#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

From the first content creator to interview President Biden, leading progressive voice Brian Tyler Cohen takes a step back from the day-to-day news cycle to explain how American politics has turned into such a dumpster fire--and what Democrats need to do to get us out of it.

In Shameless, Brian Tyler Cohen lays bare the long con of the modern Republican Party. While the radical right continues hiding behind gaslighting maneuvers, artificial slogans, and hollow catchphrases, Cohen's unflinching narrative illuminates the realities and dangers of the ever-widening gulf between the vaunted Republican brand and their actual behavior.

With a foreword by Congressman Jamie Raskin, drawing on interviews and insights from Pete Buttigieg, Mehdi Hasan, Jen Psaki, and other luminaries of the Left, Cohen reveals:

How Republicans have leaned on their histor-ical branding to give themselves a permission structure to behave antithetically to everything they say;Why the mainstream media has proved itself a willing participant in this ongoing farce-- particularly since the rise of toxic, sensational-ist MAGA mania; andWhat lessons Democrats can glean from a clear-eyed view of the landscape we're operating in--and the steps we must take to rebalance our political landscape.

During this all-hands-on-deck moment in our his-tory, Shameless is essential reading for those seeking to understand our dire situation, and a rallying cry for those fighting to preserve democracy.

Instant New York Times Bestseller

A searing, vital investigation of the Republican Party's dangerous campaign to rewrite recent history in real time, from the Emmy Award-winning Rachel Maddow Show producer and bestselling author of The Impostors.

There is nobody who is writing in an episodic way who has more influence on the way I think about politics than Steve Benen. --Rachel Maddow

For as long as historical records have existed, authoritarian regimes have tried to rewrite history to suit their purposes, using their dictatorial powers to create myths, spread propaganda, justify decisions, erase opponents, and even dispose of crimes.

As the Republican Party becomes increasingly radicalized, the GOP is putting their own twist on a similarly despotic script. Indeed, the party is taking dangerous, aggressive steps to rewrite history--and not just from generations past.

Unable to put a positive spin on Trump-era scandals and fiascos, GOP voices and their allies have grown determined to rewrite the stories of the last few years--from the 2020 election results and the horror of January 6^th to their own legislative record--treating the recent past as an enemy to be overpowered, crushed, and conquered. The consequences for our future, in turn, are dramatic.

Extraordinarily timely and undeniably important, Steve Benen's new book tells the staggering chronicle of the Republican party's unsettling attempts at historical revisionism. It reveals not only how dependent they have grown on the tactic, but also how dangerous the consequences are if we allow the party to continue. The stakes, Benen argues, couldn't be higher: the future of democracy hinges on both our accurate understanding of events and the end of alternative narratives that challenge reality.

Partisanship is a dirty word in American politics. If there is one issue on which almost everyone in our divided country seems to agree, it's the belief that the intense loyalty within the electorate toward Democrats and Republicans is the source of our democratic ills--division, dysfunction, distrust, and disinformation. The possibilities that responsible partisanship can offer were at the heart of an important intellectual tradition that flourished in the 1950s and 1960s, one which was institutionalized through a sweeping set of congressional reforms in the 1970s and 1980s.

In Defense of Partisanship reimagines what partisanship might look like going forward from today. A new era of party-oriented reforms has the potential to pay respect to the deep differences that divide us--simultaneously creating a more functional path on which two responsible political parties compete to shape policy while still being able to govern.

Politics today doesn't look much like it did fifty years ago. Electorates that were once divided by economics--with blue-collar workers supporting leftwing parties while the wealthy trended right--are now more likely to split along cultural lines. Campaigns have gone high-tech, hoping to turn electioneering into a science. Meanwhile, a permanent class of political consultants has emerged, with teams of pollsters, message gurus, and field operatives. Taken together, all this amounts to a silent revolution that has transformed politics across much of the globe.

Left Adrift provides a new perspective on this transformation by following the lives of two political strategists who watched it unfold firsthand. Stan Greenberg and Doug Schoen were Zeligs of the international center-left, with an eerie talent for showing up at just the right moment to see history being made. But they could not stand each other. The mutual disdain was, partly, a result of professional jealousy, of decades spent nursing private grievances while competing for the same clients. But it grew out of a deeper conflict, a clash of political visions that raised fundamental questions about democracy itself. Left Adrift is about that battle--and the world it made.

Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 presidential election shocked the world. Yet his defeat in 2020 may have been even more surprising: he received 12 million more votes in 2020 than in 2016 and his unexpectedly diverse coalition included millions of nonwhite voters, a rarity for the modern Republican party.

In 2020, Trump defied expectations and few journalists, strategists, or politicians could explain why Trump had nearly won reelection. Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster and one of the country's leading experts on political targeting, technology, and demography, has the answers--and the explanation may surprise you. For all his apparent divisiveness, Trump assembled the most diverse Republican presidential coalition in history and rode political trends that will prove significant for decades to come.

The shift is profound: seven in ten American voters belong to groups that have shifted right in the last two presidential elections, while under three in ten whites with a college degree belong to votes groups that are trending left. Together, this super-majority of right-trending voters forms a colorblind, populist coalition, largely united by its working-class roots, moderate to conservative views on policy, strong religious beliefs, and indifference to or outright rejection of the identity politics practice by the left. Not all these voters are Republican, and in certain corners of the coalition, only a small minority are. But recent elections are pointing us towards a future where party allegiances have been utterly upended.

The Party of the People demonstrates this data. Ruffini was as wrong as every pollster in 2016 and spent the intervening years figuring out why and developing better methods of analyzing voters in the digital age. Using robust data, he shifts you away from the complacent, widespread narrative that the Republican party is a party of white, rural voters. It is, but more importantly for its longevity, it's a party of non-college-educated voters. And as fewer voters attend college, the Republican party shows no signs of stagnation. With rich data and clear analysis, Party of the People is a deeply researched book (Amy Walter, editor-in-chief of The Cook Political Report) that explains the present and future of the Republican party and American elections.

A provocative exploration of how America's democratic crisis is rooted in a dangerous mismatch between our Constitution and today's nationalized, partisan politics.

The ground beneath American political institutions has moved, with national politics subsuming and transforming the local. As a result, American democracy is in trouble.

In this paradigm-shifting book, political scientists Paul Pierson and Eric Schickler bring a sharp new perspective to today's challenges. Attentive to the different coalitions, interests, and incentives that define the Democratic and Republican parties, they show how contemporary polarization emerged in a rapidly nationalizing country and how it differs from polarization in past eras. In earlier periods, three key features of the political landscape--state parties, interest groups, and media--varied locally and reinforced the nation's stark regional diversity. But this began to change in the 1960s as the two parties assumed clearer ideological identities and the power of the national government expanded, raising the stakes of conflict. Together with technological and economic change, these developments have reconfigured state parties, interest groups, and media in self-reinforcing ways. The result is that today's polarization is self-perpetuating--and intensifying.

Partisan Nation offers a powerful caution. As a result of this polarization, America's political system is distinctly and acutely vulnerable to an authoritarian movement emerging in the contemporary Republican Party, which has both the motive and the means to exploit America's unusual Constitutional design. Combining the precision and acuity characteristic of their earlier work, Pierson and Schickler explain what these developments mean for American governance and democracy.

New York Times Bestseller

Not a conventional Trump-era book. It is less about the daily mayhem in the White House than about the unprecedented capitulation of a political party. This book will endure for helping us understand not what is happening but why it happened.... [An] indispensable work.--Washington Post

Politico Magazine's chief political correspondent provides a rollicking insider's look at the making of the modern Republican Party--how a decade of cultural upheaval, populist outrage, and ideological warfare made the GOP vulnerable to a hostile takeover from the unlikeliest of insurgents: Donald J. Trump.

As George W. Bush left office with record-low approval ratings and Barack Obama led a Democratic takeover of Washington, Republicans faced a moment of reckoning: they had no vision, no generation of new leaders, and no energy in the party's base. Yet Obama's progressive agenda, coupled with the nation's rapidly changing cultural identity, lit a fire under the right. Republicans regained power in Congress but spent that time fighting among themselves. With these struggles weakening the party's defenses, and with more and more Americans losing faith in the political class, the stage was set for an outsider to crash the party. When Trump descended a gilded escalator to launch his campaign in the summer of 2015, the candidate had met the moment. Only by viewing Trump as the culmination of a decade-long civil war inside the GOP can we appreciate how he won the White House and consider the fundamental questions at the center of America's current turmoil.

