Rip Gop

A leading pollster and adviser to America’s most important political figures explains why the Republicans will crash in 2020. For decades the GOP has seen itself in an uncompromising struggle against a New America that is increasingly secular, racially diverse, and fueled by immigration. It has fought non-traditional family structures, ripped huge holes in the social safety net, tried to stop women from being independent, and pitted aging rural Evangelicals against the younger, more dynamic cities. Since the 2010 election put the Tea Party in control of the GOP, the party has condemned America to years of fury, polarization and broken government. The election of Donald Trump enabled the Republicans to make things even worse. All seemed lost. But the Republicans have set themselves up for a shattering defeat. In RIP GOP, Stanley Greenberg argues that the 2016 election hurried the party’s imminent demise. Using amazing insights from his focus groups with real people and surprising revelations from his own polls, Greenberg shows why the GOP is losing its defining battle. He explores why the 2018 election, when the New America fought back, was no fluke. And he predicts that in 2020 the party of Lincoln will be left to the survivors, opening America up to a new era of renewal and progress.

Torn apart by infighting over a diminishing base, the Republican Party seems destined to shatter. Award-winning author and Washington journalist Martin Schram brings his keen eye to this important and timely issue, pulling from demographics, polling, and political science analysis to paint a startlingly bleak picture of the Republican Party. With social conservatives and Wall Street businesses scrabbling for purchase, not even the influx of new blood from the deeply radical Tea Party can hold the Republican party together. Employing irrefutable numerical analysis and backed by strong historical research, Martin shows that it has become almost impossible for a Republican to win the White House. As demographics move against the party of old, white, southern evangelicals, Hispanics surge in number, and social issues concerning women and younger voters leap to the forefront of voter issues, Americans have begun asking themselves the big questions about the grand old party. Will the GOP go the way of the Whigs or the pre-Civil War Democrats? Will it break apart or will one wing emerge triumphant? What could bring it back together, and should it even be saved? Is this the end of the Republican Party? Sure to be deeply controversial, RIP GOP is both wake-up call and a confirmation of undeniable trends. A must-read for Democrats, this book is for anyone interested in the fate of the Republican party going into the sure-to-be historic 2016 elections.

As a Republican, Mona Charen hardly recognizes her own party anymore. The party’s focus has shifted from policy to provocation. Over time, many mainstream Republicans have embraced extremist views that were once reserved for the fringes—challenging free and fair elections, praising demagogues, encouraging conspiracies, and abandoning basic respect and decency. The Republican Party crashed through the floor of decency when Donald J. Trump was nominated as the party’s candidate in the 2016 presidential election. Since then, it has continued to find new lows in conspiracism, cynicism, stoked outrage, falsehoods, and finally, insurrection. In this collection of syndicated columns since 2016, Ms. Charen, a long-time political analyst, calls out the Republican Party for drifting far from its principles, offering sharp criticism and level-headed advice. Charen’s journey has taken her to distrust of excessive partisanship on all sides and a renewed urgency about confirming the values and traditions of small-l liberal democracy.

A New York Times Editors’ Choice An “essential” (Jane Mayer) account of the dangerous marriage of plutocratic economic priorities and right-wing populist appeals — and how it threatens the pillars of American democracy. In Let Them Eat Tweets, best-selling political scientists Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson argue that despite the rhetoric of Donald Trump, Josh Hawley, and other right-wing “populists,” the Republican Party came to serve its plutocratic masters to a degree without precedent in modern global history. To maintain power while serving the 0.1 percent, the GOP has relied on increasingly incendiary racial and cultural appeals to its almost entirely white base. Calling this dangerous hybrid “plutocratic populism,” Hacker and Pierson show how, over the last forty years, reactionary plutocrats and right-wing populists have become the two faces of a party that now actively undermines democracy to achieve its goals against the will of the majority of Americans. Based on decades of research and featuring a new epilogue about the intensification of GOP radicalism after the 2020 election, Let Them Eat Tweets authoritatively explains the doom loop of tax cutting and fearmongering that defines the Republican Party—and reveals how the rest of us can fight back.

Take your students on a journey into the world of campaign managers. Powered by scores of interviews and surveys of political professionals, the book considers the purpose, potency, and poetry of modern political campaigns in the US.

This book is concerned with the polarisation of US society as represented in 27 editorial articles on the presidential election campaign 2020, taken from three different newspapers. The aim of the study is to develop an integrated framework for the linguistic analysis of societal polarisation, which combines findings from the political sciences and sociology with critical linguistic concepts from political discourse analysis and newspaper discourse analysis. The main finding is that all three newspapers, irrespective of their political orientation, make use of polarising discourse around the presidential election 2020 and thus partially contribute to a split US society. The explicit presentation of the media company’s stance as well as the distinct rejection and the explicit portrayal of aversion towards opposing positions can be detected as main factors in creating a polarising environment. Equally interesting appeared the prevalence of the topos Threat/ Crisis/ Defeat in all three newspapers, indicating a focus on negativity. De-polarising elements are only rarely found and do not seem to be contributing to the easing of tensions in society.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Dispatches from the 2016 election that provide an eerily prescient take on our democracy’s uncertain future, by the country’s most perceptive and fearless political journalist. In twenty-five pieces from Rolling Stone—plus two original essays—Matt Taibbi tells the story of Western civilization’s very own train wreck, from its tragicomic beginnings to its apocalyptic conclusion. Years before the clown car of candidates was fully loaded, Taibbi grasped the essential themes of the story: the power of spectacle over substance, or even truth; the absence of a shared reality; the nihilistic rebellion of the white working class; the death of the political establishment; and the emergence of a new, explicit form of white nationalism that would destroy what was left of the Kingian dream of a successful pluralistic society. Taibbi captures, with dead-on, real-time analysis, the failures of the right and the left, from the thwarted Bernie Sanders insurgency to the flawed and aimless Hillary Clinton campaign; the rise of the “dangerously bright” alt-right with its wall-loving identity politics and its rapturous view of the “Racial Holy War” to come; and the giant fail of a flailing, reactive political media that fed a ravenous news cycle not with reporting on political ideology, but with undigested propaganda served straight from the campaign bubble. At the center of it all stands Donald J. Trump, leading a historic revolt against his own party, “bloviating and farting his way” through the campaign, “saying outrageous things, acting like Hitler one minute and Andrew Dice Clay the next.” For Taibbi, the stunning rise of Trump marks the apotheosis of the new postfactual movement. Taibbi frames the reporting with original essays that explore the seismic shift in how we perceive our national institutions, the democratic process, and the future of the country. Insane Clown President is not just a postmortem on the collapse and failure of American democracy. It offers the riveting, surreal, unique, and essential experience of seeing the future in hindsight. “Scathing . . . What keeps the pages turning in this so freshly familiar story line is the vivid observation and original turns of phrase.”—San Francisco Chronicle