Hard Right: The GOP’s Drift Toward Extremism

Hard Right: The GOP’s Drift Toward Extremism PDF Author: Mona Charen
Publisher: Creators Publishing
ISBN: 1949673936
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 159

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Book Description
As a Republican, Mona Charen hardly recognizes her own party anymore. The party’s focus has shifted from policy to provocation. Over time, many mainstream Republicans have embraced extremist views that were once reserved for the fringes—challenging free and fair elections, praising demagogues, encouraging conspiracies, and abandoning basic respect and decency. The Republican Party crashed through the floor of decency when Donald J. Trump was nominated as the party’s candidate in the 2016 presidential election. Since then, it has continued to find new lows in conspiracism, cynicism, stoked outrage, falsehoods, and finally, insurrection. In this collection of syndicated columns since 2016, Ms. Charen, a long-time political analyst, calls out the Republican Party for drifting far from its principles, offering sharp criticism and level-headed advice. Charen’s journey has taken her to distrust of excessive partisanship on all sides and a renewed urgency about confirming the values and traditions of small-l liberal democracy.

Hard Right: The GOP’s Drift Toward Extremism

Hard Right: The GOP’s Drift Toward Extremism PDF Author: Mona Charen
Publisher: Creators Publishing
ISBN: 1949673936
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 159

Get Book Here

Book Description
As a Republican, Mona Charen hardly recognizes her own party anymore. The party’s focus has shifted from policy to provocation. Over time, many mainstream Republicans have embraced extremist views that were once reserved for the fringes—challenging free and fair elections, praising demagogues, encouraging conspiracies, and abandoning basic respect and decency. The Republican Party crashed through the floor of decency when Donald J. Trump was nominated as the party’s candidate in the 2016 presidential election. Since then, it has continued to find new lows in conspiracism, cynicism, stoked outrage, falsehoods, and finally, insurrection. In this collection of syndicated columns since 2016, Ms. Charen, a long-time political analyst, calls out the Republican Party for drifting far from its principles, offering sharp criticism and level-headed advice. Charen’s journey has taken her to distrust of excessive partisanship on all sides and a renewed urgency about confirming the values and traditions of small-l liberal democracy.

Against the Tide

Against the Tide PDF Author: Lincoln Chafee
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1429934425
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
In this smart, candid, and surprising political memoir, Lincoln Chafee offers a behind-the-scenes look at the first six years of the Bush Administration from the vantage point of one of the few Republican moderates in the Senate. When Senator Chafee (R-RI) went to Washington, he encountered a Republican Party drifting so far to the right it no longer stood for the mainstream principles that united Americans. Instead, under the direction of George W. Bush, the Party had fallen victim to extremism. In the face of this trend, Chafee stood fast as one of the most liberal Republicans in the Senate, seeking to cut across partisan lines at the very time that they threatened to irrevocably divide the nation. A political iconoclast, Chafee was the only Republican senator to have expressed support for same-sex marriage; the only Republican to vote in favor of reinstating the top federal tax rate on upper-income payers; the only Republican in the Senate to have voted against authorization of the use of force in Iraq; the only Republican to vote for the Levin-Reed amendment calling for a nonbinding timetable for a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq; and the only Republican to vote against Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito. Chafee favored increased federal funding for health care, supported affirmative action and gun control, supported women's reproductive rights, and endorsed federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. Sometimes referred to by conservatives as a RINO (Republican in Name Only), Chafee turns the tables on the right and asks why it has enabled Bush Jr. to pull the GOP and the nation away from traditional principles of fiscal conservatism, respect for our environment, and aversion to foreign entanglements. Unabashedly frank, Chafee's memoir recounts his political journey from small-town mayor to a voice crying from the congressional wilderness. He offers a forward-looking assessment of what comes next for the Republican and Democratic parties, and he also addresses the potential rise of a third party within the void created by bipartisan extremism. Most important, Chafee sounds a wake-up call to his Party, and to all Americans, by challenging our government to strive, as Abraham Lincoln once articulated, "to elevate the condition of men."

American Carnage

American Carnage PDF Author: Tim Alberta
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062896369
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 891

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Book Description
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.

