Conservatism Books - Page 4

Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

Max Weber

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Total reviews: 34 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism represents the starting point in Weber's studies of religion and demonstrates the role played in the development of modern capitalism by Protestant (and particularly Calvinist) ethics. At the same time it does much more, and students new to Weber who are seeking an understanding of the continuing contribution made by this book to current debates on the origins of capitalism, on economic determinism, on methodology, and on the future of contemporary industrial culture, will welcome the introduction written by Anthony Giddens. Giddens analyses the background within which the book was written, summarises its main themes and connects them to broader aspects of Weber's studies in history and sociology. In addition, he provides a concise account of the protracted debate to which The Protestant Ethic has given rise, concluding with an assessment of how far Weber's ideas has withstood the critical battering to which they have been subjected for over seventy years.

Conservatives Without Conscience

John W. Dean

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Total reviews: 166 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Moderate Voice of Reason - FINALLY 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Being a moderate in the USA today is not easy during an election year, we need to constantly hear the sniping on both sides. I was trying to find some information about what happened to conservatives to make them so angry and mean spirited. John Dean provides part of that answer. Their movement was high jacked by authoritarians that pretend to be conservatives. As someone that voted for and supported both Reagan and Clinton, I find our polarization troubling to say the least, to find someone that explains why and how it happened is a relief.

John Dean comes at the issue in a reasoned and dispassionate way that allows the reader to make up their own mind. This is a great change from so many political books today that pummel the reader as though they are too stupid to make up their own mind about complex issues.

Whether you are blue or red, right or left, read this book, share this book, tell people about the main idea of this book. Conservatives are not bad, authoritarians are bad. We do not need to live in fear of liberals, terrorists or foreigners, we need only fear and control the real danger - that we turn over our great democracy to the hypocritical liars that pretend to be conservatives. This book makes sense of today's corrupt and sad political situation. We can save our great republic, but we need to understand the real danger and John Dean lays it out perfectly.

Editorial Review:

John Dean, author of The New York Times bestseller Worse Than Watergate, takes a sobering look at how radical elements are destroying the Republican Party along with the very foundations of American democracy.

Unabridged CDs - 8 CDs, 9 hours

One Man's America: The Pleasures and Provocations of Our Singular Nation

George Will

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Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

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In his provocative and compelling new book, America’s most widely read and most influential commentator casts his gimlet eye on our singular nation. Moving far beyond the strict confines of politics, George F. Will offers a fascinating look at the people, stories, and events–often unheralded–that make the American drama so endlessly entertaining and instructive.

With Will’s signature erudition and wry wit always on display, One Man’s America chronicles a spectacular, eclectic procession of figures who have shaped our cultural landscape–from Playboy founder Hugh Hefner to National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr., from Victorian poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, from cotton picker— turned—country singer Buck Owens to actor-turned-president Ronald Reagan.

Will crisscrosses the country to illuminate what it is that makes America distinctive. He visits the USS Arizona memorial in Pearl Harbor and ponders its enduring links to the present. He travels to Milwaukee to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of an iconic brand, Harley-Davidson. In Los Angeles he finds the inspiring future of education, while in New York he confronts the dispiriting didacticism of the avant-garde. He ventures to the Civil War battlefields of Virginia to explore what we risk when we efface our own history. And on the outskirts of Chicago he investigates one of the darkest chapters in American history, only to discover a shining example of resilience and grace–the best the country has to offer.

Will’s wide lens takes in much more as well–everything from the “most emblematic novel of the 1930s” (and no, it is not about the Joads) to the cult of ESPN to Brooks Brothers and Ben & Jerry’s. And of course, One Man’s America would not be complete without the author’s insights on the national pastime, baseball–the icons and the cheats, the hapless and the greats.

Finally, in a personal and reflective turn, Will writes movingly of his thirty-five-year-old son Jon, born with Down syndrome, and pays loving and poignant tribute to his mother, who died at the age of ninety-eight after a long struggle with dementia.

The essays in One Man’s America, even when critiquing American culture, reflect Will’s deep affection and regard for our nation. After all, he notes, when America falls short, it does so only as compared to “the uniquely high standards it has set for itself.” In the end, this brilliantly informative and entertaining book reminds us of the enduring value of “the simple virtues and decencies that can make communities flourish and that have made America great and exemplary.”

Who's Looking Out for You?

Bill O'Reilly

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Total reviews: 38 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

From the mega-bestselling author of The O'Reilly Factor and The No Spin Zone, a no-holds-barred exposé of the people and institutions who are letting Americans down – and what we should do about it.


