support for civil rights and used racially coded language to capitalize on southern white racial angst. However, that decision was but one in a series of decisions the GOP made not just on race, but on feminism and religion as well, in what Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields call the "Long Southern Strategy."