The CNN host and best-selling author explores the revolutions -- past and present -- that define the polarized and unstable age in which we live.Populist rage, ideological fracture, economic and technological shocks, war, and an international system studded with catastrophic risk -- the early decades of the twenty-first century may be the most revolutionary period in modern history. But it is not the first.
Humans have lived, and thrived, through more than one great realignment. What are these revolutions, and how can they help us to understand our fraught world?In this major work, Fareed Zakaria masterfully investigates the eras and movements that have shaken norms while shaping the modern world.
Three such periods hold profound lessons for today. First, in the seventeenth-century Netherlands, a fascinating series of transformations made that tiny land the richest in the world -- and created politics as we know it today.
Respected conservative journalist and commentator Timothy P. Carney continues the conversation begun with Hillbilly Elegy and the classic Bowling Alone in this hard-hitting analysis that identifies the true factor behind the decline of the American dream: it is not purely the result of economics as the left claims, but the collapse of the institutions that made us successful, including marriage, church, and civic life.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald J. Trump proclaimed, "the American dream is dead," and this message resonated across the country. Why do so many people believe that the American dream is no longer within reach? Growing inequality, stubborn pockets of immobility, rising rates of deadly addiction, the increasing and troubling fact that where you start determines where you end up, heightening political strife - these are the disturbing realities threatening ordinary American lives today.
The standard accounts pointed to economic problems among the working class, but the root was a cultural collapse: While the educated and wealthy elites still enjoy strong communities, most blue-collar Americans lack strong communities and institutions that bind them to their neighbors. And outside of the elites, the central American institution has been religion
That is, it's not the factory closings that have torn us apart; it's the church closings. The dissolution of our most cherished institutions - nuclear families, places of worship, civic organizations - has not only divided us, but eroded our sense of worth, belief in opportunity, and connection to one another.In Alienated America, Carney visits all corners of America, from the dim country bars of Southwestern Pennsylvania., to the bustling Mormon wards of Salt Lake City, and explains the most important data and research to demonstrate how the social connection is the great divide in America. He shows that Trump's surprising victory was the most visible symptom of this deep-seated problem. In addition to his detailed exploration of how a range of societal changes have, in tandem, damaged us, Carney provides a framework that will lead us back out of a lonely, modern wilderness.
Political polarization is at an all-time high, and the consequences for our personal relationships are significant. Many people have friends and family members with whom they feel they can no longer communicate because of their extreme political views. In this book, psychologist Tania Israel presents her program for helping people have meaningful, constructive conversations with those they disagree with politically.
Chapters show readers how to develop and use the scientifically-proven skills that are the foundation of constructive conversation, including strategies for effective listening, managing emotions, and understanding someone else's perspective, as well as finding common ground, avoiding self-righteousness, and telling your own story. Throughout, conversation prompts, practical exercises, case examples, and self-quizzes help readers visualize and practice starting, sustaining, and ending challenging conversations.
The untold story of why America is so culturally and politically dividedAmerica may be more diverse than ever coast to coast, but the places where we live are becoming increasingly crowded with people who live, think, and vote as we do. This social transformation didnt happed by accident. Weve 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 dont know and cant 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.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERFrom the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, an "astonishing" and "enthralling" (BOOKLIST ) new examination of how the Founders' belief in natural rights created a great American political tradition--"easily one of the best books on American Conservatism ever written" (Jonah Goldberg) .
For more than four decades, George F. Will has attempted to discern the principles of the Western political tradition and apply them to America's civic life. Today, the stakes could hardly be higher. Vital questions about the nature of man, of rights, of equality, of majority rule are bubbling just beneath the surface of daily events in America. The Founders' vision, articulated first in the Declaration of Independence and carried out in the Constitution, gave the new republic a framework for government unique in world history. Their beliefs in natural rights, limited government, religious freedom, and in human virtue and dignity ushered in two centuries of American prosperity. Now, as Will shows, conservatism is under threat--both from progressives and elements inside the Republican Party. America has become an administrative state, while destructive trends have overtaken family life and higher education. Semi-autonomous executive agencies wield essentially unaccountable power. Congress has failed in its duty to exercise its legislative powers. And the executive branch has slipped the Constitution's leash. In the intellectual battle between the vision of Founding Fathers like James Madison, who advanced the notion of natural rights that pre-exist government, and the progressivism advanced by Woodrow Wilson, the Founders have been losing.