Bill O’Reilly is mad as hell – and he’s not going to let you take it anymore. In his most powerful and personal book yet, this media powerhouse and unstoppable truth-teller takes on those individuals and institutions in American life who are failing in their duties – big-time. In his inimitable style, mixing wit, pugnacity, and plain common sense, O’Reilly kicks butt and takes (and also names) names – from crooked corporate weasels to venal politicians to lazy and/or politically correct bureaucrats to sexually predatory priests and the Church hierarchy that protects them to a media establishment rife with political bias and economically hooked on violence and smut. At the same time that he calls the famous and powerful to account, he dares to get personal, questioning just how much our closest friends, families, and lovers do look out for us, and delivering a powerful message about personal responsibility and self-reliance in an uncertain world. He forces us to ask just how much genuine altruism is left in a society that thrives on self-indulgence and ruthless competition.
Who’s Looking Out for You? is a book that boldly confronts our worst fears and biggest problems in a post-9/11, post-corporate-meltdown world. Its sage, candid advice on regaining control and trust in these troubled times will resonate with the millions of readers and viewers who have come to believe in Bill O’Reilly as the man who speaks for them.

Why You're Wrong About the Right: Behind the Myths: The Surprising Truth About Conservatives

S. E. Cupp, Brett Joshpe

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Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

And on your right, ladies and gentlemen, please observe The Conservative (Conservitus Americanus). This fascinating species in-habits vast territories across middle America, but rarely reveals itself in coastal urban areas. It is commonly believed to be uptight, humorless, and devoid of compassion, and is often characterized as racist, homophobic, and highly eco-unfriendly. Primary behaviors include unnecessary warmongering, tax cutting, and gun collecting. For decades, conservatives have proven to be hopelessly un-hip, and their mating habits dull. They are highly feared and often despised, for so few know and understand their true nature.

Get ready to meet the conservative next door or in the office down the hall, the person you never thought in a million years was one of "them." Lively, witty, and thought-provoking, Why You're Wrong About the Right blows the lid off the stereotypes that have long been associated with the American Right, and reveals the face of today's conservatives: an intellectually and philosophically diverse new breed of young, outgoing, smart, friendly professionals who live and work among liberals everywhere!

Themselves closet conservatives in Leftoid Land (aka Manhattan), S. E. Cupp and Brett Joshpe inject their own unique and colorful points of view into an honest dialogue on conservative ideas in American life and popular culture, and draw from interviews with a roster of renowned writers and political personalities, including Tony Stewart, Tucker Carlson, Brian C. Anderson, Laura Ingraham, Pat Toomey, David Horowitz, Ted Hayes, and many more.

Undercover conservatives, reveal your true colors with pride! Liberals, hug a conservative today! And whichever side you find yourself on, you'll be engaged, surprised, and happily re-educated when you discover Why You're Wrong About the Right.

Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again

David Frum

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Total reviews: 15 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Thought provoking discourse for genuine conservatives 5 out of 5 stars.
7 of 10 people found this review helpful.

Both the Republican and Democrat national parties are built on the "big tent" theory: that they are to incorporate all the divergent views of their respective constituencies into a single party, rather than have dozens of splinter parties as in Europe and elsewhere.

The result has been a remarkably stable system of government. The serious student of politics knwos that within the larger party, there is always a dominant faction and that this dominant faction changes from time to time.

For about thirty years, genuine conservatives dominated the Republican Party. With them came the West's victory over the Soviet Union, the freeing of Eastern Europe without bloodshed, forcing welfare and budget reform on the nation and other victories, large and small, including the historic 1994 election victory. Perhaps because of its very success, the Republican Party lost its way and genuine conservatives were shouldered aside.

Now comes David Frum, a Canadian, with his thoughts on how Conservatism can win again.

It is indeed a thought provoking book, but not one that will be adopted as a Conservative bible.

Frum's basic thesis is that conservatives have lost their way, that too many of them have lost touch with the changing public and its views. He is right in his perceptions, but his prescriptions may not be acceptable to real conservatives.

For example, Frum goes on at length about how his proposal for a new way of viewing the abortion issue. I have a better idea, I think: ignore. Just say that the government has no business getting involved with the question at all and take the Republican Party out of a can't win situation.

Frum's suggestions on trying to get people to understand that terrorism is a real problem, on the other hand, are sound as are his suggestions for true reform of public education.

To his credit, Frum doesn't declare that his ideas are the only ideas. They are suggestions to get the debate rolling - and his book is laudable for that. It is, in fact, excellent and thought provoking reading.

One thing Frum can't do in this book, however, is to reconnect conservatives to the leadership of the Republican Party, which truly seems to have lost its way.

Jerry

Editorial Review:

At a moment of crisis and pessimism for American conservatives, David Frum offers fresh ideas---and fresh hope. Too many conservatives and Republicans have shut their eyes to negative trends. Frum offers answers.

State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America

Patrick J. Buchanan

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Total reviews: 246 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

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"The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities," said Theodore Roosevelt. State of Emergency will demonstrate that this is exactly what is happening to America and may now be unstoppable.
The United States of 1960 was a First World nation, 90% of whose people traced their ancestry to Europe, 97% of whom spoke English. We studied the same history and literature in school, went to the same movies, read the same books, listened to the same radio and TV, cherished the same heroes. We were one nation and one people.
That America is dead and gone. The deconstruction of America -- along the lines of culture and values, language and faith, allegiance and loyalty -- has begun. By 2050, Americans of European descent will be a minority in the United States. One hundred million Hispanics with ties of language and loyalty to Mexico and Latin America will be living here, concentrated in the Southwest
It is the thesis of State of Emergency that the Melting Pot is broken beyond repair, that assimilation and Americanization are not taking place, and that only action is to seal and secure America’s borders to halt the flow of over a million legal and illegal immigrants a year, and to begin the Americanization of the tens of millions of aliens in our midst can save America. Our civilization cannot survive indefinitely what is going on.
 State of Emergency reveals who is doing this to us, why they are doing it, why this is our last chance, and how, if the will is there, we can yet save America from Balkanization and break-up.

