The Political Books That Help Us Make Sense of 2024

The Political Scene | The New Yorker

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🗓️ 23 March 2024

⏱️ 37 minutes

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Summary

The Washington Roundtable reflects on the books they’ve been reading to understand the 2024 Presidential campaigns and the state of international politics. Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos swap recommendations of works about all things political, from the anger of rural voters to the worldwide rise of authoritarian rule, including a fictionalized imagining of a powerful real-life political family.

Read with the Roundtable:

“America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators,” by Jacob Heilbrunn

“Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism,” by Rachel Maddow

“The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers, and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism,” by Joe Conason

“Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism,” by Brooke Harrington

“The Wizard of the Kremlin,” by Giuliano da Empoli

“The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family,” by Joshua Cohen

“The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America's Invasion of Iraq,” by Steve Coll (The New Yorker)

“The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China,” by Minxin Pei

“White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy,” by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman

“Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture,” by Kyle Chayka (The New Yorker)

“Romney: A Reckoning,” by McKay Coppins

“The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism,” by Tim Alberta

“Unholy: How White Christian Nationalists Powered the Trump Presidency, and the Devastating Legacy They Left Behind,” by Sarah Posner

“Playing God: American Catholic Bishops and The Far Right,” by Mary Jo McConahay

“Reading the Constitution: Why I Chose Pragmatism, Not Textualism,” by Stephen Breyer

“The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court,” by Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong

“What It Takes: The Way to the White House,” by Richard Ben Cramer

Theodore Roosevelt Trilogy: “The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt,” “Theodore Rex,” and “Colonel Roosevelt,” by Edmund Morris

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the political scene, a weekly discussion about the big questions in American politics.
0:09.0	I'm Evan Osnos and I'm joined as ever by my colleagues Jane Mayer and Susan Glasser.
0:15.0	Good morning to you both.
0:17.0	Hey Evan.
0:18.0	Hi there, great to be with you. President Biden and Donald Trump clinched their party's nominations last week,
0:29.7	which solidifies the rematch that we've all come to expect.
0:32.9	But today we wanted to step back and try to get some perspective
0:36.4	about not only this election, but politics more broadly.
0:40.0	The three of us are reading a lot these days,
0:42.1	and we thought we'd highlight some of the books
0:44.3	that are helping us make sense of it all.
0:46.8	Susan, what has caught your attention lately?
0:51.0	What have you been reading that you think people should know about?
0:54.0	Well, we can certainly talk about what we're reading to escape from this election.
0:59.0	It's going to be the longest general election. I think I read somewhere since Al Gore and George W Bush locked up their respective
1:05.8	party nominations in early March of 2000.
1:09.2	So lucky us, right?
1:11.6	And actually I do like to read a lot of fiction just to escape from things.
1:15.4	But to your point about how does the past sort of shape our thinking about the future today,
1:20.8	one of the best of the recent books that I have read and done a
1:24.8	couple book appearances for because I think it's really a terrific piece of
1:28.8	history that's relevant to the moment is a book by Jacob Halbren called
	...

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