Book picks similar to
American Conservatism and the American Founding by Harry V. Jaffa
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america-gloriana
american-history
conservatism
The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism
Carl F.H. Henry - 1947
In this classic book Carl F. H. Henry, the father of modern fundamentalism, pioneered a path for active Christian engagement with the world -- a path as relevant today as when it was first staked out.Now available again and featuring a new foreword by Richard J. Mouw, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism offers a bracing world-and-life view that calls for boldness on the part of the evangelical community. Henry argues that a reformation is imperative within the ranks of conservative Christianity, one that will result in an ecumenical passion for souls and in the power to meaningfully address the social and intellectual needs of the world.
Faith and Politics: How the "Moral Values" Debate Divides America and How to Move Forward Together
John C. Danforth - 2006
senator and ordained Episcopal priest examines the controversial intersection of faith and politics in America As a former three-term Republican U.S. senator from Missouri and an ordained Episcopal priest, John C. Danforth has watched the changes in his party and the church with growing alarm. After penning two op-eds for The New York Times criticizing the right for its focus on wedge issues—abortion, stem-cell research, gay marriage, the Schiavo case, the public display of religion—that drive people apart, he speaks out again to call for a change. “The Republican Party has been taken over by something that it’s not,” Danforth says. “People do not want a sectarian political party, including a lot of people who are traditional Republicans.” In Faith and Politics, Danforth provides suggestions for moving toward a more secular Republican party that inspires trust in the people of the United States. Based on years of hard- won political experience and a life of religious service, he calls for Christians to look to the Bible and Christian teachings for ways in which they can practice their faith day to day and turn the country’s focus to a common ground once more. As a respected former senator, special envoy for peace in Sudan, priest, as an author, Senator Danforth is uniquely qualified to call for the change we so desperately need. He writes openly about his political life and ambition, humbly about his achievements, and above all with clarity and reason that both Republicans and Democrats hear all too little of.
On Valor's Side: A Marine's Own Story of Parris Island and Guadalcanal
T. Grady Gallant - 2014
The invasion of Guadalcanal was a long, cruel holding operation fought with too little equipment and support, not enough food and ammunition, and too few men. The marines on the island were subjected to bombing raids and strafing by Japanese aircraft, bombardment by battleships, cruisers, destroyers, submarines, and land artillery, as well as being continually attacked by Japanese tanks and infantry. For five long months they were attacked day and night before being eventually relieved by Army units. Who were these men who faced overwhelming odds? And how did they survive? T. Grady Gallant, who fought at Guadalcanal himself, answers these questions in his brilliant book On Valor’s Side Gallant’s account begins with an account of the grueling training that he and his fellow marines received in places such as Parris Island, before they undertook last minute preparations in New Zealand and made the journey towards Guadalcanal. It is a fascinating work that gives an eyewitness view of one of the most ferocious encounters that the United States Marines had to face through the course of the Second World War. “recreates the real-life training, fighting and comradeship of men at arms, from North Carolina to Guadalcanal.” — Kirkus Review “A great book” — Leon Uris T. Grady Gallant was a journalist, editor, columnist, author and editor. He served as a Sergeant of Special Weapons in the U.S. 1st marine Division, Fleet Marine Force 1941-1945, in the assault at Guadalcanal, and served a second tour with the 4th marine Division, Fleet Marine Force and was in the assault and Battle of Iwo Jima during World War II. His book On Valor’s Side was first published in 1963 and he passed away in 2009.