It's time to reverse America's political fortunes. Expansive, intellectually thrilling, and written with the erudite wit that has made Will beloved by millions of readers, The Conservative Sensibility is an extraordinary new book from one of America's most celebrated political writers.
A vital, necessary playbook for navigating and defending free speech today by the CEO of PEN America, Dare To Speak provides a pathway for promoting free expression while also cultivating a more inclusive public culture.Online trolls and fascist chat groups. Controversies over campus lectures. Cancel culture versus censorship. The daily hazards and debates surrounding free speech dominate headlines and fuel social media storms.
In an era where one tweet can launch - or end - your career, and where free speech is often invoked as a principle but rarely understood, learning to maneuver the fast-changing, treacherous landscape of public discourse has never been more urgent. In Dare To Speak, Suzanne Nossel, a leading voice in support of free expression, delivers a vital, necessary guide to maintaining democratic debate that is open, free-wheeling but at the same time respectful of the rich diversity of backgrounds and opinions in a changing country.
Human history is full of the stories of peasants, subjects, and tribes. Yet the concept of the "citizen" is historically rare - and was among America's most valued ideals for over two centuries. But without shock treatment, warns historian Victor Davis Hanson, American citizenship as we have known it may soon vanish.In The Dying Citizen, Hanson outlines the historical forces that led to this crisis.
The evisceration of the middle class over the last fifty years has made many Americans dependent on the federal government. Open borders have undermined the idea of allegiance to a particular place. Identity politics have eradicated our collective civic sense of self. And a top-heavy administrative state has endangered personal liberty, along with formal efforts to weaken the Constitution.
Named one of the "juiciest political books to come in 2018" by Entertainment Weekly.An up-close look at the voters of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, who decisively swung the state for Donald J. Trump, and an examination of the role of the President's base as the midterm elections loom.
Luzerne County Pennsylvania, as Ben Bradlee describes it, is a microcosm of the nation. While it boasts its own police, firemen, schools and municipal services, Luzerne has few urban centers and is fundamentally rural in character. And like so many of the 3,000 other counties that resemble it across America, Donald J. Trump won Luzerne County in 2016. But President Obama had carried Luzerne in both elections. What changed? And what does this mean for America? The Forgotten tells this story, revealing how Trump voters came to feel like strangers in their own land, marginalized by flat or falling wages, rapid demographic change, and a liberal culture that mocks their faith and patriotism. As they explain it, residents of Luzerne felt like others were 'cutting in line' and that the federal government was taking too much money from the employed and giving it to the idle. They felt a loss of breadwinner status, and more importantly, a loss of dignity.
Drawing an unforgettable portrait of Americans caught in a fraught political moment that doesn't seem to end, The Forgotten not only expresses the growing divide between the two political parties, but also the immense forces that powered the election of Donald Trump. America is changing, and the men and women of The Forgotten are the ones who are changing it.
Democracy is a non-stop experiment in the strengths and weaknesses of our political institutions, local communities, and the human heart--its outcome can never be taken for granted. The experiment is endless, unless we blow up the lab, and the explosives to do the job are found within us. But so also is the heart's alchemy that can turn suffering into community, conflict into the energy of creativity, and tension into a force that opens us to the common good. Healing the Heart of Democracy names the vital "habits of the heart" we need to do the job and shows how they can be formed. Palmer proposes practical and hopeful, on-the-ground ways to learn how to hold the tensions of our differences in a manner that can restore a government "of the people, by the people, for the people
That's what "high conflict" does. It's the invisible hand of our time. And it's different from the useful friction of healthy conflict. That's good conflict, and it's a necessary force that pushes us to be better people. High conflict, by contrast, is what happens when discord distills into a good-versus-evil kind of feud, the kind with an us and a them. In this state, the normal rules of engagement no longer apply. The brain behaves differently. We feel increasingly certain of our own superiority and, at the same time, more and more mystified by the other side. New York Times bestselling author and award-winning journalist Amanda Ripley investigates how good people get captured by high conflict - and how they break free. Our journey begins in California, where a world-renowned conflict expert struggles to extract himself from a political feud.
