Our Divided Political Heart
The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent
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Narrated by:
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Michael Kramer
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By:
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E. J. Dionne
About this listen
Our Divided Political Heart will be the must-listen book of the 2012 election campaign. Offering an incisive analysis of how hyper-individualism is poisoning the nation's political atmosphere, E. J. Dionne Jr. argues that Americans can't agree on who we are because we can't agree on who we've been, or what it is, philosophically and spiritually, that makes us Americans.
Dionne takes on the Tea Party's distortions of American history and shows that the true American tradition points not to radical individualism, but to a balance between our love of individualism and our devotion to community.
Dionne offers both a fascinating tour of American history - from the Founding Fathers to Clay and Lincoln and on to the Populists, the Progressives, and the New Dealers - and also an analysis of our current politics that shatters conventional wisdom. The true American idea, far from endorsing government inaction or indifference, has always viewed the federal government as an active and constructive partner with the rest of society in promoting prosperity, opportunity, and American greatness.
The ability of the American system to self-correct is its greatest asset, and Dionne challenges progressives to embrace the American story. Our fractious but productive past offers us the resources both to rediscover the idea of progress and to put an end to our fears of decline. Our Divided Political Heart will be required listening for all who seek a path out of our current impasse.
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The Lost History of Liberalism
- From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century
- By: Helena Rosenblatt
- Narrated by: Xe Sands
- Length: 8 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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The Lost History of Liberalism challenges our most basic assumptions about a political creed that has become a rallying cry - and a term of derision - in today's increasingly divided public square. Taking listeners from ancient Rome to today, Helena Rosenblatt traces the evolution of the words "liberal" and "liberalism", revealing the heated debates that have taken place over their meaning. In this timely and provocative book, Rosenblatt debunks the popular myth of liberalism as a uniquely Anglo-American tradition centered on individual rights.
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Educative and informative
- By Amazon Customer on 06-05-19
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Why the Right Went Wrong
- Conservatism from Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond
- By: E. J. Dionne Jr.
- Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain
- Length: 20 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Why the Right Went Wrong offers a historical view of the right since the 1960s. Its core contention is that American conservatism and the Republican Party took a wrong turn when they adopted Barry Goldwater's worldview during and after the 1964 campaign. Since 1968, no conservative administration could live up to the rhetoric rooted in the Goldwater movement that began to reshape American politics 50 years ago.
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Outstanding, refreshing, inspiring
- By James Adams on 03-19-16
By: E. J. Dionne Jr.
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Suicide of the West
- How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy
- By: Jonah Goldberg
- Narrated by: Jonah Goldberg
- Length: 16 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Only once in the last 250,000 years have humans stumbled upon a way to lift ourselves out of the endless cycle of poverty, hunger, and war that defines most of history. If democracy, individualism, and the free market were humankind’s destiny, they should have appeared and taken hold a bit earlier in the evolutionary record. The emergence of freedom and prosperity was nothing short of a miracle.
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Put some gratitude in your attitude
- By Amazon Customer on 04-25-18
By: Jonah Goldberg
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The Paranoid Style in American Politics
- By: Richard Hofstadter, Sean Wilentz - foreward
- Narrated by: Keith Sellon-Wright
- Length: 10 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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This timely reissue of Richard Hofstadter's classic work on the fringe groups that influence American electoral politics offers an invaluable perspective on contemporary domestic affairs. In The Paranoid Style in American Politics, acclaimed historian Richard Hofstadter examines the competing forces in American political discourse and how fringe groups can influence - and derail - the larger agendas of a political party.
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Written in the 50s and 60s...
- By Kindle Customer on 11-06-19
By: Richard Hofstadter, and others
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The American Political Tradition
- And the Men Who Made it
- By: Richard Hofstadter, Christopher Lasch - foreword
- Narrated by: Kaleo Griffith
- Length: 17 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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The American Political Tradition is one of the most influential and widely read historical volumes of our time. First published in 1948, its elegance, passion, and iconoclastic erudition laid the groundwork for a totally new understanding of the American past. By writing a "kind of intellectual history of the assumptions behind American politics", Richard Hofstadter changed the way Americans understand the relationship between power and ideas in their national experience. Hofstadter was able to articulate, in a single work, a historical vision that inspired and shaped an entire generation.
