
Illiberal America
A History
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Narrated by:
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Mitch Crawford
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By:
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Steven Hahn
About this listen
If your reaction to the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol was to think, 'That's not us,' think again: in Illiberal America, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian uncovers a powerful illiberalism as deep seated in the American past as the founding ideals.
Driven by popular movements and implemented through courts and legislation, illiberalism is part of the American bedrock. The United States was born a republic of loosely connected states and localities that demanded control of their domestic institutions, including slavery. As white settlement expanded west and immigration exploded in eastern cities, the democracy of the 1830s fueled expulsions of Blacks, Native Americans, Catholics, Mormons, and abolitionists.
After the Civil War, southern states denied new constitutional guarantees of civil rights and enforced racial exclusions in everyday life. Illiberalism was modernized during the Progressive movement through advocates of eugenics who aimed to reduce the numbers of racial and ethnic minorities.
The turmoil of the 1960s enabled George Wallace to tap local fears of unrest and build support outside the South, a politics adopted by Richard Nixon in 1968. Today, with illiberalism shaping elections and policy debates over guns, education, and abortion, it is urgent to understand its long history, and how that history bears on the present crisis.
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- Narrated by: Daniel Thomas May
- Length: 7 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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No Democracy Lasts Forever argues that the Constitution has become a threat to American democracy and must be dramatically changed or replaced if secession is to be avoided. Deeply troubled by the Constitution's inherent flaws, Erwin Chemerinsky, the renowned dean of Berkeley law school, came to the sobering conclusion that our nearly 250-year-old founding document is responsible for the crisis now facing American democracy.
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Leftist, but he makes sense to me
- By Mike Liveright on 11-29-24
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Freedom's Dominion
- A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power
- By: Jefferson Cowie
- Narrated by: André Chapoy
- Length: 16 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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American freedom is typically associated with the fight of the oppressed for a better world. But for centuries, whenever the federal government intervened on behalf of nonwhite people, many white Americans fought back in the name of freedom—their freedom to dominate others. In Freedom’s Dominion, historian Jefferson Cowie traces this complex saga by focusing on a quintessentially American place: Barbour County, Alabama, the ancestral home of political firebrand George Wallace.
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Very easily read and I learned a lot
- By Kev All on 02-05-23
By: Jefferson Cowie
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America, América
- A New History of the New World
- By: Greg Grandin
- Narrated by: Holter Graham
- Length: 25 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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From the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, the first comprehensive history of the Western Hemisphere, a sweeping five-century narrative of North and South America that redefines our understanding of both.
By: Greg Grandin
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A Great Disorder
- National Myth and the Battle for America
- By: Richard Slotkin
- Narrated by: Chris Sorensen
- Length: 20 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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A Great Disorder is a bold, urgent work that helps us make sense of today's culture wars through a brilliant reconsideration of America's foundational myths and their use in contemporary politics. Richard Slotkin identifies five myths, born of different eras, that have shaped our conception of what it means to be American: the myths of the Frontier, the Founding, the Civil War (which he breaks into two opposing camps, Emancipation and the Lost Cause), and the Good War, embodied by the multiethnic platoon fighting for freedom.
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Opinion masquerading as history
- By bob bishop on 02-19-25
By: Richard Slotkin
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Ordinary Notes
- By: Christina Sharpe
- Narrated by: Christina Sharpe
- Length: 7 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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A singular achievement, Ordinary Notes explores profound questions about loss and the shapes of Black life that emerge in the wake. In a series of 248 notes that gather meaning as we hear them, Christina Sharpe skillfully weaves artifacts from the past—public ones alongside others that are poignantly personal—with present realities and possible futures, intricately constructing an immersive portrait of everyday Black existence. The themes and tones that echo through this book always attend, with exquisite care, to the ordinary-extraordinary dimensions of Black life.
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Very good…
- By lawrence fauntleroy on 10-01-23
By: Christina Sharpe
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Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy
- Politics and Culture
- By: Jonathan Rauch
- Narrated by: Asa Siegel
- Length: 6 hrs
- Unabridged
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What happens to American democracy if Christianity is no longer able, or no longer willing, to perform the functions on which our constitutional order depends? In this provocative book, the award-winning journalist Jonathan Rauch—a lifelong atheist—reckons candidly with both the shortcomings of secularism and the corrosion of Christianity. Thin Christianity, as Rauch calls the mainline church, has been unable to inspire and retain believers.
By: Jonathan Rauch
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An Emancipation of the Mind
- Radical Philosophy, the War Over Slavery, and the Refounding of America
- By: Matthew Stewart
- Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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How a band of antislavery leaders recovered the radical philosophical inspirations of the first American Revolution to defeat the slaveholders' oligarchy in the Civil War.
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“The arc of the moral universe is long…”
- By Susan on 03-07-25
By: Matthew Stewart
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Erasing History
- By: Jason Stanley
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 4 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Combining historical research with an in-depth analysis of our modern political landscape, Erasing History issues a dire warning for America and the world: the worst fascist movements of humanity’s past began in schools; the same place so many of today’s right-wing political parties have trained their most vicious attacks. Yale professor Jason Stanley exposes the true danger of the right’s tactics and traces their inspirations and funding back to some of the most dangerous ideas of human history.
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The bias attitude of the author
- By Elizabeth ohanna on 09-30-24
By: Jason Stanley
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Reconstruction (Updated Edition)
- America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877
- By: Eric Foner
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 31 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Reconstruction chronicles the way in which Americans—black and white—responded to the unprecedented changes unleashed by the war and the end of slavery. It addresses the ways in which the emancipated slaves' quest for economic autonomy and equal citizenship shaped the political agenda of Reconstruction; the remodeling of Southern society and the place of planters, merchants, and small farmers within it; the evolution of racial attitudes and patterns of race relations; and the emergence of a national state possessing vastly expanded authority and committed.
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Child of SC
- By William Latham on 02-13-25
By: Eric Foner
What listeners say about Illiberal America
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- CommentDante
- 04-28-24
Excellent and important Am history
The confederate nazi American goon impulse has always been here and entwined and interacting with our progress to a republic with liberty and justice for all. Keep the nihilistic impulse down in the hole.
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- Rolando
- 08-27-24
Comprehensive American History
A thorough analysis of US Illiberal history presented in a collection of essays. I'm purchasing the print version of this ASAP
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- d.l.bagnoli
- 04-26-25
A good title with a vague content
Very disappointed. The author constantly drifts away from his title/theme. The book is disjointed and loses all focus as the chapters roll by. I have read many books on US political history and this book is one of the worst.
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