The New York Times bestselling author of The Origins of Political Order offers a provocative examination of modern identity politics: its origins, its effects, and what it means for domestic and international affairs of stateIn 2014, Francis Fukuyama wrote that American institutions were in decay, as the state was progressively captured by powerful interest groups. Two years later, his predictions were borne out by the rise to power of a series of political outsiders whose economic nationalism and authoritarian tendencies threatened to destabilize the entire international order. These populist nationalists seek direct charismatic connection to "the people," who are usually defined in narrow identity terms that offer an irresistible call to an in-group and exclude large parts of the population as a whole. Demand for recognition of one's identity is a master concept that unifies much of what is going on in world politics today. The universal recognition on which liberal democracy is based has been increasingly challenged by narrower forms of recognition based on nation, religion, sect, race, ethnicity, or gender, which have resulted in anti-immigrant populism, the upsurge of politicized Islam, the fractious "identity liberalism" of college campuses, and the emergence of white nationalism. Populist nationalism, said to be rooted in economic motivation, actually springs from the demand for recognition and therefore cannot simply be satisfied by economic means. The demand for identity cannot be transcended; we must begin to shape identity in a way that supports rather than undermines democracy.Identity is an urgent and necessary book -- a sharp warning that unless we forge a universal understanding of human dignity, we will doom ourselves to continuing conflict.
A New York Times Editors ChoiceAn "essential" (Jane Mayer) account of the dangerous marriage of plutocratic economic priorities and right-wing populist appeals - and how it threatens the pillars of American democracy.In Let Them Eat Tweets, best-selling political scientists Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson argue that despite the rhetoric of Donald Trump, Josh Hawley, and other right-wing "populists," the Republican Party came to serve its plutocratic masters to a degree without precedent in modern global history. To maintain power while serving the 0.1 percent, the GOP has relied on increasingly incendiary racial and cultural appeals to its almost entirely white base. Calling this dangerous hybrid "plutocratic populism," Hacker and Pierson show how, over the last forty years, reactionary plutocrats and right-wing populists have become the two faces of a party that now actively undermines democracy to achieve its goals against the will of the majority of Americans. Based on decades of research and featuring a new epilogue about the intensification of GOP radicalism after the 2020 election, Let Them Eat Tweets authoritatively explains the doom loop of tax cutting and fearmongering that defines the Republican Party - and reveals how the rest of us can fight back.
At a moment when we are facing an epidemic of incivility and hate - with divisive political speech, online trolling, and hate crimes escalating - popular CNN commentator Sally Kohn sets out to discover why we hate and how can stop it. As a progressive commentator on Fox News and now CNN, Sally Kohn has made a career out of bridging intractable political differences, learning how to talk civilly to people whose views she disagrees with passionately. Famously "nice," she even gave a TED Talk about what she termed emotional correctness. But these days, even Kohn has found herself wanting to breathe fire at her enemies. It was time, she decided, to look into the ugliness erupting all around us. In The Opposite of Hate, Kohn talks to leading scientists and researchers, investigating the evolutionary and cultural roots of hate and how simple incivility can be a gateway to much worse. She travels to Rwanda, to the Middle East, and across the United States, introducing us to terrorists, white supremacists, and even some of her own Twitter trolls, drawing surprising lessons from these dramatic examples - including inspiring stories of those who left hate behind. As Kohn boldly confronts her own shameful moments, whether it's the girl she bullied as a child or her own deep partisan resentment, she points the way toward change. No one is more poised to lead us out of this wilderness of hate than Sally Kohn. Her engaging, fascinating, and often funny book will open your eyes and your heart.
