American Doctrines

Greg Gutfeld hates artificial tolerance. At the root of every single major political conflict is the annoying coddling Americans must endure of these harebrained liberal hypocrisies. In fact, most of the time liberals use the mantle of tolerance as a guise for their pathetic intolerance. And what we really need is smart intolerance, or as Gutfeld reminds us, what we used to call common sense. The Joy of Hate tackles this conundrum head on- - replacing the idiocy of open-mindness with a shrewd judgmentalism that rejects stupid ideas, notions, and people.

Taking stock of our fragmented political landscape, Michael Patrick Lynch delivers a trenchant philosophical take on digital culture and its tendency to make us into dogmatic know-it-alls. The internet - where most shared news stories are not even read by the person posting them - has contributed to the rampant spread of "intellectual arrogance". In this culture, we have come to think that we have nothing to learn from one another; we are rewarded for emotional outrage over reflective thought; and we glorify a defensive rejection of those different from us.

Among the unsettling social shifts in the wake of 9/11 was the global attention paid to Islam. Here in the United States, we became divided, often sadly along partisan lines, between those who believed every Muslim was a potential threat and those who believed no Muslim could do wrong. For conservative Wisconsin native and former U.S. Navy lieutenant commander Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, these radical times meant facing a new reality as a devout Muslim and a patriot - a certain betrayal within his faith.

As a biomedical sciences student, Isabel Brown never anticipated finding herself immersed in a world of leftism, silenced by the thought police, and afraid to speak up for conservative values, but this is the reality that defined her college experience. Isabel's story is a compelling memoir about the current state of affairs on America's college campuses - unveiling the truth that university administrators don't want you to hear - and a reminder of the need for true ideological diversity.

Written in an accessible, conversational style that incorporates numerous stories and questions, this book exposes the weaknesses of a Western worldview through a personal engagement with Indigenous theology. Randy Woodley critiques the worldview that undergirds the North American church by dismantling assumptions regarding early North American histories and civilizations. Woodley explains that Western theology has settled for a particular view of God and has perpetuated that basic view for hundreds of years, but Indigenous theology originates from a completely different DNA.

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.

A bold new history of modern conservatism that finds its origins in the populist right-wing politics of the 1990s.

Over the past two generations, U.S. leaders deregulated big business on the faith that it would yield a better economy and a freer society. But the opposite happened. Americans lost stable, well-paying jobs, Wall Street dominated industry to the detriment of the middle class and local communities, and corporations began to subject us to total surveillance, even dictating what we are, and aren’t, allowed to think. The corporate titans and mega-donors who aligned themselves with this vision knew exactly what they were getting: perfect conditions for what Sohrab Ahmari calls “private tyranny”.

Al Franken reveals the alarming story of how Bush (barely) beat Kerry with his campaign of "fear, smear, and queers", and then claimed a nonexistent mandate; Republicans decided that Terri Schiavo would make "a great political issue"; Conservatives sought to undermine Social Security by using a strategy borrowed from...Vladimir Lenin; and more.

Told in a series of essays that balance memoir with fieldwork, Heaven Is a Place on Earth is an idiosyncratic study of American utopian experiments—from the Shakers to the radical faerie communes of Short Mountain to the Bronx rebuilding movement—through the lens of one woman’s quest to create a more communal life in a time of unending economic and social precarity.

Propelled by the belief that government has slipped out of the hands of ordinary citizens, a surging wave of populism is destabilizing democracies around the world. As John Matsusaka reveals in Let the People Rule, this belief is based in fact. Over the past century, while democratic governments have become more efficient, they have also become more disconnected from the people they purport to represent. The solution Matsusaka advances is familiar but surprisingly underused: direct democracy, in the form of referendums.

Matthew Continetti gives a sweeping account of movement conservatism’s evolution, from the Progressive Era through the present. He tells the story of how conservatism began as networks of intellectuals, developing and institutionalizing a vision that grew over time, until they began to buckle under new pressures, resembling national populist movements. Drawing out the tensions between the desire for mainstream acceptance and the pull of extremism, Continetti argues that the more one studies conservatism’s past, the more one becomes convinced of its future.

One of the enduring legacies of the 2012 Presidential campaign was the demise of the white American male voter as a dominant force in the political landscape. On election night, after Obama was announced the winner, a distressed Bill O'Reilly lamented that he didn't live in "a traditional America anymore". He was joined by others who bellowed their grief on the talk radio airwaves, the traditional redoubt of angry white men. Why were they so angry?

Ben Shapiro uncovers the simple strategy used by liberals and their friends in the media: bully the living hell out of conservatives. Play the race card, the class card, the sexism card. Use any and every means at your disposal to demonize your opposition - to shut them up. Then pretend that such bullying is justified because, after all, conservatives are the true bullies and need to be taught a lesson for their intolerance.

John Hay, Lincoln's private secretary and later secretary of state under presidents McKinley and Roosevelt, and Samuel Langhorne Clemens, famous as "Mark Twain", grew up 50 miles apart on the banks of the Mississippi River in the same rural antebellum stew of race, class, and want. This shared history drew them together in the late 1860s, and their mutual admiration never waned in spite of sharp differences.

Examine the ways in which expertise, reason, and manners are continually under attack in our institutions, courts, political arenas, and social venues with this collection from the Pulitzer Prize-winning conservative columnist.

The Big Break investigates how Washington works, and how different kinds of people try to make it work for them. Ben Terris presents an inside history of this crucial moment in Washington, reporting from exclusive parties, poker nights, fundraisers, secluded farms outside town and the halls of Congress; among the oddballs and opportunists and true believers. This book is about the people who see this moment as an opportunity to bet big—on their country or maybe just on themselves.

In this visionary book, Dennis Prager, one of America's most original thinkers, contends that humanity confronts a monumental choice. The world must decide between American values and its two oppositional alternatives: Islamism and European-style democratic socialism. Prager makes the case for the American value system as the most viable program ever devised to produce a good society. Those values are explained here more clearly and persuasively than ever before.

This timely reissue of Richard Hofstadter's classic work on the fringe groups that influence American electoral politics offers an invaluable perspective on contemporary domestic affairs. In The Paranoid Style in American Politics, acclaimed historian Richard Hofstadter examines the competing forces in American political discourse and how fringe groups can influence - and derail - the larger agendas of a political party.

In Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries, best-selling author Naomi Wolf illustrates the breathtaking changes that can take place when ordinary citizens engage in the democratic system the way the founders intended and tells you how to use that system, right now, to change your life, your community, and ultimately the nation.