Political Culture

What makes a country fall to a dictator? How are authoritarian leaders - strongmen - capable of killing millions acquire their power? How are they able to defeat the ideal of democracy? And what can we do to make sure it doesn't happen again? By profiling five of the most notoriously ruthless dictators in history - Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Saddam Hussein - Kenneth C. Davis seeks to answer these questions, examining the forces in these strongmen's personal lives and historical periods that shaped the leaders they'd become.

Ideology consists of normative prescriptions regarding how society should be shaped, together with an interpretive roadmap indicating how this normative vision can be implemented in reality. Ideological Fixation is the result of tensions and conflicts between these two elements. The book focuses on ideologies' factual claims about the world, typically subordinate to, and often distorted by, their normative commitment. In exploring this phenomenon, the book combines insights from evolutionary psychology regarding the nature of some of our deepest proclivities.

The American way - independence, entrepreneurialism, liberty - has been under assault for decades. The cultural foundations of the United States and its institutions are devolving along the line of some futuristic apocalyptic novel and producing social, moral, and economic dry rot that can lead only to chaos and ruin. Attacks on individuality, freedom, and personal responsibility for most of the last century have resulted, as Alexis de Tocqueville once predicted, in a gradual degradation of the people and the descent into slavery of once-free people.

The syndicated columnist and bestselling author of Brainwashed, Porn Generation, and Project President tells the shocking true story of how the most powerful medium of mass communication in human history became a vehicle for spreading the radical agenda of the left side of the political spectrum. Similar to what Bernard Goldberg’s Bias and A Slobbering Love Affair did for the liberal news machine, Shapiro’s Primetime Propaganda is an essential exposé of corrupting media bias, pulling back the curtain on widespread and unrepentant abuses of the Hollywood entertainment industry.

Have you ever seen a baby pigeon? You haven’t, have you? No one has, not in many, many years. They used to be everywhere. You couldn’t walk out of your front door in New York City in the 1930s without seeing dozens of those little guys scurrying around. Today, there are millions of grown up pigeons in New York, but not a baby pigeon to be seen. That’s because they come out of the factory as adults. In Birds Aren’t Real, whistleblowers Peter McIndoe and Connor Gaydos trace the roots of a political conspiracy so vast and well-hidden that it almost seems like an elaborate hoax.

There is an ancient Chinese proverb that states, "Two tigers cannot share the same mountain." However, in East Asia, there are three tigers on that mountain: China, Japan, and Korea, and they have a long history of turmoil and tension with each other. In his latest entertaining and thought-provoking narrative travelogue, Michael Booth sets out to discover how deep, really, the enmity is between these three "tiger" nations and what prevents them from making peace.

We live in an age when the pursuit of authenticity—from living our 'best life' to eating artisan food—matters more and more to us, but where the forces of inauthenticity seem to be taking over. Our world is full of people and products that are not what they seem. We no longer know whether we are talking to a person or a machine. But we can fight back—and this award-winning book shows us how. Authenticity argues that although our counterfeit culture is shaped by the most powerful forces of evolution, economics and technology, we can still come together to reclaim reality.

On the face of it, Avatar: The Last Airbender is a story about a lone superhero. However, saving the world is a team effort, embodied in Team Avatar, aka the Gaang. Aang needs help from his friends and tutors, even from non-human animals. Avatar: The Last Airbender and Philosophy brings to the fore the Eastern, Western, and Indigenous philosophies that are implicit in the show. This volume features contributions by experts on Buddhist, Daoist, Confucian, and Indigenous schools of thought, next to focusing on Western classical authors.

The election of Donald J. Trump sent shockwaves around the world. Shock troops were deployed along with the predictable rent-a-mob who stormed the streets of our nation’s cities. Within hours a movement was born. Stephen E. Strang explores and analyzes Trump’s effect on American culture from a Christian perspective, drawing upon interviews with many of the key players and offering insightful commentary on what the long-term prospects of the ongoing war of worldviews may portend.

