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The election of 2016 prompted journalists and political scientists to write obituaries for the Republican Party-or prophecies of a new dominance. But it was all rather familiar. Whenever one of our two great parties has a setback, we've heard: "This is the end of the Democratic Party," or, "The Republican Party is going out of existence." Yet both survive, and thrive.We have the oldest and third oldest political parties in the world-the Democratic Party founded in 1832 to reelect Andrew Jackson, the Republican Party founded in 1854 to oppose slavery in the territories. They are older than almost every American business, most American colleges, and many American churches. Both have seemed to face extinction in the past, and have rebounded to be competitive again. How have they managed it?Michael Barone, longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics, brings a deep understanding of our electoral history to the question and finds a compelling answer. He illuminates how both parties have adapted, swiftly or haltingly, to shifting opinion and emerging issues, to economic change and cultural currents, to demographic flux. At the same time, each has maintained a constant character. The Republican Party appeals to "typical Americans" as understood at a given time, and the Democratic Party represents a coalition of "out-groups." They are the yin and yang of American political life, together providing vehicles for expressing most citizens' views in a nation that has always been culturally, religiously, economically, and ethnically diverse.The election that put Donald Trump in the White House may have appeared to signal a dramatic realignment, but in fact it involved less change in political allegiances than many before, and it does not portend doom for either party. How America's Political Parties Change (and How They Don't) astutely explains why these two oft-scorned institutions have been so resilient.

This project of restoration includes an examination of the absurdity of the attacks on common sense. It also turns to well-known stories drawn from the Western literary tradition to help readers again find their footing in the world of common sense.

Vexing social issues such as the opioid epidemic, criminal violence, and chronic unemployment are the target of social programs Americans fund with their tax dollars. Husock argues that over the past century, the U.S. has lost sight of the more powerful antidote to these problems: positive social norms.

Longtime analyst Gertz explains how America's elites disastrously underestimated China for decades. Now, China is moving quickly with its ambitions to advance its brand of totalitarianism around the world and is working to replace free, open and democratic societies.

Burdens of Freedom presents a new and radical interpretation of America and its challenges. The United States is an individualist society where most people seek to realize personal goals and values out in the world. This unusual, inner-driven culture was the chief reason why first Europe, then Britain, and finally America came to lead the world. But today, our deepest problems derive from groups and nations that reflect the more passive, deferential temperament of the non-West. The long-term poor and many immigrants have difficulties assimilating in America mainly because they are less inner-driven than the norm. Abroad, the United States faces challenges from Asia, which is collective-minded, and also from many poorly-governed countries in the developing world. The chief threat to American leadership is no longer foreign rivals like China but the decay of individualism within our own society. The great divide is between the individualist West, for which life is a project, and the rest of the world, in which most people seek to survive rather than achieve. This difference, although clear in research on world cultures, has been ignored in virtually all previous scholarship on American power and public policy, both at home and abroad. Burdens of Freedom is the first book to recognize that difference. It casts new light on America's greatest struggles. It re-evaluates the entire Western tradition, which took individualism for granted. How to respond to cultural difference is the greatest test of our times.

"Karr started in life as a leg man for scandal-monging columnist Drew Pearson. He was long accused of being a card-carrying communist. He avoided a career crash-and-burn when anti-communism peaked, by claiming to have been working for the FBI. This was certainly untrue. Karr did PR for political campaigns, then the private sector. His political background was obviously a source of his unscrupulousness, and it certainly gave him an edge in business. Many hated him and thought him unethical; others admired his drive and aggression. Karr succeeded in charming an elderly French hotel owner to sell her prize Paris hotel properties to Forte, after many others had failed. Karr is also rumored by his competitor for business in Russia, Armand Hammer to have sold arms to the PLO. Karr's counter-rumor is that Hammer was caught in a scheme calculated to endear himself to Brezhnev, by stealing some letters of Lenin, then arranging to buy them back in an auction, then grandly to return them to Mother Russia. However, he was caught at this by the KGB. Karr soon found himself as a top executive of an industrial firm, but running a company turned out not to be his talent. A ladies' man, Karr had a succession of well-connected wives. He also wound up richer than anyone exactly expected. The sudden discovery by his heirs of big bucks spawned a nasty and colorful legal battle among his ex-wives and children. There was a lot of reporting in New York and Paris speculating that the Soviets had done him in. Aristotle Onassis; Bobby Kennedy; President Lyndon Baines Johnson, Bobby's hated rival; Kennedy pal and Ambassador to France Sargent Shriver; Palestinian terrorists; and various KGB agents fill this book chockablock with intriguing stories one after another."--Provided by publisher.

