Book picks similar to
Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency by Andrew C. McCarthy
politics
history
non-fiction
political
The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin
Corey Robin - 2011
Buckley made a confession to Corey Robin. Capitalism is "boring," said the founding father of the American right. "Devoting your life to it," as conservatives do, "is horrifying if only because it's so repetitious. It's like sex." With this unlikely conversation began Robin's decade-long foray into the conservative mind. What is conservatism, and what's truly at stake for its proponents? If capitalism bores them, what excites them?Tracing conservatism back to its roots in the reaction against the French Revolution, Robin argues that the right is fundamentally inspired by a hostility to emancipating the lower orders. Some conservatives endorse the free market, others oppose it. Some criticize the state, others celebrate it. Underlying these differences is the impulse to defend power and privilege against movements demanding freedom and equality.Despite their opposition to these movements, conservatives favor a dynamic conception of politics and society--one that involves self-transformation, violence, and war. They are also highly adaptive to new challenges and circumstances. This partiality to violence and capacity for reinvention has been critical to their success.Written by a keen, highly regarded observer of the contemporary political scene, The Reactionary Mind ranges widely, from Edmund Burke to Antonin Scalia, from John C. Calhoun to Ayn Rand. It advances the notion that all rightwing ideologies, from the eighteenth century through today, are historical improvisations on a theme: the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.
The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart
Bill Bishop - 2008
This social transformation didn't happen by accident. We’ve built a country where we can all choose the neighborhood -- and religion and news show -- most compatible with our lifestyle and beliefs. And we are living with the consequences of this way-of-life segregation. Our country has become so polarized, so ideologically inbred, that people don’t know and can’t understand those who live just a few miles away. The reason for this situation, and the dire implications for our country, is the subject of this groundbreaking work.In 2004, the journalist Bill Bishop, armed with original and startling demographic data, made national news in a series of articles showing how Americans have been sorting themselves over the past three decades into alarmingly homogeneous communities -- not by region or by red state or blue state, but by city and even neighborhood. In The Big Sort, Bishop deepens his analysis in a brilliantly reported book that makes its case from the ground up, starting with stories about how we live today and then drawing on history, economics, and our changing political landscape to create one of the most compelling big-picture accounts of America in recent memory.The Big Sort will draw comparisons to Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone and Richard Florida's The Rise of the Creative Class and will redefine the way Americans think about themselves for decades to come.
Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich
Peter Schweizer - 2015
Since then, they’ve earned over $130 million. Where did the money come from? Most people assume that the Clintons amassed their wealth through lucrative book deals and high-six figure fees for speaking gigs. Now, Peter Schweizer shows who is really behind those enormous payments.In his New York Times bestselling books Extortion and Throw Them All Out, Schweizer detailed patterns of official corruption in Washington that led to congressional resignations and new ethics laws. In Clinton Cash, he follows the Clinton money trail, revealing the connection between their personal fortune, their “close personal friends,” the Clinton Foundation, foreign nations, and some of the highest ranks of government.Schweizer reveals the Clinton’s troubling dealings in Kazakhstan, Colombia, Haiti, and other places at the “wild west” fringe of the global economy. In this blockbuster exposé, Schweizer merely presents the troubling facts he’s uncovered. Meticulously researched and scrupulously sourced, filled with headline-making revelations, Clinton Cash raises serious questions of judgment, of possible indebtedness to an array of foreign interests, and ultimately, of fitness for high public office.
