Trump 1 Year On: US Politics Reading List

As relentless attacks from and mass opposition to the Trump presidency continue, it’s time to take stock of the year since he became the leader of the most powerful country in the world. Arm yourself with theory, political analysis, and history of resistance and get ready for the year of struggle to come.

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The five essential speeches from “The Anti-Inauguration,” held on inauguration night 2017 at the historic Lincoln Theatre in Washington, DC. 

“It’s not enough to simply say ‘No’ to attacks [from the Trump administration]. It’s not enough because we know that where we are now, before the attacks come, is entirely unacceptable. The levels of inequality, the levels of racism―and the planet chaos that we have unleashed. We need radical system change.” —Naomi Klein

A deeply researched and authoritative report on the growth of fascism and far-right terrorism.

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America’s leading essayist on Trump as a symptom of American retreat of democracy over the last twenty-five years. in the fire and smoke of the war on terror.

Remarkable oral histories that shed light on the lives of milions of undocumented immigrants risking deportation and imprisonment to carve a life for themselves in the US.

A forty-year investigation by In These Times of the stories behind the US inequality crisis.

“To get out of the current political and economic hole, we need to understand how we ended up here. For decades, In These Times has been marshaling some of our finest minds to tackle this vital question, and here are the illuminating results of that investigation.” – Naomi Klein

In this book, Sanders tells the story of a passionate and principled political life. He describes how, after cutting his teeth in the Civil Rights movement, he helped build a grassroots political movement in Vermont, making it possible for him to become the first independent elected to the US House of Representatives in forty years. The story continues into the US Senate and through the dramatic launch of his presidential campaign.

Now in an updated edition, The “S” Word makes a case for socialist ideas as an indispensable part of American heritage. A new final chapter considers the recent signs of a leftward sea change in American politics in the face of increasing and historic levels of inequality.

Based on several years of research and reportage, in locations as disperate as Texas, New York and Yorkshire, and written in engrossing, precise prose, this is the first comprehensive critique of counterradicalization strategies. The new policy and policing campaigns have been backed by an industry of freshly minted experts and liberal commentators. The Muslims Are Coming! looks at the way these debates have been transformed by the embrace of a narrowly configured and ill-conceived antiextremism.

Crowds and Party channels the energies of the riotous crowds who took to the streets in the past five years into an argument for the political party. Rejecting the emphasis on individuals and multitudes, Jodi Dean argues that we need to rethink the collective subject of politics. 

Since the birth of the nation, impulses of empire have been close to the heart of the United States. How these urges interact with the way the country understands itself, and the nature of the divergent interests at work in the unfolding of American foreign policy, is a subject much debated and still obscure. In a fresh look at the topic, Anderson charts the intertwined historical development of America’s imperial reach and its role as the general guarantor of capital. 

Originally published in 1978, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman caused a storm of controversy. Michele Wallace blasted the masculine biases of the black politics that emerged from the sixties. She described how women remained marginalized by the patriarchal culture of Black Power, demonstrating the ways in which a genuine female subjectivity was blocked by the traditional myths of black womanhood. With a foreword that examines the debate the book has sparked between intellectuals and political leaders, as well as what has—and, crucially, has not—changed over the last four decades, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman continues to be deeply relevant to current feminist debates and black theory today.

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This breakthrough history, based on years of research into private correspondence; shipping manifests; bills of laden; port, diplomatic, and court records; and periodical literature, makes undeniably clear how decisive illegal slavery was to the making of the United States. US economic development and westward expansion, as well as the growth and wealth of the North, not just the South, was a direct result and driver of illegal slavery. The Monroe Doctrine was created to protect the illegal slave trade.

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How did America recover after its years of civil war? How did freed men and women, former slaves, respond to their newly won freedom? David Roediger’s radical new history redefines the idea of freedom after the jubilee, using fresh sources and texts to build on the leading historical accounts of Emancipation and Reconstruction.

The American Crucible furnishes a vivid and authoritative history of the rise and fall of slavery in the Americas. For over three centuries enslavement promoted the rise of capitalism in the Atlantic world. The New World became the crucible for a succession of fateful experiments in colonization, silver mining, plantation agriculture, racial enslavement, colonial rebellion, slave witness and slave resistance.

Bestselling narrative history of American media that puts race at the center of the story.

The all-encompassing embrace of world capitalism at the beginning of the twenty-first century was generally attributed to the superiority of competitive markets. Globalization had appeared to be the natural outcome of this unstoppable process. But today, with global markets roiling and increasingly reliant on state intervention to stay afloat, it has become clear that markets and states aren't straightforwardly opposing forces.

Aronowitz brings a historian’s understanding of American workers’ struggles in taking the long view of the labor movement. Then, in a survey of current initiatives, strikes, organizations, and allies, Aronowitz analyzes the possibilities of labor’s rebirth, and sets out a program for a new, broad, radical workers’ movement.