By: Richard Hofstadter, and others
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Working Class Republican
- Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue-Collar Conservatism
- By: Henry Olsen
- Narrated by: Derek Shetterly
- Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Conventional political wisdom views the two most consequential presidents of the 20th century - FDR and Ronald Reagan - as ideological opposites. FDR is hailed as the champion of big-government progressivism manifested in the New Deal. Reagan is seen as the crusader for conservatism dedicated to small government and free markets. But Henry Olsen argues that this assumption is wrong.
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Refreshing and insightful
- By Thomas Marks on 12-16-19
By: Henry Olsen
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The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Presidents
- From Wilson to Obama
- By: Steven F. Hayward
- Narrated by: Johnny Heller
- Length: 9 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Academics, journalists, and popular historians agree: our greatest presidents are the ones who confronted a national crisis and mobilized the entire nation to face it. That’s the conventional wisdom. The chief executives who are celebrated in textbooks and placed in the top echelon of presidents in surveys of experts are the bold leaders - the Woodrow Wilsons and Franklin Roosevelts - who reshaped the United States in line with their grand “vision” for America. Unfortunately, along the way, these “great” presidents inevitably expanded government - and shrank our liberties.
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Really enjoyed it
- By Jkc-007 on 02-15-17
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Dog Whistle Politics
- How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class
- By: Ian Haney López
- Narrated by: Eric Yves Garcia
- Length: 12 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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In Dog Whistle Politics, Ian Haney Lopez offers a sweeping account of how politicians and plutocrats deploy veiled racial appeals to persuade white voters to support policies that favor the extremely rich yet threaten their own interests. Dog-whistle appeals generate middle-class enthusiasm for political candidates who promise to crack down on crime, curb undocumented immigration, and protect the heartland against Islamic infiltration, but ultimately vote to slash taxes for the rich.
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Narration like verbal water boarding
- By Mark Andreadis on 08-31-15
By: Ian Haney López
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The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order
- America and the World in the Free Market Era
- By: Gary Gerstle
- Narrated by: Keith Sellon-Wright
- Length: 13 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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To be sure, neoliberalism has contributed to a number of alarming trends, not least of which has been a massive growth in income inequality. Yet as the eminent historian Gary Gerstle argues in The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, these indictments fail to reckon with the full contours of what neoliberalism was and why its worldview had such persuasive hold on both the right and the left for three decades.
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Cursory, unoriginal, class-blind
- By A Reviewer on 10-24-22
By: Gary Gerstle
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Ill Fares the Land
- By: Tony Judt
- Narrated by: James Adams
- Length: 5 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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In Ill Fares The Land, Tony Judt, one of our leading historians and thinkers, reveals how we have arrived at our present dangerously confused moment. Judt masterfully crystallizes what we've all been feeling into a way to think our way into, and thus out of, our great collective dis-ease about the current state of things.
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Blah, Blah, Blah.
- By Michael on 07-15-10
By: Tony Judt
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Temptations of Power
- Islamists & Illiberal Democracy in a New Middle East
- By: Shadi Hamid
- Narrated by: Peter Ganim
- Length: 10 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1989, Francis Fukuyama famously announced the "end of history." The Berlin Wall had fallen; liberal democracy had won out. But what of illiberal democracy - the idea that popular majorities, working through the democratic process, might reject gender equality, religious freedoms, and other norms that Western democracies take for granted? Nowhere have such considerations become more relevant than in the Middle East, where the uprisings of 2011 swept the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups to power.
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A new perspective
- By Dave114 on 08-06-18
By: Shadi Hamid
What listeners say about Our Divided Political Heart
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Jean
- 09-17-12
Must-read
What made the experience of listening to Our Divided Political Heart the most enjoyable?
A great perspective on American political history
What was the most compelling aspect of this narrative?
A fascinating take on how we got to this disturbingly polarized political landscape
What does Michael Kramer bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?
