Conservative Politics

One of the most maligned, misunderstood, and even mocked constituencies in American politics, gay Republicans regularly face condemnation from both the LGBTQ+ community and their own political party. Yet they’ve been active and influential for decades. Gay conservatives were instrumental, for example, in ending “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and securing the legalization of same-sex marriage—but they also helped lay the groundwork for the rise of Donald Trump.

In this well-rounded, deeply investigated biography, the first full look at the vice president, two award-winning journalists unmask the real Mike Pence. In this landmark biography, Pulitzer Prize winner Michael D’Antonio and Emmy-nominated journalist Peter Eisner follow the path Pence followed from Catholic Democrat to conservative evangelical Republican. As The Shadow President reveals, Mike Pence is the most important and powerful Christian right politician America has ever seen.

When the Cold War ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Washington establishment felt it had prevailed in a world-historical struggle. Our side had won, a verdict that was both decisive and irreversible. For the world’s “indispensable nation”, its “sole superpower”, the future looked very bright. History, having brought the United States to the very summit of power and prestige, had validated American-style liberal democratic capitalism as universally applicable.

Following his election, President Obama's supporters and detractors anticipated radical reform. As the first African American to serve as president, he reached the White House on a campaign promise of change.

From coronavirus lockdowns to critical race theory in the classroom, it has become crystal clear that America’s schools aren’t working for America’s students and parents. No one knows this better than Betsy DeVos. In Hostages No More, DeVos unleashes her candid thoughts about working in the Trump administration, recounts her battles over the decades to put students first, hits back at “woke” curricula in our schools, and details the reforms America must pursue to fix its long and badly broken education system.

American freedom is being gutted. Whether we are trying to run a business, practice a vocation, raise our families, cooperate with our neighbors, or follow our religious beliefs, we run afoul of the government—not because we are doing anything wrong but because the government has decided it knows better. When we object, that government can and does tell us, “Try to fight this, and we’ll ruin you.”

In this reappraisal of racial politics in modern America, Kevin Kruse explains the causes and consequences of "white flight" in Atlanta and elsewhere. Seeking to understand segregationists on their own terms, White Flight moves past simple stereotypes to explore the meaning of white resistance. In the end, Kruse finds that segregationist resistance, which failed to stop the civil rights movement, nevertheless managed to preserve the world of segregation and even perfect it in subtler and stronger forms.

Donald Trump promised the American people a transformative change in economic policy after eight years of stagnation under Obama. But he didn’t adopt a conventional left or right economic agenda. In Trumponomics, conservative economists Stephen Moore and Arthur B. Laffer offer a well-informed defense of the president's approach to trade, taxes, employment, infrastructure, and other economic policies.

Over the past few years, a remarkable number of sexual harassment victims have come forward with their stories, demanding consequences for their assailants and broad societal change. Each prominent allegation, however, has also set off a wave of questions—some posed in good faith, some distinctly not—about the rights of the accused. The national conversation has grown polarized, inflamed by a public narrative that wrongly presents feminism and fair process as warring interests. Sexual Justice is an intervention, pointing the way to common ground.

John F. Kennedy is lionized by liberals. He inspired Bill Clinton to go into politics and Lyndon B. Johnson to push for landmark civil rights laws. His champions insist he would have done "great liberal things" had he not been killed by Lee Harvey Oswald. But what if we have completely misunderstood him? What if we judge him by the lengthy record of his actual political career? His two great causes were anticommunism and economic growth.

In the wake of the 2016 presidential election, there was widespread shock that the Midwest, the Democrats' so-called blue wall, had been so effectively breached by Donald Trump. But the blue wall, as The Conservative Heartland makes clear, was never quite as secure as so many observers assumed. Focusing on nine states, from Iowa and the Dakotas to Indiana and Ohio, the essays in this collection detail the rise of Midwestern conservatism after World War II - a trend that coincided with the transformation of the prewar Republican Party into the New Right.

Trump's enemies set out to remove him from office even before his inauguration - which culminated in an election-year impeachment trial.

The Radio Right tells the story of the 1960s far right, who were frustrated by what they perceived to be liberal bias in the national media, particularly the media's sycophantic relationship with the John F. Kennedy administration. By the early 1960s, millions of Americans listened each week to conservative broadcasters, the most prominent of which were clergy or lay broadcasters from across the religious spectrum, including Carl McIntire, Billy James Hargis, and Clarence Manion.

Politics are a detail in the story of what we call ideology. After a six-year effort that involved three tours of the US, help from dozens of the world's top academic experts, and hundreds of interviews with conservatives, writer and researcher J. Scott Wagner brings us on a rollicking tour of the conservative mind, looking at them through the lens of five sciences: neurology/cognitive psychology, personality, bias, social conformity, and morality.

Drawing on over 130 interviews as well as numerous national surveys, Addicted to Lust tells us that, compared to other Americans, pornography shapes the lives of conservative Protestants in ways that are uniquely damaging to their mental health, spiritual lives, and intimate relationships. Perry demonstrates how certain pervasive beliefs within the conservative Protestant subculture unwittingly create a context in which those who use pornography are often overwhelmed with shame and discouragement, sometimes to the point of depression or withdrawal from faith altogether.

For better or for worse, Google and social media - “Big Tech”, collectively - have become the new public square. Unfortunately, this public square has a watchful referee standing behind them, ready and waiting to blow the whistle if they veer too far from the preferred narrative. Americans have given these companies enormous power to select the information they read, share and discuss with their neighbors and friends.

The Fall of Wisconsin is a deeply reported, searing account of how the state’s progressive tradition was undone and turned into a model for national conservatives bent on remaking the country. Dan Kaufman, a Wisconsin native who has been covering the story for several years, traces the history of progressivism that made Wisconsin so widely admired. Kaufman reveals how the “divide-and-conquer” strategy of Governor Scott Walker and his allies pitted Wisconsin’s citizens against one another, so powerful corporations and donors could effectively take control of state government.

From Phyllis Schlafly, the woman whose celebrated classic, A Choice, Not an Echo, upended the 1964 Republican Convention, comes a persuasive new argument for a surprising conservative choice: Donald Trump. For the first time since 1980, a significant number of Republicans are considering abandoning their party's nominee. This is a grave mistake, Schlafly says, because a Donald Trump "radical redirection" could actually set America back on the path of Reagan's conservative revolution.

Grover Cleveland is truly the forgotten conservative: a man of dignity, integrity, and courage often overlooked by the history books. Historian and author John Pafford reveals a president who deserves more attention. Cleveland might not have presided over deeply troubled times, but he set a standard for principled leadership in office that is especially relevant today.

Debates about U.S. foreign policy have revolved around three main traditions - liberal internationalism, realism, and nationalism. In this audiobook, distinguished political scientist, Henry Nau, delves deeply into a fourth, overlooked foreign policy tradition that he calls "conservative internationalism." This approach spreads freedom, like liberal internationalism; arms diplomacy, like realism; and preserves national sovereignty, like nationalism.