What Were We Thinking
A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era
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Narrated by:
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Christian Barillas
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By:
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Carlos Lozada
About this listen
In this “crisp, engaging, and very smart” (The New York Times Book Review) work, The Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic digs into books of the Trump era and finds that our response to this presidency often reflects the same polarization, contradictions, and resentments that made it possible.
It is an irony of our age that a man who rarely reads has unleashed an onslaught of books about his tenure and his time. Dissections of the white working class. Manifestos of political resistance. Works on identity, gender, and migration. Memoirs on race and protest. Revelations of White House mayhem. Warnings over the future of conservatism, progressivism, and of American democracy itself.
As a book critic for The Washington Post, Carlos Lozada has read just about all of them. In What Were We Thinking, he draws on some 150 recent volumes to explore how we understand ourselves in the Trump era. Lozada’s characters are not the president, his advisers, or his antagonists but the political and cultural ideas at play — and at stake — in America.
Just as Trump’s election upended the country’s political establishment, it shocked its intellectual class. Though some of the books of the Trump era skillfully illuminate the challenges and transformations the nation faces, too many works are more defensive than incisive, more righteous than right. Lozada offers a provocative argument: Whether written by liberals or conservatives, activists or academics, true believers or harsh critics, the books of Trump’s America are vulnerable to the same failures of imagination that gave us this presidency in the first place.
In What Were We Thinking, Lozada’s selections range from best-selling titles to little-known works, from thoroughly reported accounts of the administration to partisan polemics, from meditations on the fate of truth to memoirs about enduring — or enabling — the Trump presidency. He also identifies books that challenge entrenched assumptions and shift our vantage points, the books that best help us make sense of this era.
The result is an “elegant yet lacerating” (The Guardian) intellectual history of our time, a work that transcends daily headlines to discern how we got here and how we thought here. What Were We Thinking will help today’s listeners understand America, and will help tomorrow’s listeners look back and understand us.
©2020 Carlos Lozada. All rights reserved. (P)2020 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.Listeners also enjoyed...
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The Reckoning will examine America’s national trauma, rooted in our history but dramatically exacerbated by the impact of current events and the Trump administration’s corrupt and immoral policies. Our failure to acknowledge this trauma, let alone root it out, has allowed it to metastasize. Whether it manifests itself in rising levels of rage and hatred, or hopelessness and apathy, the stress of living in a country we no longer recognize has affected all of us. America is suffering from PTSD - a new leader alone cannot fix us.
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Focus of racism using her uncle as a mirror
- By Amazon Customer on 08-18-21
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The Smallest Minority
- Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics
- By: Kevin D. Williamson
- Narrated by: Stephen Graybill
- Length: 6 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Listener beware: Kevin D. Williamson - the lively, literary firebrand from National Review who was too hot for The Atlantic to handle - comes to bury democracy, not to praise it. With electrifying honesty and spirit, Williamson takes a flamethrower to mob politics, the “beast with many heads” that haunts social media and what currently passes for real life. It’s destroying our capacity for individualism and dragging us down “the Road to Smurfdom, the place where the deracinated demos of the Twitter age finds itself feeling small and blue.”
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Brutally honest, accurate and relevant
- By Sean on 09-19-19
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Death of the Liberal Class
- By: Chris Hedges
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 9 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Chris Hedges examines the failure of the liberal class to confront the rise of the corporate state and the consequences of a liberalism that has become profoundly bankrupted. Hedges argues that there are five pillars of the liberal establishment and that each of these institutions has sold out the constituents it represented. In doing so, the liberal class has become irrelevant to society at large and ultimately the corporate power elite they once served.
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Integrity-Can You Tell Me Where It's Gone?
- By Mel on 06-14-12
By: Chris Hedges
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The Man Who Sold America
- Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story
- By: Joy-Ann Reid
- Narrated by: Joy-Ann Reid
- Length: 9 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Candidate Trump sold Americans a vision that was seemingly at odds with their country’s founding principles. Now in office, he’s put up a "for sale" sign - on the prestige of the presidency, on America’s global stature, and on our national identity. At what cost have these deals come? Joy-Ann Reid's essential new audiobook, The Man Who Sold America, delivers an urgent accounting of our national crisis from one of our foremost political commentators.
