Political Ideologies

America's political leaders have considered suffrage not a natural right but a privilege restricted by wealth, sex, race, residence, literacy, criminal conviction, and citizenship. Today, voter identification laws, political gerrymandering, registration requirements, felon disenfranchisement, and voter purges deny many millions of citizens the opportunity to express their views at the ballot box. We cannot blame the founders alone for America's embattled vote. Best-selling author Allan Lichtman notes that subsequent generations have failed to establish suffrage as a universal right.

In 2015, Bloomberg News named Steve Bannon "the most dangerous political operative in America." Since then, he has grown exponentially more powerful - and not only in the United States. In this groundbreaking and urgent account, award-winning scholar of the radical right Benjamin Teitelbaum takes listeners behind the scenes of Bannon's global campaign against modernity.

Thomas Hobbes lived through the Thirty Years War and Britain's civil wars, and the trauma of these events led to his great masterpiece of political thought. How could humankind rescue itself from life in the natural state, which was 'poor, nasty, brutish and short'? Vilified and scorned from the moment it was published, Leviathan was publicly burnt for sedition, but ever since it has exercised a unique fascination upon its readers, both for its ideas and its remarkable prose. Its concepts helped to drag Europe into a new world - one in which we still live today.

Our economy is designed by the 1 percent, for the 1 percent. This audiobook offers a compelling vision of an equitable, ecologically sustainable alternative that meets the essential needs of all people. At a time when competing political visions are at stake the world over, this audiobook urges a move beyond tinkering at the margins to address the systemic crisis of our economy.

No dictator can rule through fear and violence alone. Naked power can be grabbed and held temporarily, but it never suffices in the long term. A tyrant who can compel his own people to acclaim him will last longer. The paradox of the modern dictator is that he must create the illusion of popular support. Throughout the 20th century, hundreds of millions of people were condemned to enthusiasm, obliged to hail their leaders even as they were herded down the road to serfdom.

Academics, journalists, and popular historians agree: our greatest presidents are the ones who confronted a national crisis and mobilized the entire nation to face it. That’s the conventional wisdom. The chief executives who are celebrated in textbooks and placed in the top echelon of presidents in surveys of experts are the bold leaders - the Woodrow Wilsons and Franklin Roosevelts - who reshaped the United States in line with their grand “vision” for America. Unfortunately, along the way, these “great” presidents inevitably expanded government - and shrank our liberties.

Richard Bessel, history professor at the University of York, specializes in the social and political history of Nazi Germany. In four compelling essays, he forcefully argues that racism made war inevitable. The Third Reich, led by "[A] band of political gangsters", came to power with a deep ideological commitment to war and racism. As the driving force behind the economics, social policy, and propaganda of Germany, racial hatred was the catalyst that plunged Europe into war.

Stephen Miller is one of the most influential advisors in the White House. He has crafted Donald Trump’s speeches, designed immigration policies that ban Muslims and separate families, and outlasted such Trump stalwarts as Steve Bannon and Jeff Sessions. But he’s remained an enigma. Until now. Emmy- and PEN-winning investigative journalist and author Jean Guerrero charts the 34-year-old’s astonishing rise to power, drawing from more than 100 interviews with his family, friends, adversaries, and government officials.

Conspiracy theories are as old as politics. But conspiracists today have introduced something new - conspiracy without theory. And the new conspiracism has moved from the fringes to the heart of government with the election of Donald Trump. In A Lot of People Are Saying, Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum reveal how the new conspiracism differs from classic conspiracy theory, why so few officials speak truth to conspiracy, and what needs to be done to resist it.

From one of the leading critics of leftist orientations comes a study of the thinkers who have most influenced the attitudes of the New Left. Beginning with a ruthless analysis of New Leftism and concluding with a critique of the key strands in its thinking, Roger Scruton conducts a reappraisal of such major left-wing thinkers as E. P. Thompson, Ronald Dworkin, R. D. Laing, Jurgen Habermas, Gyorgy Lukacs, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Žižek, Ralph Milliband, and Eric Hobsbawm. Scruton delivers a critique of modern left-wing thinking.

In this eloquent challenge to the reigning wisdom on globalization, Dani Rodrik reminds us of the importance of the nation-state, arguing forcefully that when the social arrangements of democracies inevitably clash with the international demands of globalization, national priorities should take precedence. Combining history with insight, humor with good-natured critique, Rodrik’s case for a customizable globalization supported by a light frame of international rules shows the way to a balanced prosperity as we confront today’s global challenges in trade, finance, and labor markets.

In the aftermath of World War II, the United States stood at a precipice. The forces of modernity unleashed by the war had led to astonishing advances in daily life, but technology and mass culture also threatened to erode the country's traditional moral character. As award-winning historian George M. Marsden explains in The Twilight of the American Enlightenment, postwar Americans looked to the country's secular liberalelites for guidance in this precarious time, but these intellectuals proved unable to articulate a coherent common cause by which America could chart its course.

Since the eviction of Occupy protestors from encampments in many cities throughout the world, smaller and more targeted occupations have continued. Workers in a Chicago factory occupied - with the support of their union - to protest layoffs. Teachers and students in Tucson staged a walkout to protest the removal of Chicano history books from the curriculum. Home foreclosures were disrupted, even avoided, by direct community action. But what does it all mean? What do we talk about when we talk about "revolution", if we talk about it at all?

The American invasion of Iraq has been a success - for the Kurds. Kurdistan is an invisible nation, and the Kurds the largest ethnic group on Earth without a homeland, comprising some 25 million moderate Sunni Muslims living in the area around the borders of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. Through a history dating back to biblical times, they have endured persecution and betrayal, surviving only through stubborn compromise with greater powers. They have always desired their own state, and now, accidentally, the United States may have helped them take a huge step toward that goal.

When it comes to the gun control debate, there are two kinds of data: data that's accurate and data that left-wing billionaires, politicians, and media want you to believe is accurate. In The War on Guns, economist and gun rights advocate John Lott turns a skeptical eye to well-funded antigun studies and stories that perpetuate false statistics to frighten Americans into giving up their guns.

There are hundreds of ways to lead a more environmentally friendly, socially conscious, and liberally minded life - ways that can even be enjoyable. Justin Krebs explains that being liberal, or progressive, isn’t only a political act - it’s a lifestyle that’s suited to our changing America.

Behind today's headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did.

When parents send their children off to college, Mom and Dad hope they'll return more cultivated, knowledgeable, and astute - able to see issues from all points of view. But, according to Ben Shapiro, there's only one view allowed on most college campuses: a rabid brand of liberalism that must be swallowed hook, line, and sinker.

Steve Bannon, the chief architect of Trump’s 2016 win, describes Taking Back Trump’s America as “a brass-knuckled insider’s account of the merciless 2020 fall and miraculous 2024 rise of the White House of Trump”. In Peter Navarro’s telling—he was in all of the rooms where it happened—Trump’s fall may be laid squarely at the feet of a coterie of incompetent and disloyal “bad personnel” inside the White House. They continually sought to undermine the commander in chief they putatively served.

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.