Election History

How does the First Amendment really work? Is it a principle or a value? What is hate speech and should it always be banned? Are we free to declare our religious beliefs in the public square? What role, if any, should companies like Facebook play in policing the exchange of thoughts, ideas, and opinions? With clarity and power, Stanley Fish explores these complex questions in The First.

From a leading voice among young conservatives, an impassioned argument that to stay relevant the Republican Party must look beyond short-term electoral gains and re-commit to historic conservative values. In 1963 Richard Hofstadter published his landmark book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Today, Matt Lewis argues, America's inclination toward simplicity and stupidity is stronger than ever, and its greatest victim is the Republican Party.

Dinesh D'Souza, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller America, is back with this darkly entertaining deconstruction of Hillary Clinton's flawed character and ideology. From her Alinskyite past to her hopes for America's progressive future, the presumptive Democratic nominee is revealed to be little more than a political gangster intent on controlling the nation's wealth.

Tehran, June 12, 2009. Mohsen Abbaspour, an ordinary young man in his 20s - not particularly political, or ambitious, or worldly - casts the first vote of his life in Iran's 10th presidential election. Fed up with rising unemployment and inflation, he backs the reformist party and its candidate, Mir-Hossein Mousavi. Mohsen believes his vote will count. It will not.

First he considers moments in history - Periclean Athens, the English Civil War, the American and French Revolutions, among them - in which the challenges we face today were first encountered and what solutions, however imperfect, were found. Then he lays bare the specific problems of democracy in the 21st century and maps out a set of urgently needed reforms. With the advent of authoritarian leaders and the simultaneous rise of populism, representative democracy appears to be caught between a rock and a hard place, yet it is this space that it must occupy, says Grayling, if a civilised society that looks after all its people is to flourish.

Joe Scarborough—former Republican congressman and the always insightful host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe—takes a nuanced and surprising look at the unexpected rise and self-inflicted fall of the Republican Party. Dominant in national politics for forty years under the influence of the conservative but pragmatic leadership of Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, the GOP, Scarborough argues, is in a self-inflicted eclipse. The only way forward? Recover the principled realism of the giants who led the party to greatness.

They adore her in Manhattan. They worship her in Hollywood. They idolize her in the liberal media. But out in the real world are those of us who see through her lies about her husband, reject her socialist economics, and despise her radical social agenda. We are the members of what Hillary Clinton described as a "Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy", and at VRWC headquarters, we've been keeping a file on her.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan created one of the dumbest talking points of all time: "I'm not a scientist, but..." Since then, politicians have repeatedly committed egregious transgressions against scientific knowledge prefaced by this seemingly innocuous phrase. Yet, as science journalist Dave Levitan reveals, that line is just the tip of the melting iceberg when it comes to rhetorical tools wielded to attack scientific findings that don't cooperate with political agendas.

Bill Novelli doesn't believe that retirement has to mean rocking one's way into the sunset. As the head of the strongest organization of retired people in the world, the AARP, Novelli believes that retirement can be a time of action and influence rather than one of illness and decline.

This grippingly intimate and heartbreaking book provides a portrait of the walking wounded who make up the base of the Trump movement. Desperate and angry, these are the Americans of the vanishing industrial heartland, depressed Appalachian coal country, and the no-man's land along the Southwestern border. These are coal miners, out-of-work construction workers, and small business owners who have watched their fortunes dwindle with each passing year.

Bestselling author and Fox News Channel host Eric Bolling presents an infuriating, amusing, revealing, and outrageous history of American politics, past and present, Republican and Democrat. From national political scandals to tempests in a teapot that blew up; bribery, blackmail, bullying, and backroom deals that contradicted public policies; cronyism that cost taxpayers hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars; and personal conduct that can only be described as regrettable, The Swamp is a journey downriver through the bayous and marshes of Capitol Hill and Foggy Bottom.

People on the right are furious. People on the left are livid. And the center isn't holding. There is only one thing on which almost everyone agrees: there is something very wrong in Washington. The country is being run by pollsters. Few politicians are able to win the voters' trust. Blame abounds and personal responsibility is nowhere to be found. There is a cynicism in Washington that appalls those in every state, red or blue.

From Chris Matthews, best selling author of Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, comes this celebration of the American spirit. Matthews presents a portrait of a country that enters the world arena armed with an extremely potent weapon: the collective notions we carry of America at its best. It's a picture of more than just a nation challenged but a people ready and eager to prevail.

Drawing comparisons to empires past, Johnson explores in vivid detail the likely consequences of US dependence on a permanent war economy, and what it will mean when the globe's sole "hyperpower" is no longer capable of paying for the vaulting ambitions of its leaders - and becomes the greatest hyper-debtor of all time. In his stunning conclusion, Johnson suggests that the crisis of a financial breakdown could ultimately prove to be the only path to a renewed nation.

The 2008 financial crisis crystallized for people around the country the fact that something was wrong. Americans had already been losing faith in elites who had failed to protect them from crisis after crisis and disaster after disaster. After the collapse, we expected someone to have a solution but were inevitably disappointed. Instead, we got high and rising unemployment, foreclosures spiraling out of control, and, as the protest chant went, "banks got bailed out, we got sold out."

In his eighth book, Dean takes the broadest and deepest view yet of the dysfunctional chaos and institutional damage that the Republican Party and its core conservatives have inflicted on the federal government. He assesses the state of all three branches of government, tracing their decline through the presidencies of Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II.

In 1989, Francis Fukuyama famously announced the "end of history." The Berlin Wall had fallen; liberal democracy had won out. But what of illiberal democracy - the idea that popular majorities, working through the democratic process, might reject gender equality, religious freedoms, and other norms that Western democracies take for granted? Nowhere have such considerations become more relevant than in the Middle East, where the uprisings of 2011 swept the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups to power.

Conservative pundit Ann Coulter pillories American liberals for their views on Republicans and conservative causes. Author of the best-selling anti-Clinton book High Crimes and Misdemeanors, Coulter summons pages of footnotes to support her highly original thesis that most of the media condemn even the most moderate of conservative views.

Collaborative democracy - government with the people - is a new vision of governance in the digital age. Wiki Government explains how to translate the vision into reality. Beth Simone Noveck draws on her experience in creating Peer-to-Patent, the federal government's first social networking initiative, to show how technology can connect the expertise of the many to the power of the few. In the process, she reveals what it takes to innovate in government.

The vast right wing conspiracy has found its General Patton, and his name is David Kahane. Kahane's pseudonymous, satiric column for National Review Online, lampooning the Left via his Hollywood-radical persona - Stephen Colbert's liberal doppelganger - is must-listening for political aficionados of all stripes. Now, from the inside, Kahane proudly exposes the secret and not-so-secret winning strategies (and vulnerabilities) of the Left.