Loaded with explosive original reporting and based on hundreds of exclusive interviews--including with key players such as President Trump, Paul Ryan, Ted Cruz, John Boehner, and Mitch McConnell--American Carnage takes us behind the scenes of this tumultuous period and establishes Tim Alberta as the premier chronicler of a political era.

This work, first published in German in 1911 introduced the concept of iron law of oligarchy. It is considered one of the classics of social sciences, in particular sociology and political science. This work analyzes the power structures of organizations such as political parties and trade unions. Michels' main argument is that all organizations, even those in theory most egalitarian and most committed to democracy - like socialist political parties - are in fact oligarchical, and dominated by a small group of leadership. The book also provides a first systematic analysis of how a radical political party loses its radical goals under the dynamics of electoral participation. The origins of moderation theory can be found in this analysis.

We've Got People: From Jesse Jackson to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the End of Big Money and the Rise of a

Movement is the first book-length treatment of the roots and rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, tracing the

movement that propelled her back to the 1988 presidential campaign of Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow

Coalition -- a year before she was born. That campaign stunned the Democratic Party by coming within inches

of winning the nomination. One of the few white progressives to endorse the campaign early was Burlington

Mayor Bernie Sanders; Ocasio-Cortez, in 2016, would volunteer for his presidential campaign. Veterans of the

Sanders campaign then formed the organization that recruited Ocasio-Cortez to run for Congress, and backed

her and her squad to the hilt. At every step, the movement was in conflict with the centrist wing of the party,

and the book, jam-packed with new revelations, explores how each shaped each other, and how that 30-year

war shapes the fight playing out today.

Our children and grandchildren leave to find a job and build their future elsewhere.

In commodity dependent regions of the United States, it's a common complaint. Whether the commodity is agricultural or mineral, the complaint is eventually voiced by the residents who remain when the economy no longer attaches value to the region's production. Similar voices have been heard in areas dependent on a manufacturing economy, such as textiles or furniture. Common to all these is a deep, often historical, over dependence on a single industry or industrial sector for jobs, economic activity, and tax revenues to support public services.

Wyoming's economy is consistently ranked among the least diversified in the United States. Originally based on agriculture, the state soon transformed into a minerals-based economy, largely energy minerals. Buffeted by the ups and downs of commodity markets, citizens either leave or adopt a stoic attitude.

Rethinking Wyoming's future means those of us enjoying today's low tax-high service reality will need to carry more of our own weight.

This book examines the political history of Wyoming with an emphasis on the period between 1966 and 1986. During these 20 years, underlying historical trends were accelerated by American energy, economic, and environmental policies that define much of Wyoming's economic predicament today.

#1 New York Times bestselling author and investigative reporter David Corn tells the wild and harrowing story of the Republican Party's decades-long relationship with far-right extremism, bigotry, and paranoia.​

A fast-paced, rollicking, behind-the-scenes account of how the GOP since the 1950s has encouraged and exploited extremism, bigotry, and paranoia to gain power, American Psychosis offers readers a brisk, can-you-believe-it journey through the netherworld of far-right irrationality and the Republican Party's interactions with the darkest forces in America. In a compelling and thoroughly-researched narrative, Corn reveals the hidden history of how the Party of Lincoln forged alliances with extremists, kooks, racists, and conspiracy-mongers and fostered fear, anger, and resentment to win elections--and how this led to Donald Trump's triumph and the transformation of the GOP into a Trump personality cult that foments and bolsters the crazy and dangerous excesses of the right.

The Trump-incited insurrectionist attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, was no aberration. American Psychosis shows it was a continuation of the long and deep-rooted Republican practice of boosting and weaponizing the rage and derangement of the right.

The gripping tale in American Psychosis covers the last seven decades. From McCarthyism to the John Birch Society to segregationists to the New Right to the religious right to Rush Limbaugh to Newt Gingrich to the militia movement to Fox News to Sarah Palin to the Tea Party to Trumpism, the Republican Party has deliberately nurtured and exploited rightwing fear and loathing fueled by paranoia, grievance, and tribalism. This powerful and important account explains how one political party has harnessed the worst elements in politics to poison the nation's discourse and threaten American democracy.