Weapons of Mass Delusion

Weapons of Mass Delusion PDF Author: Robert Draper
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593300149
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
One of The Washington Post's 10 Best Books of 2022 The disturbing eyewitness account of how a new breed of Republicans—led by Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, and Madison Cawthorn—far from moving on from Trump, have taken the politics of hysteria to even greater extremes and brought American democracy to the edge The violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, was a terrible day for American democracy, but many people dared to hope that at least it would break the fever that had overcome the Republican Party and banish Trump's relentless lies about the stealing of the 2020 election. That is not what happened. Instead, “the big steal” has become dogma among an ever-higher percentage of American Republicans. What happened to the Republican Party, and America, during the Trump presidency is a story we more or less think we know. What has happened to the party since, it turns out, is even more disquieting. That is the story Robert Draper tells in Weapons of Mass Delusion. Through his extraordinarily intrepid cross-country reporting, Draper chronicles the road from January 6 to the 2022 midterms among the Republican base and in the U.S. Congress, rendering unforgettable portraits of how Marjorie Taylor Greene and her ilk came to shape their party’s terms of engagement to an extent that would have been unimaginable even five years ago. He also brings to life the efforts of a dwindling group of Republicans who are willing to push back against the falsehoods, in the face of a group of ascendent demagogues who are merrily weaponizing them. With a base whipped up into a perpetual frenzy of outrage by conspiracy theories—not just about the big steal but about COVID and vaccines, pedophilia and Antifa and Black Lives Matter and George Soros and President Obama, and on and on and on—the forces of reason within the GOP are on the defensive, to put it mildly. The book also benefits greatly from reporting conducted in Texas, Arizona, Georgia, New Hampshire, and other bellwether states in the country of the mind one might call a fever of undending conspiracies. Robert Draper has been a wise, fearless, and fair-minded chronicler of the American political scene for over twenty-five years. He has seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. He has never seen it this ugly. Ultimately, this book tells the story of a fearful test of our ability, as a country, to hold together a system of government grounded in truth and the rule of law. Written on the eve of the 2022 midterm elections, Draper’s account of a party teetering on the precipice of madness reveals how the GOP fringe became its center of gravity.

Useful Idiots

Useful Idiots PDF Author: Mona Charen
Publisher: Regnery Publishing
ISBN: 9780895261397
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
The author attacks American liberals as naive and disingenuous in their dealings with the world, accusing them of rewriting history to portray themselves as "Cold Warriors" along with conservatives.

Is the Republican Party Destroying Itself?

Is the Republican Party Destroying Itself? PDF Author: Thomas E Patterson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781658728638
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Is the Republican Party Destroying Itself? explores five traps that the Republican Party has set for itself and endanger its future. The traps vary in lethality but, together, they could cripple the party for a generation or more. One trap is its steady movement to the right, which has distanced the party from the moderate voters who hold the balance of power in a two-party system. A second trap is demographic change. Younger adults and minorities vote heavily Democratic, and their numbers increase with each passing election. The older white voters that are the GOP's base of support are shrinking in number. Within two decades, based on demographic change alone, the GOP faces the prospect of being a second-rate party. Right-wing media are the Republicans' third trap. A powerful force within the party, they have tied the GOP to policy positions and versions of reality that are blunting its ability to govern and impeding its efforts to attract new sources of support. A fourth trap is the large tax cuts that the GOP has three times handed to the wealthy. The rich have reaped a windfall but at a high cost to the GOP. It has soiled its image as the party of the middle class and created a split between its working-class supporters and its marketplace conservatives. The fifth trap is the GOP's disregard for democratic norms and institutions, including its effort through voter ID laws to suppress the vote of minorities and lower-income Americans. In the process, it has made lasting enemies and created instruments of power that can be used against it. That Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election says more about the Republican Party than it does about Trump. In the whole of American history, there is only one major party - today's GOP - that would have nominated a Trump-like candidate for president. And he has deepened each of the Republican Party's traps. If the GOP were to become a second-rate party, Trump will have accelerated its downfall rather than being the cause of it. Before he came on the scene, the GOP was already a conservative party in name only. It had become a reactionary party out of step with what America is becoming. Republicans have traded the party's future for yesterday's America.The GOP needs to restore its conservative heritage if it is to remain a competitive party. Our democracy requires a healthy and competitive two-party system and would not benefit from a greatly diminished Republican Party, nor can it flourish from the reactionary course that the GOP has been pursuing.

