Tag: review

Autocrats vs. Democrats

China, Russia, America and the New Global Disorder

by Michael McFaul

Publisher: Mariner Books

“A history, an analysis, and a set of prescriptions for the greatest geopolitical challenge of our time: the threat to the democratic world posed by China and Russia.” —Anne Applebaum, author of Autocracy, Inc.

“A monumental account of contemporary geopolitics”—Francis Fukuyama, author of Liberalism and Its Discontents
From New York Times bestselling author and former ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul comes a bold, clear-eyed look at how the autocracies of China and Russia are challenging the current global order, and how America’s future depends on successfully confronting this threat.

White Rural Rage

The Threat to American Democracy

by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman

Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks

In White Rural Rage, Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman explore why rural Whites have failed to reap the benefits from their outsize political power and why, as a result, they are the most likely group to abandon democratic norms and traditions. Their rage—stoked daily by Republican politicians and the conservative media—now poses an existential threat to the United States.

INTERVIEW: Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman talk to Matt Lewis Media

Washington Post – Review

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Tyranny of the Minority

Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt offer a coherent framework for understanding these volatile times. They draw on a wealth of examples—from 1930s France to present-day Thailand—to explain why and how political parties turn against democracy. They then show how our Constitution makes us uniquely vulnerable to attacks from within: It is a pernicious enabler of minority rule, allowing partisan minorities to consistently thwart and even rule over popular majorities. Most modern democracies—from Germany and Sweden to Argentina and New Zealand—have eliminated outdated institutions like elite upper chambers, indirect elections, and lifetime tenure for judges. The United States lags dangerously behind.

INTERVIEW: Levitsky and Ziblatt with journalist Tiziana Dearing at Harvard

Review

AllSides

AllSides helps you get the full picture.

AllSides is the standard for information integrity. By revealing bias and providing perspectives from all sides, we help people better understand the world — and each other.

We believe information integrity requires:

  • Revealing and combating bias to avoid information manipulation and blindspots.
  • A breadth of perspectives to combat groupthink and false narratives.
  • Effective dialogue and deliberation to make the best decisions and implement them effectively with buy-in.

Information integrity is not only needed in news, but also in AI, businesses, schools, government, and throughout our daily lives.

AllSides’ information integrity technologies and services help people and organizations get out of manipulative, one-sided, and biased information systems wherever they might be — in technology, news, companies, government, classrooms and beyond — so we can all see the full picture, think for ourselves and make the best decisions.

With the information ecosystem being rewired at a rapid pace, we dedicate ourselves to trustworthy information by using an explicitly multipartisan, diverse team and providing the systems and technology to deliver information from a variety of different sources so people can think critically and act confidently.

AllSides Media Bias Chart
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A Warning About Donald Trump and 2024

by The Editorial Board (New York Times)

Summary

“Mr. Trump does not offer voters anything resembling a normal option of Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal, big government or small. He confronts America with a far more fateful choice: between the continuance of the United States as a nation dedicated to “the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity” and a man who has proudly shown open disdain for the law and the protections and ideals of the Constitution.”

Publisher: The New York Times

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Ad Fontes Media

Ad Fontes Media is a public benefit corporation based in Colorado. Being a public benefit corporation means we are a for-profit business with a stated public mission, which is to rate all the news to positively transform society.

Fundamentally, we want to help bring people together. Misleading, inaccurate, and highly polarizing media content has driven so many of us apart. This affects everything from our familial relationships to our ability to create legislative solutions to our biggest challenges. 

Ad Fontes is Latin for “to the source,” because at the heart of what Ad Fontes Media does is look at the source—analyze the very content itself—to rate it.

What We Do? We Rate the News

The information landscape is vast and noisy. We’re here to help you sort through it by rating sources for reliability and bias. Obviously, people have lots of different thoughts about how reliable and biased various news sources are, so we do everything we can to earn your trust.

