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The Demagogue's Playbook
- The Battle for American Democracy from the Founders to Trump
- Narrated by: Peter Berkrot
- Length: 8 hrs and 30 mins
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Publisher's Summary
"Narrator Peter Berkrot's vocal tone has a flinty mid-20th century quality that works well with this historical review of how demagogues in the U.S. have repeatedly exploited populism since the founding of the nation. Serious but never overwrought, he has a lovely way with phrasing that enhances the richness of these sentences while deftly moderating the undercurrent of alarm in the writing." (AudioFile magazine, Earphones Award winner)
What happens to democracy when a demagogue comes to power?
"It is hard to imagine understanding the Trump presidency and its significance without reading this book." (Bob Bauer, former chief counsel to President Barack Obama)
What - and who - is a demagogue? How did America's Founders envision the presidency? What should a constitutional democracy look like - and how can it be fixed when it appears to be broken?
Something is definitely wrong with Donald Trump's presidency, but what exactly? The extraordinary negative reaction to Trump's election - by conservative intellectuals, liberals, Democrats, and global leaders alike - goes beyond ordinary partisan and policy disagreements. It reflects genuine fear about the vitality of our constitutional system. The Founders, reaching back to classical precedents, feared that their experiment in mass self-government could produce a demagogue: a charismatic ruler who would gain and hold on to power by manipulating the public rather than by advancing the public good.
President Trump, who has played to the mob and attacked institutions from the judiciary to the press, appears to embody these ideas. How can we move past his rhetoric and maintain faith in our great nation?
In The Demagogue's Playbook, acclaimed legal scholar Eric A. Posner offers a blueprint for how America can prevent the rise of another demagogue and protect the features of a democracy that help it thrive - and restore national greatness, for one and all.
A Macmillan Audio production from All Points Books
"Cuts through the hyperbole and hysteria that often distorts assessments of our republic, particularly at this time." (Alan Taylor, winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for History)
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What listeners say about The Demagogue's Playbook
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Performance
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- Ronald E. Glenn
- 08-18-20
History Everyone Should Be Aware Of
This is a needed book, in that it conveys entertained and successfully the history of people who rise up and take power to suit themselves in our country. A demagogue is not necessarily bad, but the ones we have had have been. There was something to the Founders’ view on actual democracy. Some might think that they have found the way to hack the republic through democracy to better gain their wants. And here are some examples.
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- Kindle Customer
- 08-09-20
Nice statement of the obvious
Anyone who observes honestly already knows that Trump is a demagogue, and anyone who still supports him doesn't care, so this book is just a nice stroll through familiar history.
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A Concealed Story that Could Not be More Relevant
- By Ekim N. on 06-05-20
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American Rule
- How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People
- By: Jared Yates Sexton
- Narrated by: MacLeod Andrews
- Length: 10 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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In American Rule, Jared Yates Sexton upends those convenient fictions by laying bare the foundational myths at the heart of our collective American imagination. From the very origins of this nation, Americans in power have abused and subjugated others; enabling that corruption are the many myths of American exceptionalism and steadfast values, which are fed to the public and repeated across generations.
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Truth
- By Laurie on 09-28-20
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The Problem with Lincoln
- By: Thomas J. DiLorenzo
- Narrated by: John McLain
- Length: 8 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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So many thousands of books deifying Abraham Lincoln have been published that it is nearly impossible for the average citizen to learn much of anything that is truthful about Lincoln’s presidency. You’ll learn that the real reason why Lincoln launched an invasion of his own country (he never admitted that secession was legal or legitimate) was to destroy the voluntary union of the founders and replace it with a coerced union held together by violence and threats of violence, much more like the old Soviet Union than the original American union.
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Not sure about this guy
- By Luis Renta on 07-26-20
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The Dying Citizen
- How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America
- By: Victor Davis Hanson
- Narrated by: James Edward Thomas
- Length: 15 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Human history is full of the stories of peasants, subjects, and tribes. Yet the concept of the “citizen” is historically rare — and was among America’s most valued ideals for over two centuries. But without shock treatment, warns historian Victor Davis Hanson, American citizenship as we have known it may soon vanish.
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From an uneducated reader;
- By wbc on 10-12-21
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Democracy Incorporated
- Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism
- By: Sheldon S. Wolin
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 12 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Sheldon Wolin considers the unthinkable: has America unwittingly morphed into a new and strange kind of political hybrid, one where economic and state powers are conjoined and virtually unbridled? Can the nation check its descent into what the author terms "inverted totalitarianism"? Wolin portrays a country where citizens are politically uninterested and submissive - and where elites are eager to keep them that way.
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Essential listening....