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Good explanation of how we got to where we are
- By Caduceus26 on 07-13-19
By: Joy-Ann Reid
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Stop Mass Hysteria
- America's Insanity from the Salem Witch Trials to the Trump Witch Hunt
- By: Michael Savage
- Narrated by: Barry Baer
- Length: 10 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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In his new audiobook, Stop Mass Hysteria, number one New York Times best-selling author Michael Savage calls out the mass hysteria mongers and their methods and shows Americans that we must look to history to understand the present and avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.
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Common sense in a country that is trying not to
- By Mike on 10-09-18
By: Michael Savage
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Why We're Polarized
- By: Ezra Klein
- Narrated by: Ezra Klein
- Length: 8 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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In Why We’re Polarized, Klein reveals the structural and psychological forces behind America’s descent into division and dysfunction. Neither a polemic nor a lament, this book offers a clear framework for understanding everything from Trump’s rise to the Democratic Party’s leftward shift to the politicization of everyday culture. America is polarized, first and foremost, by identity. Everyone engaged in American politics is engaged, at some level, in identity politics.
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Good as an intro, skip if you’re a wonk
- By Tony on 01-29-20
By: Ezra Klein
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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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Blackout
- How Black America Can Make Its Second Escape from the Democrat Plantation
- By: Candace Owens, Larry Elder
- Narrated by: Candace Owens, Larry Elder
- Length: 6 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Black Americans have long been shackled to the Democrats. Seeing no viable alternative, they have watched liberal politicians take the Black vote for granted without pledging anything in return. In Blackout, Owens argues that this automatic allegiance is both illogical and unearned. She contends that the Democrat Party has a long history of racism and exposes the ideals that hinder the Black community’s ability to rise above poverty, live independent and successful lives, and be an active part of the American dream.
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Thought provoking!
- By Girl with curls on 09-16-20
By: Candace Owens, and others
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A Lot of People Are Saying
- The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy
- By: Nancy L. Rosenblum, Russell Muirhead
- Narrated by: Katherine Fenton
- Length: 6 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Conspiracy theories are as old as politics. But conspiracists today have introduced something new - conspiracy without theory. And the new conspiracism has moved from the fringes to the heart of government with the election of Donald Trump. In A Lot of People Are Saying, Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum reveal how the new conspiracism differs from classic conspiracy theory, why so few officials speak truth to conspiracy, and what needs to be done to resist it.
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INSIGHTFUL
- By JaredENH on 04-30-19
By: Nancy L. Rosenblum, and others
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Trumpocalypse
- Restoring American Democracy
- By: David Frum
- Narrated by: David Frum
- Length: 6 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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A huge swath of Americans have put their faith in Trump, and Trump only, because they see the rest of the country building a future that doesn't have a place for them. If they would risk their lives for Trump in a pandemic, they will certainly risk the stability of American democracy. They brought the Trumpocalypse upon the country, and a post-Trumpocalypse country will have to find a way either to reconcile them to democracy - or to protect democracy from them.
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Trump More Dangerous Than the Axis of Evil
- By J.B. on 05-26-20
By: David Frum
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The Black Presidency
- Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America
- By: Michael Eric Dyson
- Narrated by: Michael Eric Dyson
- Length: 9 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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A provocative, lively deep dive into the meaning of America's first Black president and first Black presidency, from "one of the most graceful and lucid intellectuals writing on race and politics today" (
Vanity Fair).
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Unbalanced, narrow and personal
- By CH on 02-06-18
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What Truth Sounds Like
- Robert F. Kennedy, James Baldwin, and Our Unfinished Conversation About Race in America
- By: Michael Eric Dyson
- Narrated by: Michael Eric Dyson
- Length: 6 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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This audiobook exists at the tense intersection of the conflict between politics and prophecy - of whether we embrace political resolution or moral redemption to fix our fractured racial landscape.
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Riffing on a meeting with RFK and James Baldwin
- By Adam Shields on 06-08-18
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Originally released in fall 2017, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump was a runaway best seller. Alarmed Americans and international onlookers wanted to know: What is wrong with him? That question still plagues us. The Trump administration has proven as chaotic and destructive as its opponents feared, and the man at the center of it all remains a cipher.
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The Cult of Trump is an accessible and in-depth analysis of the president, showing that under the right circumstances, even sane, rational, well-adjusted people can be persuaded to believe the most outrageous ideas. Hassan’s audiobook is essential listening for anyone wanting to understand the Trump phenomenon and looking for a way forward.
