American Polarisation

In Polarization: What Everyone Needs to Know Nolan McCarty takes listeners through what scholars know and don't know about the origins, development, and implications of our rising political conflicts, delving into social, economic, and geographic determinants of polarization in the United States. While the current political climate seems to suggest that extreme views are becoming more popular, McCarty also argues that, contrary to popular belief, the 2016 election was a natural outgrowth of 40 years of polarized politics, rather than a significant break with the past. 

“Should be required reading for anyone interested in preserving our 246-year experiment in self-government.” —The New York Times Book Review * “Well researched and eloquently presented.” —The Atlantic * “Delivers Cormac McCarthy-worthy drama; while the nonfictional asides imbue...

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES AND USA TODAY BESTSELLER A vital exploration as we head into the 2026 midterm elections of how right-wing extremism, media manipulation, and ideological echo chambers have eroded critical thinking and deepened political divisions—and how we can fight back to save our...

Liberal democracy in America has always contained contradictions—most notably, a noble but abstract commitment to freedom, justice, and equality that, tragically, has seldom been realized in practice. While these contradictions have caused dissent and even violence, there was always an underlying and evolving solidarity drawn from the cultural resources of America’s “hybrid Enlightenment”. James Davison Hunter, who introduced the concept of “culture wars” 30 years ago, tells us in this new book that those historic sources of national solidarity have now largely dissolved.

Social psychologist Peter T. Coleman explores how conflict resolution and complexity science provide guidance for dealing with seemingly intractable political differences. Deploying the concept of attractors in dynamical systems, he explains why we are stuck in this rut as well as the unexpected ways that deeply rooted oppositions can and do change. 

American politics today can be defined by the intense and increasingly toxic divide between Democrats and Republicans. Matthew D. Luttig explores why so many Americans have endorsed this level of political conflict.

How a notorious far right organization set the Republican Party on a long march toward extremism At the height of the John Birch Society’s activity in the 1960s, critics dismissed its members as a paranoid fringe. After all, “Birchers” believed that a vast communist conspiracy existed in...

In a work of deeply reported narrative journalism, The Hunt tells the extraordinary inside story of the deadliest wolf hunt in the history of Yellowstone National Park, in which a fifth of the park’s wolf population was decimated in the winter of 2021–2022, a drama of conservation...

From the celebrated author of the international bestseller The End of History and the Last Man and other books on the most important political questions of our time, comes a strikingly personal intellectual memoir. Francis Fukuyama, a leading public intellectual, is well-known for his landmark...

Increasingly, political parties have adopted not only different policies, but different sets of facts. As E. J. Fagan argues, partisan think tanks have helped create these alternate realities in their capacity as de facto formal party organizations. Through the analyses generated by aligned think tanks, political elites on both the left and right frequently offer radically different assessments of a policy's consequences.

A rallying cry to fight the commodification of human attention, with the tools we need to reclaim our humanity, by a group of writers, artists, and activists in the vanguard of the movement “A stirring battle cry on behalf of our shared humanity against the forces that seek to diminish and...

America is broken. America is divided. 80% of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track. And everything you need to know about the Divided States of America can be explained by two relentless forces: hyper-individualism and hyper-capitalism. American Restraint explores how both hyper-individualism and hyper-capitalism are what is fundamentally ripping our country apart. Traditional solutions and status quo politicians can’t help us.

A Pulitzer Prize winner’s intimate portrait of a church, its radical mission, and its riveting crisis. "Jennifer Pickens adopts an even-keeled reportorial cadence and timbre well suited to Griswold's immersion journalism, which recounts the rise and fall of Circle of Hope."—AudioFile “The...