recently finished on audible and would recommend:
Partisans by Nicole Hemmer
A theory that Reagan was not the beginning of the modern conservative era, but actually the end of the previous era. Highlights specific players and movements from the 1990s through the 2010s to examine how the party has changed and what it cares about and how it came to be that way (she's a conservative media scholar)
Elite Capture by Olufemi O. Taiwo
A very short, but well-constricted critique by an African-born Marxist challenging the ideas of liberalism and woke rhetoric from the left. He makes the case that deferring to the most relevant minority in any given room likely still empowers the opinions of an elite, rather than of the people, leaving a broad culture thinking they are doing right by the working oppressed but instead glomming onto ideas and word choices formulated by elites.
Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick J. Deneen
A well-written book with an incomplete thesis basically indicating that the whole liberal experiment--the traditional liberalism which would contain both our conservative agrarian founders and our more progressive urban founders--will inevitably lead to an overbearing government as people focus more on their own individualism so thoroughly that only a government power can come in and pick up the pieces and provide the structure that a more communal orientation would have don outside of government. A really strange "conservative" anti-founding ideology book. Like he wants to try something wholly new, but fails to propose what it might look like. Written to appeal to all walks, but clearly a conservative book
The Bitter End by a handful of researchers
A look back on the 2020 election (and the campaigns that led to it) using insane amounts of data and analysis to get to the roots of what was driving voting behavior. These authors have done this post-election for the past 3 elections now. Very insightful.
So that's a moderate author who studies conservative media, a full-on marxist who is (not in his words) criticizing the establishment left culture of orthodoxy as elitist; a conservatism who believes the whole American experiment based on liberty is and was always doomed to lead to self-involved people deferring their power to an overlord; and political scientists examining how thoroughly Trump lost the 2020 election and how people felt about various people and issues along the way, right up through January 6th.
Narrow topics, broad ideologies. Encourage every one.
