Political Liberalism

In 1996 Amy Goodman started a radio show called Democracy Now! to focus on the issues that are underreported or ignored by mainstream news coverage. Shortly after September 11, 2001, they were broadcasting on television every weekday. Today it is the only public media in the US that airs simultaneously on satellite and cable television, radio, and the Internet. Now Amy and her journalist brother, David, share stories of the progressive heroes - the whistleblowers, the organizers, the protestors - who have brought about remarkable, often invisible change.

Back by popular demand, the bestselling Politically Incorrect Guides provide an unvarnished, unapologetic overview of the topics every American needs to know. The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Presidents, Part 1 profiles America’s early presidents, from George Washington to William Howard Taft.

Let’s talk about secession. Not exactly the most suitable cocktail party conversation starter anywhere in the country, but take that notion deep into the heart of Dixie and you might find yourself running from the possum-hunting conservatives, trailer-park lifers, and prayer warriors Chuck Thompson encountered during the two years he spent traveling the American South asking the question: Would we be better off without ’em?

This highly understandable audiobook offers a contemporary interpretation of the political thought of Edmund Burke, drawing on his experiences to illuminate and address fundamental questions of politics and society that are of particular interest today. In Edmund Burke for Our Time, Byrne asserts that Burke's politics is reflective of unique and sophisticated ideas about how people think and learn, and about determinants of political behavior.

In this timely new edition of his classic book A Political Philosophy, celebrated conservative philosopher Roger Scruton interrogates contemporary values, virtues and morality. What principles should govern our relations to animals, the nation state, the environment and other ways of life? What does modern marriage look like? What is Enlightenment, and how has its inheritance made itself known? How should we approach religion, evil and death? What explains the rise of totalitarianism, and how should we respond to nihilism?

From the time he arrived on the political scene in 1964, throughout his presidency and beyond, Ronald Reagan used his speeches to inspire and reinvigorate America. When he spoke, Reagan said, he was "preaching a sermon". The American people saw his vision of America and his dreams for the future, and they overwhelmingly responded; he was reelected in 1984 by the largest number of electoral votes in the nation's history.

The struggle between the main political parties has been reduced to an unpopularity contest, in which voters hold their noses and sigh as they trudge to the polls. Peter Hitchens explains how and why British politics has sunk to this dreary level - the takeover of the parties and the media by conventional left-wing dogmas which then call themselves 'the centre ground'. The Tory party under David Cameron has become a pale-blue twin of New Labour, offering change without alteration.

In the 1960s and 1970s, an insurgent attack on traditional liberalism took shape in America. It was built on new ideals of citizen advocacy and the public interest. Drawing energy from civil rights protests and opposition to the Vietnam War, the new citizens' movement drew legions of followers and scored major victories. And yet, in the process, citizen advocates also helped to undermine big government liberalism - the powerful alliance between government, business, and labor that dominated the United States politically in the decades following the New Deal and World War II.

Politics in America are polarized and trivialized, perhaps as never before. In Congress, the media, and academic debate, opponents from right and left, the Red and the Blue, struggle against one another as if politics were contact sports played to the shouts of cheerleaders. The result, Ronald Dworkin writes, is a deeply depressing political culture, as ill equipped for the perennial challenge of achieving social justice as for the emerging threats of terrorism. Can the hope for change be realized?

One of the most maligned, misunderstood, and even mocked constituencies in American politics, gay Republicans regularly face condemnation from both the LGBTQ+ community and their own political party. Yet they’ve been active and influential for decades. Gay conservatives were instrumental, for example, in ending “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and securing the legalization of same-sex marriage—but they also helped lay the groundwork for the rise of Donald Trump.

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.

Moderate Conservatism: Reclaiming the Center by John Kekes is a response to attacks on the United States' 300-year-old constitutional democracy by extremists on the left and the right. It makes a reasoned case for moderation and the defense of a political system that has endured because it has balanced the often-conflicting claims of justice, liberty, equality, prosperity, and security. That balance is now threatened by extremists who ignore all else but their grievances.

Emmy Award-winning news anchor and New York Times best-selling author Chris Hayes argues that there are really two Americas: a Colony and a Nation. America likes to tell itself that it inhabits a postracial world, but nearly every empirical measure - wealth, unemployment, incarceration, school segregation - reveals that racial inequality hasn't improved since 1968.

Christopher Hitchens was for many years considered one of the fiercest and most eloquent left-wing polemicists in the world. But on much of today's left, he's remembered as a defector, a warmonger, and a sellout—a supporter of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq who traded his left-wing principles for neoconservatism after the September 11 attacks. In How Hitchens Can Save the Left, Matt Johnson argues that this easy narrative gets Hitchens exactly wrong. Hitchens was a lifelong champion of free inquiry, humanism, and universal liberal values.

Welcome to the world of Ann Coulter. With her monumental bestsellers Treason, Slander, and High Crimes and Misdemeanors, Coulter has become the most recognized and talked-about conservative intellectual in years—and certainly the most controversial. Now, in How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must), which is sure to ignite impassioned debate, she offers her most comprehensive analysis of the American political scene to date.

In No Apology, Mitt Romney asserts that American strength is essential—not just for our own well-being, but for the world’s. Governments such as China and a newly-robust Russia threaten to overtake us on many fronts, and Islam continues its dangerous rise. Drawing on history for lessons on how great powers collapse, Romney shows how and why our national advantages have eroded.

Who is killing America? Is it really Donald Trump and a GOP filled with white supremacists? In this audiobook, Dinesh D’Souza makes the provocative case that Democrats are the ones killing America by turning it into a massive nanny state modeled on the Southern plantation system. Death of a Nation's bracing alternative vision of American history explains the Democratic Party's dark past, reinterprets the roles of figures like Van Buren, FDR, and LBJ, and exposes the hidden truth that racism comes not from Trump or the conservative right but rather from Democrats.

Justice Anthony Kennedy slipped out of the Supreme Court building on June 27, 2018, and traveled incognito to the White House to inform President Donald Trump that he was retiring, setting in motion a political process that his successor, Brett Kavanaugh, would denounce three months later as a "national disgrace" and a "circus". Justice on Trial, the definitive insider's account of Kavanaugh's appointment to the Supreme Court, is based on extraordinary access to more than 100 key figures - including the president, justices, and senators - in that ferocious political drama.

Neoliberalism has become a dirty word. In political discourse, it stigmatizes a political opponent as a market fundamentalist; in academia, the concept is also mainly wielded by its critics, while those who might be seen as actual neoliberals deny its very existence. Yet, the term remains necessary for understanding the varieties of capitalism across space and time. Arguing that neoliberalism is widely misunderstood when reduced to a doctrine of markets and economics alone, this book shows that it has a political dimension that we can reconstruct and critique.

From a loose movement that lurked in the shadows in the early 2000s, the alt-right has achieved a level of visibility that has allowed it to expand significantly throughout America’s cultural, political, and digital landscapes. Racist, sexist, and homophobic beliefs that were previously unspeakable have become commonplace, normalized, and accepted - endangering American democracy and society as a whole. Yet in order to dismantle the destructive movement that has invaded our public consciousness, we must first understand the core beliefs that drive the alt-right.