Best of
Political-Science

2022

Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win


Peter Schweizer - 2022
    From the Biden family to the Bush family, this book explores material that will astonish (or distress) the American reader.

The Great Reset: Joe Biden and the Rise of Twenty-First-Century Fascism


Glenn Beck - 2022
    It is a highly influential movement among the world’s elite to “reset” the global economy using banks, government programs, and environmental, social, and governance metrics. If they are successful and the Great Reset is finalized, it would put substantially more economic and social power in the hands of large corporations, international institutions, banks, and government officials, including Joe Biden, the United Nations, and many of the members of the World Economic Forum. In The Great Reset: Joe Biden and the Rise of Twenty-First-Century Fascism, Glenn Beck uses his trademark blend of humor, storytelling, and detailed analysis to reveal for the first time the unbelievable truth about the Great Reset, tying together nearly two decades of groundbreaking research about authoritarian movements and their efforts to fundamentally transform the United States. The roadmap to stopping the Great Reset begins with fully understanding what the free peoples of the world are up against, and no resource provides more information about this radical movement than Glenn Beck’s The Great Reset: Joe Biden and the Rise of Twenty-First-Century Fascism.

How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them


Barbara F. Walter - 2022
    While violence has declined worldwide, civil wars have increased. This is a new phenomenon. With the exception of a handful of cases - the American and English civil wars, the French Revolution - historically it has been rare for people to organise and fight their governments. This has changed. Since 1946, over 250 armed conflicts have broken out around the world, a number that continues to rise. Major civil wars are now being fought in countries including Iraq, Syria and Libya. Smaller civil wars are being fought in Ukraine, India, and Malaysia. Even countries we thought could never experience another civil war - such as the USA, Sweden and Ireland - are showing signs of unrest.In How Civil Wars Start, acclaimed expert Barbara F. Walter, who has advised on political violence everywhere from the CIA to the U.S. Senate to the United Nations, explains the rise of civil war and the conditions that create it. As democracies across the world backslide and citizens become more polarised, civil wars will become even more widespread and last longer than they have in the past. This urgent and important book shows us a path back toward peace.

Price Wars: How the Commodities Markets Made Our Chaotic World


Rupert Russell - 2022
    border. In Price Wars, he sets out on a worldwide journey to investigate what caused the wave of chaos that consumed the world in the 2010s.Russell travels to Tunisia, Iraq, Venezuela, Ukraine, East Africa, and Central America and discovers that unrest in all these places was triggered by dramatic and mysterious swings in the price of essential commodities. Deregulation of the commodities markets means that food prices can shoot up even in years of abundant harvests, causing hunger and protest. Oil prices and real-estate values can surge even when supplies are normal, enriching and emboldening dictators. It is this instability--fueled by banks and hedge funds in faraway New York and London--that has toppled regimes and unsettled the West.Price Wars is a fascinating, original, and groundbreaking expos� of the power of the commodities markets to disrupt the world.

25 Lies: Exposing Democrats' Most Dangerous, Seductive, Damnable, Destructive Lies and How to Refute Them


Vince Everett Ellison - 2022
    Agree or disagree with his thesis, open-minded readers must grapple with the persuasive power of his arguments, his mastery of facts, and his passionate love for mankind and our Creator. As a young man, Ellison began his career in the belly of the beast—as a prison guard working in the worst cellblock imaginable—the one housing mass murderers, rapists, child molesters, and others who would never be released, and whose crimes would never be redeemed in this world. Vince Ellison saw the face of evil up close. He knows it like few of us ever could. And it was to his dismay and sadness that he has seen that same evil later in life. This time, not in the faces of hardened, incarcerated criminals. But rather in the eyes of the leaders of the Democratic party. In this stunningly persuasive work, Vince marshals his own experience and couples it with a learned and original analysis to conclude that the leaders of America’s “progressive” party aren’t just wrong on their policy stances—they are deliberately and intently destructive. Ellison painstakingly dismantles the twenty-five lies underlying Democratic policies and arguments, and provides readers with the tools they need to understand and refute these myths and deceptions. Finally, Ellison implores his fellow Americans and Christians to open their eyes to the damage being done to the nation’s heart and soul in the name of progressivism.

The Twilight Struggle: What the Cold War Teaches Us about Great-Power Rivalry Today


Hal Brands - 2022
    Hadley, national security adviser to President George W. Bush   The United States is entering an era of great-power competition with China and Russia. Such global struggles happen in a geopolitical twilight, between the sunshine of peace and the darkness of war. In this innovative and illuminating book, Hal Brands, a leading historian and former Pentagon adviser, argues that America should look to the history of the Cold War for lessons in how to succeed in great-power rivalry today. Although the threat posed by authoritarian powers is growing, America’s muscle memory for dealing with dangerous foes has atrophied in the thirty years since the Cold War ended. In long-term competitions where the diplomatic jockeying is intense and the threat of violence is omnipresent, the United States will need all the historical insight it can get. Exploring how America won a previous twilight struggle is the starting point for determining how America can successfully prosecute another high-stakes rivalry today.