Barbarians: How The Baby Boomers, Immigration, and Islam Screwed my Generation
Lauren Southern - 2016
Instead, millennials have been raised to hold hedonism above all. Whatever feels good goes. Freedoms and rights are things for legislators and judges to conjure out of thin air, not precious traditions forged in the crucible of history. Most millennials reject the nuclear family, and the religious values, that our culture was built on because they resemble some sort of “unenlightened” old world of responsibility and duty that millennials want no part in. In short, squaring the truth about the West with the twisted values they’ve been brought up to swallow without complaint is not something that will be comfortable for many millennials. But I think that if not now, eventually most of them will take the plunge. Because deep down I think we know that what we’ve done is not empowering. Abandoning all guidance of our past and embracing hedonism and subjectivity was not some genius idea. Dismissing the guidance built for us over thousands and thousands of years in the form of gender roles, traditional lifestyles, hard work, objectivity, and cultural supremacy was, in fact, painfully stupid. Because really, what have we got to show for it? Nothing but infinite license to put who and what we want in our bodies, while our freedoms to speak, to think, to dream, and to build get more limited every day. We’ve decided to fall backwards off the shoulders of giants, and that fall probably feels good, until you realize there’s going to be a “splat” at the end. So with the ground of reality rushing up at them, more and more young people are clawing for anything to stop their feelings of personal, ethical, political, intellectual and artistic failure. And the rotted timber of progressivism is increasingly failing to break their fall. So eventually, they turn elsewhere. And so, a steadily increasing number of millennials are finally beginning to wake up to the choice we face as a civilization, and to the value they’ve so long overlooked in traditional standards of morality and beauty. They are wondering: is modern culture really so great if it means we substitute Meghan Trainor for Mozart, Emma Sulkowicz for Da Vinci, or Bell Hooks for Plato? Is it really such a step forward that our civilization, which once shed both blood and ink debating Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, is now reduced to considering theses like VICE Magazine’s “Dear Straight Guys: It’s Time to Start Putting Things In Your Butt?” Is this all there is, or can we do better? No, it isn’t, and yes, we can and must do better. Sure, it’ll be hard for us to dig ourselves out of the pit that the left-wing indoctrination and media machines has dug for everyone our age. But it’s work worth doing. Because right now, the world is on fire. And while my generation didn’t start the fire, with apologies to Billy Joel, I believe we have a chance to contain it, or even put it out. But first we have to expose the frauds, liars, idiots, and above all, barbarians who threw gas on it. So without further ado, let’s get to naming those names.
Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America's Founding Ideals
David Hackett Fischer - 2004
Before 1776, a variety of icons appeared throughout the colonies: New England's Liberty Trees, New York's Liberty Poles, Pennsylvania's Liberty Bells, South Carolina's Liberty Crescents, and backcountry rattlesnakes that warned "Don't tread on me." After independence, the search for a common vision inspired new symbols with other meanings: the eagle, the flag, Yankee Doodle, Uncle Sam, Brother Jonathan, and Miss Liberty.
The Loyalist: The LIfe and Times of Andrew Johnson
Jeffrey K. Smith - 2012
Lincoln became an instant martyr, immortalized as the "The Great Emancipator." After Lincoln's assassination, the commonest of men tried to fill the gigantic void. Andrew Johnson, a self-educated tailor from Tennessee, became the 17th President of the United States, and the first to enter office after the murder of his predecessor. Rising above an impoverished childhood, Johnson was truly a self-made man, learning a useful trade and developing his own successful business. At the same time, he rapidly ascended the poltical ladder--Alderman, Mayor, State Legislator, Congressman, Governor of Tennessee, United States Senator, Military Governor of Union-occupied Tennessee, Vice-President, and President of the United States. As the only lawmaker from the South to remain in Congress after the outbreak of the Civil War, Andrew Johnson was the ultimate "Loyalist." In recognition for his dedication to the Union, Johnson was nominated as Abraham Lincoln's running mate in the 1864 presidential election. Barely a month into his vice-presidency, Johnson was thrust on the center stage of America politics. After Lincoln was murdered, the tailor from Tennessee ascended into the unenviable position of succeeding a legend. Johnson's obstinancy and rigid interpretaion of the Constitution soon placed him at odds with the Republican congression leadership and the national press. The bitter chasm widened as the Johnson presidency lurched forward, and ultimately led to his being the first President in American history to be impeached by the House of Representatives. By a single vote, Johnson avoided conviction by the Senate, and forfeiture of of office. After narrowly surving this constitutional crisis, Johnson's historical legacy was irrevocably damaged, and his hopes for an elected term as President were dashed. Returning to Tennessee after his presidency, Johnson was determined to return to political office. In remarkable fashion, he was elected to the United States Senate, marking the first and only time that a former President has returned to serve in that legislative body. Ambitous, lacking humility, and largely humorless, Johnson was unable to tolerate criticism. He angrily attacked his foes, once likening himself to Christ on the Crucifix. His combative personality and intemperate remarks readily allowed his enemies to portray him as vindictive and unstable. "The Loyalist: The Life and Times of Andrew Johnson" is a concise biography of the 17th President of the United States, focusing upon the tumultuous years surrounding the American Civil War. Sustained by courage and ambition, Johnson was inevitably doomed by petulance, leading to a remarkable rise, dramatic fall, and partial vindication.
