In Schoolhouse Wreck: The Betsy DeVos Story (Strong Arm Press, 2018), Jason Linkins delivers a searing critique of controversial Trump administration Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. The book tracks the DeVos family’s accumulation of wealth through the multi-level marketing company Amway, which was founded by her Betsy DeVos’ father-in-law, and the...

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In Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy (Crown Forum, 2018), conservative Jonah Goldberg argues that America’s foundation of democracy and capitalism is a “Miracle” which has saved us from chronic violence and crushing poverty, but now is threatened by rising...

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Charlie Sykes had been a conservative in good standing for decades, hosting a popular Wisconsin talk radio show. But he found himself to be a man without a party after become a vocal opponent of Donald Trump in 2016. His attempt to understand what happened to conservatism culminated in his...

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What fueled Donald Trump’s election? In Troll Nation: How The Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set On Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself (Hot Books, 2018), Salon senior political writer Amanda Marcotte argues it was not a principled conservatism but burning desire by right-wing trolls to annoy liberals. Marcotte observes how...

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In his new book, Dinner in Camelot: The Night America’s Greatest Scientists, Writers, and Scholars Partied at the Kennedy White House (ForeEdge, 2018), Joseph Esposito examines the night of April 49, 1962 when President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy hosted America’s leading scientists, writers, activists, and thinkers...

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Five days a week, Carl Cannon writes the Morning Note newsletter for Real Clear Politics, and includes a historical vignette about something in American history that happened on that date. Now he’s turned his daily vocation into a book. On This Date: From the Pilgrims to Today, Discovering America One...

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How did President Lyndon Johnson engineer one of the biggest bursts of liberal legislation in American history? And did his vision of a Great Society successfully alleviate poverty and reduce inequality? In Building the Great Society: Inside Lyndon Johnson’s White House (Viking, 2018), historian Joshua Zeitz takes you inside the...

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Political commentator Matt K. Lewis warns his fellow conservatives that their movement is going off the rails in Too Dumb to Fail: How the GOP Went from the Party of Reagan to the Party of Trump (Hachette, 2016). Lewis chafes at the populist, protectionist and nativist elements that have come...

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Since it was published in 2016, Arlie Russell Hochschild‘s Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (The New Press, 2016) has been many times heralded as necessary reading for our current political moment. For her perceptive and dramatic account of a Berkeley sociologist’s exploration of...

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Medicaid provides health care for around 1 in 5 Americans. Despite the large number served, the programs administration by state and local governments means very different things in different places. The geography of federalism matters a lot for Medicaid. But unlike some other large social welfare programs, Medicaid seems to...

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