Showing results by publisher "Tantor Media" in Elections & Political Process

Lie Machines is full of riveting behind-the-scenes stories from the world's biggest and most damagingly successful misinformation initiatives - including those used in Brexit and US elections. Howard not only shows how these campaigns evolved from older propaganda operations, but also exposes their new powers, gives us insight into their effectiveness, and shows us how to shut them down.

In Polarization: What Everyone Needs to Know Nolan McCarty takes listeners through what scholars know and don't know about the origins, development, and implications of our rising political conflicts, delving into social, economic, and geographic determinants of polarization in the United States. While the current political climate seems to suggest that extreme views are becoming more popular, McCarty also argues that, contrary to popular belief, the 2016 election was a natural outgrowth of 40 years of polarized politics, rather than a significant break with the past.

In this offbeat approach to leadership, college president Steven B. Sample - the man who turned the University of Southern California into one of the most respected and highly rated universities in the country - challenges many conventional teachings on the subject. Here, Sample outlines an iconoclastic style of leadership that flies in the face of current leadership thought, but a style that unquestionably works, nevertheless.

With Uncivil Agreement, Lilliana Mason looks at the growing social gulf across racial, religious, and cultural lines, which have recently come to divide neatly between the two major political parties. She argues that group identifications have changed the way we think and feel about ourselves and our opponents. Even when Democrats and Republicans can agree on policy outcomes, they tend to view one another with distrust and to work for party victory over all else.

What is the impact of surveillance capitalism on our right to free speech? The internet once promised to be a place of extraordinary freedom beyond the control of money or politics, but today corporations and platforms exercise more control over our ability to access information and share knowledge to a greater extent than any state. In Silicon Values, leading campaigner Jillian York looks at how our rights have become increasingly undermined by the major corporations' desire to harvest our personal data and turn it into profit.

In two previous highly regarded books on the US Senate, Ira Shapiro chronicled the institution from its apogee in the 1970s through its decline in the decades since. Now, Shapiro turns his gaze to how the Senate responded to the challenges posed by the Trump administration and its prospects under President Biden. Shapiro documents the pivotal challenges facing the Senate during the Trump administration, arguing that the body's failure to provide leadership represents the most catastrophic failure of government in American history.

Mussolini's Grandchildren delves into Italy's self-styled 'post-fascist' movements—rooted in historical fascism yet claiming to have 'transcended' it. David Broder highlights the reinventions of far-right politics since WWII and examines the interplay between a parliamentary face aimed at integrating fascists into the mainstream and militant fringe groups which, despite their extremism, play an important role in nurturing the broader far right.

American political history has a rhythm and a progression. Part of that progression is White populist anger and resentment. The Forgotten Man and White Populist Resentment: Power, Politics, and Narrative Dominance in the Trump Era traces how this White populism rose to dominate the Republican Party primary base, how the populist campaigns of Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich paved the way for the rise of Donald Trump, and how he maintains narrative dominance over both parties and American political discourse.

The Great Recession, institutional dysfunction, a growing divide between urban and rural prospects, and failed efforts to effectively address immigration have paved the way for a populist backlash that disrupts the postwar bargain between political elites and citizens. Whether today's populism represents a corrective to unfair and obsolete policies or a threat to liberal democracy remains up for debate. To respond to today's crisis, good leaders must strive for inclusive economic growth while addressing social and cultural issues, including demographic anxiety, with frank attention.

Alan Dershowitz has been called "one of the most prominent and consistent defenders of civil liberties in America" by Politico and "the nation's most peripatetic civil liberties lawyer and one of its most distinguished defenders of individual rights" by Newsweek. He is also a fair-minded and even-handed expert on the Constitution and our civil liberties, and in this book offers his knowledge and insight to help listeners understand the war being waged against free speech by the ostensibly well-meaning forces seeking to constrain this basic right.

Most people are familiar with the concept and understand that fraud is prohibited by law. What many fail to appreciate, however, is that the law does not treat all frauds equally. In a perverse sense, the bigger the fraud, the more likely it is protected by the First Amendment and therefore legal. In addition to exposing the depths of the problem, Henricksen gives listeners a way forward. By revealing for the first time the root legal cause of the misinformation crisis and presenting novel solutions, In Fraud We Trust speaks to the present moment as it offers answers for the future.

In the heyday of American labor, the influence of local unions extended far beyond the workplace. Unions were embedded in tight-knit communities, touching nearly every aspect of the lives of members and their families and neighbors. Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol provide timely insight into the relationship between the decline of unions and the shift of working-class voters away from Democrats.

Conspiratorial thinking, mis- and disinformation, and anti-intellectualism are at dangerous levels. With traditional media on the way out, social media algorithms siloing users into personal echo chambers, and generative AI muddying the waters, it's getting harder and harder to tell news from nonsense. Our ability to think critically about the world around us is being undermined by these forces and many others, which are being used to sow confusion, disrupt democracy, damage the environment, and degrade social well-being.

We're Number One!?: America's Uncertain Standing in the World compares the domestic policies of the United States to other countries across a wide variety of social, political, and economic metrics. This book demonstrates conclusively that despite America's wealth, its strong economy, its...

Why do politicians engage in nasty politics? Why do they use insult, accusations, intimidation, and in rare cases violence against their domestic political opponents? In Nasty Politics, Thomas Zeitzoff answers these questions by examining this global political trend in the US, Ukraine, and Israel and looking at how key leaders such as Trump, Zelensky, and Netanyahu use it. Nasty Politics highlights how it influences the kinds of politicians who run for office and deepens our understanding for why so many politicians now rely on outsized anger and withering insults for political gain.

American politics today can be defined by the intense and increasingly toxic divide between Democrats and Republicans. Matthew D. Luttig explores why so many Americans have endorsed this level of political conflict.

Donald A. Ritchie, a congressional historian for forty years, takes listeners on a fascinating, behind-the-scenes tour of Capitol Hill, pointing out the key players, explaining their behavior, and translating parliamentary language into plain English. He also explores the essential necessity of compromise to accomplish anything significant in the legislative arena.

The United States, through its local, state, and national contests, holds more elections, more often, than any democracy in the world. But in recent years, there have been troubling signs that our system of campaigns and elections has become much more fragile and vulnerable. This new edition of Campaigns, Elections, and the Threat to Democracy: What Everyone Needs to Know® offers the most up-to-date examination of campaigns, elections, and future threats to voting and democracy.

The Rise of a New American Left is the first book to look closely at this new politics. Propelled by interviews with AOC and the other key figures and organizations that have shaken up American politics, the book includes portraits of groups like Democratic Socialists of America, the Sunrise Movement, and Justice Democrats, explaining who they are, where they come from, and what they want.

The Baby Boomers are the largest and most powerful generation in American history—and they aren't going away any time soon. They dominate cultural and political institutions and make up the largest slice of the electorate. Generational conflict, with Millennials and Generation Z pitted against the aging Boomer cohort, has become a media staple. The generation gap is widening into a political fault line.