American Elections

The 2016 election was a watershed for the United States. But, as Tim Alberta explains in American Carnage, to understand Trump’s victory is to view him not as the creator of this era of polarization and bruising partisanship, but rather as its most manifest consequence. American Carnage is the story of a president’s rise based on a country’s evolution and a party’s collapse. As George W. Bush left office with record-low approval ratings and Barack Obama led a Democratic takeover of Washington, Republicans faced a moment of reckoning.

In Find Me the Votes, two years of immersive reporting by Isikoff and Klaidman has produced the most authoritative and dramatic account yet of a defeated president’s conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election and how a local Georgia prosecutor—a daughter of the civil rights movement—decided to indict him and his allies for his desperate attempt to hold on to power. From the beginning, Fani Willis saw Donald Trump’s crimes as a voting rights case, and an attempt by the former president to deprive the citizens of Georgia of the franchise, a right for which her forebears had bled.

President Theodore Roosevelt forever transformed America, ushering the country into the arena of world supremacy. His brand of leadership was entirely American: confident, compassionate, energetic, diverse, visionary. But Roosevelt was not a born leader; his ascent to the apex of power was not a foregone conclusion.

What You Should Know About Politics...But Don't breaks it all down, issue by issue, explaining who stands for what, and why - whether it's the economy, income inequality, Obamacare, foreign policy, education, immigration, or climate change. If you're a Democrat, a Republican, or somewhere in between, it's the perfect audiobook to brush up on a single topic or listen through to get a deeper understanding of the often mucky world of American politics.

In the best-selling tradition of Truman, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer David Herbert Donald offers a new classic in American history and biography - a masterly account of how one man's extraordinary political acumen steered the Union to victory in the Civil War, and of how his soaring rhetoric gave meaning to that agonizing struggle for nationhood and equality.

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.

A fast-paced, rollicking, behind-the-scenes account of how the GOP since the 1950s has encouraged and exploited extremism, bigotry, and paranoia to gain power, American Psychosis offers listeners a brisk, can-you-believe-it journey through the netherworld of far-right irrationality and the Republican Party’s interactions with the darkest forces in America.

The Alabama Communist Party was made up of working people without a Euro-American radical political tradition: devoutly religious and semiliterate Black laborers and sharecroppers, and a handful of Whites, including unemployed industrial workers, housewives, youth, and renegade liberals. In this book, Robin D. G. Kelley reveals how the experiences and identities of these people from Alabama's farms, factories, mines, kitchens, and city streets shaped the Party's tactics and unique political culture.

New York Times best-selling author and legendary political insider Roger Stone lashes out with a blistering indictment that exposes the true history and monumental hypocrisy of the Bushes. In his usual "go for the jugular" style, Stone collaborates with Saint John Hunt - author, musician, and son of legendary CIA operative E. Howard Hunt - to make this a "no-holds-barred" history of the Bush family.

Disinformation is designed to evoke a strong emotional response to push us toward more extreme views, unable to find common ground with others. The false claims that led to the breathtaking attack on our Capitol in 2020 may have been only a dress rehearsal. Attack from Within shows us how to prevent it from happening again, thus preserving our country's hard-won democracy.

As Hitler's ascendancy began to make a Second World War inevitable, a clandestine network flooded the United States with disinformation aimed at sapping the strength of its war effort and persuading Americans that their natural alliance was with the Axis. Prequel unearths the forgotten story of these insurrectionists, as well as the heroic efforts of the journalists, prosecutors, and regular citizens who sought to expose their plot and bring them to justice. Deeply researched, the story of how the crisis was averted is also a deeply relevant tale for our own disquieting times.

There was a huge upsurge of global interest in US politics during the Trump presidency, culminating in the November 2020 election, the victory of the Democrat candidate Joe Biden and the subsequent, horrifying response in the storming of the US capitol. American politics is likely to remain deeply divided during the coming years and also the focus of global attention - with Trump mobilising his base for 2024. But the transatlantic fascination with the role and office of the US president isn't new at all and in fact reaches all the way back to the birth of the United States itself.

China is killing Americans and working aggres­sively to maximize the carnage while our leaders remain passive and, in some cases, compliant. Why? If anyone could crack the code, it’s the renowned nonpartisan investigator Peter Schweizer. Schweizer’s previous three number one New York Times bestsellers sent shock waves through official Wash­ington, sparking FBI investigations and congres­sional probes that continue to this day.

America’s Conspiracies and Cover-Ups brings together interviews with the bestselling and brightest minds in the alternative history world to create the definitive guide to our country’s biggest secrets. Jim Marrs and G. Edward Griffin, along with scholar Noam Chomsky and others experts, come together to answer questions about your favorite conspiracies: Is the Federal Reserve System unconstitutional? Was the IRS created to bail out Big Banks? Are cancer cures and cheap alternative energy being suppressed? Are elections made fraudulent by hacked voting machines?

For all the attempts to understand the state of American politics and the blue/red divide, we've ignored what economic and cultural loss can do to pride. What happens, Arlie Russell Hochschild asks, when a proud people in a hard-hit region suffer the deep loss of pride and are confronted with a powerful political appeal that makes it feel "stolen"? Hochschild's research drew her to Pikeville, Kentucky, in the heart of Appalachia, within the whitest and second-poorest congressional district in the nation.

Since the eviction of Occupy protestors from encampments in many cities throughout the world, smaller and more targeted occupations have continued. Workers in a Chicago factory occupied - with the support of their union - to protest layoffs. Teachers and students in Tucson staged a walkout to protest the removal of Chicano history books from the curriculum. Home foreclosures were disrupted, even avoided, by direct community action. But what does it all mean? What do we talk about when we talk about "revolution", if we talk about it at all?

Peter Schweizer says that, in a quarter-century as an investigative journalist, this is the scariest investigation he has ever conducted. That the Chinese government seeks to infiltrate American institutions is hardly surprising. What is wholly new, however, are the number of American elites who are eager to help the Chinese dictatorship in its quest for global hegemony.

For more than half a century, the United States has been pursuing a grand imperial strategy with the aim of staking out the globe. Our leaders have shown themselves willing, as in the Cuban missile crisis, to follow the dream of dominance no matter how high the risks. Now the Bush administration is intensifying this process, driving us toward the final frontiers of imperial control, toward a choice between the prerogatives of power and a livable Earth.

From the heterodox right wing of the 1940s to the Buchanan/Rothbard alliance of 1992 and all the way through to what he witnessed personally in Charlottesville, The New Right is a thorough firsthand accounting of the concepts, characters and chronology of this widely misunderstood sociopolitical phenomenon. Today’s fringe is tomorrow’s orthodoxy. As entertaining as it is informative, The New Right is required listening for every American across the spectrum who would like to learn more about the past, present and future of our divided political culture.

Some Americans cling desperately to the myth that we are living in a post-racial society, that the election of the first Black president spelled the doom of racism. In fact, racist thought is alive and well in America - more sophisticated and more insidious than ever. And as award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi argues in Stamped from the Beginning, if we have any hope of grappling with this stark reality, we must first understand how racist ideas were developed, disseminated, and enshrined in American society.