"The election of Donald J. Trump to the presidency shocked the political establishment, triggering a wave of hysteria among the bicoastal elite that may yet never subside. The biggest shockwaves of all however were felt not in the progressive parishes of Manhattan or San Francisco, but in the halls of the political elite's cherished and oft-overlooked center of power: Washington, D.C.'s sprawling 'administrative state.' For President Trump represented an existential threat to its denizens, which came to be known as 'swamp creatures.' How did it come to pass that the 'deconstruction' of this obscure institution - the 'draining of the swamp' - would become a core aim of the Trump administration, impacting everything from judicial appointments to the federal budget and regulatory policy? Could public aversion to policies and practices for which the administrative state was sometimes surreptitiously and other times overtly responsible explain President Trump's rise? What was the intellectual basis for the argument that the administrative state need be dismantled in the first place? The answers to these questions and many more lie in the underappreciated but revolutionary scholarship of Professor John Marini, collected in his timely, comprehensive, accessible new book, Unmasking the Administrative State"--

Britain yesterday; America today. The reality of being top dog is that everybody hates you. In this provocative book, noted historian and commentator Jeremy Black shows how criticisms of the legacy of the British Empire are, in part, criticisms of the reality of American power today. He emphasizes the prominence of imperial rule in history and in the world today, and the selective way in which certain countries are castigated. Imperial Legacies is a wide-ranging and vigorous assault on political correctness, its language, misuse of the past, and grasping of both present and future.

McCarthy argues that the real collusion in the 2016 election was not between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin, but between the Clinton campaign and the Obama administration instead.

A comprehensive look at the decline of the United States offers non-ideological remedies on how to overcome national self-doubt, reclaim optimism, and secure a prosperous future for American citizens.

David Horowitz spent the first part of his life in the world of the Communist-progressive left, a politics he inherited from his mother and father, and later in the New Left as one of its founders. When the wreckage he and his comrades had created became clear to him in the mid-1970s, he left. Three decades of second thoughts then made him this movement’s principal intellectual antagonist. “For better or worse,” as Horowitz writes in the preface, “I have been condemned to spend the rest of my days attempting to understand how the left pursues the agendas from which I have separated myself, and why.”When Horowitz began his odyssey, the left had already escaped the political ghetto to which his parents’ generation and his own had been confined. Today, it has become the dominant force in America’s academic and media cultures, electing a president and achieving a position from which it can shape America’s future. How it achieved its present success and what that success portends are the overarching subjects of Horowitz’s conservative writings. Through the unflinching focus of one singularly engaged witness, the identity of a destructive movement that constantly morphs itself in order to conceal its identity and mission becomes disturbingly clear.Horowitz reflects on the years he spent at war with his own country, collaborating with and confronting radical figures like Huey Newton, Tom Hayden and Billy Ayers, as he made his transition from what the writer Paul Berman described as the American left’s “most important theorist” to its most determined enemy.

In this penetrating work, an eminent political scientist offers a provocative treatise on the requirements of leadership in the modern world.

"America is a nation founded on justice and the rule of law. But our laws are too complex, and legal advice too expensive, for poor and even middle-class Americans to get help and vindicate their rights. Criminal defendants facing jail time may receive an appointed lawyer who is juggling hundreds of cases and immediately urges them to plead guilty. Civil litigants are even worse off; usually, they get no help at all navigating the maze of technical procedures and rules. The same is true of those seeking legal advice, like planning a will or negotiating an employment contract. Rebooting Justice presents a novel response to longstanding problems. The answer is to use technology and procedural innovation to simplify and change the process itself. In the civil and criminal courts where ordinary Americans appear the most, we should streamline complex procedures and assume that parties will not have a lawyer, rather than the other way around. We need a cheaper, simpler, faster justice system to control costs. We cannot untie the Gordian knot by adding more strands of rope; we need to cut it, to simplify it"--

"Past and Present brings together almost two dozen newly collected essays by the distinguished American historian and cultural critic, Gertrude Himmelfarb. Their common theme is the intriguing, often unexpected ways in which the past illuminates the present. The novelist William Faulkner wrote that "The past is never dead. It's not even past." In these essays, Himmelfarb shows the truth of this statement. She helps us find a new perspective on contemporary issues by bringing to bear a trenchant analysis of debates and thinkers of the past. She allows the past to inform the present without distorting either past or present. The essays, unified by the common theme of present and past, are varied. The topics range from the disorders of modern democracy to the challenges of postmodernism, from the Victorian ethos to the Jewish question. The thinkers range from Edmund Burke to Leo Strauss, from Cardinal Newman to Lionel Trilling. The political figures range from Benjamin Disraeli to Winston Churchill, from the American founders to Queen Elizabeth II. The underlying premise and principle of the essays is the conviction that the pursuit of knowledge and truth, however difficult or discomforting, eminently matters, in the "practical life,"as Trilling put it, as in the "moral life."Past and Presentis a notable contribution to this endeavor-to understanding where we have been, where we are now, and where we may be-or should be-going"--

