Book picks similar to
Corruptions of Empire: Life Studies and the Reagan Era by Alexander Cockburn
politics
essays
non-fiction
history
Conservatives Without Conscience
John W. Dean - 2006
Bush, offered the former White House insider's telling perspective on George W. Bush's presidency. Once again, he employs his knowledge & understanding of Washington politics & process to examine the conservative movement's current inner circle of radical Republican leaders--from Capitol Hill to Pennsylvania Ave to K Street & beyond. In Conservatives without Conscience, he not only highlights specific right-wing-driven GOP policies but also probes the conservative mindset, identifying recurring qualities such as the unbridled viciousness toward those daring to disagree with them, as well as the big business favoritism that costs taxpayers billions. He identifies specific examples of how court-packing seeks to form a judiciary that is biased by its very nature, how religious piety is producing politics run amok & how concealed indifference to the founding principles of liberty & equality is pushing America further & further from its constitutional foundations. By the end, he paints a vivid picture of what's happening at the top levels of the Republican Party, a party corrupted by leaders who cloak their actions in moral superiority while packaging their programs in blatant propaganda. He finds disturbing signs that current right-wing authoritarian thinking, when conflated with the domineering personalities of the conservative leadership, could take the USA toward its own version of fascism.
Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army
Jeremy Scahill - 2007
The shooting spree, labeled "Baghdad's Bloody Sunday," was neither the work of Iraqi insurgents nor U.S. soldiers. The shooters were private forces working for the secretive mercenary company, Blackwater Worldwide. This is the explosive story of a company that rose a decade ago from Moyock, North Carolina, to become one of the most powerful players in the "War on Terror." In his gripping bestseller, award-winning journalist Jeremy Scahill takes us from the bloodied streets of Iraq to hurricane-ravaged New Orleans to the chambers of power in Washington, to expose Blackwater as the frightening new face of the U.S. war machine.
The Anti-Inauguration: Building Resistance in the Trump Era
Naomi Klein - 2017
for "The Anti-Inauguration." With powerful speeches from Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Naomi Klein, Jeremy Scahill, Anand Gopal, and Owen Jones, the event was a counterpoint to Donald Trump's (poorly attended) inauguration. It also served as a counter-inauguration for the resistance we need in the era of Trump — and a reminder of the kind of future worth fighting for.
The Assault on Reason
Al Gore - 2007
Nobel Peace Prize winner, bestselling author, activist, and political icon, Al Gore has become one of the most respected and influential public intellectuals in America today. The Assault on Reason takes an unprecedented look at how faith in the power of reasonâ€"the idea that citizens can govern themselves through rational debate
A Warning
Anonymous - 2019
An unprecedented behind-the-scenes portrait of the Trump presidency from the anonymous senior official whose first words of warning about the president rocked the nation's capital.
The Conscience of a Conservative
Barry M. Goldwater - 1960
Written at the height of the Cold War and in the wake of America's greatest experiment with big government, the New Deal, Goldwater's message was not only remarkable, but radical. He argued for the value and importance of conservative principles--freedom, foremost among them--in contemporary political life. Using the principles he espoused in this concise but powerful book, Goldwater fundamentally altered the political landscape of his day--and ours.
The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency
Chris Whipple - 2017
The chiefs of staff, often referred to as "the gatekeepers," wield tremendous power in Washington and beyond; they decide who is allowed to see the president, negotiate with Congress to push POTUS's agenda, and--most crucially--enjoy unparalleled access to the leader of the free world. Each chief can make or break an administration, and each president reveals himself by the chief he picks.Through extensive, intimate interviews with all seventeen living chiefs and two former presidents, award-winning journalist and producer Chris Whipple pulls back the curtain on this unique fraternity. In doing so, he revises our understanding of presidential history, showing us how James Baker's expert managing of the White House, the press, and Capitol Hill paved the way for the Reagan Revolution--and, conversely, how Watergate, the Iraq War, and even the bungled Obamacare rollout might have been prevented by a more effective chief.Filled with shrewd analysis and never-before-reported details, The Gatekeepers offers an essential portrait of the toughest job in Washington.
Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area
Harry M. Caudill - 1963
Today it details Appalachia's difficult past, and at the same time, presents an accurate historical backdrop for a contemporary understanding of the Appalachian region.