Since the launch of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars—now the longest wars in American history—the US military has struggled to recruit troops. It has responded, as Matt Kennard’s explosive investigative report makes clear, by opening its doors to neo-Nazis, white supremacists, gang members, criminals of all stripes, and the mentally ill. Irregular Army connects some of the War on Terror’s worst crimes to this opening-up of the US military. With millions of veterans now back in the US and domestic extremism on the rise, Kennard’s book is a stark warning about potential dangers facing Americans—from their own soldiers.

First-hand accounts of the largest pro-labor mass mobilization in modern American history.
 

Alt-America

by David Neiwert

Just as Donald Trump’s victorious campaign for the US presidency shocked liberal Americans, the seemingly sudden national prominence of white supremacists, xenophobes, militia leaders, and mysterio...

Age of Folly

by Lewis H. Lapham

In twenty-five years of imperial adventure, America has laid waste to its principles of democracy. The self-glorifying march of folly steps off at the end of the Cold War, in an era when delusions ...

Underground America

by Voice of Witness

Foreword by Luis Alberto Urrea

Edited by Peter Orner

They arrive from around the world for countless reasons. Many come simply to make a living. Others are fleeing persecution in their native countries. Millions of immigrants risk deportation and imp...

The Age of Inequality

Edited by Jeremy Gantz

With heart-wrenching reporting and incisive analysis, In These Times magazine has charted a staggering rise in inequality and the fall of the American middle class. Here, in a selection from four d...

Outsider in the White House

by Bernie Sanders

Afterword by John Nichols

Contributions by Huck Gutman

In this book, Senator Bernie Sanders explains where he comes from. He describes in detail how, after cutting his teeth in the Civil Rights movement, Sanders helped build an extraordinary grassroots...

The "S" Word

by John Nichols

During the Cold War it became a dirty word in the United States, but “socialism” runs like a red thread through the nation’s history, an integral part of its political consciousness since the found...

The Muslims Are Coming!

by Arun Kundnani

The new front in the War on Terror is the “homegrown enemy,” domestic terrorists who have become the focus of sprawling counterterrorism structures of policing and surveillance in the United Stat...

Crowds and Party

by Jodi Dean

Crowds and Party channels the energies of the riotous crowds who took to the streets in the past five years into an argument for the political party. Rejecting the emphasis on individuals and multi...

American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers

by Perry Anderson

Since the birth of the nation, impulses of empire have been close to the heart of the United States. How these urges interact with the way the country understands itself, and the nature of the dive...

Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman

by Michele Wallace

Foreword by Jamilah Lemieux

Originally published in 1978, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman caused a storm of controversy. Michele Wallace blasted the masculine biases of the black politics that emerged from the si...

No God But Gain

by Stephen Chambers

From 1501 to 1867 more than 12.5 million Africans were brought to the Americas in chains, and as many as 100 million Africans died as a result of the slave trade. The U.S. constitution set a 20-yea...

Seizing Freedom

by David R. Roediger

How did America recover after its years of civil war? How did freed men and women, former slaves, respond to their newly won freedom? David Roediger’s radical new history redefines the idea of fr...

The American Crucible

by Robin Blackburn

For over three centuries, slavery in the Americas fuelled the growth of capitalism. But the stirrings of a revolutionary age in the late eighteenth century challenged this “peculiar institution” an...

News for All the People

by Juan González and Joseph Torres

From colonial newspapers to the Internet age, America’s racial divisions have played a central role in the creation of the country’s media system, just as the media has contributed to—and every so ...

The Making of Global Capitalism

by Sam Gindin and Leo Panitch

The all-encompassing embrace of world capitalism at the beginning of the twenty-first century was generally attributed to the superiority of competitive markets. Globalization had appeared to be ...

The Death and Life of American Labor

by Stanley Aronowitz

Union membership in the United States has fallen below 11 percent, the lowest rate since before the New Deal. Labor activist and scholar of the American labor movement Stanley Aronowitz argues that...

Irregular Army

by Matt Kennard

Since the launch of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars—now the longest wars in American history—the US military has struggled to recruit troops. It has responded, as Matt Kennard’s explosive investigati...

It Started in Wisconsin

Afterword by Michael Moore

Introduction by John Nichols

Contributions by Patrick Barrett, Mary Bottari, Roger Bybee, Ruth Conniff, Gary Dumm, Frank Emspak, Simon Hardy, Ashok Kumar, Tom Morello, David Poklinkowski, Matthew Rothschild, Sharon Rudahl, Charity A. Schmidt, Kim Scipes and Nick Thorkelson

Edited by Mari Jo Buhle and Paul Buhle

In the spring of 2011, Wisconsinites took to the streets in what became the largest and liveliest labor demonstrations in modern American history. Protesters in the Middle East sent greetings—and p...

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