American Political Science

During one sweltering week in July 1948, the Democratic Party gathered in Philadelphia for its national convention. The most pressing and controversial issue facing the delegates was not whom to nominate for president—the incumbent, Harry Truman, was the presumptive candidate—but whether the Democrats would finally embrace the cause of civil rights and embed it in their official platform. On the convention's final day, Hubert Humphrey, the relatively obscure mayor of the midsized city of Minneapolis, ascended the podium.

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.

While the hyper-partisanship in Washington that has stunned the world has been building for decades, Ira Shapiro argues that the US Senate has suffered most acutely from the loss of its political center. In Broken, Ira Shapiro, a former senior Senate staffer and author of the critically-acclaimed book The Last Great Senate, offers an expert's account of some of the most prominent battles of the past decade and lays out what must be done to restore the Senate's lost luster.

In Beyond the Messy Truth, Jones offers a blueprint for transforming our collective anxiety into meaningful change. Tough on Donald Trump but showing respect and empathy for his supporters, Jones takes aim at the failures of both parties before and after Trump's victory. He urges both sides to abandon the politics of accusation and focus on real solutions. Calling us to a deeper patriotism, he shows us how to get down to the vital business of solving, together, some of our toughest problems.

In The Politics Industry, Katherine Gehl and Michael Porter ingeniously apply the tools of business analysis - and Porter's distinctive Five Forces framework - to show how the political system functions just as every other competitive industry does, and how the duopoly has led to the devastating outcomes we see today. Using this competition lens, Gehl and Porter identify the most powerful lever for change - a strategy comprised of a clear set of choices in two key areas: how our elections work and how we make our laws.

This audiobook exists at the tense intersection of the conflict between politics and prophecy - of whether we embrace political resolution or moral redemption to fix our fractured racial landscape.

George W. Bush arrived in the White House an untested governor with an unfortunate habit of tripping over his own tongue, presiding over an economy slipping into recession, and a nation more obsessed with reality television than with the reality of international terrorism. He was considered by many opinion-leaders a dupe, an illiterate, a cowboy, a preppie, a child of privilege. Now, it is clear to John Podhoretz that Bush has become, and will be remembered, as one of this nation's strongest leaders.

In the age of Trump, our society is defined by fear. Indeed, three out of four Americans say they feel more fearful today than they did only a couple decades ago. But are we living in exceptionally perilous times? In his best-selling work The Culture of Fear, sociologist Barry Glassner demonstrates it is our perception of danger that has increased, not the actual level of risk.

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.

From the phony Russia collusion narrative to the coordinated riots laying waste to US cities, it's the same ongoing operation orchestrated by the left and targeting not just President Trump but hundreds of millions of Americans who revere their country and what it stands for. For the first time, crusading investigative journalist Lee Smith reveals who was responsible and the never before known involvement of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and senior military officials who engineered a coup against a sitting president.

A riveting, groundbreaking account of how the war on crime has torn apart inner-city communities. Forty years in, the tough-on-crime turn in American politics has spurred a prison boom of historic proportions that disproportionately affects Black communities. It has also torn at the lives of those on the outside. As arrest quotas and high-tech surveillance criminalize entire blocks, a climate of fear and suspicion pervades daily life, not only for young men entangled in the legal system but for their family members and working neighbors.

In the more than five tumultuous, paradigm-shifting years of Donald Trump’s presidency and beyond, his near-constant lying has become a fixture of political life. It is inextricably linked with how his party behaves, how the Democrats respond to it, and how he remains relevant, even after a decisive loss in 2020. Jonathan Lemire brings his connections, profile, and reportorial instincts to bear in his first book that explores how this phenomenon shapes our politics. The Big Lie is the first audiobook to examine this unprecedented and tenuous moment in our nation’s politics.

When we think of Constitutional law, we invariably think of the US Supreme Court and the federal court system. Yet much of our constitutional law is not made at the federal level. In 51 Imperfect Solutions, US Court of Appeals Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton argues that American Constitutional law should account for the role of the state courts and state constitutions, together with the federal courts and the federal Constitution, in protecting individual liberties.

In 2014, Ian Haney Lopez in Dog Whistle Politics named and explained the coded racial appeals exploited by right-wing politicians over the last half century-and thereby anticipated the 2016 presidential election. Now the country is heading into what will surely be one of the most consequential elections ever. Some want to focus on racial justice head-on; others insist that a race-silent focus on class avoids alienating white voters. Can either approach build the progressive supermajorities necessary to break political gridlock and fundamentally change the country's direction?

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.

As Reeves shows, the growing separation between the upper middle class and everyone else can be seen in family structure, neighborhoods, attitudes, and lifestyle. Those at the top of the income ladder are becoming more effective at passing on their status to their children, reducing overall social mobility. The result is not just an economic divide but a fracturing of American society along class lines. Upper-middle-class children become upper-middle-class adults.

Noam Chomsky is widely regarded as the most influential thinker of our time, but never before has he devoted a major book to one topic: income inequality. Requiem for the American Dream is not an essay collection but an entire work of some 70,000 words, based on four years of interviews with Chomsky by the editors. It is a book that makes Chomsky's breadth and depth accessible and at the same time gives us his most powerful political ideas with unprecedented, breathtaking directness.

Against the Wind completes Neal Gabler’s magisterial biography of Ted Kennedy, but it also unfolds the epic, tragic story of the fall of liberalism and the destruction of political morality in America. With Richard Nixon having stilled the liberal wind that once propelled Kennedy’s—and his fallen brothers’—political crusades, Ted Kennedy faced a lonely battle. As Republicans pressed Reaganite dogmas of individual freedom and responsibility and Democratic centrists fell into line, Kennedy was left as the most powerful voice legislating on behalf of those society would neglect or punish.

With a nation seemingly more divided than ever, many worry that Americans risk losing ground on solving the complex, interrelated problems the country faces - including rising inequality, the specter of climate change, astronomical health care costs, and economic stagnation. The renowned economist Jeffrey D. Sachs offers a practical approach to move America toward a new consensus: sustainable development.

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.