Fallout: Nuclear Bribes, Russian Spies, and the Washington Lies that Enriched the Clinton and Biden Dynasties
John Solomon - 2020
Not only did the sale of Uranium One put 20 percent of America’s domestic uranium supply under the control of Vladimir Putin, there was also evidence that the Clintons themselves had hugely profited from the deal. When presidential candidate Donald Trump made Uranium One the centerpiece of his “Crooked Hillary” attacks, the Clinton team feared its potential to damage Hillary’s campaign. Others in the Obama-Biden camp worried that if elected, Trump would expose their role in selling out America’s security to Putin.Their desperate need to neutralize the issue led them to launch an unprecedented investigation into the Trump campaign’s purported ties to Russia. The infamous Steele dossier, produced by Clinton-connected Fusion GPS, sparked an investigation under FBI Director James Comey. Instead of ending after the election, the investigation grew bigger, eventually leading to Comey’s firing and the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller. When Mueller failed to find grounds for impeachment, Democrats seized on an ambiguous phone call with the Ukrainian president as a pretext to remove Trump from office. This gambit blew up in their faces when it exposed the secrets that Democrats tried hard to keep buried. An indispensable guide to the hidden background of recent events, Fallout shows how Putin’s bid for nuclear dominance produced a series of political scandals that ultimately posed one of the greatest threats to our democracy in modern American history.
Unhinged: An Insider's Account of the Trump White House
Omarosa Manigault Newman - 2018
Their relationship has spanned fifteen years—through four television shows, a presidential campaign, and a year by his side in the most chaotic, outrageous White House in history. But that relationship has come to a decisive and definitive end, and Omarosa is finally ready to share her side of the story in this explosive, jaw-dropping account.A stunning tell-all and takedown from a strong, intelligent woman who took every name and number, Unhinged is a must-read for any concerned citizen.
The Plot Against the President: The True Story of How Congressman Devin Nunes Uncovered the Biggest Political Scandal in U.S. History
Lee Smith - 2019
Investigative journalist Lee Smith's The Plot Against the President tells the story of how Congressman Devin Nunes uncovered the operation to bring down the commander-in-chief. While popular opinion holds that Russia subverted democratic processes during the 2016 elections, the real damage was done not by Moscow or any other foreign actor. Rather, this was a slow-moving coup engineered by a coterie of the American elite, the "deep state," targeting not only the president, but also the rest of the country. The plot officially began July 31, 2016 with the counterintelligence investigation that the FBI opened to probe Russian infiltration of Donald Trump's presidential campaign. But the bureau never followed any Russians. In fact, it was an operation to sabotage Trump, the candidate, then president-elect, and finally the presidency. The conspirators included political operatives, law enforcement and intelligence officials, and the press.The plot was uncovered by Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and his investigative team. They understood that the target of the operation wasn't just Trump, but rather the institutions that sustain our republic. A country where operatives use the intelligence and security services to protect their privileges by spying on Americans, coordinating with the press, and using extra-constitutional means to undermine an election then undo a presidency is more like the third world than the republic envisioned by the founding fathers. Without Nunes and his team, the plot against the president -- and against the country -- never would have been revealed. Told from the perspective of Nunes and his crack investigators -- men and women who banded together to do the right thing at a crucial moment for our democracy -- the story of the biggest political scandal in a generation reads like a great detective novel, feels like a classic cowboy movie. The congressman from the cattle capital of California really did fight corruption in Washington. Devin Nunes took on the "deep state."
America: Imagine a World Without Her
Dinesh D'Souza - 2014
It is the Progressive view that is taught in our schools, that is preached by Hollywood, and that shapes the policies of the Obama administration. If America is a force for inequality and injustice in the world, its power deserves to be diminished; if traditional America is based on oppression and theft, then traditional America must be reformed—and the federal government can do the reforming.In America: Imagine a World without Her D'Souza offers a passionate and sharply reasoned defense of America, knocking down every important accusation made by Progressives against our country. In this book, you'll learn:-Why it is a pernicious myth that English colonists "stole" America from the Indians or that American settlers and soldiers "stole" the southwest from Mexico-Why the descendants of slaves—and the successive waves of immigrants to the United States—are better off here than in their old countries-How America, more than any other country, is based on rewarding the enterprise and hard-work of the common man-How traditional American virtues sustain prosperity and freedom, and Progressive arguments about "liberation" and "justice" undercut them-How Progressive demagoguery about "inequality" expands the power of government and its grasp on the taxpayer's wallet-Why we should fear the Progressive agenda of "reform" which is in fact an agenda of totalitarian control of the state over the individual-Why national decline is a choice--a choice that it is still not too late to reverseProvocative in its analysis, stunning in its conclusions, Dinesh D'Souza's America will be the most talked about book of the year.
