Political Ideologies

Hitler's American Friends, by Bradley W. Hart, is an audiobook examining the strange terrain of Nazi sympathizers, nonintervention campaigners, and other voices in America who advocated on behalf of Nazi Germany in the years before World War II. Americans who remember World War II reminisce about how it brought the country together. The less-popular truth behind this warm nostalgia: Until the attack on Pearl Harbor, America was deeply, dangerously divided.

It is a widespread belief among liberals that if only Democrats can continue to dominate national elections, if only those awful Republicans are beaten into submission, the country will be on the right course. But this is to fundamentally misunderstand the modern Democratic Party. Drawing on years of research and first-hand reporting, Frank points out that the Democrats have done little to advance traditional liberal goals: expanding opportunity, fighting for social justice, and ensuring that workers get a fair deal.

For generations, British thinkers told the history of an empire whose story was still very much in the making. While they wrote of conquest, imperial rule in India, the Middle East, Africa, and the Caribbean was consolidated. While they described the development of imperial governance, rebellions were brutally crushed. As they reimagined empire during the two world wars, decolonization was compromised. Priya Satia shows how these historians not only interpreted the major political events of their time but also shaped the future that followed.

To the modern mind, the idea of honor is outdated, sexist, and barbaric. It evokes Hamilton and Burr and pistols at dawn, not visions of a well-organized society. But for philosopher Tamler Sommers, a sense of honor is essential to living moral lives. In Why Honor Matters, Sommers argues that our collective rejection of honor has come at great cost. Reliant only on Enlightenment liberalism, the United States has become the home of the cowardly, the shameless, the selfish, and the alienated. Properly channeled, honor encourages virtues like courage, integrity, and solidarity.

Charles Barkley has never been shy about expressing his opinions. Michael Jordan once said that we all want to say the things that Barkley says, but we don't dare. Many people are going to be shocked and scandalized by I May Be Wrong but I Doubt It, but many more will stand up and cheer. One way or another, if more blood hasn't reached your brain by the time you've finished this book, maybe you've been embalmed.

From the phony Russia collusion narrative to the coordinated riots laying waste to US cities, it's the same ongoing operation orchestrated by the left and targeting not just President Trump but hundreds of millions of Americans who revere their country and what it stands for. For the first time, crusading investigative journalist Lee Smith reveals who was responsible and the never before known involvement of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and senior military officials who engineered a coup against a sitting president.

Breakthroughs in genetics present us with a promise and a predicament. The promise is that we will soon be able to treat and prevent a host of debilitating diseases. The predicament is that our newfound genetic knowledge may enable us to manipulate our nature - to enhance our genetic traits and those of our children. Although most people find at least some forms of genetic engineering disquieting, it is not easy to articulate why.

As white supremacy, ultra-nationalism, rabid misogyny, and anti-immigrant fervor coalesce, a new and uniquely American form of fascism looms. Could our current moment actually bring about the end of democracy in the United States? Are Americans willing to surrender their freedom and dignity, along with their ongoing struggle for equality, justice, and mutual respect in the face of the rising tide of political and ideological extremism?

A. C. Grayling makes the case for a clear, consistent, principled, and written constitution, and sets out the reforms necessary - among them addressing the imbalance of power between government and Parliament, imposing fixed terms for MPs, introducing proportional representation, and lowering the voting age to 16 (the age at which you can marry, gamble, join the army, and must pay taxes if you work) - to ensure the intentions of such a constitution could not be subverted or ignored.

Soon after the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky led the Red Army against the counter-revolutionary White armies. Written in the white heat of the Civil War, "Terrorism and Communism" is one of the most potent defences of revolutionary dictatorship of the twentieth century. In his provocative commentary in this new edition, the coruscating critic Slavoj Zizek argues that Trotsky's attack on the illusions of democracy has a vital relevance to today.

In The Red Flag, Oxford professor David Priestland tells the epic story of a movement that has taken root in dozens of countries across 200 years, from its birth after the French Revolution to its ideological maturity in 19th-century Germany to its rise to dominance (and subsequent fall) in the 20th century.

From Brexit in the UK, to Donald Trump in the US, to extremist parties in Europe and the developing world, populism has dominated recent headlines. What explains this rise of leaders who stoke nationalist anger in their countries, from Le Pen to Erdogan? How long will the populist wave last? Who will be the winners and losers in this climate, and how can we defend the values of democracy, free trade, and international cooperation? No one is better suited to explore these questions than Ian Bremmer, who has built his career on assessing global risk for his clients.

In the essays collected here, spanning the Millennial generation's many agonies, Chris Cutrone cuts through the accumulated legacy of failures that the Millennials inherited from the Left of the 20th century and that blocked their view of the socialist politics needed to turn the crisis of neoliberal capitalism into a struggle to overcome capitalism.

In The World of the John Birch Society, author D. J. Mulloy reveals the tactics of the society in a way they've never been understood before, allowing the listener to make the connections to contemporary American politics, up to and including the Tea Party. These tactics included organized dissemination of broad-based accusations and innuendo, political brinksmanship within the Republican Party, and frequent doomsday predictions regarding world events.

A Thousand Small Sanities is a manifesto rooted in the lives of people who invented and extended the liberal tradition. Taking us from Montaigne to Mill, and from Middlemarch to the civil rights movement, Adam Gopnik argues that liberalism is not a form of centrism, nor simply another word for free markets, nor merely a term denoting a set of rights. It is something far more ambitious: the search for radical change by humane measures. Gopnik shows us why liberalism is one of the great moral adventures in human history.

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.

Taking stock of our fragmented political landscape, Michael Patrick Lynch delivers a trenchant philosophical take on digital culture and its tendency to make us into dogmatic know-it-alls. The internet - where most shared news stories are not even read by the person posting them - has contributed to the rampant spread of "intellectual arrogance". In this culture, we have come to think that we have nothing to learn from one another; we are rewarded for emotional outrage over reflective thought; and we glorify a defensive rejection of those different from us.

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.

Humans are tribal. We need to belong to groups. In many parts of the world, the group identities that matter most - the ones that people will kill and die for - are ethnic, religious, sectarian, or clan-based. But because America tends to see the world in terms of nation-states engaged in great ideological battles - capitalism vs. communism, democracy vs. authoritarianism, the "free world" vs. the "axis of evil" - we are often spectacularly blind to the power of tribal politics. Time and again this blindness has undermined American foreign policy.

Author Yuval Levin explores the roots of the left/right political divide in America by examining the views of the men who best represented each side at its origin: Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine. Striving to forge a new political path in the tumultuous age of the American and French revolutions, these two ideological titans sparred over moral and philosophical questions about the nature of political life and the best approach to social change: radical and swift, or gradual and incremental. The division they articulated continues to shape our political life today.