For this October, the month before the U.S. presidential election, Yale Climate Connections has identified enough timely titles to fill two bookshelves: one on climate action, the other on electoral politics.
This bookshelf presents the political titles.
Appropriately, “Our Nation at Risk” heads this list. It’s a collection of essays on the real threat to the integrity of the upcoming election posed by those inflaming tensions with bogus threats of voter fraud and stolen elections.
The next several titles detail the very different ways Americans are divided – not just by party or ideology but also by generations, gender, race, rurality, religion, and education. These divisions affect how the country responds to international conflicts – and to climate change.
The next set of titles explain how the design of the American political system – when combined with recent cultural and technological developments, especially in media – has made the electorate more vulnerable to mis/disinformation and to the opportunists and/or zealots who purvey it.
This political bookshelf ends with three titles on “affective polarization,” the emotional antagonisms that now accompany political disagreements. How, in the American electorate, did political opponents become mortal enemies?
The last title, “Our Common Bonds: Using What Americans Share to Help Bridge the Partisan Divide,” suggests a way out of this morass: reminding ourselves that we actually share much in common. Rage is solipsistic. It disconnects us from each other and from the sorts of feedback we need to course-correct. To stop ourselves from egging each other on, however, we must not be too chicken to talk.
Bridging divides, repairing our broken party system, dispelling mis/disinformation, and finding the courage to talk with our opponents will be necessary no matter who wins on November 5.
Pick a book and start reading now.
As always, the descriptions of the titles are adapted from copy provided by their publishers.
Our Nation at Risk: Election Integrity as a National Security Issue edited by Julia E. Zelizer and Karen J. Greenberg (New York University Press 2024, 376 pages, $28.00)
In recent years, the sight of gun-wielding citizens patrolling ballot boxes and voting sites has become increasingly familiar. Major news corporations parroting false claims of election fraud, ballot stuffing, and faulty voting systems is the new normal. In an era of global anti-democratic movements, the sanctity of democratic electoral and the need to protect elections from foreign interference, disinformation, voter intimidation, and being overturned, are now front and center. How did we get here? And more importantly, how will this affect the future of democracy? The contributors outline how these problems have emerged and propose concrete solutions. At once urgent and comprehensive, Our Nation at Risk is the preeminent book on election security and a must read for anyone invested in the fight for democracy.
The Politics of Gen Z: How the Youngest Voters Will Shape Our Democracy by Melissa Deckman (Columbia University Press 2024, 320 pages, $26.00 paperback)
Progressive activism today is increasingly spearheaded by the nation’s youngest voters. Gen Zers—those born between 1997 and 2012 – witnessed the election of Donald Trump, the murder of George Floyd, and the Dobbs Supreme Court decision. And they have lived under the constant threats of mass shootings and climate change. In response, left-leaning Zoomers, particularly women and LGBTQ people, have banded together to take action. Bringing together original data and compelling narratives, political scientist Melissa Deckman explores the world of youth-led progressive organizing; she reveals why women and LGBTQ Zoomers are participating in politics at higher levels than their straight male peers. This book sheds new light on how Gen Z voters and their progressive values may transform the country in the years ahead.
The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates (One World 2024, 256 pages, $30.00)
Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set out to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell’s classic “Politics and the English Language,” but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories expose and distort our realities. In the first of the book’s three intertwining essays, Coates, on his first trip to Africa, finds himself in two places at once: in Dakar, a modern city in Senegal, and in a mythic kingdom in his mind. Then he takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he reports on his own book’s banning, but also explores the larger backlash to the nation’s recent reckoning with history. Finally, in the book’s longest section, Coates travels to Palestine, where he sees how easily we are misled by nationalist narratives, and the tragedy that lies in the clash between the stories we tell and the reality of life.
Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild (The New Press 2024, 400 pages, $30.99)
For all the attempts to understand the state of American politics and the blue/red divide, we’ve ignored what economic and cultural loss can do to pride. What happens, Arlie Russell Hochschild asks, when a proud people in a hard-hit region suffer the deep loss of pride and are confronted with a powerful political appeal that makes it feel “stolen”? Hochschild’s research drew her to Pikeville, Kentucky, in the heart of Appalachia, within the whitest and second-poorest congressional district in the nation. Although it had been in the political center thirty years ago, by 2016, 80 percent of the district voted for Donald Trump. Hochschild focuses on a group swept up in the shifting political landscape: blue-collar men. In Stolen Pride, she introduces us to unforgettable people, explores our dangerous times, and points a way forward.
The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism by Tim Alberta (Harper Collins 2023, 512 pages, $35.00)
Evangelical Christians are perhaps the most polarizing—and least understood—people living in America today. In The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, journalist Tim Alberta, himself a practicing Christian and the son of an evangelical pastor, paints an expansive and profoundly troubling portrait of the American evangelical movement. Through the eyes of televangelists and small-town preachers, celebrity revivalists and everyday churchgoers, Alberta tells the story of a faith cheapened by ephemeral fear, a promise corrupted by partisan subterfuge, and a reputation stained by perpetual scandal. He explains how Donald Trump’s presidency and the COVID-19 pandemic only accelerated historical trends that long pointed toward disaster. If the American evangelical movement has ceased to glorify God, Alberta pointedly asks, what is its purpose?
See also The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy by Matthew D. Taylor (Broadleaf Books 2024, 292 pages, $32.99).
