100 Books Like Undue Hate

This book gave me a deeper appreciation of how moral intuitions shape political divisions—not as accidents of ideology but as features of human psychology. Haidt’s metaphor of the elephant and the rider helped me see why rational argument so often fails to persuade across political lines: because reason follows intuition, not the other way around.

His mapping of multiple “moral taste buds”—including authority, loyalty, and sanctity—also challenged the narrow moral frameworks that dominate secular discourse. While I don’t agree with everything—particularly his optimistic lean toward moral equilibrium or his underemphasis on structural power—I admire his effort to move us beyond outrage toward curiosity. It’s a valuable guide for understanding why we talk past one another—and how we might start listening instead.

This book is not about America, and not directly about politics or political polarization. It's a well-known conflict resolution book. I included it because I think it might help some people see our divides through a different and more healthy lens. 

This book uses an engaging fictional premise to walk through some important points about resolving conflict. For example, it talks about how even when we're sure we're right in a conflict (as most people in conflicts tend to be), we may still be wrong in how we treat others. And it talks about how our animosity and contempt towards others can cause them to behave in the very ways that most upset us.

Talisse does a great job putting our divides in the context of the fundamental problem of democracy.

How can we maintain democratic principles when we see the "other side" as very wrong, or even as dangerous? Should we maintain those principles? What do we owe our fellow citizens even when we see them as very flawed?  

In addition to these hard and important questions, Talisse focuses on a less examined negative aspect of polarization: us-vs-them animosity makes us less able to get along even with people who are politically similar to us. We become more fractured even on "our side," and less able to do the basic work of politics.

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.

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. 

I am a huge fan of people who can translate vast amounts of research findings in a way that’s engaging, accessible, and accurate. I’m also a fan of people who don’t waste our time by shying away from hard truths, like the fact that America’s polarization problem is largely about race or that our polarized politics get baked back into our institutions and make everything worse. Klein is a master at all of this.

When I read his book, I was deep in the academic literature about the psychology of misinformation beliefs. But his book made me zoom out to consider factors way upstream of misinformation beliefs (namely social identity), to start unpacking how these upstream factors are themselves shaped by our political and media institutions.

Mettler and Lieberman place our current challenges within the broader context of other democratic crises in American history.

Readers will find it helpful to understand that democracy has been a contested part of our past, from the early days of the Republic to Watergate. Mettler and Lieberman remind us that protecting and enhancing democracy is an ongoing task.

John Price is a liberal Republican, in the old-fashioned sense of the word, but choosing to self-identify today as a moderate. This book details his political coming to age, including being co-founder of the Ripon Society. Following Nixon’s 1968 election, Price joined his White House staff as one of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s deputies, serving as director of the Urban Affairs Council. Nixon attended twenty-one of its twenty-three Cabinet Room meetings. Nixon was adamantly anti-Communist, but what John shows is that, far from being a die-hard conservative, his approach to governing was that of a pragmatist, asking how best can the government help to address this issue? John and I served on the same Domestic Council but were assigned different public policy responsibilities. I’m impressed by his personal story – and by his political insights.

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.

Faced with the deluge of modern events, I rely on intrepid authors like Mogelson to help me make sense of the world.

The book is his report back from spending a year traveling across the U.S. from the spring of 2020 to the winner of 2021, from Covid-lockdown protests in Michigan to the insurrection of January 6 in Washington, D.C. I found it both insightful and heartbreaking.