Oakland Corps Book Club: American Politics

Well, how did we get here? How did American politics go so wrong? What is wrong with the politics industry? Why are we always so surprised? 

Below is a list of 25 scholars useful for this moment in American politics. They include: 

1. Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men (1946)
2. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1965)
3. Norm Ornstein & Thomas Mann, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks (2012)
4. Colin Woodard, American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America (2012)
5. Avidit Acharya et al, Deep Roots: How Slavery Still Shapes Southern Politics (2018)
6. Michael Isikoff & David Corn, Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump (2018)
7. Charlie Sykes, How the Right Lost Its Mind (2018)
8. Andrew McCabe, The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump (2019)
9. John Sides et al, Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America (2019)
10. Michael Tomasky, If We Can Keep It: How the Republic Collapsed and How it Might Be Saved (2019)
11. Katherine Gehl et al, The Politics Industry (2020)
12. Evan Osnos, Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury (2021)
13. Jennifer Rubin, Resistance: How Women Saved Democracy (2021)
14. David Corn, American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy (2022)
15. Tim Miller, Why We Did It: A Travelog from the Republican Road to Hell (2022)
16. Tim Egan, A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them (2023)
17. Ryan Grim, The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution (2023)
18. Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt, Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point (2023)
19. Heather Cox Richardson, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America (2023)
20. Brian Stelter, Network of Lies: The Epic Saga of Fox News, Donald Trump, and the Battle for American Democracy (2023)
21. Tom Schaller & Paul Waldman, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy (2023)
22. Nick Troiano, The Primary Solution: Rescuing Our Democracy from the Fringes (2023)
23. Joe Conason & George Conway, The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers, and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (2024)
24. Jacob Heilbrunn, America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators (2024)
25. Sasha Issenberg, The Lie Detectives: In Search of a Playbook for Winning Elections in the Disinformation Age (2024)