Ten Days to D-Day: Citizens and Soldiers on the Eve of the Invasion
David A.T. Stafford - 1999
David Stafford has written a riveting account of ten of those ordinary men and women -- including an American paratrooper, a German soldier, a nineteen-year-old English woman working on secret codes, a Parisian Jew in hiding, and a daring French resistance cell -- as they lived through ten very extraordinary days. Drawing on previously unpublished diaries and letters, Stafford gives readers a fresh point of entry into one of the most significant battles ever fought.Ten Days to D-Day buzzes with the pace of a novel, as Stafford moves from country to country, from character to character, including some of D-Day's leaders: Hitler, Rommel, Eisenhower, and Churchill. Stafford compellingly brings to life the final days before the invasion through the eyes of its participants, the citizens and soldiers that made history on June 6, 1944.
Over the Cliff: How Obama's Election Drove the American Right Insane
John Amato - 2010
It explores how it overtook the conservative movement after Obama became president. The book helps readers make sense of the chaos in the media and offers ideas for bringing a stop to it and help make America sane again Compiling example after example, the editors of Crooks and Liars, a popular blog, examine the torrent of right-wing kookery--the eager willingness of conservatives to fervently believe things that are provably false--and its ramifications both for our national discourse and our national well-being. The authors show how this outlandish, overheated rhetoric--generated by mainstream-media figures like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Lou Dobbs--is accompanied by a wave of lethal right-wing threats and violence. They carefully expose the bias of Fox News contributors Neil Cavuto, Greta, Van Susteren, et al, and political opportunists like Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich. The book explores the main drivers of this descent into madness: the extremist Radical Right and the longtime Republican willingness--dating back to Nixon, but refined in more recent years by Lee Atwater and his acolytes--to engage in a divisive politics of resentment, both racial and cultural. It takes a critical look at how Tea Party provocateurs like Dick Armey and his Freedom Works organization that take huge contributions from big money interests like former presidential candidate Steve Forbes that are willing to turn a blind eye to bigots, birthers and neo-John Birchers. The book demonstrates how the Tea Party is the true face of the Republican Party. The authors propose simple ways ordinary Americans can help stop the descent into blind opposition for it own sake. They suggest that news audiences demand accountability by from their sources by critically commenting on their Web site and to their editors or producers. They write "confronting the media malfeasance that makes rightwing populism possible is only an important first step in meeting the challenges posed by the rise of this political pathology in American life. Ultimately, it means confronting the movement and its leaders, particularly in their embrace of conspiracy theories, falsehoods, scapegoating, and vicious eliminationist rhetoric."
After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency
Bob Bauer - 2020
Bush -- comes a book about the presidency like no other.After Trump systematically shows how Donald Trump has exposed the inadequacy of the current array of laws and norms governing the presidency for protecting institutions vital to the American constitutional democracy. It also highlights the inability of these laws and norms to constrain the president.Bauer and Goldsmith don't stop there. They provide a detailed roadmap for reform, including concrete proposals on presidential conflicts of interest, foreign state influence on elections, abuse of the pardon power, systematic assaults on the press, White House-Justice Department relations, the role of the White House Counsel, law enforcement independence, the institution of the Special Counsel, protecting whistleblowers, inspectors general, war powers, control of nuclear weapons, executive branch vacancies, FBI investigations of presidents and presidential campaigns, and more.After Trump is a definitive account of what the last four years have revealed about the presidency. It will be essential reading for the coming debate on how to reconstruct the institutions surrounding the world's most powerful office--and how to restore the trust and faith of Americans in it.
Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party
Geoffrey Kabaservice - 2011
Republicans in Congress threatened to shut down the government and force a U.S. debt default. Tea Party activists mounted primary challenges against Republican officeholders who appeared to exhibit too much pragmatism or independence. Moderation and compromise were dirty words in the Republican presidential debates. The GOP, it seemed, had suddenly become a party of ideological purity.Except this development is not new at all. In Rule and Ruin, Geoffrey Kabaservice reveals that the moderate Republicans' downfall began not with the rise of the Tea Party but about the time of President Dwight Eisenhower's farewell address. Even in the 1960s, when left-wing radicalism and right-wing backlash commanded headlines, Republican moderates and progressives formed a powerful movement, supporting pro-civil rights politicians like Nelson Rockefeller and William Scranton, battling big-government liberals and conservative extremists alike. But the Republican civil war ended with the overthrow of the moderate ideas, heroes, and causes that had comprised the core of the GOP since its formation. In hindsight, it is today's conservatives who are Republicans in Name Only.Writing with passionate sympathy for a bygone tradition of moderation, Kabaservice recaptures a time when fiscal restraint was matched with social engagement; when a cohort of leading Republicans opposed the Vietnam war; when George Romney--father of Mitt Romney--conducted a nationwide tour of American poverty, from Appalachia to Watts, calling on society to listen to the voices from the ghetto. Rule and Ruin is an epic, deeply researched history that reorients our understanding of our political past and present.Today, following the Republicans' loss of the popular vote in five of the last six presidential contests, moderates remain marginalized in the GOP and progressives are all but nonexistent. In this insightful and elegantly argued book, Kabaservice contends that their decline has left Republicans less capable of governing responsibly, with dire consequences for all Americans. He has added a new afterword that considers the fallout from the 2012 elections.
Written on the Heart: The Case for Natural Law
J. Budziszewski - 1997
Budziszewski presents and defends the natural-law tradition in what is at once a primer for students and a vigorous argument for scholars. Written on the Heart expounds the work of the leading architects of theory on natural law, including Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and John Locke. It also takes up contemporary philosophy, theology and political science, colorfully running against the intimidating tide of advanced pluralism that finds natural law so difficult to tolerate.
The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right
Max Boot - 2018
The respected conservative historian couldn’t fathom that the party of Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Reagan could endorse such an unqualified reality-TV star. Yet the Twilight Zone episode that Boot believed he was watching created an ideological dislocation so shattering that Boot’s transformation from Republican foreign policy adviser to celebrated anti-Trump columnist becomes the dramatic story of The Corrosion of Conservatism.No longer a Republican, but also not a Democrat, Boot here records his ideological journey from a “movement” conservative to a man without a party, beginning with his political coming-of-age as a young émigré from the Soviet Union, enthralled with the National Review and the conservative intellectual tradition of Russell Kirk and F. A. Hayek. Against this personal odyssey, Boot simultaneously traces the evolution of modern American conservatism, jump-started by Barry Goldwater’s canonical The Conscience of a Conservative, to the rise of Trumpism and its gradual corrosion of what was once the Republican Party.While 90 percent of his fellow Republicans became political “toadies” in the aftermath of the 2016 election, Boot stood his ground, enduring the vitriol of his erstwhile conservative colleagues, trolled on Twitter by a white supremacist who depicted his “execution” in a gas chamber by a smiling, Nazi-clad Trump. And yet, Boot nevertheless remains a villain to some partisan circles for his enduring commitment to conservative fiscal and national security principles. It is from this isolated position, then, that Boot launches this bold declaration of dissent and its urgent plea for true, bipartisan cooperation.With uncompromising insights, The Corrosion of Conservatism evokes both a president who has traduced every norm and the rise of a nascent centrist movement to counter Trump’s assault on democracy.