Polarized Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics by Matt Grossman and David A. Hopkins (Cambridge University Press 2024, 396 pages, $29.95)
Over the past several decades, shifting relations between social groups, evolving language and behavior norms, and the increasing value of a college degree have polarized the nation’s political climate and ignited a perpetual culture war. In a sequel to their award-winning Asymmetric Politics that draws on an extensive variety of evidence, Grossmann and Hopkins explore how these changes have affected America’s major parties. Democrats have become the home of highly-educated citizens with progressive social views who prefer credentialed experts to make policy decisions, while Republicans have become the populist champions of white voters without college degrees who increasingly distrust “experts.” The result of this “diploma divide” is an ever more complex world in which everything is about politics—and politics is about everything.
The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics by Daniel Schlozman & Sam Rosenfeld (Princeton University Press 2024, 448 pages, $35.00)
America’s political parties are hollow shells of what they could be, locked in a polarized struggle for power and unrooted as civic organizations. The Hollow Parties takes readers from the rise of mass party politics in the Jacksonian era through the years of Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld paint unforgettable portraits of figures such as Martin Van Buren, whose pioneering Democrats invented the machinery of the mass political party, and Abraham Lincoln, one of the first generation Republicans who stood up to Slave Power. And they show how today’s fractious party politics arose from the ashes of the New Deal order in the 1970s, when the parties lost control of the nomination process. The Hollow Parties explains how the nation’s parties became so dysfunctional—and how they might yet realize their promise.
Conversely, see Divergent Democracy: How Policy Positions Came to Dominate Party Competition by Katherine Krimmel (Princeton University Press 2024, 296 pages, $29.95 paperback), “an innovative examination of the shift by American political parties toward issue-based differentiation.”
Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis by James Davison Hunter (Yale University Press 2024, 504 pages, $40.00)
Liberal democracy in America has always contained contradictions—most notably, a noble but abstract commitment to freedom, justice, and equality that has seldom been realized in practice. While these contradictions have created friction, there was always an underlying solidarity drawn from the cultural resources of America’s “hybrid Enlightenment.” James Davison Hunter, who introduced the concept of “culture wars” thirty years ago, tells us in his new book that those sources of national solidarity have largely dissolved. While a deepening political polarization is the most obvious sign of this, the true problem is not polarization per se but the absence of cultural resources to work through what divides us. Can an Enlightenment-era institution—liberal democracy—survive in a post-Enlightenment world? Hunter offers no easy answers.
Lies That Kill: A Citizen’s Guide to Disinformation by Elaine C. Kamarck and Darrell M. West (Brookings Institution Press 2024, 176 pages, $27.00)
In Lies that Kill, two noted experts take readers inside the world of disinformation campaigns to show concerned citizens how to recognize disinformation, understand it, and protect themselves and others. Using case studies of elections, climate change, public health, race, war, and governance, Elaine Kamarck and Darrell West demonstrate in plain language how our political, social, and economic environment makes disinformation believable to large numbers of people. But, they argue, we are not doomed to live in an apocalyptic, post-truth world; instead, can take actions that are consistent with free speech values. Citizen education can make us more discerning consumers of online materials; we can also reduce risks through regulation, legislation, and negotiation with other countries.
See also Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind by Annalee Newitz (W.W. Norton 2024, 272 pages, $27.99)
The Roots of Polarization: From the Racial Realignment to the Culture Wars by Neil A. O’Brian (University of Chicago Press 2024, 240 pages, $30.00 paperback)
In the late twentieth century, gay rights, immigration, gun control, and abortion debates all burst onto the political scene, scrambling the parties and polarizing the electorate. Neil A. O’Brian traces the origins of today’s political divide on these issues to the 1960s when Democrats and Republicans split over civil rights. It was this partisan polarization over race, he argues, that subsequently shaped partisan fault lines on other culture war issues that persist to this day. Challenging a common understanding of partisan polarization as an elite-led phenomenon, The Roots of Polarization argues politicians and interest groups, jockeying for power, seized on these preexisting connections in the mass public to build the parties’ contemporary coalitions.
Partisan Nation: The Dangerous Logic of American Politics in a Nationalized Era by Paul Pierson & Eric Schickler (University of Chicago Press 2024, 336 pages, $29.00)
American democracy is in trouble. Attentive to the different coalitions and interests that define the Democratic and Republican parties, political scientists Paul Pierson and Eric Schickler show how contemporary polarization differs from polarization in past eras. In earlier periods, three key features of the political landscape—state parties, interest groups, and media—varied locally and reinforced the nation’s stark regional diversity. But this began to change in the 1960s as the two parties assumed clearer ideological identities and the national government expanded, raising the stakes of conflict. Together with technological and economic changes, these developments reconfigured state parties, interest groups, and media in self-reinforcing ways. The result is that today’s polarization is self-perpetuating—and intensifying. America’s democratic crisis is rooted in this dangerous mismatch between our Constitution and today’s nationalized, partisan politics.
Our Common Bonds: Using What Americans Share to Help Bridge the Partisan Divide by Matthew Levendusky (University of Chicago Press 2023, 240 pages, $30.00 paperback)
One of the defining features of twenty-first-century American politics is the rise of affective polarization: Americans increasingly not only disagree with those from the other party but distrust and dislike them as well. This has toxic downstream consequences for both politics and social relationships. Is there any solution? Matthew Levendusky argues that partisan animosity stems in part from partisans’ misperceptions of one another. Democrats and Republicans think they have nothing in common, but this is not true. In fact, it is possible to help partisans reframe the lens through which they evaluate the out-party by priming commonalities through civil cross-party dialogue. Doing so can lessenlesson partisan animosity and even reduce ideological polarization. Levendusky asks what these findings mean for real-world efforts to bridge the partisan divide.
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