Fans pick 100 books like This America

Folks familiar with the term “neoliberalism” usually describe it as the economic system that tries to unleash the market by getting the government out of the way. I like Globalists because it shows how unleashing the market demands that government gets in the way—of workers’ rights, movements for equality, and, most ominously, democracy itself. Since it’s impossible to understand fascism without tackling capitalism, a book explaining how we got to today’s market principles is vital.

I see this book as a history of the neoliberal economists who encouraged political leaders to use state violence and repression to unleash free trade and shape the global economy. Globalists tell the story of how modern capitalism developed into today’s vast landscape of inequality that makes a fertile ground for fascism and violent extremism to develop.

These days, the word fascist is pretty quickly pulled out as a handy insult. Orwell warned even back in the 1940s that the term was used so much that it was becoming meaningless. But when I listen to some of the race-obsessed autocratic leaders lurking in today's politics, I’m convinced “fascist” is a tailor-made description rather than an easy epithet.

I love this book because it helped me get past the hesitation with using that word and is, to my mind, the ultimate philosophical dissection of today’s fascism. For philosopher Alberto Toscano and the thinkers he discusses, fascism is a process at the heart of capitalism itself, "a dynamic that [even] precedes its naming."

His book describes the many aspects of fascism from well beyond Europe in the early twentieth century. If we look around, we can see the percolations of this process producing and reproducing "the racial fantasy of… show more.

I started reading books about today’s fascism when I noticed the label being used repeatedly in the wake of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. The first book I read was this one.

This very brief study compares the old-guard fascist leaders to Trump by considering elements like rhetorical style, ideas about gender and race, and what we can think of as Trump's way of being in the world. Connolly, a political philosopher, uses the classic studies of Nazism to speculate on the group psychology of today’s followers of authoritarians and analyze people’s attachment to them.

He understands that fascism results from capitalism’s inherent cruelties and will not be easily discarded or simply voted out. He argues, instead, that we must support pluralism and democracy as a starting point. 

I love this book because it’s an inspiring collection of oral histories about community building, protesting, standing up for the oppressed, and sometimes, beating the shit out of racist skinheads. The stories are told by those who had been anti-racist skinheads and punks in Portland back in the 1980s-‘90s.

Portland has long been a very white city—initially because Black people weren’t even allowed in Oregon and later because the Klan had firm control over state and local politics. Over time, more people of color moved in, but the state's white supremacist roots ran deep. In the 1980s, these sprouted racist violence, leading to the brutal beating death of Ethiopian immigrant Mulugeta Seraw.

This book collects the oral histories of the resistance movement galvanized by his death, most of whom were young members of Portland’s punk music scene who, without the support of officials or police, fought back—usually in nonviolent ways. 

I love Anderson’s narrative about the formation of nations in the 19th Century and what he calls print capitalism, promoted through books and newspapers. A market organised around the same language fosters both the economy and the very much-needed feeling of community required to organise the state and foster industrial capitalism.

More than four decades after its publication, the book remains thought-provoking as it makes me ask whether a single language suffices to hold nations and markets together.

In this fascinating and highly readable account of how we have come to think of the globe, Martin and Lewis (a geographer and historian respectively) introduce their reader to the historical construction, contingencies, and inconsistencies of our basic geographical building blocks. On what basis has the world been divided up into “east,” and “west,” and how, for example, did Japan come to be considered part of the “West?” Why do we think of continents as fixed entities rather than as conceptual categories for thinking about both space and culture? How do these categories shape our continuing perception of geographic space and our own place in the world? 

This book opens your eyes to the power of jurisdictional competition and brings hope of a future where governance is conducted for the benefit of the people being governed, rather than the benefit of government bureaucrats as is the case today.

An increasing amount of SEZs, startup societies, and privately run cities are springing up across the world. Judging by their progress, this optimistic part of human development is likely to continue.

This book opens your eyes to those developments and current opportunities for new and better governance.

Tracing the emergence of the modern nation of Thailand from the Kingdom of Siam, Thongchai Winichakul demonstrates that the rulers of the emergent nation gradually adopted the same logic of national sovereignty and geopolitics as its colonial neighbors in the region, France and Britain. The implication is that in modernizing and reconfiguring what constitutes sovereignty Asian nations are not necessarily more benign than their western counterparts in extending their rule’ victims of western colonial aggression are not exempt from exercising similar forms of coercion against their own inner others. 

Set in the heyday of Qing glory—or some might say at the beginning of its decline—Philip Kuhn traces a panic that swept through rural China in which commoners feared for the safety of their children’s lives at the hands of imagined bands of “soulstealers.” Alternately tracing allegations of incidents and the imperial response, which the reader gradually comes to understand is fueled by its own brand of paranoia, the author describes the intricate workings of bureaucratic procedure and justice in Qing China in which the emperor sometimes felt foiled by his own ‘deep state.’

Keith Dinnie is another respected colleague who has written about the city, region, and nation as brand since the twentieth century. 

It is clear that his book Nation Branding is the go-to handbook and reference guide for students, practitioners, and academics interested and working in the domain of “place branding” as it is now already in its third edition. Dinnie’s book is usually on my desk in case I need to look up definitions, sources, or specific insights and cases.

Contributors include some of the most well-established professionals in the field.