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Forgotten: How the People of One Pennslyvania County Elected Donald Trump and Changed America by Ben Bradley, Jr.

12/23/2018

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August 14, 2019

Discussion led by Will Singleton

What the veteran journalist learned in Luzerne County (Wilkes-Barre is the major city in a predominately rural area) will mostly hearten devoted Republican supporters, mostly upset Democratic supporters, and perhaps baffle independent voters. By one measure, Luzerne County is typical because Trump won in 2,584 counties, compared to Hillary Clinton’s 493 counties. Looking closer, though, Luzerne is an atypical Trump stronghold, since many of the residents were labor unionists who traditionally supported Democratic Party candidates. During previous presidential elections, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama had won majorities there. A Trump victory seemed plausible because during the Republican primary in Luzerne County, 5,643 registered Democrats shifted to the Republican side to choose among the large number of candidates, and many of the shifters decided Trump would be the best choice. As Bradlee relates the findings from his in-depth conversations with Luzerne voters, he avoids stereotypes and pat answers. Trump detractors across the nation labeled him a racist, but how could the author call Trump voters unadulterated racists when so many had cast ballots for Obama in the previous election? Regardless, race and ethnicity clearly influenced some Trump supporters interviewed by Bradlee. Trump’s draconian immigration policies aimed at Spanish speakers gained widespread favor among Luzerne County voters, many of whom were alarmed by the increase in the Hispanic population. Apart from support or opposition to Trump’s policy proposals, voters who spoke with Bradlee made clear that they would have preferred any candidate to Hillary Clinton, having believed every false Republican claim about her; that they knew nothing about Trump’s past as a failed businessman; and that allegations of his sexual assaults and overall misogyny could be forgiven at the polling booth.
A fascinating, ultimately puzzling deep dive into one county’s electoral behavior.

======================================================
This is a county called Luzerne County in northeast Pennsylvania. The county seat is Wilkes-Barre. It's not very prosperous, fraying at the edges, and has been hurting for a long time. And combing through the vote in the three critical swing states, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, I discovered Luzerne County, which is a traditionally Democratic county, hadn't voted Republican since 1988 for Bush senior. President Obama won it twice, but it surged in the other direction for Trump, and he won it by 20 points, building up such a margin in this one county that it was 60 percent of his victory margin for the state of Pennsylvania. So without this one county he wouldn't have won the state or perhaps the presidency."

On how Trump was able to connect to voters in Luzerne
"Well, I think people base most of their vote for president on the extent to which they can relate to them on a human level, how likable they are. And I think that that is in the end more important than where they stand on a variety of issues. And I think the people that I settled on generally like Trump on most issues but really liked his style. They just liked his moxie, his feistiness, how he gets up every morning and has a tweetstorm and sticks it to the elites."
https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2018/10/17/pennsylvania-trump-2016-election

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/ben-bradlee-jr/the-forgotten-bradlee/
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Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Morning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild

12/23/2018

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August 14, 2019

Discussion led by Will Singleton

Arlie Hochschild’s generous but disconcerting look at the Tea Party presents a likable fellow named Lee Sherman, who once worked for a Louisiana chemical plant where his duties included illegally dumping toxic waste into the bayou.
Sherman did the dirty work; then the company did him dirty. After 15 years on the job, he was doused with chemicals that “burned my clothes clean off me” and left him ill. But rather than pay his disability costs, his bosses accused him of absenteeism and fired him.


Sherman became a fledgling environmentalist and got his revenge after a giant fish kill threatened the livelihood of nearby fishermen. Company officials feigned innocence, but Sherman barged into a public meeting with an incriminating sign: I’M THE ONE WHO DUMPED IT IN THE BAYOU. Fast-forward a couple of decades and Sherman, still an environmentalist, is campaigning for a Tea Party congressman who wants to gut the Environmental Protection Agency. Sherman still distrusts chemical companies, but he distrusts the federal government more, because it spends his tax money on people who “lazed around days and partied at night.”


https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/11/10/american-right-inside-the-sacrifice-zone/

https://thenewpress.com/books/strangers-their-own-land

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10767-017-9266-6

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The Lives of the Constitution: Ten Exceptional Minds that Shaped America's Supreme Law by Joseph Tartakovsky

12/22/2018

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August 15, 2019

Discussion Led by Ed Lane

In a fascinating blend of biography and history, Joseph Tartakovsky tells the epic and unexpected story of our Constitution through the eyes of ten extraordinary individuals―some renowned, like Alexander Hamilton and Woodrow Wilson, and some forgotten, like James Wilson and Ida B. Wells-Barnett.

Tartakovsky brings to life their struggles over our supreme law from its origins in revolutionary America to the era of Obama and Trump. Sweeping from settings as diverse as Gold Rush California to the halls of Congress, and crowded with a vivid Dickensian cast, Tartakovsky shows how America’s unique constitutional culture grapples with questions like democracy, racial and sexual equality, free speech, economic liberty, and the role of government.

