American Doctrines

This remarkable piece of history will change the way you look at American politics. It shows that the corruption of American "conservatism" began long before George W. Bush ballooned the budget and asserted dictatorial rights over the country and the world. The American Right long ago slid into the abyss. Betrayal of the American Right is the story, and the author none other than Murray N. Rothbard, who witnessed it all firsthand. He tells his own story and reveals the machinations behind the subversion of an anti-state movement into one that cheers statism of the worst sort.

As presidential candidates sling dirt at each other, America desperately needs a few real heroes. Tragically, liberal historians and educators have virtually erased traditional American heroes from history. According to the Left, the Founding Fathers were not noble architects of America but selfish demagogues, and self-made entrepreneurs like Rockefeller were robber barons and corporate polluters.

From the heterodox right wing of the 1940s to the Buchanan/Rothbard alliance of 1992 and all the way through to what he witnessed personally in Charlottesville, The New Right is a thorough firsthand accounting of the concepts, characters and chronology of this widely misunderstood sociopolitical phenomenon. Today’s fringe is tomorrow’s orthodoxy. As entertaining as it is informative, The New Right is required listening for every American across the spectrum who would like to learn more about the past, present and future of our divided political culture.

After the 2016 election, Americans witnessed a frightening trend: the rise of a host of new extremist groups across the country. Emboldened by a new president, they flooded political rallies and built fervent online presences, expanding rapidly until they were a regular sight at everyday demonstrations. Amid the chaos, one group emerged as a leader among the others, with matching outfits, bizarre rituals, and a reputation for violence: the Proud Boys. We Are Proud Boys is the definitive narrative exploration of this notorious street gang and all the far-right movements they’re connected to.

In his most ambitious work to date, Thomas L. Friedman shows that we have entered an age of dizzying acceleration - and explains how to live in it. Due to an exponential increase in computing power, climbers atop Mount Everest enjoy excellent cell phone service, and self-driving cars are taking to the roads. A parallel explosion of economic interdependency has created new riches as well as spiraling debt burdens.

With its emphasis on traditional values, family, faith, military service, good manners, small government, and independent-minded people, the South should certainly rise again. Far from being the backwater of prejudice and ignorance that the liberal media would have you believe, the South has always been the center of American culture.

In his short life, the Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution, leading movements in North America, South America, the African continent, and the Caribbean. In each locale, Rodney found himself a lightning rod for working class Black Power. His deportation catalyzed 20th century Jamaica's most significant rebellion, the 1968 Rodney riots, and his scholarship trained a generation how to think politics at an international scale.

Although populism is ultimately part of democracy, populist movements constitute an increasing challenge to democratic politics. Comparing political trends across different countries, this compelling audiobook debates what the long-term consequences of this challenge could be, as it turns the spotlight on the bewildering effect of populism on today's political and social life.

This is the authoritative, “deeply reported” (The Wall Street Journal) account of an eighteen-month crisis in American democracy that will be seared into the country’s political memory for decades to come. With stunning, in-the-room detail, New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns show how both our political parties confronted a series of national traumas, including the coronavirus pandemic, the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and the political brinksmanship of President Biden’s first year in the White House.

What is "the big lie" of the Democratic Party? That conservatives - and President Donald Trump in particular - are fascists. Nazis, even. In a typical comment, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow says the Trump era is reminiscent of "what it was like when Hitler first became chancellor." But in fact, this audacious lie is a complete inversion of the truth. Yes, there is a fascist threat in America - but that threat is from the Left and the Democratic Party.

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.

For more than half a century, the United States has been pursuing a grand imperial strategy with the aim of staking out the globe. Our leaders have shown themselves willing, as in the Cuban missile crisis, to follow the dream of dominance no matter how high the risks. Now the Bush administration is intensifying this process, driving us toward the final frontiers of imperial control, toward a choice between the prerogatives of power and a livable Earth.

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.

The American military is a tightly sealed community, and few outsiders have reason to know that a great many senior officers view the Iraq war with incredulity and dismay. But many officers have shared their anger with renowned military reporter Thomas E. Ricks, and in Fiasco, Ricks combines these astonishing on-the-record military accounts with his own extraordinary on-the-ground reportage to create a spellbinding account of an epic disaster.

"Fascists", "Brownshirts", "jackbooted stormtroopers" - such are the insults typically hurled at conservatives by their liberal opponents. Calling someone a fascist is the fastest way to shut them up, defining their views as beyond the political pale. But who are the real fascists in our midst?

Twenty years after the Starr Report and the Clinton impeachment, former special prosecutor Ken Starr finally shares his definitive account of this period in American history. Now Starr finally shares his unique perspective on the investigation that began with the Whitewater land deal and spread to a wide range of President Clinton's actions, including accusations of sexual harassment and perjury in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Starr's narrative includes behind-the-scenes details that have never before emerged as well as a new analysis from the perspective of history.

The Longest Con tells the fascinating story of the partisan con artists who have corrupted conservative politics in our time, creating a toxic phenomenon that culminated in the election of Donald Trump, a bumptious fraud whose checkered career and tawdry retinue, including his presidential cabinet, have featured almost every variety of scam. But long before he appeared, Trump's path to power was blazed by the motley horde of swindlers and quacks who preceded him.

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?

In The Unwinding, George Packer, author of The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, tells the story of the United States over the past three decades in an utterly original way, with his characteristically sharp eye for detail and gift for weaving together complex narratives. The Unwinding portrays a superpower in danger of coming apart at the seams, its elites no longer elite, its institutions no longer working, its ordinary people left to improvise their own schemes for success and salvation.

Acclaimed historian Rick Perlstein chronicles the rise of the conservative movement in the liberal 1960s. At the heart of the story is Barry Goldwater, the renegade Republican from Arizona who loathed federal government, despised liberals, and mocked "peaceful coexistence" with the USSR. Perlstein's narrative shines a light on a whole world of conservatives and their antagonists, including William F. Buckley, Nelson Rockefeller, and Bill Moyers. Vividly written, Before the Storm is an essential book about the 1960s.