[Corn is] a great journalist. I love the way he thinks. I love the way he writes. I'm so glad he's done a super-readable, modern history of the right...We just need smart, digestible history about this stuff right now...[American Psychosis] is perfectly timed...Relevant history for where we are right now. --Rachel Maddow, host, The Rachel Maddow Show

With American Psychosis, David Corn 'did the full homework to take us all the way back to where it really begins.' --Lawrence O'Donnell, host, The Last Word

When the radical Islamist group Hamas was elected to lead Palestine in 2006, the Western world was shocked. How had the majority of Palestinians come to support an extremist organization and how would the group's new political power affect the larger Israel/Palestine conflict?

Italian journalist and historian Paola Caridi offers a clear-eyed account of how the conditions in this war-torn region led to the rise of Hamas and an unbiased look at the complex feelings that Palestinians have toward getting behind a government that supports violent resistance. By breaking from the sensationalist journalism surrounding the elections, Caridi is able to tell the story of a movement caught between the desire to resist its oppressor and the need to provide support for a refugee people. Caridi, informed by years of on-the-ground research and interviews with residents of Gaza and leaders of Hamas, covers the history of Gaza from its golden age as a port city to the formal birth and slow militarization of Hamas. This English-language translation brings the reader to present-day Palestine by offering a never-before-seen chapter on Operation Cast Lead, the shocking WikiLeaks disclosures, and the Cairo Revolution.

Hamas paints a picture, with intelligence, dexterity, and heart, of a people trapped in the most historic of political battles and reveals the strange complexities behind the controversy by explaining one of the key players in the search for peace and justice that runs through the central crisis of the Middle East today.

How the Chinese Communist Party maintains its power by both repressing and responding to its people

Since 1949, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has maintained unrivaled control over the country, persisting even in the face of economic calamity, widespread social upheaval, and violence against its own people. Yet the party does not sustain dominance through repressive tactics alone--it pairs this with surprising responsiveness to the public. The Party and the People explores how this paradox has helped the CCP endure for decades, and how this balance has shifted increasingly toward repression under the rule of President Xi Jinping.

Delving into the tenuous binary of repression and responsivity, Bruce Dickson illuminates numerous questions surrounding the CCP's rule: How does it choose leaders and create policies? When does it allow protests? Will China become democratic? Dickson shows that the party's dual approach lies at the core of its practices--repression when dealing with existential, political threats or challenges to its authority, and responsiveness when confronting localized economic or social unrest. The state answers favorably to the demands of protesters on certain issues, such as local environmental hazards and healthcare, but deals harshly with others, such as protests in Tibet, Xinjiang, or Hong Kong. With the CCP's greater reliance on suppression since Xi Jinping's rise to power in 2012, Dickson considers the ways that this tipping of the scales will influence China's future.

Bringing together a vast body of sources, The Party and the People sheds new light on how the relationship between the Chinese state and its citizens shapes governance.

In today's political and media environment, people are more divided than ever. I am certainly not innocent of past divisive rhetoric and am willing to own that. This is my call to rationalize our differences and discuss them by removing emotion.

Have we as a people changed that much? Has the flow of information from which we form our opinions changed? What happened in the last two years that lead to this all-out social war? It wasn't Trump; he was a symptom of a larger issue. The division was already there, lurking under the surface from the Obama era, following one of the most divisive administrations this country has ever seen.

The people screaming the loudest are liberal groups who got their way for 8 years. They didn't riot or attack people in mobs when the progressive agenda was being steamrolled over America, but when Trump won the election, all bets were off. The people that were sold a bill of goods, by a party no longer in power, suffered a mental breakdown.

This book removes emotion from our ideologies and weighs facts and reason against many political divides for and against both sides. I rationalize the issues conservatives can come together on, win on, and separate voting with our hearts versus voting with our brains.

A groundbreaking look at how group expectations unify Black Americans in their support of the Democratic party

Black Americans are by far the most unified racial group in American electoral politics, with 80 to 90 percent identifying as Democrats--a surprising figure given that nearly a third now also identify as ideologically conservative, up from less than 10 percent in the 1970s. Why has ideological change failed to push more Black Americans into the Republican Party? Steadfast Democrats answers this question with a pathbreaking new theory that foregrounds the specificity of the Black American experience and illuminates social pressure as the key element of Black Americans' unwavering support for the Democratic Party.

