Political Ideologies

One of the enduring legacies of the 2012 Presidential campaign was the demise of the white American male voter as a dominant force in the political landscape. On election night, after Obama was announced the winner, a distressed Bill O'Reilly lamented that he didn't live in "a traditional America anymore". He was joined by others who bellowed their grief on the talk radio airwaves, the traditional redoubt of angry white men. Why were they so angry?

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.

Judicial Watch, America's largest nonpartisan government watchdog, has investigated the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations. Judicial Watch is the group that helped impeach Bill Clinton and took the Bush White House secrecy all the way up to the Supreme Court. Since the beginning of the Obama administration, this grassroots group has filed over 700 open records demands and dozens of lawsuits, including a successful fight over the secret Obama White House visitor logs.

DemoCRIPS and ReBLOODlicans uncovers the truth about how corporations have bought the American electoral and legislative process through the power of lobbyists, campaign contributions, and political action committees. Using historical details, such as the development of the two-party system and the advent of third-party candidates throughout U.S. history, DemoCRIPS and ReBLOODlicans exposes how the two major parties have allowed corporations, businesses, and politically-motivated wealthy individuals to manipulate elections.

Dinesh D'Souza, the most original and controversial writer on politics and society in the U.S. today, uncovers the links between the spread of American pop culture, leftist ideas, and secular values and the rise of anti-Americanism throughout the world. In The Enemy at Home, D'Souza makes the startling claim that 9/11 and other terrorist acts can be directly traced to the ideas and attitudes perpetrated by America's cultural left.

In this book, which the author calls a "culmination of 30 years of work in the history of ideas", Sowell attempts to explain the ideological difference between liberals and conservatives as a disagreement over the moral potential inherent in nature. Those who see that potential as limited prefer to constrain governmental authority, he argues. They feel that reform is difficult and often dangerous, and put their faith in family, custom, law, and traditional institutions.

An engaging, polemical romp through economic theory, computational complexity, and the history of planning, The People's Republic of Walmart revives the conversation about how society can extend democratic decision-making to all economic matters. With the advances in information technology in recent decades and the emergence of globe-straddling collective enterprises, democratic planning in the interest of all humanity is more important and closer to attainment than ever before.

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.

The lifeblood of any free society is persuasion: changing other people’s minds in order to change things. But America is suffering a crisis of faith in persuasion that is putting its democracy and the planet itself at risk. Anand Giridharadas takes us inside these movements and battles, seeking out the dissenters who continue to champion persuasion in an age of polarization. As the book’s subjects grapple with how to call out injustices while calling in those who don’t agree with them but just might one day, they point a way to healing, and changing, a fracturing country.

America's fight against radical Islam could soon be over, and a top secret plan from the Cold War is the key to our victory. Dr. Sebastian Gorka, counterinsurgency expert and Distinguished Chair of Military Theory at Marine Corps University, explains how America can win the war on terror quickly and decisively by delegitimizing the enemy in the eyes of its followers - a strategy that won the Cold War and would end the era of Jihad forever.

John Hay, Lincoln's private secretary and later secretary of state under presidents McKinley and Roosevelt, and Samuel Langhorne Clemens, famous as "Mark Twain", grew up 50 miles apart on the banks of the Mississippi River in the same rural antebellum stew of race, class, and want. This shared history drew them together in the late 1860s, and their mutual admiration never waned in spite of sharp differences.

In The Problem with Work, Kathi Weeks boldly challenges the presupposition that work, or waged labor, is inherently a social and political good. Taking up Marxist and feminist critiques, Weeks proposes a postwork society that would allow people to be productive and creative rather than relentlessly bound to the employment relation.

In Makers and Takers, Peter Schweizer broadens his scope to examine the damaging effects of liberal philosophy on ordinary Americans. Drawing on national polls and academic studies, as well as the revealing testimony of liberals themselves, Schweizer shows that liberals are, on the whole, less honest, less generous, lazier, and more materialistic than their conservative counterparts.

It is well known that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were close allies and kindred political spirits. During their eight overlapping years in office, the U.S. president and the U.K. prime minister worked together to promote lower taxes, deregulation, free trade, and an aggressive stance against the Soviet Union. But according to Nicholas Wapshott, the Reagan/Thatcher relationship was much deeper than an alliance of mutual interests.

What is fascism? By focusing on the concrete, what the fascists did rather than what they said, the esteemed historian Robert O. Paxton answers this question for the first time. From the first violent uniformed bands beating up "enemies of the state", through Mussolini's rise to power, to Germany's fascist radicalization in World War II, Paxton shows clearly why fascists came to power in some countries and not others.

Spin Dictators traces how leaders such as Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew and Peru's Alberto Fujimori pioneered less violent, more covert, and more effective methods of monopolizing power. They cultivated an image of competence, concealed censorship, and used democratic institutions to undermine democracy, all while increasing international engagement for financial and reputational benefits.

The purpose of this book is twofold: first, to elucidate the logic, principles, and significance of the Declaration of Independence as the embodiment of the American mind; and, second, to shed light on what John Adams once called the "real American Revolution"; that is, the moral revolution that occurred in the minds of the people in the 15 years before 1776.

Sam Tanenhaus's essay "Conservatism Is Dead" prompted intense discussion and debate when it was published in the New Republic in the first days of Barack Obama's presidency. Now Tanenhaus, a leading authority on modern politics, has expanded his argument into a sweeping history of the American conservative movement.

In Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries, best-selling author Naomi Wolf illustrates the breathtaking changes that can take place when ordinary citizens engage in the democratic system the way the founders intended and tells you how to use that system, right now, to change your life, your community, and ultimately the nation.

The foundation for all modern economic thought and political economy, The Wealth of Nations is the magnum opus of Scottish economist Adam Smith, who introduces the world to the very idea of economics and capitalism in the modern sense of the words.