The Ezra Klein Show

And I'd end with Quiet Revolution by Byron Shafer, which is the inside story of the McGovernFraser Commission and how people didn't really understand what was happening when they made all these rule changes.

In the great book, The Hollow Parties, Sam Rosenfeld and Dana Schlossman tell the history of how the strong parties of yesterday became the hollowed out vehicles for individual presidential ambition we see today.

The ethos of the early American political parties was that they were a bulwark against politics becoming about one person at a time when Americans feared a return to that.

The idea, Rosenfeld told me, was, quote, that parties subsume individual ambition. You commit to the party and to the cause, never to the man.

They did live up to it at key moments. Famously, it was a delegation of Republican members of Congress who persuaded President Richard Nixon to resign.

There is not more to the Republican Party today than Donald Trump's ambitions.

I came across a book by a guy named Paul Dixon called The Rise of the G.I. Army that's about the effort to sort of build up the World WarII American military before Pearl Harbor, and really making the case that the kind of wisdom of the people who saw in 1939, 1940 that America was going to need a powerful military in the future. It's really interesting.

Yana Kruptikov, welcome to the show. ... she's the author of The Other Divide, Polarization and Disengagement in American Politics.

When I wrote my book on political polarization, which came out in 2020, I was very influenced by a bunch of studies on the media that made to me this very interesting point...

One of the fundamental books here is Marcus Pryor's PostBroadcast Democracy, which kind of tracks this idea that once we get more choices, we're not really choosing to follow politics.

There's a great book by Marcus Pryor called Hooked. And Marcus basically argues that, well, your level of interest and engagement in politics, is socialized early on in life. And it actually pretty much stays steady over the course of a lifetime.

The first book I would recommend is a book called What Goes Without Saying by Taylor Carlson and Jamie Settle, which is about how people talk to each other or actually don't talk to each other about politics.

It's a book called Through the Grapevine, which is a book about what happens when we count on other people to tell us about political news, how people get it wrong, and what ends up happening if that's who we are dependent on.

And it is a book called Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come by Jessica Pan, which is an incredibly funny book, but it also gets at this idea of looking at the world from the eyes of somebody who is completely different than you.

He's got a book coming out in English in September called The Story of Israeli Politics.

Of course, my book, it's going out in English in September, The Story of Israeli Politics.

I just read the last volume of The Biography of Lyndon Johnson by Caro.

It's a story that the political scientists Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld tell in their new book, The Hollow Parties, the many pasts and disordered present of American party politics.

They argued that this change has been perilous for our democracy.

He has a giant new book out about Americans' views of the Constitution, but he in 2010 wrote a very substantial and brilliant book called The Two Faces of American Freedom that is a good synthesis of a master theme in American history.

Wonderful book by Stephen Eerie, Rainbows and Irish Americans and the Dilemmas of Urban Machine Politics, 1840 to 1985.

What Rainbows End offers is a claim of what the machine actually did, which is to direct its benefits not sprinkled around to everybody, but to core Irish constituencies that Irish Americans rewarded their coethnics.

The point that Levitsky and Ziblatt make in How Democracies Die, which is like a big book a couple of years ago, leads to the idea that parties once acted as a gatekeeper against demagogues.

William F. Buckley wrote a book called Up from Liberalism.

Objectivity by Peter Galison and Lorraine Daston.

That book is a history of something that seems impossible to historicize. Objectivity doesn't have a history. Objectivity is just being objective. That's like transhistorical.

They do an extraordinary and counterintuitive job of showing how radically historical our conceptualization of Objectivity itself is, and how entangled it is with shifting ideas of subjectivity, for instance, or the way that it plays off of the emergence of mechanical technologies for making inscriptions.

The recently deceased French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, in a beautiful and difficult book called Taking Care of the Youth and the Generations, centers that book on attention.

John Haidt writes this book, The Anxious Generation. Part of the book's thesis is that smartphones and social media have kicked off a mental health crisis in our children.

Okay, so Reza Negarestani wrote a book called Intelligence and Spirit. It's a pretty dense philosophical book about Intelligence and Spirituality that I think is really great.