The Swamp

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George C. Rable

Although much has been written about the ways in which Confederate politics affected the course of the Civil War, George Rable is the first historian to investigate Confederate political culture in its own right. Focusing on the assumptions, values, and beliefs that formed the foundation of Confederate political ideology, Rable reveals how Southerners attempted to purify the political process and avoid what they saw as the evils of parties and partisanship. According to Rable, secession marked the beginning of a revolution against politics in which the Confederacy's founding fathers saw themselves as the true heirs of the American Revolution. Nevertheless, factionalism developed as the war dragged on, with Confederate nationalists emphasizing political unity and support for President Jefferson Davis's administration and libertarian dissenters warning of the dangers of a centralized Confederate government. Both sides claimed to be the legitimate defenders of a genuine Southern republicanism and of Confederate nationalism, and the conflict between them carried over from the strictly political sphere to matters of military strategy, civil religion, and education. Consulting a wide range of sources, including newspapers, sermons, contemporary textbooks, political correspondence, and military documents, Rable constructs an analytical narrative of Confederate political culture, arguing that it did more to strengthen the Confederacy than weaken it. He concludes that despite the war's outcome, the anti-political legacy of the Confederate republic had a profound impact on the future of Southern politics.

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Edward Luce

Luce diagnoses factors behind the country's waning global leadership such as the shrinking middle class; an ineffective and flawed educational system; the stagnation of innovation in business and technology; a bloated and inefficient bureaucracy; the virulent polarization of national politics; and the damage caused by the influence of money in politics, along with endless campaigning. In the end, he assesses the prospects for change and offers a bleak outlook.

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John McCain, with Mark Salter

"A candid new political memoir from Senator John McCain--his most personal book in years--covering everything from 2008 up to the present."--Provided by publisher.

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Joan Didion

In 1988, Joan Didion began looking at the American political process for The New York Review of Books. What she found was not a mechanism that offered the nation's citizens a voice in its affairs but one designed by--and for--"that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life." The eight pieces collected here from The New York Review build, one on the other, to a stunning whole, a portrait of the American political landscape that tells us, devastatingly, how we got where we are today.In Political Fictions, tracing the dreamwork that was already clear at the time of the first Bush ascendance in 1988, Didion covers the ways in which the continuing and polarizing nostalgia for an imagined America led to the entrenchment of a small percentage of the electorate as the nation's deciding political force, the ways in which the two major political parties have worked to narrow the electorate to this manageable element, the readiness with which the media collaborated in this process, and, finally and at length, how this mindset led inexorably over the past dozen years to the crisis that was the 2000 election. In this book Didion cuts to the core of the deceptions and deflections to explain and illuminate what came to be called "the disconnect"--and to reveal a political class increasingly intolerant of the nation that sustains it.Joan Didion's profound understanding of America's political and cultural terrain, her sense of historical irony, and the play of her imagination make Political Fictions a disturbing and brilliant tour de force.