Joining the ranks of other great American storytellers, Tartakovsky chronicles how Daniel Webster sought to avert the Civil War; how Alexis de Tocqueville misunderstood America; how Robert Jackson balanced liberty and order in the battle against Nazism and Communism; and how Antonin Scalia died warning Americans about the ever-growing reach of the Supreme Court.

From the 1787 Philadelphia Convention to the clash over gay marriage, this is a grand tour through two centuries of constitutional history as never told before, and an education in the principles that sustain America in the most astonishing experiment in government ever undertaken.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/04/the-human-factor/

https://www.josephtartakovsky.com/about/​

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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles C. Mann

12/12/2018

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April 16, 2019

Discussion led by Peter Bluhm

ABOUT 1493
​
A deeply engaging new history of how European settlements in the post-Colombian Americas shaped the world, from the bestselling author of 1491. 

Presenting the latest research by biologists, anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians, Mann shows how the post-Columbian network of ecological and economic exchange fostered the rise of Europe, devastated imperial China, convulsed Africa, and for two centuries made Mexico City—where Asia, Europe, and the new frontier of the Americas dynamically interacted—the center of the world. In this history, Mann uncovers the germ of today's fiercest political disputes, from immigration to trade policy to culture wars. In 1493, Mann has again given readers an eye-opening scientific interpretation of our past, unequaled in its authority and fascination.



An excellent NY Times review
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/books/review/1493-uncovering-the-new-world-columbus-created-by-charles-c-mann-book-review.html



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Presidents of War by Michael Beschloss

12/12/2018

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March 21, 2019

Discussion led by Joel Wolk

Ten years in the research and writing, Presidents of War is a fresh, magisterial, intimate look at a procession of American leaders as they took the nation into conflict and mobilized their country for victory. It brings us into the room as they make the most difficult decisions that face any President, at times sending hundreds of thousands of American men and women to their deaths. 
 
From James Madison and the War of 1812 to recent times, we see them struggling with Congress, the courts, the press, their own advisers and antiwar protesters; seeking comfort from their spouses, families and friends; and dropping to their knees in prayer. We come to understand how these Presidents were able to withstand the pressures of war—both physically and emotionally—or were broken by them.
 
Beschloss’s interviews with surviving participants in the drama and his findings in original letters, diaries, once-classified national security documents, and other sources help him to tell this story in a way it has not been told before. Presidents of War combines the sense of being there with the overarching context of two centuries of American history. This important book shows how far we have traveled from the time of our Founders, who tried to constrain presidential power, to our modern day, when a single leader has the potential to launch nuclear weapons that can destroy much of the human race.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/11/books/review/michael-beschloss-presidents-of-war.html

https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/presidents-war

https://www.dallasnews.com/arts/books/2018/10/15/presidents-war-michael-beschloss-looks-long-history-lines-crossed

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/americas-5-worst-wartime-presidents-12668

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The Wright Brothers by David McCullogh

12/11/2018

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February 21, 2019

Discussion led by Nathan Doctrow

On a winter day in 1903, in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, two brothers—bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio—changed history. But it would take the world some time to believe that the age of flight had begun, with the first powered machine carrying a pilot.

Orville and Wilbur Wright were men of exceptional courage and determination, and of far-ranging intellectual interests and ceaseless curiosity. When they worked together, no problem seemed to be insurmountable. Wilbur was unquestionably a genius. Orville had such mechanical ingenuity as few had ever seen. That they had no more than a public high school education and little money never stopped them in their mission to take to the air. Nothing did, not even the self-evident reality that every time they took off, they risked being killed.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/04/books/review-the-wright-brothers-by-david-mccullough.html

https://www.amazon.com/Wright-Brothers-David-McCullough-ebook/dp/B00LD1RWP6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1544561103&sr=8-1&keywords=the+wright+brothers+book

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wright_Brothers_(book)

https://www.biography.com/news/the-wright-brothers-david-mccullough-book​
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How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt

12/10/2018

1 Comment

 

Discussion led by Andy Fisher

January 14, 2019

What’s the worst thing to happen to US democracy recently? Most answers to that question start and end with Donald Trump. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, two Harvard political scientists, though as horrified by Trump as anyone, try to take a wider view. For them the great harbinger of disaster happened during the final year of the Obama presidency. Following the sudden death of the conservative supreme court justice Antonin Scalia in early 2016, President Obama nominated Merrick Garland, a centrist liberal, to replace him. It was up to the Senate to decide whether to confirm the president’s choice. But the Senate did something it had never done in more than 150 years: it refused even to grant Garland a hearing. This was not about Trump – most Republican senators were at this point deeply alarmed by, if not downright hostile to, the prospect of the Donald in the White House. Instead, it was about their shared view that any Republican supreme court nominee would be better than any Democratic nominee, and any price was worth paying to achieve that. It was scorched earth politics.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2018/jan/21/this-is-how-democracies-die

http://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?id=1334

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/10/books/review-trumpocracy-david-frum-how-democracies-die-steven-levitsky-daniel-ziblatt.html

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2018/05/how-democracy-dies
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