He's a great reader, and makes challenging material very accessible
Any additional comments?
Whether you agree or disagree with this notion of an imbalance of our historically conflicting tendencies of individualism vs. more community-focused policymaking, books like this need to be read by more people so we can at least begin to have a civilized conversation around our differences instead of the current winner-take-all bloodletting style of politics
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1 person found this helpful
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- Mark Carras
- 03-02-13
A subject this dry could not have been done better
As much as I love to expand my brain by listening to books like this, I find most of them so boring I can't seem to focus long enough to learn anything. This book however did a great job at keeping things interesting enough to keep my focus, but without getting into a level of sensationalism that has destroyed cable news journalism over the past decade.
I also love how the author points out how both sides have helped cause harm to the political discord in this country. He doesn't stop at just throwing around accusations. There are real solutions here as well. This book is strongly recommended. I'm sure I will listen to it again when I am mentally ready for something this heavy. It seems like the kind of thing that could be listened to many times over and over again with each time the reader picking up new info missed every time before.
Highly recommended, but be ready to grab something light after.
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- Sheldon
- 08-01-12
Great description of the current political field
Would you consider the audio edition of Our Divided Political Heart to be better than the print version?
Yes it was quite thrilling to read this great book, I enjoyed it considerably.
What was the most compelling aspect of this narrative?
Points of view. Yes it was quite thrilling to read this great book, I enjoyed it considerably.
Which character – as performed by Michael Kramer – was your favorite?
Obama. Yes it was quite thrilling to read this great book, I enjoyed it considerably.
Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?
Yes it was quite thrilling to read this great book, I enjoyed it considerably.
Any additional comments?
Yes it was quite thrilling to read this great book, I enjoyed it considerably.
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- Jamie B
- 08-15-12
Good points and lots of good information
Where does Our Divided Political Heart rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?
This book was full of information and insights which I found to be very interesting. That said, I am a huge early-American political thought nerd, and others might have found this level of detail and intricacy a bit difficult to grasp or at least be overwhelmed by all the little details that go into making what is a very nuanced argument. It might have been presented more concisely, but I like the book, I agree with the bulk of the author's insights and thought he explained it well and thoroughly and it was very well-thought-out.
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4 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Amazon Customer
- 01-23-16
EJ allowed me to understand MY POLITICAL HEART
Book was great. I cant wait for next book to become available on listen too.
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- eugene m edele
- 02-08-16
Narrator adds too much gravity
EJ Dionne regularly appears on talk radio. He has buoyancy and positive humor in his voice. This narrator was a little too grave.
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1 person found this helpful
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- BucNasty
- 01-18-13
Recommend for anyone interested in politics
Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?
Kramer reads it well and it is enjoyable to listen to. Despite Dionne's personal liberal bias, which he freely admits, the book is a fair look at the history of how we've arrived where we are now.
Who was your favorite character and why?
N/A
What about Michael Kramer’s performance did you like?
Voice was interesting to listen to. Very nice.
Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?
Yes
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- Robert O'Neill
- 07-23-16
Great Review of U.S. Political History and Thought
E.J. Dionne writes in a clear, unadorned style. He presents a broad picture of all strains of American political theory. His analysis is fair but firm.
The narrator's voice and tone matched the content. Steady and strong. Light and conversational when he needed it.
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- Cloud Captain
- 12-10-12
Great read, not so great listen
Would you listen to Our Divided Political Heart again? Why?
Yes. E.J. Dione presents a reasoned and knowledgeable analysis of the American Political scene that makes great sense in light of the wide-ranging grasp he presents of the forces contributing to the current divide. Unfortunately, after hearing the author often on televised interviews, I found Michael Kramer's narration disappointing, often monotonous, and frequently unable to keep me from falling asleep while listening. Perhaps the author's schedule prevented him from narrating his own work, but the narrator failed to share the author's passion for his work .
Who was your favorite character and why?
Likely F.D.R., as I gained new appreciation for his political skills from this listen.
Would you listen to another book narrated by Michael Kramer?
Not likely
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