- By M. Levine on 02-25-11
By: Sheldon S. Wolin
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The Future of Freedom
- Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad
- By: Fareed Zakaria
- Narrated by: Ned Schmidtke
- Length: 10 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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American democracy is, in many people's minds, the model for the rest of the world. Fareed Zakaria points out that the American form of democracy is one of the least democratic in use today. Members of the Supreme Court and the Federal Reserve, institutions that fundamentally shape our lives, are appointed, not elected. The Bill of Rights enumerates a set of privileges to which citizens are entitled, no matter what the majority says. By restricting our democracy, we enhance our freedom.
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Superb Survey of Modern Democratic Issues
- By G Barth on 03-26-04
By: Fareed Zakaria
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The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Presidents
- From Wilson to Obama
- By: Steven F. Hayward
- Narrated by: Johnny Heller
- Length: 9 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Academics, journalists, and popular historians agree: our greatest presidents are the ones who confronted a national crisis and mobilized the entire nation to face it. That’s the conventional wisdom. The chief executives who are celebrated in textbooks and placed in the top echelon of presidents in surveys of experts are the bold leaders - the Woodrow Wilsons and Franklin Roosevelts - who reshaped the United States in line with their grand “vision” for America. Unfortunately, along the way, these “great” presidents inevitably expanded government - and shrank our liberties.
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Really enjoyed it
- By Jkc-007 on 02-15-17
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The People, No
- A Brief History of Anti-Populism
- By: Thomas Frank
- Narrated by: Thomas Frank
- Length: 8 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Rarely does a work of history contain startling implications for the present, but in The People, No, Thomas Frank pulls off that explosive effect by showing us that everything we think we know about populism is wrong. Today "populism" is seen as a frightening thing, a term pundits use to describe the racist philosophy of Donald Trump and European extremists. But this is a mistake. The real story of populism is an account of enlightenment and liberation; it is the story of American democracy itself, of its ever-widening promise of a decent life for all.
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I need something more reasoned
- By Nana Landgraf on 08-05-20
By: Thomas Frank
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Code Red
- How Progressives and Moderates Can Unite to Save Our Country
- By: E.J. Dionne Jr.
- Narrated by: Adam Barr, E.J. Dionne Jr.
- Length: 7 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Will progressives and moderates feud while America burns? Or will these natural allies take advantage of the greatest opportunity since the New Deal Era to strengthen American democracy, foster social justice, and turn back the threats of the Trump Era? In Code Red, award-winning journalist E. J. Dionne, Jr., calls for a shared commitment to decency and a politics focused on freedom, fairness, and the future, encouraging progressives and moderates to explore common ground and expand the unity that brought about Democrat victories in the 2018 elections.
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Misses the mark
- By Amazon Customer on 11-27-20
By: E.J. Dionne Jr.
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American Character
- A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good
- By: Colin Woodard
- Narrated by: Jonathan Yen
- Length: 9 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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The struggle between individualism and the good of the community as a whole has been the basis of every major disagreement in our history, from the debates at the Constitutional Convention and in the run-up to the Civil War to the fights surrounding the agenda of the Progressives, the New Deal, the civil rights movement, and the Tea Party.
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Biased Misrepresentation
- By Jay Ehret on 06-24-16
By: Colin Woodard
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The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution
- Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic
- By: Ganesh Sitaraman
- Narrated by: MacLeod Andrews
- Length: 12 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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For most of Western history, Sitaraman argues, constitutional thinkers assumed economic inequality was inevitable and inescapable - and they designed governments to prevent class divisions from spilling over into class warfare. The American Constitution is different. Compared to Europe and the ancient world, America was a society of almost unprecedented economic equality, and the founding generation saw this equality as essential for the preservation of America's republic.
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Very well done
- By JLyman on 08-27-17
By: Ganesh Sitaraman
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Let Them Eat Tweets
- How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality
- By: Jacob S. Hacker, Paul Pierson
- Narrated by: Peter Berkrot
- Length: 8 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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In Let Them Eat Tweets, best-selling political scientists Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson offer a definitive answer: the Republican Party serves its plutocratic masters to a degree without precedent in modern global history. Conservative parties, by their nature, almost always side with the rich. But when faced with popular resistance, they usually make concessions, allowing some policies that benefit the working and middle classes. After all, how can a political party maintain power in a democracy if it serves only the interests of a narrow and wealthy slice of society?
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a call to action that does not shame but warns
- By SomeGuy on 08-29-20
By: Jacob S. Hacker, and others
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Fears of a Setting Sun
- The Disillusionment of America's Founders
- By: Dennis C. Rasmussen
- Narrated by: Keith Sellon-Wright
- Length: 9 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Americans seldom deify their Founding Fathers any longer, but they do still tend to venerate the Constitution and the republican government that the founders created. Strikingly, the founders themselves were far less confident in what they had wrought, particularly by the end of their lives. In fact, most of them - including George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson - came to deem America's constitutional experiment an utter failure that was unlikely to last beyond their own generation.
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Fun and surprisingly inspiring book about the founding fathers and their changing views.
- By Kyle Eschenroeder on 12-30-22