Illiberal America
A History
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Illiberal America
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Narrated by:
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Mitch Crawford
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By:
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Steven Hahn
About this listen
If your reaction to the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol was to think, 'That's not us,' think again: in Illiberal America, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian uncovers a powerful illiberalism as deep seated in the American past as the founding ideals.
Driven by popular movements and implemented through courts and legislation, illiberalism is part of the American bedrock. The United States was born a republic of loosely connected states and localities that demanded control of their domestic institutions, including slavery. As white settlement expanded west and immigration exploded in eastern cities, the democracy of the 1830s fueled expulsions of Blacks, Native Americans, Catholics, Mormons, and abolitionists.
After the Civil War, southern states denied new constitutional guarantees of civil rights and enforced racial exclusions in everyday life. Illiberalism was modernized during the Progressive movement through advocates of eugenics who aimed to reduce the numbers of racial and ethnic minorities.
The turmoil of the 1960s enabled George Wallace to tap local fears of unrest and build support outside the South, a politics adopted by Richard Nixon in 1968. Today, with illiberalism shaping elections and policy debates over guns, education, and abortion, it is urgent to understand its long history, and how that history bears on the present crisis.
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-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 26
The American Civil War stands at the center of the story, its military history and the drama of emancipation the highlights. Taylor relies on vivid characters to carry the story, from Joseph Hooker, whose timidity in crisis was exploited by Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in the Union defeat at Chancellorsville, to Martin Delany and Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Black abolitionists whose critical work in Canada and the United States advanced emancipation and the enrollment of Black soldiers in Union armies.
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5 out of 5 stars
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fascinating!
- By Brandon Marken on 07-12-24
By: Alan Taylor
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A Great Disorder
- National Myth and the Battle for America
- By: Richard Slotkin
- Narrated by: Chris Sorensen
- Length: 20 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 11
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 8
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 8
A Great Disorder is a bold, urgent work that helps us make sense of today's culture wars through a brilliant reconsideration of America's foundational myths and their use in contemporary politics. Richard Slotkin identifies five myths, born of different eras, that have shaped our conception of what it means to be American: the myths of the Frontier, the Founding, the Civil War (which he breaks into two opposing camps, Emancipation and the Lost Cause), and the Good War, embodied by the multiethnic platoon fighting for freedom.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Opinion masquerading as history
- By bob bishop on 02-19-25
By: Richard Slotkin
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Myth America
- Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past
- By: Kevin M. Kruse, Julian E. Zelizer
- Narrated by: Allan Aquino, Maleah Woodley, Todd Menesses, and others
- Length: 12 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 245
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 220
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Story4 out of 5 stars 219
The United States is in the grip of a crisis of bad history. Distortions of the past promoted in the conservative media have led large numbers of Americans to believe in fictions over facts, making constructive dialogue impossible and imperiling our democracy. In Myth America, Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer have assembled an all-star team of fellow historians to push back against this misinformation.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Right Wing Bashing book!! Aka a History Book
- By amy on 02-08-23
By: Kevin M. Kruse, and others
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Rebellion
- How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart—Again
- By: Robert Kagan
- Narrated by: Jason Culp
- Length: 5 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 102
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 92
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Story5 out of 5 stars 92
The 2024 election could be the last free election held in a unified America. So warns Robert Kagan in this brilliant and terrifying analysis of the perilous state of democracy in the United States today. If Donald Trump loses the upcoming election, as he did in 2020, but refuses to accept the result, as he also did in the last election, he is likely to call on his millions of followers to repudiate the election results. It will be a short step from there to Republican-dominated states rejecting the legitimacy of the federal government and effectively seceding.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Best Book In Its Class
- By Laurie on 05-02-24
By: Robert Kagan
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Freedom's Dominion
- A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power
- By: Jefferson Cowie
- Narrated by: André Chapoy
- Length: 16 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 65
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 60
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 60
American freedom is typically associated with the fight of the oppressed for a better world. But for centuries, whenever the federal government intervened on behalf of nonwhite people, many white Americans fought back in the name of freedom—their freedom to dominate others. In Freedom’s Dominion, historian Jefferson Cowie traces this complex saga by focusing on a quintessentially American place: Barbour County, Alabama, the ancestral home of political firebrand George Wallace.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Very easily read and I learned a lot
- By Kev All on 02-05-23
By: Jefferson Cowie
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Stolen Pride
- Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right
- By: Arlie Russell Hochschild
- Narrated by: Ellen Archer
- Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 51
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 51
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 51
For all the attempts to understand the state of American politics and the blue/red divide, we've ignored what economic and cultural loss can do to pride. What happens, Arlie Russell Hochschild asks, when a proud people in a hard-hit region suffer the deep loss of pride and are confronted with a powerful political appeal that makes it feel "stolen"? Hochschild's research drew her to Pikeville, Kentucky, in the heart of Appalachia, within the whitest and second-poorest congressional district in the nation.