The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power

Jeff Sharlet

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Total reviews: 22 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

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A journalist's penetrating look at the untold story of christian fundamentalism's most elite organization, a self-described invisible network dedicated to a religion of power for the powerful

They are the Family—fundamentalism's avant-garde, waging spiritual war in the halls of American power and around the globe. They consider themselves the new chosen—congressmen, generals, and foreign dictators who meet in confidential cells, to pray and plan for a "leadership led by God," to be won not by force but through "quiet diplomacy." Their base is a leafy estate overlooking the Potomac in Arlington, Virginia, and Jeff Sharlet is the only journalist to have reported from inside its walls.

The Family is about the other half of American fundamentalist power—not its angry masses, but its sophisticated elites. Sharlet follows the story back to Abraham Vereide, an immigrant preacher who in 1935 organized a small group of businessmen sympathetic to European fascism, fusing the far right with his own polite but authoritarian faith. From that core, Vereide built an international network of fundamentalists who spoke the language of establishment power, a "family" that thrives to this day. In public, they host Prayer Breakfasts; in private, they preach a gospel of "biblical capitalism," military might, and American empire. Citing Hitler, Lenin, and Mao as leadership models, the Family's current leader, Doug Coe, declares, "We work with power where we can, build new power where we can't."

Sharlet's discoveries dramatically challenge conventional wisdom about American fundamentalism, revealing its crucial role in the unraveling of the New Deal, the waging of the cold war, and the no-holds-barred economics of globalization. The question Sharlet believes we must ask is not "What do fundamentalists want?" but "What have they already done?"

Part history, part investigative journalism, The Family is a compelling account of how fundamentalism came to be interwoven with American power, a story that stretches from the religious revivals that have shaken this nation from its beginning to fundamentalism's new frontiers. No other book about the right has exposed the Family or revealed its far-reaching impact on democracy, and no future reckoning of American fundamentalism will be able to ignore it.

Leave Us Alone: Getting the Government's Hands Off Our Money, Our Guns, Our Lives

Grover Norquist

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Total reviews: 17 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

One of the nation's most influential political strategists provides a daring manifesto and vision for conservatives.

The modern Republican party is a coalition of groups and tendencies created during the political life of Ronald Reagan, based on principle rather than region and history. The new political movement that now controls much of the Republican party is one of Americans who simply wish to be left alone by the government. They are not asking the government for others' money, time, or attention. Rather, they want to be free to own a gun, homeschool their children, pray, invest their money, and control their own destiny.

They are the Leave Us Alone coalition, at the heart of the center-right, and Grover Norquist argues that it will grow in power and size during the next generation. Directly opposed to this coalition is the descriptively titled Takings Coalition, which is at the heart of the tax-and-spend left, and they will battle for control of America's future over the next fifty years. It is increasingly important to better understand these coalitions than it is the Republican or Democratic parties themselves.

In a compelling and powerful narrative, Norquist describes the two competing coalitions in American politics, how they are organized, what makes them stronger or weaker. What each can achieve and what they cannot do. And how you may fit into the contest as well as gain a deeper understanding of American politics—where it's been, where it is and particularly where it will go—through a series of eye-opening economic, demographic, and political trends that will shape these coalitions in the years to come.

Required reading for any conservative who wants a deeper understanding of politics in America today, Leave Us Alone shows the order of battle for the next generation.

Flying High: Remembering Barry Goldwater

William F. Buckley Jr.

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Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

If any two people can be called indispensable in launching the conservative movement in American politics, they are William F. Buckley Jr. and Barry Goldwater. Buckley’s National Review was at the center of conservative political analysis from the mid-fifties onward. But the policy intellectuals knew that to actually change the way the country was run, they needed a presidential candidate, and the man they turned to was Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. Goldwater was in many ways the perfect choice: self-reliant, unpretentious, unshakably honest and dashingly handsome, with a devoted following that grew throughout the fifties and early sixties. He possessed deep integrity and a sense of decency that made him a natural spokesman for conservative ideals. But his flaws were a product of his virtues. He wouldn’t bend his opinions to make himself more popular, he insisted on using his own inexperienced advisors to run his presidential campaign, and in the end he electrified a large portion of the electorate but lost the great majority. Flying High is Buckley’s partly fictional tribute to the man who was in many ways his alter ego in the conservative movement. It is the story of two men who looked as if they were on the losing side of political events, but were kept aloft by the conviction that in fact they were making history.