100 Books Like The Politics of Rage

This history of moderate Republicanism was a long-awaited (especially by me!) analysis of moderate Republicanism written when most historians of the GOP only focused on conservatives. Published in 2012 at the height of the Tea Party Movement, this history is as much a warning to all Americans as it is a methodical accounting of the dismantling of a minority strand of Republicanism.

I find it to be more prescient today than it was the day of publication. Most of the book focuses on the height of what Kabaservice calls the “moderate movement” in the 1960s, but it also accounts for the increasingly frustrating experiences of moderates in the last decades of the twentieth century.

This is a fantastic corrective for understanding what the term “moderate Republican” meant from the age of Eisenhower to George W. Bush when today the label is used to identify any Republican who is open to… show more.

When I first considered researching Republicans, this was the book that pulled me in and convinced me that I was on the right track. There is a captivating story on almost every page, and Gould makes everyone, from the people who founded the Republican Party to its leadership in the 1990s (I read the first edition, but the revised edition takes the narrative into the early 2000s), endlessly engaging.

This book explains how the GOP has shaped and responded to every major moment and contentious issue in United States history since its founding in the Antebellum Era.

This book convinced me that any book on modern conservatism that doesn’t identify women as central figures in that movement is missing much of the picture. Phyllis Schlafly is the most often mentioned female conservative leader in the US, but there are so many more that deserve the attention provided in this book.

The fight for and eventual demise of the Equal Rights Amendment is dramatized in unparallelled fashion and explains the durability of the so-called family values movement, but also the hyperbolic and caustic tenor of today’s politics. Every time I return to this book, I marvel at how relevant it is to contemporary political debates and the post-2016 iteration of the Republican Party.

Nicole Hemmer’s insightful look at and redefinition of the Reagan Era is the type of political history I admire the most. It proves the power of historical context for reexamining contemporary politics. This book is much more than an explainer for Donald Trump’s takeover of the GOP, but it demystifies his rise by tracing the power struggles waged by ultra-partisan Republicans in the 1990s.

It makes a chaotic and norm-breaking era in our politics legible and compelling. This very recent history will come into clearer view over time, but for now, Hemmer provides a great service by weighing in early and helping us decipher the nature of today’s politics. 

Alaska’s politics have always been a blood sport, in part because participants are usually down-to-earth, no-nonsense Alaskans bound and determined to do what they think is right no matter the consequences—even if it costs them an election. 

A former Marine pilot with the famed “Black Sheep” squadron, Jay Hammond came north as a bush pilot and at statehood in 1959 was elected to the Alaska House of Representatives. His self-deprecating accounts of the political battles of the next quarter of a century, including the Permanent Fund, are sure to bring more than a chuckle. I once looked out an aircraft window to see a small plane upside down on a dirt runway at Hamond’s homestead some miles from Port Alsworth. Inquiring, I was told, “Oh, don't worry, Jay’s fine; he just bounced on a bad landing.”

Brammer’s novel has resonated throughout my career, warning of almost inevitable disillusionment with a political powerhouse. Brammer had served as a top aide to Lyndon Johnson, on whom he based Arthur Fenstemaker, a star as bright as Penn Warren’s Willie Stark. The Gay Place spoke to me even more directly, focusing on minor politicos and their ambitions, frailties, and humanity. And the book drove home, through a pervading sadness, the anomie that rises from disillusionment. Brammer’s “Flea Circus” metaphor continues to amuse and bum me.

I’m not usually a fan of political memoirs (I tend to be skeptical of the authors), but this one is an enlightening read in terms of understanding the sorts of structural and governmental prejudices that Hispanic people faced in the early twentieth century as exemplified by New Mexico’s long struggle to obtain statehood. Otero was from a prominent New Mexican family and was the governor of the territory from 1897 to 1906. New Mexico was acquired as part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in the aftermath of the Mexican-American war in 1848, but it didn’t become a state until 1912, due in part to the anti-Hispanic attitudes in Washington DC that Otero discusses in his book.

Mukhopadhyay’s book joined an emerging cohort of books that sought to demonstrate that the collapse of the state does not necessarily lead to a vacuum. This is because any vacuum left by the decline of the state is bound to be filled by other forces, be they local or external to the region.

In the case of Afghanistan, Mukhopadhyay shows through the case of Afghanistan, and based on a fieldwork in the country, how the state that was born out of the ousting of the Taliban in 2001 was capable of co-opting local warlords in the remote periphery and integrate them into the emerging order in the country.

Through a close examination and detailed accounts of several case studies from across Afghanistan, Mukhopadhyay offers persuading arguments about what makes warlords and other peripheral actors useful allies to a weak central government.

George W. Bush, even today, 14 years after leaving the presidency, is a controversial president. But as with all presidents, to understand their politics and policies you have to first understand their personality and character. That’s what I like about this book: Bruni seeks to explain and understand who Bush was as a man—a man who, although the son of a president, never seemed destined to lead a nation and the world and yet ultimately faced one of the greatest crises in US history. Bruni, a former New York Times reporter who covered Bush as presidential nominee and president, shows W.’s weaknesses and strengths, his somewhat surprising life journey of serious endeavors for an often less-than-serious man, and ultimately how the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, changed Bush’s entire outlook and demeanor, thrusting him into an unprecedented challenge that elevated the laid-back good-time guy to a serious and dedicated leader.… show more.

I knew Lobianco (we call him T-Lo) when he was a reporter at the Indiana Statehouse for the Associated Press and the Indianapolis Star. His chronicle of Pence’s story from his youth in Columbus, Indiana, through his rise in Republican politics to his surprising pick to join the Trump ticket is fascinating.

The connection between the strategies and choices Pence made along the way shows a collection of moral bargaining that explains what we see in the former VP today. Hoosiers knew much of these stories in isolation, but the collection of them and the contextualizing of them in hindsight makes sense of the seemingly senseless things he did in his political life.