APPENDIX B:
RECOMMENDED READING

RADCONISM

I have found the following books especially helpful for understanding the major ideas of radical conservatism in modern America, and their origins:

Bennett, William J. The Broken Hearth: Reversing the Moral Collapse of the American Family (New York: Broadway Books, 2001).

Bloom, Allan. The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Touchstone, 1988).

Bork, Robert H. Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline (New York: ReganBooks, 1996).

Buckley, William F., Jr. Up from Liberalism (New York: Honor Books, 1965).

Charen, Mona. Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2003).

Friedman, Milton, and Rose Friedman. Free to Choose (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980).

Gilder, George. Wealth and Poverty (New York: Bookthrift, 1984).

Goldwater, Barry M. The Conscience of a Conservative (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1990).

* Harding, Susan Friend. The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001).

Hayek, Friedrich von. The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944).

Herrnstein, Richard, and Charles Murray. The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1999).

Himmelfarb, Gertrude. One Nation, Two Cultures: A Searching Examination of American Society in the Aftermath of Our Cultural Revolution (New York: Vintage, 2001).

* Hofstadter, Richard. The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).

* ———. Social Darwinism in American Thought (Boston: Beacon, 1955).

Kagan, Robert. Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (New York: Knopf, 2003).

Kirk, Russell. The Conservative Mind (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1953).

Murray, Charles. Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1984).

Podhoretz, Norman. The Present Danger (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980).

Rand, Ayn. Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: New American Library, 1986).

Strauss, Leo. Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953).

Wanniski, Jude. The Way the World Works (Morristown, N.J.: Polyconomics, 1989).

* An asterisk on this and the following list denotes an author who provides a historical account or analysis, rather than an argument about what the nation should do or become. The distinction between the two types of book is not always easy to draw, of course.

 

THE LIBERAL TRADITION IN AMERICA

The following books are helpful for understanding the major ideas of American liberalism that dominated the twentieth century:

Beard, Charles A. The Idea of National Interest (New York: Macmillan, 1934).

Brandeis, Louis D. Other People’s Money (New York: Macmillan, 1914).

Croly, Herbert David. The Promise of American Life (1909; New York: Transaction Books, 1993).

Dewey, John. The Public and Its Problems (New York: Holt, 1927).

Fulbright, J. William. The Arrogance of Power (New York: Random House, 1967).

Galbraith, John Kenneth. The Affluent Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958).

* Goldman, Eric F. Rendezvous with Destiny: A History of Modern American Reform (New York: Vintage, 1967).

Harrington, Michael. The Other America (New York: Macmillan, 1962).

* Hofstadter, Richard. The Age of Reform (New York: Vintage, 1955).

* Isaacson, Walter. The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997).

Kennan, George F. Memoirs, 1925–1950 (New York: Knopf, 1983).

Popper, Karl. The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971).

Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1971).

* Rorty, Richard. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).

Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr. The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949).

* Schwarz, Jordan. Liberal: Adolf A. Berle and the Vision of an American Era (New York: Free Press, 1987).

* Steel, Ronald. Walter Lippmann and the American Century (New York: Vintage, 1980).

Tarbell, Ida. The History of the Standard Oil Company (New York: Macmillan, 1904).

Tawney, R. H. The Acquisitive Society (London: Macmillan, 1921).

Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Macmillan, 1912).

THE CURRENT BATTLE

The following books provide useful insights into the battle over American politics and values that emerged full blown in the 1990s and continued into the first decade of the twenty-first century:

Alterman, Eric. What Liberal Media?: The Truth About Bias and the News (New York: Basic Books, 2003).

Blumenthal, Sidney. The Clinton Wars (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003).

Brock, David. Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2002).

Dionne, E. J., Jr. They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next Political Era (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).

Krugman, Paul. The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century (New York: Norton, 2003).

Nye, Joseph S., Jr. The Paradox of American Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go It Alone (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

Teixeira, Ruy, and Joel Rogers. Why the White Working Class Still Matters (New York: Basic Books, 2000).