A woman of contradictions, "a gun-toting, lesbian, feminist, voted-for-Reagan activist", Tammy Bruce is standing in line to become the next Ann Coulter. The "left wing" is engaged in an enormous conspiracy to make moral values relative, to undercut pride and patriotism in our country, to destroy Christian ideology at any cost, to pollute the minds of our youth by means of leftist professors who rewrite history, and to hijack the justice system through morally bankrupt trial lawyers.

Americans are living through a social crisis. Our politics is polarized and bitterly divided. Culture wars rage on campus, in the media, social media, and other arenas of our common life. And for too many Americans, alienation can descend into despair, weakening families and communities and even driving an explosion of opioid abuse. Left and right alike have responded with populist anger at our institutions, and use only metaphors of destruction to describe the path forward: cleaning house, draining swamps. But, as Yuval Levin argues, this is a misguided prescription.

For the past 30 years, David Mamet has been a controversial and defining force in theater and film, championing the most cherished liberal values along the way. In some of the great movies and plays of our time, his characters have explored the ethics of the business world, embodied the struggles of the oppressed, and faced the flaws of the capitalist system. But in recent years Mamet has had a change of heart.

When gun control legislation emerged in the 1960s, many Americans, accustomed to the unregulated postwar bounty of cheap guns and fearful of Soviet invasion, domestic subversion, and urban uprisings, fiercely challenged it. Meanwhile, gun control groups were diverted from their abolitionist roots toward a conciliatory, fundraising-focused strategy that struggled to limit the stockpiling of firearms. Gun Country recasts the story of guns in postwar America as one of Cold War and racial anxieties, unfettered capitalism, and exceptional violence that continues to haunt us.

Former high-ranking Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials, alongside an army colonel, a judge, a diplomat, a propaganda official, a secret agent, and a CCP role-model student, lift the veil on the Marxist culture that has molded the thoughts and actions of Chinese people for over 70 years. It is this culture that created China’s “Walking Dead”. Filmmaker and author, Kay Rubacek, weaves together interviews with these Chinese communist insiders with extensive research, and a sense of humor, into a rich narrative.

Surviving the Future is a story drawn from the fertile ground of the late David Fleming's extraordinary Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It. That hardback consists of 404 interlinked dictionary entries, inviting listeners to choose their own path through its radical vision. Recognizing that Lean Logic's sheer size and unusual structure can be daunting, Fleming's long-time collaborator Shaun Chamberlin has selected and edited one of these potential narratives to create Surviving the Future.

Los Angeles in 1974 exerted more influence over popular culture than any other city in America. Rock Me on the Water traces the confluence of movies, music, television, and politics in Los Angeles month by month through that transformative, magical year. Ronald Brownstein reveals how 1974 represented a confrontation between a massive younger generation intent on change, and a political order rooted in the status quo. Brownstein shows how the voices resistant to change may win the political battle for a time, but they cannot hold back the future.

Social media connected the world - and gave rise to fake news and increasing polarization. Now a leading researcher at MIT draws on 20 years of research to show how these trends threaten our political, economic, and emotional health in this eye-opening exploration of the dark side of technological progress.

In Lies the Government Told You, Judge Andrew P. Napolitano reveals how America's freedom, as guaranteed by the US Constitution, has been forfeited by a government more protective of its own power than its obligations to preserve our individual liberties.

In an unparalleled collaboration, two leading global thinkers in technology and foreign affairs give us their widely anticipated, transformational vision of the future: a world where everyone is connected - a world full of challenges and benefits that are ours to meet and to harness. Eric Schmidt is one of Silicon Valley’s great leaders, having taken Google from a small startup to one of the world’s most influential companies. Jared Cohen is the director of Google Ideas and a former adviser to secretaries of state Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton.

Dan Savage eviscerates the right-wing conservatives as he commits each of the Seven Deadly Sins himself (or tries to) and finds those everyday Americans who take particular delight in their sinful pursuits. Combine a unique history of the Seven Deadly Sins, a new interpretation of the biblical stories of Sodom and Gomorrah, and enough Bill Bennett, Robert Bork, Pat Buchanan, Dr. Laura, and Bill O'Reilly bashing to more than make up for their incessant carping, and you've got the most provocative book of the fall.