Ismail White and Chryl Laird argue that the roots of Black political unity were established through the adversities of slavery and segregation, when Black Americans forged uniquely strong social bonds for survival and resistance. White and Laird explain how these tight communities have continued to produce and enforce political norms--including Democratic Party identification in the post-Civil Rights era. The social experience of race for Black Americans is thus fundamental to their political choices. Black voters are uniquely influenced by the social expectations of other Black Americans to prioritize the group's ongoing struggle for freedom and equality. When navigating the choice of supporting a political party, this social expectation translates into affiliation with the Democratic Party. Through fresh analysis of survey data and original experiments, White and Laird explore where and how Black political norms are enforced, what this means for the future of Black politics, and how this framework can be used to understand the electoral behavior of other communities.

An innovative explanation for why Black Americans continue in political lockstep, Steadfast Democrats sheds light on the motivations consolidating an influential portion of the American electoral population.

Even before the cataclysmic 2016 election, the Democratic Party had long been at war with itself--yet Joe Biden's narrow victory in 2020 bridged the divide. Facing the dire threat of a second Trump administration, Democrats forged an unlikely but effective coalition that stalled Trumpism at the ballot box and enacted a raft of consequential legislation. But how long can the uneasy peace hold, and can Biden win again?

The Truce is a definitive history of a half-decade of upheaval in the Democratic Party in which a new generation aggressively pursued their progressive ideals while the powerful, centrist establishment adapted to remain in command. Journalists Hunter Walker and Luppe B. Luppen illuminate this story of backroom maneuvering and political strategy with new revelations about pivotal events and exclusive, on-the-record comments from activists, campaign operatives, and members of Congress.

The Truce explores the major fault lines that define Democratic politics today and asks big questions about the future of the party. Will economic or social justice hold primacy at the top of the Democratic agenda? Who will lead the major wings of the party after two defining figures, Biden and Sanders, exit the stage? The Truce surveys the major shifts underway, from the rise of the Squad and new Democratic leadership in the House to a complete overhaul of the primary process. By digging into the divide between left and center, Walker and Luppen expose the creeping generational and political tensions that Biden has--for the moment--kept at bay.

An engrossing work, and a surprising page-turner, The Truce grapples with the dangers that threaten American democracy and the complicated cast of characters who are trying to save it.

The mushrooming rolls of the Democratic Socialists of America, Marxist explainers in Teen Vogue, and the outsized impact of the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, all herald a new, youth-inflected radical politics.

The Rise of a New Left gets behind the headlines about AOC and her cohort of elected officials to tell the stories of the young organizers who created the Squad and the new social movements that have roiled US politics, from the DSA to the Sunrise Movement to Justice Democrats. Ranging across the country to describe grassroots organizing in places like rural Pennsylvania, upstate New York, Kentucky, Florida, and California, this book examines the panoply of strategies and struggles of activists working in--and trying to transform--electoral politics and the climate justice, racial justice, and labor movements. Alongside Ocasio-Cortez, we hear from the even younger Alexandra Rojas, one of the strategists who guided her political insurgency.

Propelled by scores of immersive and absorbing conversations on political strategy with young activists determined to reshape the country, this book--by a writer who is herself a member of this generational movement--is a riveting account of a resurgent left.

A groundbreaking look at how group expectations unify Black Americans in their support of the Democratic party

Black Americans are by far the most unified racial group in American electoral politics, with 80 to 90 percent identifying as Democrats--a surprising figure given that nearly a third now also identify as ideologically conservative, up from less than 10 percent in the 1970s. Why has ideological change failed to push more Black Americans into the Republican Party? Steadfast Democrats answers this question with a pathbreaking new theory that foregrounds the specificity of the Black American experience and illuminates social pressure as the key element of Black Americans' unwavering support for the Democratic Party.

Ismail White and Chryl Laird argue that the roots of Black political unity were established through the adversities of slavery and segregation, when Black Americans forged uniquely strong social bonds for survival and resistance. White and Laird explain how these tight communities have continued to produce and enforce political norms--including Democratic Party identification in the post-Civil Rights era. The social experience of race for Black Americans is thus fundamental to their political choices. Black voters are uniquely influenced by the social expectations of other Black Americans to prioritize the group's ongoing struggle for freedom and equality. When navigating the choice of supporting a political party, this social expectation translates into affiliation with the Democratic Party. Through fresh analysis of survey data and original experiments, White and Laird explore where and how Black political norms are enforced, what this means for the future of Black politics, and how this framework can be used to understand the electoral behavior of other communities.

An innovative explanation for why Black Americans continue in political lockstep, Steadfast Democrats sheds light on the motivations consolidating an influential portion of the American electoral population.