Political Ideologies

Americans have always put the past to political ends. The Union laid claim to the Revolution - so did the Confederacy. Civil rights leaders said they were the true sons of liberty - so did Southern segregationists. This book tells the story of the centuries-long struggle over the meaning of the nation's founding, including the battle waged by the Tea Party, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and evangelical Christians to "take back America".

From revolutionary to Cold War adversary, Fidel Castro was one of the world's most controversial leaders and perhaps its most enduring. As Cuba's president for nearly 50 years, Castro's influential leadership captivated allies and enemies alike. By virtue of passionate oration and committed sense of purpose - good or bad - Castro kept the Cuban people devoted and the world enthralled.

Robert B. Reich urges Americans to get beyond mere outrage about the nation’s increasingly concentrated wealth and corrupt politics in order to mobilize and to take back our economy and democracy. Americans can’t rely only on getting good people elected, Reich argues, because nothing positive happens in Washington unless good people outside Washington are organized to help make those things happen after the election. But in order to be effectively mobilized, we need to see the big picture.

It’s amateur hour at the White House. So says New York Times best-selling author Edward Klein in his political exposé The Amateur. Tapping into the public’s growing sentiment that President Obama is in over his head, The Amateur argues that Obama’s toxic combination of incompetence and arrogance has run our nation and his presidency off the rails.

In a collection of original essays, the venerated television journalist, Dan Rather, celebrates our shared values and what matters most in our great country, and shows us what patriotism looks like. Writing about the institutions that sustain us, such as public libraries, public schools, and national parks; the values that have transformed us, such as the struggle for civil rights; and the drive toward science and innovation that has made the US great, Rather brings his experience on the frontlines of the world's biggest stories, and offers listeners a way forward.

Every man in America could stand to learn a lesson or two from our vice president.

The Longest Con tells the fascinating story of the partisan con artists who have corrupted conservative politics in our time, creating a toxic phenomenon that culminated in the election of Donald Trump, a bumptious fraud whose checkered career and tawdry retinue, including his presidential cabinet, have featured almost every variety of scam. But long before he appeared, Trump's path to power was blazed by the motley horde of swindlers and quacks who preceded him.

Weak, corrupt, and politically unstable, the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan are dismissed as isolated and irrelevant to the outside world. But are they? This hard-hitting book argues that Central Asia is in reality a globalization leader with more extensive involvement in economics, politics, and security dynamics beyond its borders than any other world region. Yet Central Asia's international activities are mostly hidden from view, with disturbing implications for world security.

The Venezuelan revolutionary Simón Bolívar, also known as El Libertador, sought to lead Latin America to independence from the Spanish in the early nineteenth century. Ever since he has been held as a model for subsequent Latin American radicals; Hugo Chávez, President of Venezuela, has dubbed his own programmes of social reform the Bolívarian Revolution . In his introduction to this collection of Bolívar s writings, Chávez explains why Bolívar continues to inspire.

Wild Democracy calls for a more anarchic, more courageous democracy. This is an ethic for people who know the rights they hold, and who struggle to rule themselves. This is an ethic for unfinished revolutions; an ethic for those who will not be mastered. This is an ethic for those who hold fast to the rights they have by nature.

Two months before the 2016 presidential election, an anonymously published essay titled "The Flight 93 Election" rallied conservatives to charge the cockpit by voting for Trump. Michael Anton, the author of that controversial viral essay, now says that the last few years have only served to prove his Flight 93 thesis: The left has become more aggressive, more vindictive, and more dangerous - and the stakes have never been higher.

In 1848, The Communist Manifesto was published by two émigrés from Germany. Marx and Engels' apocalyptic vision of an insatiable system that penetrates every corner of the world reduces every relationship to that of profit, and burst asunder the old forms of production and of politics. It is still a recognisable picture of our world—the vampiric energy of the system being once again highly contentious. This is a strikingly imaginative take on Marx and what his most haunting book has to say to us today.

Scott Coley exposes the inner workings of the religious right’s propaganda—and how Christians can resist it. Good evangelical Christians are Republican. It seems like it’s always been this way. That means the propaganda is working. Scott Coley trains a critical eye on the fusion of evangelicalism and right-wing politics in Ministers of Propaganda.

The decline and fall of America's global empire is the central feature of today's geopolitical landscape, and the nature of our response to it will determine much of our future trajectory, with implications that reach far beyond the limits of one nation's borders. Decline and Fall: The End of Empire and the Future of Democracy in 21st Century America challenges the conventional wisdom of empire, using a wealth of historical examples combined with groundbreaking original analysis.

The story of America is the struggle between our liberal ideal and illiberal resistance. Donald Trump catalyzed a reactionary revolution by tapping into the dark, shadowy side of American democracy that embraces exclusion and inequality. Throughout American history these alarming impulses have come to the forefront of our culture — during the Civil War, the era of the Robber Barons, and the Civil Rights Movement — but have now come to fruition in the presidency of Donald Trump.

Two hundred and rising. That's the death tally for the Obama administration's "Operation Fast & Furious." The program was supposedly designed to "win the drug war" by deliberately walking more than two thousand guns across the border to Mexico. But instead of catching drug lords, Fast & Furious armed the very kingpins it was supposed to trap.

Some have claimed that the neoliberal era is behind us. Baradaran shows that such thinking is misguided. Neoliberalism is a failed economic idea—it doesn't, in fact, create more wealth or more freedom. But it has been successful nevertheless, by seizing the courts and enabling our age of crypto fraud, financial instability, and accelerating inequality.

"Le Manifeste du Parti communiste" est un essai politico-philosophique rédigé par le philosophe allemand Karl Marx en 1848 avec la participation de son ami Friedrich Engels. "Le Manifeste du Parti communiste" peut être vu comme un résumé de la pensée marxiste.

There was a time when liberalism was an ism like any other, but that time, writes Michael Walzer, is gone. “Liberal” now conveys not a specific ideology but a moral stance, so the word is best conceived not as a noun but as an adjective—one is a “liberal democrat” or a “liberal nationalist.” Walzer itemizes the characteristics described by “liberal” in an inventory of his own deepest political and moral commitments—among other things, to the principle of equality, to the rule of law, and to a pluralism that is both political and cultural.

Hyperpartisanship has gridlocked the American government. Congress' approval ratings are at record lows, and both Democrats and Republicans are disgusted by the government's inability to get anything done. In It's Even Worse Than It Looks, Congressional scholars Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein present a grim picture of how party polarization and tribal politics have led Congress - and the United States - to the brink of institutional failure.