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A party gone astray
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What listeners say about What Were We Thinking
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Mr. Potter
- 12-31-20
Power Bar for the Intellectually Indolent
What more can you ask for? Mr. Lozada read 175 books and you get to pick up scores of pithy cocktail party tidbits in just one read. It's like an IV drip of Trump Info. On a broader, and somewhat more serious level... I got so vexed with Trump and the people who support him that I bought a stack of books on the subject. In what is here essentially a "meta study", Mr. Lozada is able sample many learned and diverse views, who all come to the same conclusion: Donald Trump is (at the end of the day) just a money grubbing white trash showoff who doesn't have an original idea in his bed-head comb-over head. Which, given the fact that we've made him President of our Country, makes him "the most dangerous man in History". (Thank you to Mary Trump for that pithy phrase) Of the varies books I've read on Trump the one that really sticks with me is (surprisingly) "Disloyal" by Michael Cohen. I was no fan of Michael Cohen and completely prepared to hate the book and throw it aside - but he has an very interesting personal story, is earnest and self examining of his relationship with Trump, is contrite and regretful of his many transgressions, and is a damn good old-style New York story teller. (e.g. "Donald Trump never prepares for anything - ever"!) I appreciate that economical style of writing. The big takeaway from "Disloyal" is that we're all overthinking Donald Trump. According to Cohen, it's always about the money. Trump is just a shallow vainglorious shell who judges his and everyone else's worth by their bank account. Putin is the wealthiest man in the world - so he's Trump's biggest hero. And on, and on...
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2 people found this helpful
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- Lesleigh J. Owen
- 12-27-20
Intellectual Literature Review for the Trump Era
Any scholar will recognize the lit review format of this book. This is a powerful discussion and synthesis of some of the germinal books to emerge out of the Trump Era. The author divides the themes into chapters like immigration, conservatism, feminism, etc., and then analyzes and synthesizes the many books he read on the topics.
The writing is gorgeous and the author's voice dryly humorous, witty, and incisive. I don't agree with all his analyses, but I respect his breakdowns and subtle editorializing. A spectacular read (or listen).
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3 people found this helpful
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- Kindle Customer
- 11-22-20
Useful book
A very thoughtful summary of the writing about the civic chaos of the last four years. The best part is the author's final list of twelve essential books, and his rationale for them.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Asarchus
- 12-02-20
Great Sampler and Critique of Trump Literature
Carlos Lozada, a Pulitzer Prize-winning book reviewer, takes us on a wild ride through the hundreds of books written thus far on the Trump presidency, from fawning works of praise to blistering critiques. Nearly every volume published since 2015 when Trump infamously descended (!) the escalator in Trump tower to announce his candidacy and demean Mexicans is examined. Before you spend your money on a Trump foe or friend's "tell all" book, read Lozada's. You'll thank him for steering you to the few gems in a field of slag.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Patrick Benvenutti
- 05-22-24
The mess we’re in
The more I listened the more worried I became for our democracy and its very fragile state. It’s now approximately 4 years later then the publication and just 7 months until our next presidential election and Trump is still overpowering the republicans, dominating the poles and quite possibly in a position to be elected again. If more Americans would take the time to listen to this book they quite possibly have their eyes opened and reconsider voting for him and the fall of our democracy in his hands. Please wake up America. Educate yourself and turn off FOX. News. For the love of your grandchildren- educate yourself. Please!
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1 person found this helpful
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- Dwayne
- 09-10-21
Nice summary of what we were reading and writing
This title won't be for everyone, but if you'd like a review of a broad array of books during the Trump era, this is a good option. I was intrigued by the premise of looking at what was written during the Trump years as a way to understand what we were collectively thinking. As you might expect, there were some good clear approaches to understanding our national predicament and some wild-eyed not so thoughtful works as well. The intellectual in you will appreciate the broad review, even if you disagree with the authors conclusions. I found myself largely in agreement with the author's thoughtful take on the various publications over this period and the book was a worthwhile investment. I recommend it.
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- Kindle Customer
- 01-10-21
Thought Provoking
This boons was written before the 2020 election and subsequent misinformation campaign regarding election fraud. The events that have unfolded only make this an incredibly relevant read.
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- Shelley W
- 03-02-21
It lost me
While I was very drawn to the premise and the content--the author had read over 150 books about Trump--I had a hard time following it on Audible. The author is quite the loquacious writer, but the point got lost in the words for me. At the end of a long passage, I couldn't remember what the starting point was! Perhaps it would be easier to follow in print form. I returned the audiobook because I couldn't motivate myself to pick it up again after the first couple of chapters.
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1 person found this helpful