The best books for everyone concerned about the state of U.S. democracy

I hope readers internalize this book's message: grappling with past threats to our democracy is vital in facing down future threats carrying a greater likelihood of success. 

Maddow’s impressively researched book recounts the period of U.S. history corresponding to the rise of Nazism in Germany and the spread of European fascism. Her laudable goal is ensuring more citizens know the story of leading American figures—captains of industry, Congressmen, and Governors—sympathetic to Nazism and willing to undermine vital democratic norms, embrace anti-Semitism, and engage in coordinated violence to bring fascism to the U.S., and of those unsung heroes who refused to let them succeed.

Maddow rightly views education as vital to ensuring that past isn’t prologue.

Regardless of personal political ideology, we must all recognize this modern-day profile in courage.  

Few have the moral standing of former Wyoming Congresswoman and one-time rising GOP star Liz Cheney to interrogate the once honorable GOP’s tragic erosion of leadership. Cheney emerged a party pariah not by abandoning conservative values, but rather by refusing to subordinate those values to her party’s absolute embrace of Donald Trump. 

I admire Cheney’s standing firm, resisting Trump’s willingness to undermine longstanding democratic norms, especially his role in fomenting the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol to subvert the peaceful transfer of power. Cheney, whose father was Vice President under George W. Bush, insistently elevated patriotism above partisanship, including serving on the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.

When giving talks across the country on fixing our broken democracy, I’m always sure to discuss this book. I want citizens to learn the audacious story of Republican operatives, following Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential victory, deploying a targeted hyper-partisan campaign in below-the-radar State General Assembly races. By turning enough blue and purple states red, the GOP empowered those states to gerrymander their House of Representatives maps. 

Although Republicans overreached in thinking they’d entrenched GOP House control for 20 years (it returned Democratic in 2019), the legacy of Redmapping and Bluemapping has been to subvert meaningful electoral representation. Rather than constituents choosing their representatives, hyper-partisan gerrymandering lets representatives choose their constituents. 

RatF**k means a dirty deed done dirt cheap. Fixing our democracy demands knowing how hyper-partisan gerrymandering has RatF**ked our democracy.

I hope all U.S. citizens internalize this book’s essential message. What poses the more serious threat to our ability to continue as a democracy: the events of January 6, 2021, when, for the first time, insurrectionists sought to prevent the peaceful transfer of power or the prolonged build-up to January 6 and its aftermath, marking an ongoing erosion of longstanding democratic norms? 

In this amply researched study, Ziblatt and Levitsky demonstrate that throughout history, although some former democracies have suffered spectacular deaths—a military coup or civil war—most witnessed a gradual erosion process, taking years, even decades, before an inflection point made reversing course impossible. 

We’re all wise to heed the authors’ clarion call to ensure the U.S. doesn’t suffer the fate of other formerly robust, since failed, democracies.

I highly recommend this powerful book, which demonstrates how longstanding political divides have thwarted policies not only benefiting communities of color but also marginalized white communities. McGhee reveals a tragic racial history harming the sum of us. 

Critical Race Theory has emerged as a lightning rod, or Rorschach test, pitting progressives and liberals against conservatives and libertarians. But facing down the threats to our democracy demands recognizing the integral role race has played throughout our history and in our politics and culture. 

This amply researched book provides an essential account that should resonate on all sides. McGhee carefully and thoroughly details the longstanding, tragic history of combined governmental policies and private conduct in systematically subordinating blacks in education, housing, zoning and urban development, and lending practices, ultimately harming us all.