American Polarization

Social psychologist Peter T. Coleman explores how conflict resolution and complexity science provide guidance for dealing with seemingly intractable political differences. Deploying the concept of attractors in dynamical systems, he explains why we are stuck in this rut as well as the unexpected ways that deeply rooted oppositions can and do change.

Increasingly, political parties have adopted not only different policies, but different sets of facts. As E. J. Fagan argues, partisan think tanks have helped create these alternate realities in their capacity as de facto formal party organizations. Through the analyses generated by aligned think tanks, political elites on both the left and right frequently offer radically different assessments of a policy's consequences.

America is broken. America is divided. 80% of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track. And everything you need to know about the Divided States of America can be explained by two relentless forces: hyper-individualism and hyper-capitalism. American Restraint explores how both hyper-individualism and hyper-capitalism are what is fundamentally ripping our country apart. Traditional solutions and status quo politicians can’t help us.

As American politics descends into a battle of anger and hostility between two groups called "left" and "right," people increasingly ask: What is the essential difference between these two ideological groups? In The Myth of Left and Right, Hyrum Lewis and Verlan Lewis provide the surprising answer: nothing. As the authors argue, there is no enduring philosophy, disposition, or essence uniting the various positions associated with the liberal and conservative ideologies of today.

At the height of the John Birch Society’s activity in the 1960s, critics dismissed its members as a paranoid fringe. After all, “Birchers” believed that a vast communist conspiracy existed in America and posed an existential threat to Christianity, capitalism, and freedom. But as historian Matthew Dallek reveals, the Birch Society’s extremism remade American conservatism. Most Birchers were white professionals who were radicalized as growing calls for racial and gender equality appeared to upend American life.

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.

American politics today can be defined by the intense and increasingly toxic divide between Democrats and Republicans. Matthew D. Luttig explores why so many Americans have endorsed this level of political conflict.

More than three-quarters of Americans today, from all across the political spectrum, fear for their democracy. While most popular attention centers on America’s political institutions–presidents, legislatures, courts, political parties, & elections–historian, entrepreneur, and political philosopher Raphael Chayim Rosen argues this approach is upside down. The foundational strength of American democracy does not lie within institutions beyond the reach of ordinary Americans, but rather inside the quotidian thoughts, words, and deeds of citizens themselves. Merging insights across ...

A chronicle of our times based on real events, In God We Trust is a story of political intrigue, religious conspiracies, and the corruption of money. It’s the story of Dante Jefferson Washington, a brash, young, black, religious conservative and Deputy Chief of Staff to South Carolina Senator Winston J. Sinclair. Dante’s ambitions for public service soon become entangled in the unholy alliance of money, politics, and religion that define our national political dysfunction. His journey echoes that of his Italian namesake in The Divine Comedy. A social and political contradiction because ...