100 Books Like Prequel

What are the true costs of racism and the benefits of breaking out of its cage? I deeply admire the way Heather McGhee mines evidence and shows how the construction of race has worked against the interests of everyone, regardless of race. Then, she flips the script and shows compelling evidence for all the ways that we as a people benefit by working together. She calls it the ‘Solidarity Dividend,’ and I love this term she has coined.

She gives living examples of how everyone benefits when we work together to move beyond the zero-sum game, whether in the fields of healthcare, education, housing, employment, voting rights, the safety net, or more. Data-driven but in a refreshing style, McGhee’s book is inspiring!

This book has become a touchstone in conversations about democratic erosion. What I found most compelling was how it uses global and historical patterns to explain how democracies can slide into authoritarianism—slowly, and often legally. It helped me connect institutional changes in the U.S. to larger global trends in democratic backsliding.

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argue that today’s democracies rarely collapse through sudden coups. Instead, they are gradually weakened from within by elected leaders who stretch or disregard institutional norms to expand their own power. These changes frequently occur under the appearance of legality, making democratic decay harder to detect.

Drawing on historical and global examples, the authors show how democracies slide into authoritarianism when two foundational norms begin to erode: mutual toleration (the recognition that political rivals are legitimate) and institutional forbearance (the practice of exercising restraint even when one holds legal authority). When those norms break down,… show more.

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.

It is important for Americans to understand why millions of Germans who were not violent antisemites and racists voted for the Nazis. Looking at the case of a typical German town, Allen shows that economics, culture wars, and fear for the future motivated middle-class Germans to vote for an extremist party – not because of its racism, but despite its racism.

Born in 1934 in Berchtesgaden, in the shadow of Hitler’s Eagles Nest, Irmgard Hunt witnessed the growth of fascist ideology among the people she loved during an otherwise idyllic childhood. As the shadow of World War II fell over the mountain, however, Hunt began to question and then disavow the Nazi doctrines she had accepted as a young child. As time went on and the regime crumbled literally before her eyes, she was vocal in confronting her country’s criminal past and in championing the democratic principles her elders had so easily dismissed.

Throughout the early 20th century, General Smedley Butler was the go-to commander for overthrowing other countries' governments on behalf of US interests. So, when American fascists conspired to oust then-recently elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt, they recruited Butler to lead their coup attempt. The fascists’ error: they failed to take Butler’s remorse seriously when, in a 1931 speech, he lamented his career as a "…high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and the bankers." The Plot to Seize The White House details how Butler brought the conspiracy down.

I was reminded as I read that there always were—and will be—powerful people eager to topple the barriers democracy puts in their way. But it’s also a reminder that, as in the 2020 election, principled people, in the right positions, make all the difference. 

This is a dazzling mix of theory, sociology, and history. Falasca-Zamponi is attentive to the myths, rituals, festivals and ceremonies, symbols, and recurring images of Italian fascism—and she is attentive, too, to the political power that Mussolini relentlessly drew from such cultural forms.

With tremendous analytical imagination, Falasca-Zamponi unpacks the significance of the fascist salute, Mussolini’s balcony poses, all the axe-and-bundle imagery, those omnipresent black shirts, and the fascists’ distinctive “passo romano” marching style. For me, the heart of the book is its intense analysis of fascist violence as spectacle. Not just spectacle, though. Falasca-Zamponi also makes the case that for the early fascists violence—“great, beautiful, inexorable violence,” in Mussolini’s words—was sublime, regenerative, glorious, salvific.

The early fascists made violence, Falasca-Zamponi suggests, as if it were art. 

An American journalist, expelled from Italy in 1925, traces roots, rise, and rule of Il Duce in this 1935 book, which is as vivid as its title.

Mussolini appears as a cheap showman, who, “acting the Hero,” revived ancient Roman pomp and spectacles. He was also aware of the power of mass media, especially the cinema, “posing before men and moviemen.”

One of the virtues of Seldes’ book are the extensive quotations, which unmask Mussolini and others in their own words. Fascist documents, quoted at length, include “The Fascist Decalogue” (note its VIII. Commandment!) and the “Fascist Catechism,” which must be read to be (dis)believed.

Seldes’ book has become valuable again in the current age of assorted domestic and foreign media- and image-obsessed demagogues, autocrats, and dictators.

Fascism and Communism purported to explain all social and political phenomena and, on that basis, justified their authoritarian or totalitarian rule. The term ‘fascist’ tends to be loosely applied to intolerant and autocratic political behaviour, but the outstandingly lucid, and highly readable, book by Robert Paxton not only surveys fascism in practice – in Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany and in fascist movements and parties in many different countries – it also shows what its distinctive components are. What he calls the ‘mobilizing passions’ of fascism include the glorification of war and violence, expansionism, racism, a fixation on national solidarity, rejection of the legitimacy of diverse interests and values within a society, and, not least, a cult of the heroic leader, with the leader’s instincts counting for more than reasoned, evidence-based argument.