Fans pick 100 books like Rule and Ruin

This book is engaging because it shows how the base of the Democratic party has changed since Franklin Roosevelt first assembled the New Deal political coalition in the 1930s. 

Today, it is increasingly the party of college-educated suburban voters and reflects their cultural and political priorities. From the Great Depression until the 1960s, however, working-class urban voters formed the heart of the party. Geismer uses metropolitan Boston as a template to depict this important transition, which helped produce suburban candidates such as Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, whose political career emerged from and was shaped by his life in Brookline, MA.  

The 1988 election was the last contest in which the three broadcast networks (ABC, NBC, and CBS) and the major mainstream newspapers like The New York Times dominated political coverage. 

Over the next three decades, a more diverse media environment emerged where cable channels, talk radio and other sources would play a central role. Rosenwald lays out the rise of Rush Limbaugh and other conservative talk radio hosts in the 1990s and how they helped shape the modern Republican Party and the more partisan and tribalized political climate of the early 21st century.

Williams’ book is an excellent look at an earlier election with many similarities to 1988. 

As opposed to today’s elections where candidates work to motivate their bases, Democrat Jimmy Carter and Republican Gerald Ford worked to build broad electoral coalitions in 1976. They had to concern themselves with both liberal and conservative constituencies within their own parties. 

In the end, Carter was able to unite the old New Deal coalition for one last hurrah while Ford nearly provided a last gasp for traditional establishment conservatism. By 1988, the two parties were not the same big tents they were in 1976 but still featured much greater ideological diversity than they do today.

This book is interesting because it shows how a traditional New Deal/Great Society liberal like Vice President Mondale adapted to the changing politics of the 1970s and 1980s. 

To a certain extent, he saw how some Democratic policies needed to be reformed for the new circumstances of a more conservative era. During his 1984 run for the president, he famously proposed raising taxes to combat the Reagan-era deficits. 

Though this proposal is recalled as a misguided attempt to campaign as a conventional progressive, Mondale was trying to show that Democrats could be responsible fiscal stewards. Four years later, Dukakis continued this effort through his own repeated mentions of the multiple budgets he balanced while governor of Massachusetts.

Critchlow offers compelling portraits of four men (Richard Nixon, Nelson Rockefeller, Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan) who sought to define the direction of the Republican Party during the 1960s, an era when the Democrats were firmly entrenched as the nation’s majority party.

This book reminds us of the role of contingency as we seek to explain the past. Critchlow stresses that although ideas are important, politics more often involves various figures responding pragmatically to shifting circumstances. The Republican Party of the 1960s was more ideologically diverse than it has been in recent decades.  

Of all the changes in environmental politics since the Cuyahoga River caught fire in 1969, perhaps the most perplexing – and disappointing – is the Republican turn away from environmental protection. From the Reagan Administration through the Trump regime, the Republican Party has staked the claim not just to passivity toward environmental regulation but has engaged in an all-out assault on government protection of the human and nonhuman environment. Turner and Isenberg make sense of this policy turn, emphasizing the roles of libertarian ideologues, multinational corporations with a stake in the status quo, and rural Americans who tired of federal intrusions in their lives and livelihoods. As aspects of the urban crisis have eased, and specific places like the Cuyahoga River have improved, environmental activists would do well to figure out how to make environmental protection bipartisan once again.

Due to the overly negative, pessimistic views we often have of each other, we'll often miss the many things we have in common. This is what Levendusky's book focuses on.

He examines survey results that show us that, despite many people's perceptions, Democrats and Republicans actually have a surprising amount in common. And this is especially true when you ask about people's policy preferences and remove the more polarizing party-associated language and labels. 

Making our culture less toxic will require us to focus more on our common bonds, and less on those things that drive us apart. The more we adjust that focus, the more we'll shift how people view their fellow Americans and our divides, and the more we’ll create a culture of healthier disagreement.

A timely and well-researched look at the right’s successful, decades-long strategy of capturing state legislatures, this book sounds the alarm—and points to a crucial path forward. I love that Winter succeeds where many academic authors have failed: she has written a book that’s both deeply informative and fun to read. I especially appreciate her concrete and practical approach to moving the United States in a more progressive direction; anyone can point out that the right is, by many measures, winning, but it takes real talent to show us what we can do about it.

In the 1930s, Wendell Willkie was a Democrat who sided with big business and criticized Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt. Then, in a whirlwind, Willkie switched parties and won the Republication presidential nomination in June 1940.

After FDR won the election of 1940, Willkie shattered party expectations again when he called upon Congress to pass FDR’s controversial Lend Lease program to send military aid to European nations facing the assault of Hitler’s Nazi armies. 

Willkie also took a strong stance in support of civil rights. Time and again, he proved he was a leader with a nimble mind unfettered by party politics. He broke the rules by defying those who would predict his politics according to his party affiliation. 

The compelling story of Wendell Willkie and his call for human rights in America and around the world comes to life in David Levering Lewis’s beautifully written biography, The Improbable Wendell Willkie… show more.

Mouritsen’s short, detailed, survey of Roman politics in the Republic packs such a punch in terms of its sophisticated, but brief, analyses of Roman political systems including the fall of the Republic. In short, I think Mouritsen has done as good a job as any historian, page-for-page examining in brief the mechanics of Republican politics and their collapse. I certainly relied on his broader analysis of Roman political systems and their collapse on a number of occasions in my book as we investigated the turbulent tenures of this and that aristocrat. Politics in the Roman Republic is an excellent first step to Mouritsen’s thoughtful analysis, since it will provide the stories of essentially all the key aristocrats who form the evidence for his analysis. For those who want even more understanding of the political and competitive systems as they operated, Mouritsen’s book is a terrific next step.