The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War


Nicholas Mulder - 2022
    . . offers many lessons for Western policy makers today.”—Paul Kennedy, Wall Street Journal   "The lessons are sobering.”—The Economist  “Original and persuasive. . . . For those who see economic sanctions as a relatively mild way of expressing displeasure at a country’s behavior, this book . . . will come as something of a revelation.”—Lawrence D. Freedman, Foreign Affairs   Economic sanctions dominate the landscape of world politics today. First developed in the early twentieth century as a way of exploiting the flows of globalization to defend liberal internationalism, their appeal is that they function as an alternative to war. This view, however, ignores the dark paradox at their core: designed to prevent war, economic sanctions are modeled on devastating techniques of warfare.     Tracing the use of economic sanctions from the blockades of World War I to the policing of colonial empires and the interwar confrontation with fascism, Nicholas Mulder uses extensive archival research in a political, economic, legal, and military history that reveals how a coercive wartime tool was adopted as an instrument of peacekeeping by the League of Nations. This timely study casts an overdue light on why sanctions are widely considered a form of war, and why their unintended consequences are so tremendous.

A Conspiratorial Life: Robert Welch, the John Birch Society, and the Revolution of American Conservatism


Edward H. Miller - 2022
      Though you may not know his name, Robert Welch (1899-1985)—founder of the John Birch Society—is easily one of the most significant architects of our current political moment. In A Conspiratorial Life, the first full-scale biography of Welch, Edward H. Miller delves deep into the life of an overlooked figure whose ideas nevertheless reshaped the American right. A child prodigy who entered college at age 12, Welch became an unlikely candy magnate, founding the company that created Sugar Daddies, Junior Mints, and other famed confections. In 1958, he funneled his wealth into establishing the organization that would define his legacy and change the face of American politics: the John Birch Society. Though the group’s paranoiac right-wing nativism was dismissed by conservative thinkers like William F. Buckley, its ideas gradually moved from the far-right fringe into the mainstream. By exploring the development of Welch’s political worldview, A Conspiratorial Life shows how the John Birch Society’s rabid libertarianism—and its highly effective grassroots networking—became a profound, yet often ignored or derided influence on the modern Republican Party. Miller convincingly connects the accusatory conservatism of the midcentury John Birch Society to the inflammatory rhetoric of the Tea Party, the Trump administration, Q, and more. As this book makes clear, whether or not you know his name or what he accomplished, it’s hard to deny that we’re living in Robert Welch’s America.

The Black Boom


Jason L. Riley - 2022
    Riley—acclaimed Wall Street Journal columnist and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute—digs into the data and concludes that the economic lives of black people improved significantly under policies put into place during the Trump administration. To acknowledge as much is not to endorse the 45th president but rather to champion policies that achieve a clear moral objective shared by most Americans.As Riley argues in The Black Boom: “Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020, the economic fortunes of blacks improved under Trump to an extent that was not only unseen under Obama but unseen going back several generations. Black unemployment and poverty reached historic lows, and black wages increased at a faster clip than white wages.”Less inequality is something that everyone wants, but disapproval of Trump’s personality and methods too often skewed the media’s appraisal of effective policies advocated by his administration. If we want to make real progress in improving the lives of low-income minorities, says Riley, we must look beyond our partisan differences at what works and keep doing it. Unfortunately, many press outlets were unable or unwilling to do that.As The Black Boom notes: “Political reporters were not unaware of this data. Rather, they chose to ignore or downplay it because it was inconvenient. In their view, Trump, because he was a Republican and because he was Trump, had it in for blacks, and thus his policy preferences would be harmful to minorities.To highlight the fact that significant racial disparities were narrowing on his watch—that the administration’s tax and regulatory reforms were mainly boosting the working and middle classes rather than ‘the rich’—would have undermined a narrative that the media preferred to advance, regardless of its veracity.”As with previous books in our New Threats to Freedom series, The Black Boom includes two essays from prominent experts who take issue with the author’s perspective. Juan Williams, a veteran journalist, and Wilfred Reilly, a political scientist, contribute thoughtful responses to Riley and show that it is possible to share a deep concern for disadvantaged groups in our society even while disagreeing on how best to help them.The Black Boom exemplifies the calm, rational dialogue that Americans want and need at this moment in our history to understand which public policies best promote upward mobility for everyone.