Plunder and Deceit: Big Government's Exploitation of Young People and the Future
Mark R. Levin - 2015
Levin’s overlying patriotic mission has been to avert a devastating tragedy: The loss of the greatest republic known to mankind. But who stands to lose the most?In modern America, the civil society is being steadily devoured by a ubiquitous federal government. But as the government grows into an increasingly authoritarian and centralized federal Leviathan, many parents continue to tolerate, if not enthusiastically champion, grievous public policies that threaten their children and successive generations with a grim future at the hands of a brazenly expanding and imploding entitlement state poised to burden them with massive debt, mediocre education, waves of immigration, and a deteriorating national defense.Yet tyranny is not inevitable. In Federalist 51, James Madison explained with cautionary insight the essential balance between the civil society and governmental restraint: “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”This essential new book is, against all odds, a likeminded appeal to reason and audacity—one intended for all Americans but particularly the rising generation. Younger people must find the personal strength and will to break through the cycle of statist manipulation, unrelenting emotional overtures, and the pressure of groupthink, which are humbling, dispiriting, and absorbing them; to stand up against the heavy hand of centralized government, which if left unabated will assuredly condemn them to economic and societal calamity.Levin calls for a new civil rights movement, one that will foster liberty and prosperity and cease the exploitation of young people by statist masterminds. He challenges the rising generation of younger Americans to awaken to the cause of their own salvation, asking: will you acquiesce to a government that overwhelmingly acts without constitutional foundation—or will you stand in your own defense so that yours and future generations can live in freedom?
Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America
Nancy MacLean - 2017
The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. Democracy in Chains names its true architect—the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan—and dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed over six decades to alter every branch of government to disempower the majority.In a brilliant and engrossing narrative, Nancy MacLean shows how Buchanan forged his ideas about government in a last gasp attempt to preserve the white elite’s power in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. In response to the widening of American democracy, he developed a brilliant, if diabolical, plan to undermine the ability of the majority to use its numbers to level the playing field between the rich and powerful and the rest of us. Corporate donors and their right-wing foundations were only too eager to support Buchanan’s work in teaching others how to divide America into “makers” and “takers.” And when a multibillionaire on a messianic mission to rewrite the social contract of the modern world, Charles Koch, discovered Buchanan, he created a vast, relentless, and multi-armed machine to carry out Buchanan’s strategy. Without Buchanan's ideas and Koch's money, the libertarian right would not have succeeded in its stealth takeover of the Republican Party as a delivery mechanism. Now, with Mike Pence as Vice President, the cause has a longtime loyalist in the White House, not to mention a phalanx of Republicans in the House, the Senate, a majority of state governments, and the courts, all carrying out the plan. That plan includes harsher laws to undermine unions, privatizing everything from schools to health care and Social Security, and keeping as many of us as possible from voting. Based on ten years of unique research, Democracy in Chains tells a chilling story of right-wing academics and big money run amok. This revelatory work of scholarship is also a call to arms to protect the achievements of twentieth-century American self-government.
Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010
Charles Murray - 2012
In Coming Apart, Charles Murray explores the formation of American classes that are different in kind from anything we have ever known, focusing on whites as a way of driving home the fact that the trends he describes do not break along lines of race or ethnicity. Drawing on five decades of statistics and research, Coming Apart demonstrates that a new upper class and a new lower class have diverged so far in core behaviors and values that they barely recognize their underlying American kinship—divergence that has nothing to do with income inequality and that has grown during good economic times and bad. The top and bottom of white America increasingly live in different cultures, Murray argues, with the powerful upper class living in enclaves surrounded by their own kind, ignorant about life in mainstream America, and the lower class suffering from erosions of family and community life that strike at the heart of the pursuit of happiness. That divergence puts the success of the American project at risk. The evidence in Coming Apart is about white America. Its message is about all of America.
The Reagan Diaries
Ronald Reagan - 2007
Brought together in one volume and edited by historian Douglas Brinkley, "The Reagan Diaries" provides a striking insight into one of this nation's most important presidencies and sheds new light on the character of a true American leader.
Happy Days Were Here Again: Reflections of a Libertarian Journalist
William F. Buckley Jr. - 1993
This volume covers a wide range of enthusiasms, criticisms, tributes, and reflections from the former National Review editor.
Road Work: Among Tyrants, Heroes, Rogues, and Beasts
Mark Bowden - 2004
Road Work gathers the best of his award-winning writing, from his breakout stories for the Philadelphia Inquirer to his influential pieces in the Atlantic on the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Whether traveling to Zambia, where a team of antipoachers fights to save the black rhino, to Guantánamo Bay to expose the controversial ways America is fighting its war on terror, or to a small town in Rhode Island to penetrate the largest cocaine ring in history, Bowden takes us down rough roads previously off limits—and gives us another gripping read.