It's Even Worse Than It Looks

It's Even Worse Than It Looks PDF Author: Thomas E. Mann
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465096735
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Acrimony and hyperpartisanship have seeped into every part of the political process. Congress is deadlocked and its approval ratings are at record lows. America's two main political parties have given up their traditions of compromise, endangering our very system of constitutional democracy. And one of these parties has taken on the role of insurgent outlier; the Republicans have become ideologically extreme, scornful of compromise, and ardently opposed to the established social and economic policy regime.In It's Even Worse Than It Looks, congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein identify two overriding problems that have led Congress -- and the United States -- to the brink of institutional collapse. The first is the serious mismatch between our political parties, which have become as vehemently adversarial as parliamentary parties, and a governing system that, unlike a parliamentary democracy, makes it extremely difficult for majorities to act. Second, while both parties participate in tribal warfare, both sides are not equally culpable. The political system faces what the authors call &"asymmetric polarization," with the Republican Party implacably refusing to allow anything that might help the Democrats politically, no matter the cost.With dysfunction rooted in long-term political trends, a coarsened political culture and a new partisan media, the authors conclude that there is no &"silver bullet"; reform that can solve everything. But they offer a panoply of useful ideas and reforms, endorsing some solutions, like greater public participation and institutional restructuring of the House and Senate, while debunking others, like independent or third-party candidates. Above all, they call on the media as well as the public at large to focus on the true causes of dysfunction rather than just throwing the bums out every election cycle. Until voters learn to act strategically to reward problem solving and punish obstruction, American democracy will remain in serious danger.

The Best People

The Best People PDF Author: Alexander Nazaryan
Publisher: Hachette Books
ISBN: 0316421421
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
An engrossing look at the Trump cabinet: the scandals, the incompetence, the assault on the federal government, the bungled attempts to impose order on an administration lost in a chaos of its own making. Donald Trump promised a return to national greatness, but each day of his presidency seems to bring a new crisis, a deepening sense of national unease. Why, and how, has he failed his supporters? And how has he, on occasion, bested his detractors? The Best People takes complete measure of the Trump administration, to grasp with clarity the president and his intentions, and how those intentions are being carried out-or subverted-by the people he has hired. Alexander Nazaryan argues that the "assault on the administrative state" promised by Steve Bannon in early 2017 never came. What the American people got instead was Wilbur Ross hauling his tennis pro to confirmation hearing preparations; Scott Pruitt running away from rattlesnakes; Reince Priebus enduring insults from junior White House staffers. And yet, bungling as Trump's cabinet members have been, they have managed to either damage or arrest many of the gears that make government run. They have given away public lands to oil companies and allowed corporate lobbyists to make decisions about what is best for the American people, and have done it all while flying on private jets and dining at the finest restaurants, at taxpayers' expense. Meticulously reported and enthrallingly told, The Best People takes readers inside the federal government under Trump's control, a government assailed by the very people charged to lead it, a government awash in confusion and corruption.

How Democracies Die

How Democracies Die PDF Author: Steven Levitsky
Publisher: Broadway Books
ISBN: 1524762938
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Fateful alliances -- Gatekeeping in America -- The great Republican abdication -- Subverting democracy -- The guardrails of democracy -- The unwritten rules of American politics -- The unraveling -- Trump against the guardrails -- Saving democracy

The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right

The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right PDF Author: Max Boot
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 1631495682
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
A “must read” (Joe Scarborough) by a New York Times– best- selling author, The Corrosion of Conservatism presents a necessary defense of American democracy. Praised on publication as “one of the most impressive and unfl inching diagnoses of the pathologies in Republican politics that led to Trump’s rise” (Jonathan Chait, New York), The Corrosion of Conservatism documents a president who has traduced every norm and the rise of a nascent centrist movement to counter his assault on democracy. In this “admirably succinct and trenchant” (Charles Reichman, San Francisco Chronicle) exhumation of conservatism, Max Boot tells the story of an ideological dislocation so shattering that it caused his courageous transformation from Republican foreign policy advisor to celebrated anti- Trump columnist. From recording his political coming- of- age as a young émigré from the Soviet Union to describing the vitriol he endured from his erstwhile conservative colleagues, Boot mixes “lively memoir with sharp analysis” (William Kristol) from its Reagan-era apogee to its corrosion under Donald Trump.