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The Science of Defeating an Authoritarian, Part 5 - Reading List [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-02-12

This is the fifth diary in a series about how we can use social science to save our democracy. It is action oriented. Today’s action is: READ! Here’s an annotated bibliography of the books I find most helpful to understand what’s going on. I’m going to cover memoirs, books by journalists, and books by social scientists and other academics, in that order. I’m putting asterisks in front of the books I recommend most highly. If you don’t want to read entire books, check for interviews with the authors and book reviews where you can find out the main arguments of the book quickly.

Past diaries in this series:

Memoirs

I like reading books by those who interacted directly with Trump. As a social scientist, I use these as primary source data. Each person is telling their own narrative — what they want to believe themselves and what they want you to believe. Of course each person who writes a book has an agenda — at a minimum to make themselves look good, but also to vent, get back at their enemies, etc. But that doesn’t mean you can’t glean some truth from them by comparing different accounts to one another, considering their motivations, and comparing them to what you can observe in plain sight or read in the news.

Spicer’s book was worthless because he covered for Trump even though Trump humiliated him and tossed him out. McMaster’s book was worthless because he was an idiot. He had a delusional understanding of Trump and used his book to vent about Mattis (or at least, the part of the book I read before giving up). I haven’t read Bolton’s book yet. Here are the ones I read and liked:

*Mary Trump’s Too Much and Never Enough:

As a clinical psychologist, Mary Trump tells the story of Donald’s upbringing. Why he is the way he is. How he got that way. It’s an insider view of a screwed up family from a person who got out and got therapy. Yes, she has an axe to grind because Trump robbed her of so much money. But she also has no delusions about him and no reason to protect him because she has nothing financially to gain.

Fred C Trump III’s All in the Family:

Mary’s brother (Fred Jr’s son, Donald’s nephew) is more enmeshed with Donald and more in denial about the family situation than his sister, but he’s also a member of the branch of the family that got screwed. Donald stole a lot of money from his brother Fred Jr’s kids and then, when they sued, he cut off health insurance from Fred III and his family (including Donald’s grand nephew William, who was a severely disabled infant at the time). This book has a few bombshells in it, despite Fred III’s denial. It also corroborates Mary’s story, even though the two siblings no longer speak.

*Mark Esper’s A Sacred Oath:

Esper entered the administration to be one of the “adults in the room.” He was a traditional Republican, not MAGA. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, but it also scared the hell out of me because it shows the number of bad ideas Trump didn’t get to do in his first term. It may be a preview of what we’re in for now.

Stephanie Grisham’s I’ll Take Your Questions Now:

This book has value for a few reasons. First, Grisham was MAGA before ultimately quitting her job over Jan 6. This is not the work of someone who simply opposed Trump and his agenda. She was a loyalist who changed her mind by working close to Trump. I found her explanations of how Trump repeatedly wouldn’t cooperate with his comms team useful for understanding how the media interacts with Trump. Trump got used to being covered by the celebrity press and thought the same rules should apply for the U.S. president (spoiler: they don’t). There’s also details about Melania and about their marriage, for the curious.

It was also useful to read about how she reacted to the harsh criticism of Trump. Even though she saw the dysfunction up close and it was hurting her — she described it as an abusive relationship — she said all of the anti-Trump opposition drove her closer to Trump and made it harder to leave. But, the book also tells how she did eventually see reality for what it was and leave.

One last useful point that comes up again in many of these Republican memoirs: why she took the job. Some like Esper and, if I recall correctly, Elizabeth Neumann, felt called to serve their country even though they thought the Trump admin was a shit show.

*Liz Cheney’s Oath and Honor:

Maybe it’s not how Nancy Pelosi would have told the story, but I appreciated hearing a Republican version of what happened on Jan 6 and in the Jan 6 Commission. What’s more, you can corroborate details between this book, Adam Kinzinger’s book, Cassidy Hutchinson’s book, and the Jan 6 Commission report, plus all of the evidence available online to read/hear/watch. For this country to save itself, we NEED Republicans on the side of democracy. That’s why I think it’s so important to learn about the few who do stand up for what’s right (even if I disagree with, say, Liz Cheney’s stance on reproductive rights).

Cassidy Hutchinson’s Enough:

A lot of what I wrote about Cheney applies to Hutchinson, but you get a different vantage point here. How a young woman comes of age and decides to take a job in the Trump White House. How she finds the inner strength to do what’s right. How Trump can apply pressure tactics to bend most people to his will even if they would prefer not to. Plus you get some insight into the inner workings of the Trump admin.

Adam Kinzinger’s Renegade:

More of the same. It’s good to get Republican perspectives into what went on. He came into Congress in the Tea Party era despite being more moderate than the Tea Party. It’s an interesting insight into Republican politics from someone less extreme and much more ethical than most of the party.