Deep State Target: How I Got Caught in the Crosshairs of the Plot to Bring Down President Trump
George Papadopoulos - 2019
Mark Meadows, R-N.C. Deep State Target is the only firsthand account that proves the attempted sabotage of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign by American and international intelligence services, from former Trump advisor George Papadopoulos—whose global network, clandestine meetings about Hillary Clinton’s hacked emails, and rift with former Attorney General Jeff Sessions made him the first target of Spygate, the Mueller Investigation, and the Russian Collusion Hoax.As a young, ambitious foreign policy advisor to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, Papadopoulos became the first Trump official to plead guilty in special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. He is now the first campaign advisor sentenced and to have served time in prison. But as he explains in Deep State Target, there was an intricate set up at play, and it was neither Trump nor the Russians pulling the strings. American and allied intelligence services set out to destroy a Trump presidency before it even started. An energy policy consultant working for the insurgent campaign, Papadopoulos encountered a rogues’ gallery of infamous figures employed by agents from the US, Britain, and Australia. Here, he gives the play-by-play of how operatives like Professor Joseph Mifsud, Sergei Millian, Alexander Downer, and Stefan Halper worked to invent a Russian conspiracy that would irreparably damage the Trump administration. Papadopoulos was there: In secret meetings across the globe, on city streets being tailed by agents, watching Jeff Sessions make false statements under oath about a strategy session he attended, and ultimately being interrogated by Mueller’s team and agreeing to a guilty plea. Deep State Target is a shocking account of international spy games and a disturbing eyewitness report on a secret double government—the Deep State—intent on destroying lives and a presidency.
What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era
Carlos Lozada - 2020
As a book critic for The Washington Post, Carlos Lozada has read some 150 volumes claiming to diagnose why Trump was elected and what his presidency reveals about our nation. Many of these, he’s found, are more defensive than incisive, more righteous than right. In What Were We Thinking, Lozada uses these books to tell the story of how we understand ourselves in the Trump era, using as his main characters the political ideas and debates at play in America today. He dissects works on the white working class like Hillbilly Elegy; manifestos from the anti-Trump resistance like On Tyranny and No Is Not Enough; books on race, gender, and identity like How to Be an Antiracist and Good and Mad; polemics on the future of the conservative movement like The Corrosion of Conservatism; and of course plenty of books about Trump himself. Lozada’s argument is provocative: that many of these books—whether written by liberals or conservatives, activists or academics, Trump’s true believers or his harshest critics—are vulnerable to the same blind spots, resentments, and failures that gave us his presidency. But Lozada also highlights the books that succeed in illuminating how America is changing in the 21st century. What Were We Thinking is an intellectual history of the Trump era in real time, helping us transcend the battles of the moment and see ourselves for who we really are.
The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad
Fareed Zakaria - 2003
With an easy command of history, philosophy and current affairs, 'The Future of Freedom' calls for a restoration of the balance between liberty and democracy, and shows how liberal democracy has to be made effective and relevant for our time.
