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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From the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, the first comprehensive history of the Western Hemisphere, a sweeping five-century narrative of North and South America that redefines our understanding of both.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Most important history book of 2025
- By Emily B Wachsmann on 05-19-25
By: Greg Grandin
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Mind and Cosmos
- Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False
- By: Thomas Nagel
- Narrated by: Brian Troxell
- Length: 3 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 311
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 264
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Story4 out of 5 stars 262
The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value. This failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Intellectual honesty at its finest
- By Alice Walker on 02-15-18
By: Thomas Nagel
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Democracy in America
- By: Alexis de Tocqueville
- Narrated by: Peter Wickham
- Length: 33 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 26
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 21
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 21
Sent by the French government to examine the American prison system, Alexis de Tocqueville spent nine months touring the United States between 1831 and 1832. However, fascinated by the success of America's democratic system, de Tocqueville took advantage of his stay to examine the country's foundations and glean ideas that might rescue his homeland from the manacles of social inequality. He leaves no stone unturned, exploring each branch of government, the constitution, economics, religion, race, the judiciary, laws, principles, education, culture, and views on wealth and poverty.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Narrator killed it for me
- By RebelRandy on 02-22-21
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Wide Awake
- The Forgotten Force That Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War
- By: Jon Grinspan
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 12 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 17
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 13
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 13
At the start of the 1860 presidential campaign, a handful of fired-up young Northerners appeared as bodyguards to defend anti-slavery stump speakers from frequent attacks. The group called themselves the Wide Awakes. Soon, hundreds of thousands of young White and Black men, and a number of women, were organizing boisterous, uniformed, torch-bearing brigades of their own. These Wide Awakes--mostly working-class Americans in their twenties--became one of the largest, most spectacular, and most influential political movements in our history.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Interesting account
- By MikeEC on 06-06-24
By: Jon Grinspan
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No Democracy Lasts Forever
- How the Constitution Threatens the United States
- By: Erwin Chemerinsky
- Narrated by: Daniel Thomas May
- Length: 7 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 21
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 21
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 21
No Democracy Lasts Forever argues that the Constitution has become a threat to American democracy and must be dramatically changed or replaced if secession is to be avoided. Deeply troubled by the Constitution's inherent flaws, Erwin Chemerinsky, the renowned dean of Berkeley law school, came to the sobering conclusion that our nearly 250-year-old founding document is responsible for the crisis now facing American democracy.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Leftist, but he makes sense to me
- By Mike Liveright on 11-29-24
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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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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 6
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 6
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 6
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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3 out of 5 stars
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Dry But Informative
- By Zane Shields on 04-24-25
By: Nelson Lichtenstein, and others
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Democracy in America
- By: Alexis de Tocqueville
- Narrated by: John Pruden
- Length: 34 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 727
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 597
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 605
In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville, a young French aristocrat and civil servant, made a nine-month journey through the eastern United States. The result was Democracy in America, a monumental study of the strengths and weaknesses of the nation’s evolving politics. His insightful work has become one of the most influential political texts ever written on America.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Most Listenable, if not the Best Translation
- By Michael Allen on 10-04-13
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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 13
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 9
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 9
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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Muppets in Moscow
- The Unexpected Crazy True Story of Making Sesame Street in Russia
- By: Natasha Lance Rogoff, Gary Knell - afterword
- Narrated by: Emily Lahey Shoov
- Length: 10 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 47
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 40
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 40
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the timing appeared perfect to bring Sesame Street to millions of children living in the former Soviet Union. With the Muppets envisioned as ideal ambassadors of Western values, no one anticipated just how challenging and dangerous this would prove to be. In Muppets in Moscow: The Unexpected Crazy True Story of Making Sesame Street in Russia, Natasha Lance Rogoff brings this gripping tale to life.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Intriguing in measures, needs Russian counterpoint
- By Buretto on 01-15-23
By: Natasha Lance Rogoff, and others
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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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An Emancipation of the Mind
- Radical Philosophy, the War Over Slavery, and the Refounding of America
- By: Matthew Stewart
- Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 14
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 12
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Story5 out of 5 stars 12
How a band of antislavery leaders recovered the radical philosophical inspirations of the first American Revolution to defeat the slaveholders' oligarchy in the Civil War.
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5 out of 5 stars
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“The arc of the moral universe is long…”
- By Susan on 03-07-25
By: Matthew Stewart
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Ordinary Notes
- By: Christina Sharpe
- Narrated by: Christina Sharpe
- Length: 7 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 15
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 14
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Story5 out of 5 stars 14
A singular achievement, Ordinary Notes explores profound questions about loss and the shapes of Black life that emerge in the wake. In a series of 248 notes that gather meaning as we hear them, Christina Sharpe skillfully weaves artifacts from the past—public ones alongside others that are poignantly personal—with present realities and possible futures, intricately constructing an immersive portrait of everyday Black existence. The themes and tones that echo through this book always attend, with exquisite care, to the ordinary-extraordinary dimensions of Black life.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Very good…
- By lawrence fauntleroy on 10-01-23
By: Christina Sharpe
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The Metaphysical Club
- A Story of Ideas in America
- By: Louis Menand
- Narrated by: Paul Heitsch
- Length: 17 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 145
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 121
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 122
The Metaphysical Club was an informal group that met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1872, to talk about ideas. Its members included Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., future associate justice of the United States Supreme Court; William James, the father of modern American psychology; and Charles Sanders Peirce, logician, scientist, and the founder of semiotics. The Club was probably in existence for about nine months. No records were kept. The one thing we know that came out of it was an idea - an idea about ideas. This book is the story of that idea.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Hands down the best non fiction book I've read
- By Bryan Decker on 01-15-20
By: Louis Menand
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Reconstruction (Updated Edition)
- America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877
- By: Eric Foner
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 31 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 14
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 14
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 14
Reconstruction chronicles the way in which Americans—black and white—responded to the unprecedented changes unleashed by the war and the end of slavery. It addresses the ways in which the emancipated slaves' quest for economic autonomy and equal citizenship shaped the political agenda of Reconstruction; the remodeling of Southern society and the place of planters, merchants, and small farmers within it; the evolution of racial attitudes and patterns of race relations; and the emergence of a national state possessing vastly expanded authority and committed.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Child of SC
- By William Latham on 02-13-25
By: Eric Foner
Excellent and important Am history
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Comprehensive American History
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A good title with a vague content
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