INteractive Media Bias Chart

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The Divider

Trump in the White House, 2017-2021

by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser

Publisher: Vintage

The Divider brings us into the Oval Office for countless scenes both tense and comical, revealing how close we got to nuclear war with North Korea, which cabinet members had a resignation pact, whether Trump asked Japan’s prime minister to nominate him for a Nobel Prize and much more. The book also explores the moral choices confronting those around Trump—how they justified working for a man they considered unfit for office, and where they drew their lines.

INTERVIEW: Susan Glasser and Peter Baker on C-SPAN

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Peril

by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Woodward and Costa interviewed more than 200 people at the center of the turmoil, resulting in more than 6,000 pages of transcripts—and a spellbinding and definitive portrait of a nation on the brink. This classic study of Washington takes readers deep inside the Trump White House, the Biden White House, the 2020 campaign, and the Pentagon and Congress, with vivid, eyewitness accounts of what really happened.

Woodward and Costa on Washington Post Live

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Of Men and Boys

Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It

by Richard V. Reeves

Publisher: Brookings Institution Press

Recommended by: Bob B.

“The problem with men is typically framed as a problem of men,” writes Reeves. “It is men who must be fixed, one man or boy at a time. This individualist approach is wrong.” Instead, he maintains there are structural problems, societal issues, that need to be addressed if men are not to become ever more lost, defeated and angry.

Richard Reeves interviewed by Marisa Lagos on KQED Forum January 202c

Review

Of Boys and Men

Thank You for Your Servitude

Donald Trump’s Washington and the Price of Submission
By Mark Leibovich
Publisher: Penguin Press

Recommended by Cindi

“This is a really funny book.” Kara Swisher. 

Mark Leibovich’s unflinching account of the moral rout of a major American political party, tracking the transformation of Rubio, Cruz, Graham, and their ilk into the administration’s chief enablers, and the swamp’s lesser lights into frantic chasers of the grift…isn’t another view from the Oval Office: it’s the view from the Trump Hotel. 

Review
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Why We Did It

A Travelogue From the Republican Road to Hell

by Tim Miller

Publisher: Harper Collins Publishers

Recommended by: Cindi Sears

In a bracingly honest reflection on both his own past work for the Republican Party and the contortions of his former peers in the GOP establishment, Tim Miller draws a straight line between the actions of the 2000s GOP to the Republican political class’s Trumpian takeover, including the horrors of January 6th.

From ruminations on the mental jujitsu that allowed him as a gay man to justify becoming a hitman for homophobes, to astonishingly raw interviews with former colleagues who jumped on the Trump Train, Miller diagrams the flattering and delusional stories GOP operatives tell themselves so they can sleep at night. With a humorous touch he reveals Reince Priebus’ neediness, Sean Spicer’s desperation, Elise Stefanik and Chris Christie’s raw ambition, and his close friends’ submission to a MAGA psychosis.

Why We Did It is a vital, darkly satirical warning that all the narcissistic justifications that got us to this place still thrive within the Republican party, which means they will continue to make the same mistakes and political calculations that got us here, with disastrous consequences for the nation

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High Conflict

Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out

by Amanda Ripley

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Recommended by: Cindi, Bob & Linda

When we are baffled by the insanity of the “other side”—in our politics, at work, or at home—it’s because we aren’t seeing how the conflict itself has taken over. 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.

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Author’s Site

Insurgency

How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted

by Jeremy W. Peters

Publisher: Random House Publishing House

NYTimes reporter, Jeremy W. Peters’ epic narrative chronicles the fracturing of the Republican Party. Insurgency is a fantasia-like story of a party establishment that believed it could control the dark energy it helped foment—right up until it suddenly couldn’t. How, Peters asks, did conservative values that Republicans claimed to cherish, like small government, fiscal responsibility, and morality get completely eroded?