Democracy in the Time of Coronavirus


Danielle Allen - 2022
      The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated some of the strengths of our society, including the rapid development of vaccines. But the pandemic has also exposed its glaring weaknesses, such as the failure of our government to develop and quickly implement strategies for tracing and containing outbreaks as well as widespread public distrust of government prompted by often confusing and conflicting choices—to mask, or not to mask. Even worse is that over half a million deaths and the extensive economic devastation could have been avoided if the government had been prepared to undertake comprehensive, contextually-sensitive policies to stop the spread of the disease.   In Democracy in the Time of Coronavirus, leading political thinker Danielle Allen untangles the US government’s COVID-19 victories and failures to offer a plan for creating a more resilient democratic polity—one that can better respond to both the present pandemic and future crises. Looking to history, Allen also identifies the challenges faced by democracies in other times that required strong government action. In an analysis spanning from ancient Greece to the Reconstruction Amendments and the present day, Allen argues for the relative effectiveness of collaborative federalism over authoritarian compulsion and for the unifying power of a common cause. But for democracy to endure, we—as participatory citizens—must commit to that cause: a just and equal social contract and support for good governance.

The War That Doesn't Say Its Name: The Unending Conflict in the Congo


Jason K. Stearns - 2022
    Millions have died in one of the worst humanitarian calamities of our time. The War That Doesn't Say Its Name investigates the most recent phase of this conflict, asking why the peace deal of 2003--accompanied by the largest United Nations peacekeeping mission in the world and tens of billions in international aid--has failed to stop the violence. Jason Stearns argues that the fighting has become an end in itself, carried forward in substantial part through the apathy and complicity of local and international actors.Stearns shows that regardless of the suffering, there has emerged a narrow military bourgeoisie of commanders and politicians for whom the conflict is a source of survival, dignity, and profit. Foreign donors provide food and urgent health care for millions, preventing the Congolese state from collapsing, but this involvement has not yielded transformational change. Stearns gives a detailed historical account of this period, focusing on the main players--Congolese and Rwandan states and the main armed groups. He extrapolates from these dynamics to other conflicts across Africa and presents a theory of conflict that highlights the interests of the belligerents and the social structures from which they arise.Exploring how violence in the Congo has become preoccupied with its own reproduction, The War That Doesn't Say Its Name sheds light on why certain military feuds persist without resolution.

America Second: How America's Elites Are Making China Stronger


Isaac Stone Fish - 2022
    interests. The past few years have seen relations between China and the United States shift, from enthusiastic economic partners, to wary frenemies, to open rivals. Americans have been slow to wake up to the challenges posed by the Chinese Communist Party. Why did this happen? And what can we do about it?In America Second, Isaac Stone Fish traces the evolution of the Party's influence in America. He shows how America's leaders initially welcomed China's entry into the U.S. economy, believing that trade and engagement would lead to a more democratic China. And he explains how--although this belief has proved misguided--many of our businesspeople and politicians have become too dependent on China to challenge it.America Second exposes a deep network of Beijing's influence in America, built quietly over the years through prominent figures like former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright, Disney chairman Bob Iger, and members of the Bush family. And it shows how to fight that influence-without being paranoid, xenophobic, or racist. This is an authoritative and important story of corruption and good intentions gone wrong, with serious implications not only for the future of the United States, but for the world at large.

The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War


Mark Galeotti - 2022
    . . A lively reminder that war adapts to technology, that civilians are part of modern conflict whether they like it or not.”—Roger Boyes, The Times  “Galeotti’s field guide is an admirably clear overview (in his words, ‘quick and opinionated’) of a form of conflict which is vague and hard to grasp. Variously described as hybrid, sub-threshold or grey-zone warfare, this is the no man’s land between peaceful relations and formal combat.”—Helen Warrell, Financial Times   Hybrid War, Grey Zone Warfare, Unrestricted War: today, traditional conflict—fought with guns, bombs, and drones—has become too expensive to wage, too unpopular at home, and too difficult to manage. In an age when America threatens Europe with sanctions, and when China spends billions buying influence abroad, the world is heading for a new era of permanent low-level conflict, often unnoticed, undeclared, and unending.   Transnational crime expert Mark Galeotti provides a comprehensive and ground-breaking survey of the new way of war. Ranging across the globe, Galeotti shows how today’s conflicts are fought with everything from disinformation and espionage to crime and subversion, leading to instability within countries and a legitimacy crisis across the globe. But rather than suggest that we hope for a return to a bygone era of “stable” warfare, Galeotti details ways of surviving, adapting, and taking advantage of the opportunities presented by this new reality.