American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America
Chris Hedges - 2007
Today, such language no longer sounds like hyperbole but poses, instead, a very real threat to our freedom and our way of life. In "American Fascists," Chris Hedges, veteran journalist and author of the National Book Award finalist "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning," challenges the Christian Right's religious legitimacy and argues that at its core it is a mass movement fueled by unbridled nationalism and a hatred for the open society. Hedges, who grew up in rural parishes in upstate New York where his father was a Presbyterian pastor, attacks the movement as someone steeped in the Bible and Christian tradition. He points to the hundreds of senators and members of Congress who have earned between 80 and 100 percent approval ratings from the three most influential Christian Right advocacy groups as one of many signs that the movement is burrowing deep inside the American government to subvert it. The movement's call to dismantle the wall between church and state and the intolerance it preaches against all who do not conform to its warped vision of a Christian America are pumped into tens of millions of American homes through Christian television and radio stations, as well as reinforced through the curriculum in Christian schools. The movement's yearning for apocalyptic violence and its assault on dispassionate, intellectual inquiry are laying the foundation for a new, frightening America."American Fascists," which includes interviews and coverage of events such as pro-life rallies and weeklong classes on conversion techniques, examines the movement's origins, its driving motivations and its dark ideological underpinnings. Hedges argues that the movement currently resembles the young fascist movements in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and '30s, movements that often masked the full extent of their drive for totalitarianism and were willing to make concessions until they achieved unrivaled power. The Christian Right, like these early fascist movements, does not openly call for dictatorship, nor does it use physical violence to suppress opposition. In short, the movement is not yet revolutionary. But the ideological architecture of a Christian fascism is being cemented in place. The movement has roused its followers to a fever pitch of despair and fury. All it will take, Hedges writes, is one more national crisis on the order of September 11 for the Christian Right to make a concerted drive to destroy American democracy. The movement awaits a crisis. At that moment they will reveal themselves for what they truly are -- the American heirs to fascism. Hedges issues a potent, impassioned warning. We face an imminent threat. His book reminds us of the dangers liberal, democratic societies face when they tolerate the intolerant.
NFL: 100 Years
National Football League - 2019
From its humble beginnings in Canton, Ohio, to its emergence as a sport cherished by millions, all the key moments and famous athletes are honored within the pages of this handsomely produced book. In addition to the lively text, and action and portrait photography, the story of the game and the context in which it grew are animated by original lists, charts, creative statistics, and infographics, along with beautiful photos of the evolving equipment and artifacts essential to the story of the sport. A perfect gift, NFL: 100 Years will be cherished by every football fan, new or old.
The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker
Katherine J. Cramer - 2016
In a time of rising inequality, Walker not only survived a bitterly contested recall that brought thousands of protesters to Capitol Square, he was subsequently reelected. How could this happen? How is it that the very people who stand to benefit from strong government services not only vote against the candidates who support those services but are vehemently against the very idea of big government? With The Politics of Resentment, Katherine J. Cramer uncovers an oft-overlooked piece of the puzzle: rural political consciousness and the resentment of the “liberal elite.” Rural voters are distrustful that politicians will respect the distinct values of their communities and allocate a fair share of resources. What can look like disagreements about basic political principles are therefore actually rooted in something even more fundamental: who we are as people and how closely a candidate’s social identity matches our own. Using Scott Walker and Wisconsin’s prominent and protracted debate about the appropriate role of government, Cramer illuminates the contours of rural consciousness, showing how place-based identities profoundly influence how people understand politics, regardless of whether urban politicians and their supporters really do shortchange or look down on those living in the country.The Politics of Resentment shows that rural resentment—no less than partisanship, race, or class—plays a major role in dividing America against itself.