Political Liberalism

In 1981, emboldened by Ronald Reagan’s election, a group of some 50 Republican operatives, evangelicals, oil barons and gun lobbyists met in a Washington suburb to coordinate their attack on civil liberties and the social safety net. These men and women called their coalition the Council for National Policy. Over four decades, this elite club has become a strategic nerve centre for channelling money and mobilising votes behind the scenes.

Richard Hanania has come out of nowhere to become one of the best-known writers in the nation in the last few years. In this book, he directs his attention to the culture war that has driven society apart and presents a stunning new theory about what is going on. In a nation nearly evenly split between conservatives and liberals, the left dominates nearly all major institutions, including universities, the government, and corporate America. Hanania argues that this is as much a legal requirement as it is an issue of one side triumphing in the marketplace of ideas.

"Fascists", "Brownshirts", "jackbooted stormtroopers" - such are the insults typically hurled at conservatives by their liberal opponents. Calling someone a fascist is the fastest way to shut them up, defining their views as beyond the political pale. But who are the real fascists in our midst?

Rarely does a work of history contain startling implications for the present, but in The People, No, Thomas Frank pulls off that explosive effect by showing us that everything we think we know about populism is wrong. Today "populism" is seen as a frightening thing, a term pundits use to describe the racist philosophy of Donald Trump and European extremists. But this is a mistake. The real story of populism is an account of enlightenment and liberation; it is the story of American democracy itself, of its ever-widening promise of a decent life for all.

The greatest challenges facing humankind, according to Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, are poverty and tyranny, both of which hold people back. Arguing for a return to true liberal values, this engaging and accessible book develops, defends, and demonstrates how embracing the ideas first espoused by 18th-century philosophers like Locke, Smith, Voltaire, and Wollstonecraft is good for everyone. In McCloskey's view, liberalism leads to equality, but equality does not necessarily lead to liberalism - and the fixation of the left on inequality is counterproductive.

In The Unwinding, George Packer, author of The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, tells the story of the United States over the past three decades in an utterly original way, with his characteristically sharp eye for detail and gift for weaving together complex narratives. The Unwinding portrays a superpower in danger of coming apart at the seams, its elites no longer elite, its institutions no longer working, its ordinary people left to improvise their own schemes for success and salvation.

Since Obama took office, conservative pundits have been mainstays on the best-seller list. And now, the best-selling author and political legend Pat Buchanan weighs in with a warning against not only the dangers that the country faces under Obama, but the risk of sliding into irrelevancy that the Republican party faces if it chooses to forget its core values. As he shows in this incisive book, liberal policy-making and unhindered globalization have eroded America’s economic strength.

Written with bracing wit and intelligence, Rachel Maddow's Drift argues that we've drifted away from America's original ideals and become a nation weirdly at peace with perpetual war, with all the financial and human costs that entails. To understand how we've arrived at such a dangerous place, Maddow takes us from the Vietnam War to today's war in Afghanistan.

Around the world, populist movements are gaining traction among the white working class. Meanwhile, members of the professional elite - journalists, managers, and establishment politicians - are on the outside looking in, left to argue over the reasons. Williams explains that many people have conflated "working class" with "poor" - but the working class is, in fact, the elusive, purportedly disappearing middle class. They often resent the poor and the professionals alike. But they don't resent the truly rich.

Conventional wisdom holds that America has been a Christian nation since the Founding Fathers. But in One Nation Under God, historian Kevin M. Kruse argues that the idea of "Christian America" is nothing more than a myth - and a relatively recent one at that.

For more than six decades, Fidel Castro's words have echoed through the politics of Latin America. His towering political influence still looms over the region today. The swing to the Left in Latin America, known as the 'Pink Tide', was the most important political movement in the Western Hemisphere in the 21st century. It involved some of the biggest, most colourful and most controversial characters in Latin America for decades, leaders who would leave an indelible mark on their nations and who were adored and reviled in equal measure.

Roger Scruton’s How to be a Conservative presents the case for modern conservatism not in the terms of an elegy but rather as a practical example of how to live as a conservative despite the pressures to live otherwise. As he writes, the book ‘is not about what we have lost, but about what we have retained, and how to hold on to it’. In this witty and frank account, Scruton draws on his years of experience as a counter-cultural presence in public life.

A huge swath of Americans have put their faith in Trump, and Trump only, because they see the rest of the country building a future that doesn't have a place for them. If they would risk their lives for Trump in a pandemic, they will certainly risk the stability of American democracy. They brought the Trumpocalypse upon the country, and a post-Trumpocalypse country will have to find a way either to reconcile them to democracy - or to protect democracy from them.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist's "astonishing" and "enthralling" New York Times best seller and Notable Book about how the Founders' belief in natural rights created a great American political tradition (Booklist) - "easily one of the best books on American Conservatism ever written" (Jonah Goldberg).

When Bernie Sanders began his race for the presidency, it was considered by the political establishment and the media to be a "fringe" campaign, something not to be taken seriously. After all, he was just an independent senator from a small state with little name recognition. His campaign had no money, no political organization, and it was taking on the entire Democratic Party establishment. By the time Sanders' campaign came to a close, however, it was clear that the pundits had gotten it wrong.

The Law was originally published as a pamphlet in French in 1850 by Frederic Bastiat. It is his most famous work and was written two years after the third French Revolution of 1848. It defines, through development, a just system of laws and then demonstrates how such law facilitates a free society. Bastiat was a French classical liberal theorist, political economist, and member of the French assembly.

Chris Hedges examines the failure of the liberal class to confront the rise of the corporate state and the consequences of a liberalism that has become profoundly bankrupted. Hedges argues that there are five pillars of the liberal establishment and that each of these institutions has sold out the constituents it represented. In doing so, the liberal class has become irrelevant to society at large and ultimately the corporate power elite they once served.

In an astonishing, tough firsthand reportage, Chris Hedges draws on stories from inside communities across America and reveals how the hurricanes of change have allowed an array of pathologies to arise: the opioid crisis, the retreat into gambling, the corporate coup d'état of government, the pornification of culture, the rise of magical thinking, the emboldening of violence and hate, the plagues of suicides, and the global upheaval caused by catastrophic climate change.

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.

Unfreedom of the Press is not just another book about the press. [Levin] shows how those entrusted with news reporting today are destroying freedom of the press from within - not through actions of government officials, but with its own abandonment of reportorial integrity and objective journalism. With the depth of historical background for which his books are renowned, Levin takes you on a journey through the early American patriot press, which proudly promoted the principles set forth in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.