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How Civil Wars Start

and How To Stop Them

by Barbara F. Walter

Publisher: Crown

Barbara F. Walter, a political science professor at U.C. San Diego, has spent over three decades studying civil conflict.  Over the last two decades, the number of active civil wars around the world has almost doubled. Walter reveals the warning signs—where wars tend to start, who initiates them, what triggers them—and why some countries tip over into conflict while others remain stable. Drawing on the latest international research and lessons from over twenty countries, Walter identifies the crucial risk factors, from democratic backsliding to factionalization and the politics of resentment. A civil war today won’t look like America in the 1860s, Russia in the 1920s, or Spain in the 1930s. It will begin with sporadic acts of violence and terror, accelerated by social media. It will sneak up on us and leave us wondering how we could have been so blind.

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Unthinkable

Trauma, Truth and the Trials of American Democracy

by James Raskin

Publisher: Harper

In this searing memoir, Congressman Jamie Raskin tells the story of the forty-five days at the start of 2021 that permanently changed his life—and his family’s—as he confronted the painful loss of his son to suicide, lived through the violent insurrection in our nation’s Capital, and led the impeachment effort to hold President Trump accountable for inciting the political violence.

Jamie Raskin in conversation at The National Arts Club

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Strongmen

Mussolini to the Present

by Ruth Ben-Ghiat

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is the expert on the “strongman” playbook employed by authoritarian demagogues from Mussolini to Putin—enabling her to predict with uncanny accuracy the recent experience in America and Europe. In Strongmen, she lays bare the blueprint these leaders have followed over the past 100 years, and empowers us to recognize, resist, and prevent their disastrous rule in the future.

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Ruth Ben-Ghiat interviewed by Dean Peter Arnade at University of Hawai

It Was All a Lie

How The Republican Party Became Donald Trump

by Stuart Stevens

Publisher: Knopf

Recommended by: Cindi S. and Steve G.

Written by Republican political consultant Stuart Stevens, this is a tell-all book about how the party he’s stood with for years spiraled out of control and lost the moral and political standpoints that once made it great. Unlike other books about Donald Trump, Stevens presents the 45th president of the United States as the inevitable result of the Republican Party’s failings, not its instigator.

Stuart Stevens spent decades electing Republicans at every level, from presidents to senators to local officials. He knows the GOP as intimately as anyone in America, and in this new book he offers a devastating portrait of a party that has lost its moral and political compass.

This is not a book about how Donald J. Trump hijacked the Republican Party and changed it into something else. Stevens shows how Trump is in fact the natural outcome of five decades of hypocrisy and self-delusion, dating all the way back to the civil rights legislation of the early 1960s. Stevens shows how racism has always lurked in the modern GOP’s DNA, from Goldwater’s opposition to desegregation to Ronald Reagan’s welfare queens and states’ rights rhetoric. He gives an insider’s account of the rank hypocrisy of the party’s claims to embody “family values,” and shows how the party’s vaunted commitment to fiscal responsibility has been a charade since the 1980s. When a party stands for nothing, he argues, it is only natural that it will be taken over by the loudest and angriest voices in the room.

It Was All a Lie is not just an indictment of the Republican Party, but a candid and often lacerating mea culpa. Stevens is not asking for pity or forgiveness; he is simply telling us what he has seen firsthand. He helped to create the modern party that kneels before a morally bankrupt con man and now he wants nothing more than to see what it has become burned to the ground.

Listen to Stuart Steven’s interview on NPR

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On Tyranny

Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

by Timothy Snyder

Publisher: Crown

Timothy Snyder provides a stark warning for the future of American democracy. Too easily we are ignoring the ways in which tyranny starts to eat away at democracy. As our political system faces new threats – not unlike those faced by democracies in the 20th century – we must look to the past to safeguard our future.

INTERVIEW: Listen to Professor Snyder discuss his book at Politics and Prose Bookstore

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The Righteous Mind

Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

by Jonathan Haidt

Drawing on his twenty-five years of groundbreaking research on moral psychology, Jonathan Haidt shows how moral judgments arise not from reason but from gut feelings. He shows why liberals, conservatives, and libertarians have such different intuitions about right and wrong, and he shows why each side is actually right about many of its central concerns.

If you are not interested in reading the book, he has a TED talk that covers his main points. See:

Continue reading The Righteous Mind