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4 out of 5 stars
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interesting conversations
- By Mark on 03-15-25
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A Fabulous Failure
- The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism
- By: Nelson Lichtenstein, Judith Stein
- Narrated by: Tom Campbell
- Length: 17 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 5
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 5
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Story5 out of 5 stars 5
When Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, he ended twelve years of Republican rule and seemed poised to enact a progressive transformation of the US economy. Yet by the time he left office, the nation's economic and social policies had instead lurched dramatically rightward, exacerbating the inequalities so troubling in our own time. Nelson Lichtenstein and Judith Stein show how the administration's progressive reformers were stymied by a new world of global capitalism that heightened Wall Street influence, undermined domestic manufacturing, and eviscerated the labor movement.
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5 out of 5 stars
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How We Got Here…
- By D.A. Stone on 11-11-24
By: Nelson Lichtenstein, and others
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Empire of Illusion
- The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle
- By: Chris Hedges
- Narrated by: Jonathan Yen
- Length: 9 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 294
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 254
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 255
We now live in two Americas. One - now the minority - functions in a print-based, literate world that can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth. The other - the majority - is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic. To this majority - which crosses social class lines, though the poor are overwhelmingly affected-presidential debate and political rhetoric is pitched at a sixth-grade level. In this "other America", serious film and theater, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins of society.
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2 out of 5 stars
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A superficial tirade
- By Diueine Monteiro on 04-24-18
By: Chris Hedges
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The Presidents and the People
- Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It
- By: Corey Brettschneider
- Narrated by: Stephen Bel Davies
- Length: 13 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 15
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 13
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 13
In this propulsive history, constitutional law and political science professor Corey Brettschneider provides a thoroughly researched account of assaults on democracy by not one such president, but five.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Similar Presidencies to the Trump Era
- By SAOT66 on 07-29-24
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The Hollow Parties
- The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics
- By: Daniel Schlozman, Sam Rosenfeld
- Narrated by: Tom Beyer
- Length: 14 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall3 out of 5 stars 9
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Performance3 out of 5 stars 9
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Story3 out of 5 stars 9
America's political parties are hollow shells of what they could be, locked in a polarized struggle for power and unrooted as civic organizations. The Hollow Parties takes listeners from the rise of mass party politics in the Jacksonian era through the years of Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Today's parties, overbearing and ineffectual, have emerged from the interplay of multiple party traditions that reach back to the Founding.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Too arcane
- By James Larimer on 07-18-24
By: Daniel Schlozman, and others
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America Last
- The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators
- By: Jacob Heilbrunn
- Narrated by: Kent Klineman
- Length: 8 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 37
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Performance3 out of 5 stars 37
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 37
America Last is a guide for the perplexed, identifying and tracing a persuasion—or the "illiberal imagination"—that has animated conservative politics for a century now. Since the 1940s, the Right has railed against communist fellow travelers in America. Heilbrunn finally corrects the record, showing that dictator worship is a longstanding tradition within modern American conservatism that cannot be ignored—and what it means for us today.
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4 out of 5 stars
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So frustrating
- By SarahMc on 03-13-24
By: Jacob Heilbrunn
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The Other Slavery
- The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America
- By: Andrés Reséndez
- Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin
- Length: 12 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 284
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 247
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 248
Since the time of Columbus, Indian slavery was illegal in much of the American continent. Yet, as Andrés Reséndez illuminates in his myth-shattering The Other Slavery, it was practiced for centuries as an open secret. There was no abolitionist movement to protect the tens of thousands of natives who were kidnapped and enslaved by the conquistadors, then forced to descend into the "mouth of hell" of 18th-century silver mines or, later, made to serve as domestics for Mormon settlers and rich Anglos.
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4 out of 5 stars
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overall a good book
- By Paola V. Hidalgo on 01-23-17
By: Andrés Reséndez
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Minority Rule
- The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People - and the Fight to Resist It
- By: Ari Berman
- Narrated by: Gary Tiedemann
- Length: 11 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 84
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 76
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Story5 out of 5 stars 76
The mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, represented an extreme form of the central danger facing American democracy today: a blatant disregard for the will of the majority. Through voter suppression, election subversion, gerrymandering, dark money, the takeover of the courts, and the whitewashing of history, reactionary white conservatives have strategically entrenched power in the face of a massive demographic and political shift.
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5 out of 5 stars
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SO much great information!
- By CharlieSeymourJr on 05-01-24
By: Ari Berman
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Return of the Strong Gods
- Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West
- By: R.R. Reno
- Narrated by: Rick Adamson
- Length: 7 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 168
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 144
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 144
After the staggering slaughter of back-to-back world wars, the West embraced the ideal of the "open society". The promise: By liberating ourselves from the old attachments to nation, clan, and religion that had fueled centuries of violence, we could build a prosperous world without borders, freed from dogmas and managed by experts. But the populism and nationalism that are upending politics in America and Europe are a sign that after three generations, the postwar consensus is breaking down.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Mandatory reading for disenchanted souls
- By Joshua K. Jones on 06-27-20
By: R.R. Reno
What listeners say about Illiberal America
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- CommentDante
- 04-28-24
Excellent and important Am history
The confederate nazi American goon impulse has always been here and entwined and interacting with our progress to a republic with liberty and justice for all. Keep the nihilistic impulse down in the hole.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Rolando
- 08-27-24
Comprehensive American History
A thorough analysis of US Illiberal history presented in a collection of essays. I'm purchasing the print version of this ASAP
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