Trump Saves America: Our Last Hope to Be Great Again
Charles Hurt - 2019
They are people who love their country, trust their higher God, obey laws and will do anything for their family and neighbors. They are the very people the Founders envisioned when they hatched the radical idea of self-governance. This is the story of a Leviathan government - the most powerful political force in the history of mankind - that has become dangerously unmoored from the people it represents. It is the story of how elites and the politically comfortable controlling both parties in Washington have utterly lost touch. They don't even realize how much the people they represent despise the uncontrollable Leviathan.The establishment has tried their best to ignore Donald Trump-except to brand him as a racist, a xenophobe, an isolationist, and a dangerous, violence-inciting war monger. All standards of reporting vanished. In the era of Trump, no sort of criticism was off-limits. They openly mocked his looks, ridiculed his private business accomplishments, pilloried his family and children and made fun of his foreign-born wife for her accent!The Leviathan has grown untamable. Democrats and Republicans run for office year after year on promises they have no intention of keeping. Neither side wants to fix a single problem. The whole thing has become one giant ungovernable, corrupt Ponzi scheme that - one day - will come crashing down.Charles Hurt advocates for the "Nuclear Option" for dealing with this mess: just blow the whole damned thing up. Whatever is presidential or diplomatic, let's try the opposite. Whatever these people in Washington find most horrifying, let's try that. Finally, the multi-headed Leviathan swamp monster has met the perfect dragon slayer in Donald Trump. Trump Saves America examines each corrupt head of this Leviathan, and why Donald Trump is the only good answer to fixing it.
The Betrayal of the American Dream
Donald L. Barlett - 2012
In the twentieth century, that middle class provided the workforce, the educated skills, and the demand that gave life to the world’s greatest consumer economy. It was innovative and dynamic; it eclipsed old imperial systems and colonial archetypes. It gave rise to a dream: that if you worked hard and followed the rules you would prosper in America, and your children would enjoy a better life than yours. The American dream was the lure to gifted immigrants and the birthright opportunity for every American citizen. It is as important a part of the history of the country as the passing of the Bill of Rights, the outcome of the battle of Gettysburg, or the space program. Incredibly, however, for more than thirty years, government and big business in America have conspired to roll back the American dream. What was once accessible to a wide swath of the population is increasingly open only to a privileged few. The story of how the American middle class has been systematically impoverished and its prospects thwarted in favor of a new ruling elite is at the heart of this extraordinarily timely and revealing book, whose devastating findings from two of the finest investigative reporters in the country will leave you astonished and angry.
Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations
Amy Chua - 2018
We need to belong to groups. In many parts of the world, the group identities that matter most - the ones that people will kill and die for - are ethnic, religious, sectarian, or clan-based. But because America tends to see the world in terms of nation-states engaged in great ideological battles - Capitalism vs. Communism, Democracy vs. Authoritarianism, the "Free World" vs. the "Axis of Evil" - we are often spectacularly blind to the power of tribal politics. Time and again this blindness has undermined American foreign policy.In the Vietnam War, viewing the conflict through Cold War blinders, we never saw that most of Vietnam's "capitalists" were members of the hated Chinese minority. Every pro-free-market move we made helped turn the Vietnamese people against us. In Iraq, we were stunningly dismissive of the hatred between that country's Sunnis and Shias. If we want to get our foreign policy right - so as to not be perpetually caught off guard and fighting unwinnable wars - the United States has to come to grips with political tribalism abroad.Just as Washington's foreign policy establishment has been blind to the power of tribal politics outside the country, so too have American political elites been oblivious to the group identities that matter most to ordinary Americans - and that are tearing the United States apart. As the stunning rise of Donald Trump laid bare, identity politics have seized both the American left and right in an especially dangerous, racially inflected way. In America today, every group feels threatened: whites and blacks, Latinos and Asians, men and women, liberals and conservatives, and so on. There is a pervasive sense of collective persecution and discrimination. On the left, this has given rise to increasingly radical and exclusionary rhetoric of privilege and cultural appropriation. On the right, it has fueled a disturbing rise in xenophobia and white nationalism.In characteristically persuasive style, Amy Chua argues that America must rediscover a national identity that transcends our political tribes. Enough false slogans of unity, which are just another form of divisiveness. It is time for a more difficult unity that acknowledges the reality of group differences and fights the deep inequities that divide us.
Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future
Pete Buttigieg - 2019
With soaring prose that celebrates a resurgent American Midwest, Shortest Way Home narrates the heroic transformation of a “dying city” (Newsweek) into nothing less than a shining model of urban reinvention.Interweaving two narratives—that of a young man coming of age and a town regaining its economic vitality—Buttigieg recounts growing up in a Rust Belt city, amid decayed factory buildings and the steady soundtrack of rumbling freight trains passing through on their long journey to Chicagoland. Inspired by John F. Kennedy’s legacy, Buttigieg first left northern Indiana for red-bricked Harvard and then studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, before joining McKinsey, where he trained as a consultant—becoming, of all things, an expert in grocery pricing. Then, Buttigieg defied the expectations that came with his pedigree, choosing to return home to Indiana and responding to the ultimate challenge of how to revive a once-great industrial city and help steer its future in the twenty-first century.Elected at twenty-nine as the nation’s youngest mayor, Pete Buttigieg immediately recognized that “great cities, and even great nations, are built through attention to the everyday.” As Shortest Way Home recalls, the challenges were daunting—whether confronting gun violence, renaming a street in honor of Martin Luther King Jr., or attracting tech companies to a city that had appealed more to junk bond scavengers than serious investors. None of this is underscored more than Buttigieg’s audacious campaign to reclaim 1,000 houses, many of them abandoned, in 1,000 days and then, even as a sitting mayor, deploying to serve in Afghanistan as a Navy officer. Yet the most personal challenge still awaited Buttigieg, who came out in a South Bend Tribune editorial, just before being reelected with 78 percent of the vote, and then finding Chasten Glezman, a middle-school teacher, who would become his partner for life.While Washington reels with scandal, Shortest Way Home, with its graceful, often humorous, language, challenges our perception of the typical American politician. In chronicling two once-unthinkable stories—that of an Afghanistan veteran who came out and found love and acceptance, all while in office, and that of a revitalized Rust Belt city no longer regarded as “flyover country”—Buttigieg provides a new vision for America’s shortest way home.
United: Thoughts on Finding Common Ground and Advancing the Common Good
Cory Booker - 2016
Raised in northern New Jersey, Cory Booker went to Stanford University on a football scholarship, accepted a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, then studied at Yale Law School. Graduating from Yale, his options were limitless. He chose public service. He chose to move to a rough neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey, where he worked as a tenants’ rights lawyer before winning a seat on the City Council. In 2006, he was elected mayor, and for more than seven years he was the public face of an American city that had gone decades with too little positive national attention and investment. In 2013, Booker became the first African American elected to represent New Jersey in the U.S. Senate. In United, Cory Booker draws on personal experience to issue a stirring call to reorient our nation and our politics around the principles of compassion and solidarity. He speaks of rising above despair to engage with hope, pursuing our shared mission, and embracing our common destiny. Here is his account of his own political education, the moments—some entertaining, some heartbreaking, all of them enlightening—that have shaped his civic vision. Here are the lessons Booker learned from the remarkable people who inspired him to serve, men and women whose example fueled his desire to create opportunities for others. Here also are his observations on the issues he cares about most deeply, from race and crime and the crisis of mass incarceration to economic and environmental justice. “Hope is the active conviction that despair will never have the last word,” Booker writes in this galvanizing book. In a world where we too easily lose touch with our neighbors, he argues, we must remember that we all rise or fall together—and that we must move beyond mere tolerance for one another toward a deeper connection: love.Praise for United
“An exceedingly good book, and an important book, and a reminder of what makes Booker an important and, through it all, a promising public figure.”—PolitickerNJ “What sets Senator Booker’s work apart from that of similar political books is that it seeks to elevate discourse rather than bring down opponents of the opposite partisan persuasion. This is a refreshing take, one that is truly worthy of study and contemplation.”—The Huffington PostFrom the Hardcover edition.