Why can't our political leaders work together as threats loom and problems mount? Why do people so readily assume the worst about the motives of their fellow citizens? In The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores the origins of our divisions and points the way forward to mutual understanding. His starting point is moral intuition - the nearly instantaneous perceptions we all have about other people and the things they do. These intuitions feel like self-evident truths, making us righteously certain that those who see things differently are wrong. Haidt shows us how these intuitions differ across cultures, including the cultures of the political left and right. He blends his own research findings with those of anthropologists, historians, and other psychologists to draw a map of the moral domain, and he explains why conservatives can navigate that map more skillfully than can liberals.
Our current climate of partisan fury is not new, and in The Soul of America Meacham shows us how what Abraham Lincoln called the "better angels of our nature" have repeatedly won the day. Painting surprising portraits of Lincoln and other presidents, including Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Lyndon B. Johnson, and illuminating the courage of such influential citizen activists as Martin Luther King, Jr., early suffragettes Alice Paul and Carrie Chapman Catt, civil rights pioneers Rosa Parks and John Lewis, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and Army-McCarthy hearings lawyer Joseph N. Welch, Meacham brings vividly to life turning points in American history. He writes about the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the birth of the Lost Cause; the backlash against immigrants in the First World War and the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s; the fight for women's rights; the demagoguery of Huey Long and Father Coughlin and the isolationist work of America First in the years before World War II; the anti-Communist witch-hunts led by Senator Joseph McCarthy; and Lyndon Johnson's crusade against Jim Crow.
Each of these dramatic hours in our national life have been shaped by the contest to lead the country to look forward rather than back, to assert hope over fear - a struggle that continues even now.While the American story has not always - or even often - been heroic, we have been sustained by a belief in progress even in the gloomiest of times. In this inspiring book, Meacham reassures us, "The good news is that we have come through such darkness before" - as, time and again, Lincoln's better angels have found a way to prevail.
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Vanishing American Adult, an intimate and urgent assessment of the existential crisis facing our nation.Our culture has always had tribalism. Different political parties, preferred media outlets, and shifts in positions when politically advantageous. But now our country is facing a far deeper, far more serious existential crisis. We're reaching a point where we've lost faith and trust in the institutions that have held us together. Even more worrisome is that we've lost a shared sense of truth. What happens to a nation when half of us believe different facts than the other half?
In Them, bestselling author and U.S. Senator Ben Sasse argues that the problem is far deeper than politics or even any one politician. Across the nation, local communities are evaporating. The basic framework for everyday life -- family, work, neighborhoods, friends, trust -- is collapsing or, in the case of work, being vastly redefined. Our citizens have become alienated from each other, angry, and lonely.
As our traditional tribes are falling apart, Sasse argues, frustrated and displaced Americans are trying to fill the vacuum with Anti-tribes on social media and cable news, surrounding ourselves with people we already agree with and identifying a common enemy. We are stuck in a loop of loneliness, outrage, and anger.Sasse offers his own prescription for addressing this challenge, calling for a radical effort to rebuild and remake the institutions that are foundering within communities and a nationwide discussion and understanding of just how monumental this challenge is.
Discover how American politics became a toxic system, why we participate in it, and what it means for our future - from journalist, political commentator, and cofounder of Vox, Ezra Klein. After Election Day 2016, both supporters and opponents of the soon-to-be president hailed his victory as a historically unprecedented event. Most Americans could agree that no candidate like Donald Trump had ever been elected President before. But political journalist Ezra Klein makes the case that the 2016 election wasn't surprising at all. In fact, Trump's electoral victory followed the exact same template as previous elections, by capturing a nearly identical percentage of voter demographics as previous Republican candidates.
Over the past 50 years in America, our partisan identities have merged with our racial, religious, geographic, ideological, and cultural identities. Those merged identities have attained a weight that is breaking much in our politics and tearing at the bonds that hold this country together.
In this groundbreaking book, Klein shows how and why American politics polarized around identity in the 20th century, and what that polarization did to the way we see the world and each other. And he traces the feedback loops between our polarized political identities and our polarized political institutions that are driving our political system towards crisis.
Neither a polemic nor a lament, Klein offers a clear framework for understanding everything from Trump's rise to the Democratic Party's leftward shift to the politicization of everyday culture. A revelatory book that will change how you look at politics, and perhaps at yourself.
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