Elizabeth Neumann’s Kingdom of Rage:

This was a different type of book and not entirely a memoir. Neumann worked in national security and she is deeply Christian. She was alarmed and offended that people on her side of the aisle and who share her faith would engage in domestic terrorism. The book therefore focuses on the threat of rightwing domestic terrorism in this country. In the book, she’s speaking to her own people (who also happen to be the people who need to hear it).

Michael Cohen’s Disloyal:

Cohen’s rough around the edges, but I like his book. It tells how someone who isn’t even conservative could get wrapped up in Trump’s orbit and help propel him into the presidency. This was an extremely useful book in understanding why. Why are people who should know better hurting our country? It’s also a useful book in answering how. How does Trump exert power over those around him?

Ben Rhodes’ After the Fall:

This book falls somewhere between the memoir and journalist category. Rhodes worked in the Obama administration and understands how government works at the highest levels. He’s met world leaders in person. In this book, he covers three different authoritarian regimes (Hungary, Russia, China) and focuses on how their people are resisting them. The greatest value for me was that Rhodes covers Hungary. I had a hard time finding books on Orban, and it looks like the Trump people are using what he did in Hungary as a blueprint for what they plan to do here.

*M. Gessen’s Surviving Autocracy:

M. Gessen fled Putin’s Russia for the United States. This book is about that journey. It’s an insider account of what it’s like to live in — and resist — an autocracy from the perspective of someone with a marginalized identity (queer) who works in a targeted profession (journalism).

*Maria Ressa’s How to Stand Up to a Dictator:

Maria Ressa is a Fillipino journalist who stood up to her country’s Trump, Rodrigo Duterte. Because the U.S. colonized the Philippines and then established it with a government similar to our own and because a lot of political dirty tricks are tried in other countries with laxer law enforcement (like the Philippines) to see if they work before they are used here, her experience is a preview of ours. A lot of the book focuses on the role of social media, especially Facebook, in suppressing democratic discourse. READ THIS BOOK!

Christopher Wylie’s Mindf*ck:

This is the inside story of Cambridge Analytica. It’s a GREAT read and highly disturbing. It’s about how an amoral upper class racist Brit and his company got Americans’ Facebook data and used it to red pill enough of the country to elect Trump.

Journalistic Books

A number of great journalists have covered this era of American politics. Here are some of my favorites:

*Kate Conger & Ryan Mac’s Character Limit:

About how Elon broke Twitter. He’s using the same playbook on the American government right now so this one’s worth reading.

Bob Woodward’s books Fear, Rage, Peril, and War:

Definitely read these. The most recent is War so if your concern is current events, start there. Woodward has harsh words about Trump and he doesn’t hold back.

Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury:

This was a bombshell when it came out early in the Trump administration and I still like it. It’s about a previous era, pre-Musk, pre-J6, when there were still “adults in the room.” Still, both Woodward & Wolff’s books reveal how Trump wields power in ways I find useful.

McKay Coppins’ Romney:

In terms of validity, this book cannot be beat. Romney kept diaries with the intent of writing his own memoir and then handed them over to Coppins with no rules about what he could or couldn’t write. Coppins also conducted many interviews, including Romney himself. The most interesting part for me was the behind-the-scenes look at GOP Senators who weren’t fully on board with Trump but remained loyal publicly.

Elle Reeve’s Black Pill:

About the nihilistic internet culture that landed us here.

Bill Adair’s Beyond the Big Lie:

The founder of Politifact speaks out about political lying. He says Republicans do it more and do it worse, even when you leave Trump out of the calculations.

John Ganz’s When the Clock Broke:

This came very highly recommended. It’s about the 1992 election, another time when paleoconservatives reared their heads. I learned a lot I didn’t know but I expected to like it more than I did. You might like it more than me (the people who recommended it did), but I had a hard time getting through it.

Anne Applebaum’s Autocracy Inc.:

I liked this book and I like Applebaum a lot. Here’s a review.

William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich:

There are parts of this that are dated (notably his essentialist ideas about the German race) but I found this book extremely useful. Shirer was on the scene at the time reporting about World War II and then he exhaustively went back through documents that became available later and use those, in addition to his own reporting and journals, to reconstruct what happened.

Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer’s The Fall of Roe:

It is what it sounds like. Great book. Recommended.

Jonathan Blitzer’s Everyone Who is Gone is Here:

This is the book on immigration you should read.

Academic books

*Erica Frantz, Andrea Kendall-Taylor, and Joseph Wright’s The Origins of Elected Strongmen:

This book is a study of democratic backsliding and democratic collapse around the world. The tl;dr is that Trump has remade the Republican part as a personalist party and that’s a huge risk factor for democratic collapse. The #1 thing we can do to up our chances of remaining a democracy is electing Dems to a majority in Congress in 2026.

If you read it, read it in print, not audiobook. It’s a quantitative study and there’s nothing more boring than listening to a narrator read you tables of numbers. As important as this book is, it’s borking. One of the authors did an interview on Ezra Klein (now behind a paywall unless you subscribe to NYT) and I recommend that most of all. The interview (thankfully) is NOT boring.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s Strongmen:

Ben-Ghiat is a Mussolini expert who was in Italy during the Berlusconi era. She divides authoritarians into three eras: the original Fascist era, the age of military dictatorships, and the age of elected strongmen. What I found most useful in this book is how she compared and contrasted these three different generations of autocrats.