Racing Against History is the stunning story of three powerful personalities who sought in 1940 to turn the tide of history. David Ben-Gurion, Vladimir Jabotinsky, and Chaim Weizmann-the leaders of the left, right, and center of Zionism-undertook separate missions that year to America, then frozen in isolationism, to seek support for a Jewish army to fight Hitler.Their efforts were at once heroic and tragic. The book presents a portrait of three historic figures and the American Jewish community-at the beginning of the most consequential decade in modern Jewish history-and a cautionary tale about divisions within the Jewish community at a time of American isolationism. Based on previously unpublished materials, the book sheds new light on Zionism in America and the history of World War II, and it aims to stimulate discussion about the evolving relationship between Israel and American Jews, as the Jewish State approaches its 70th anniversary under the continuing threat of annihilation. A book for general readers, history buffs and academics alike, it includes 75 pages of End Notes that enable readers to pursue the stunning story in further depth.

Vladimir Putin has a master plan to destroy Europe, divide NATO, reclaim Russian influence in the world, and most of all to marginalize the United States and the West in order to achieve regional hegemony and global power. Putin's unified strategy and vision for Europe has not been thoroughly discussed or articulated in any meaningful way until now. Putin's Master Plan is the first comprehensive attempt to systematically explain Putin's global strategy, which could inevitably and inexorably lead to the breakup of the NATO alliance, and potentially to war with the West. Currently, the West has no strategy, no plan, and no tactics to confront Putin's master plan other than imposing limited economic sanctions, which have done little to deter Putin's aggression-and may well have encouraged and facilitated it. The viewpoint taken here is not just alarmism, but an accurate and, for the first time, clear and sober portrayal of a frightening situation that, more and more, serious observers of European and Russian politics are openly recognizing and acknowledging.Putin's Master Plan makes the case that it is essential to wake up to Putin's strategy to destroy Europe, divide NATO, and build a new empire in the former Soviet Union. Russia has demonstrated an extraordinary level of aggression, most boldly in its outright invasions of Georgia and Ukraine. American weakness and a divided Europe have left Russia's terrified neighbors without an alternative to Russian domination, and even once-stalwart American allies such as the Republic of Georgia are on the brink of becoming part of Putin's new empire in Europe. Putin has made it clear that he sees NATO expansion as a fundamental threat to Russian nationhood, and he is systematically challenging the NATO Alliance as well as the United States. So far, he is winning.

Philosophers usually emphasize the importance of logic, clarity and reason. Therefore when they address political issues they will usually inject a dose of rationality in these discussions, right?Wrong. This book gives a lot of examples showing the unexpected level of political irrationality among leading contemporary philosophers. The body of the book presents a detailed analysis of extreme leftist views of a number of famous philosophers and their occasional descent into apology for—and occasionally even active participation in—totalitarian politics. Most of these episodes are either virtually unknown (even inside the philosophical community) or have received very little attention.The author tries to explain how it was possible that so many luminaries of twentieth-century philosophy, who invoked reason and exhibited rigor and careful thinking in their professional work, succumbed to irrationality and ended up supporting some of the most murderous political regimes and ideologies. The huge leftist bias in contemporary philosophy and its persistence over the years is certainly a factor but it is far from being the whole story.Interestingly, the indisputably high intelligence of these philosophers did not actually protect them from descending into political insanity. It is argued that, on the contrary, both their brilliance and the high esteem they enjoyed in the profession only made them more self-confident and less cautious, thereby eventually making them blind to their betrayal of reason and the monstrosity of the causes they defended.

The 2008 financial crisis--like the Great Depression--was a world-historical event. What caused it will be debated for years if not generations. The conventional narrative about the financial crisis is that it was caused by greed on Wall Street and insufficient regulation of the financial system. That narrative produced the Dodd-Frank Act, the most

When his teenage son Christopher, brain-damaged in an auto accident, developed a 105-degree fever following weeks of unconsciousness, John Campbell asked the attending physician for help. The doctor refused. Why bother? The boy’s life was effectively over. Campbell refused to accept this verdict. He demanded treatment and threatened legal action. The doctor finally relented. With treatment, Christopher’s temperature—which had eventually reached 107.6 degrees—subsided almost immediately. Soon afterward the boy regained consciousness and was learning to walk again.This story is one of many Wesley J. Smith recounts in his award-winning classic critique of the modern bioethics movement, Culture of Death. In this newly updated edition, Smith chronicles how the threats to the equality of human life have accelerated in recent years, from the proliferation of euthanasia and the Brittany Maynard assisted suicide firestorm, to the potential for “death panels” posed by Obamacare and the explosive Terri Schiavo controversy.Culture of Death reveals how more and more doctors have withdrawn from the Hippocratic Oath and how “bioethicists” influence policy by posing questions such as whether organs may be harvested from the terminally ill and disabled. This is a passionate yet coolly reasoned book about the current crisis in medical ethics by an author who has made “the new thanatology” his consuming interest.