*Brooke Harrington’s Offshore:

Harrington is a sociologist who studied the ultra-wealthy by becoming a money manager and interviewing the people who manage the ultra-wealthy’s money. This book is fascinating, important, and disturbing. Although it’s about income inequality, it’s ultimately about democracy. She shows how all of the places where the rich offshore their money to evade taxes pay a cost in declining democracy. Including here. If you don’t read the book, you can hear a podcast interview with her here, but it doesn’t even scratch the surface of what the book gets into. Frankly, I recommend both the book and the podcast because they cover different things.

Rory McVeigh and Kevin Estep’s The Politics of Losing:

This is a quantitative analysis of how Trump took over the Republican party. McVeigh and Estep found that 2016 general election voters who voted for Trump are largely similar to 2012 general election voters who voted for Romney. However, the profile of the 2012 primary voter who chose Trump is different. McVeigh and Estep dig into who these voters were and why they chose Trump.

There’s a graph in the chapter “How Trump Found His Base” that kills me. It shows job losses and gains between 2008 and 2016. People who had college degrees or some college did fine. People without college degrees lost millions of jobs and never got them back. I don’t think Trump was the right answer to their problems, but no wonder they were pissed off.

Kathy Cramer’s The Politics of Resentment:

This is a look at rural Wisconsinites from about 2007-2012 or so (during and after the 2008 crash and during the Tea Party era). This was when Scott Walker declared war on state employees and many rural Wisconsinites supported him. The book asks why. Given what’s happening to the federal civil service now, I think this is an important book. I don’t agree with these Wisconsinites’ decisions to elect Scott Walker or with Walker’s policies — but I do agree that rural voters had (and have) legitimate grievances that could have been heard more and handled better.

*Arlie Hochschild’s Stolen Pride:

I don’t think it’s overstating it to say that Hochschild is one of the greatest living sociologists. The theme that ties together her work is emotions. Here, she studies the emotions of Trump supporters in a part of Kentucky that went from blue to deep red and MAGA in a relatively short amount of time. The area is very poor, very white, very rural, and early on in Trump’s first term, white nationalists from across the country decided to have a rally there. The book covers how the area reacted to the white nationalists, why people like Trump, and what Trump gives them emotionally — even if he isn’t solving their problems materially. For a short version of the book’s argument, check out this Time article.

Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land:

This is Hochschild’s previous book, about Tea Party Republicans in Louisiana. She asks a very specific question: Why do people whose lives are being tangibly harmed by environmental pollution oppose environmental regulations. The book is a look into the mindset of Republicans that I find useful.

Michele Lamont’s The Dignity of the Working Man:

This is a much older book, but it’s still one I find useful. I read it and thought, “Oh, I got so much wrong.” And it fits with a lot of other things I’ve read about the white working class voters who are leaving the Democratic party. They want to feel like they’ve made it themselves, not like they got a handout. As a college educated middle class person, I support a strong social safety net including food stamps, unemployment, disability, etc etc. But the folks who are struggling want to feel like they’ve earned what they got.

Jennifer Sherman’s Those Who Work, Those Who Don’t:

This is another work on a similar theme. It’s a depressed rural area where the main employer for men left, many men are disabled from their physically demanding work in logging, and a lot of the jobs left are feminized and done by women. The people are suffering a crisis of masculinity, as men who can’t work feel emasculated and taking any form of government aid is stigmatized. Like the previous book, this shows me that we need to reach these voters with jobs — not just social safety net programs that don’t require working.

*Benjamin Teitelbaum’s War for Eternity:

This book is WILD. It’s about Steve Bannon’s far right religion (if you want to call it that), Traditionalism. Traditionalists believe in circular time, with four ages going in order: the golden age, silver age, bronze age, and dark age. In the golden age, hierarchies are intact and those who should be on top are on top. In the dark age, hierarchies erode and people are egalitarian (note: to Traditionalists, this is a bad thing). Some believe that you wait for time to take its course and return you to a golden age, but others believe you need to blow things up to expedite the coming golden age.

Daniel Laurison’s Producing Politics:

Laurison is a sociologist who volunteered on a campaign and then studied the people who run campaigns. I liked his book. He studied the senior people in both parties who run the campaigns and concluded that campaigns involve such a narrow slice of the American people at the top that it harms American democracy. Those who want to participate in campaigns are left donating, phone banking, and canvassing, but not really contributing ideas.

Steve Stern’s Remembering Pinochet’s Chile:

This book is about how people remember the dictatorship in Chile. It’s a short book, and what shocked me is how Pinochet supporters remained loyal even after the dictatorship was over — after the entire world knew how brutal it was. However, another group began the dictatorship kind of checked out and then woke up. I think that’s the useful part of the book. How do we get people who aren’t paying attention to wake up?

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