The America 2.0 Reading List
Books to understand how we got here — and how to fix it.
People ask me all the time what books they can read to understand how we got here — and what we might do about it. This list started as a handout for a workshop I led at TEDSummit 2019 in Edinburgh, “Reversing Factionalism,” and it has grown since. It covers the founders’ warnings about faction, the sorting of America into hostile tribes, Russia’s political technologists, the networks and money of the anti-democratic right, Silicon Valley’s dreams of exit, and some of the stranger roots of all of it. Many of these authors have joined me on Dave Troy Presents.
Start with New & Essential, or use the buttons to filter for quick reads, classics, free e-books, or podcast guests. We'll update this periodically as new books come on our radar.
163 books · Last updated
✨ New & Essential
12The newest books on the shelf, plus the handful we come back to most.
🏛 Classics on Faction & Democracy
9The political theory behind the republic, and its warnings about faction. Several are free e-books.
🧠 Minds & Movements
13Crowds, cults, propaganda and the psychology of belief.
🧲 How We Split Apart
14How Americans sorted into hostile tribes.
🧊 Cold War Roots
16Spies, think tanks, foundations and the intellectual battles of 1945–1991.
KGB
The Secret Work of Soviet Secret Agents
John Barron · 1974
The Reader's Digest editor's landmark exposé of KGB operations, built on defector testimony.
KGB Today
The Hidden Hand
John Barron · 1983
Barron's sequel on Soviet active measures, disinformation and the peace-movement front groups of the early 1980s.
🪆 Russia & Political Technology
41The Kremlin's toolkit, its ideologies, and its reach into the West.
Black Hundred
The Rise of the Extreme Right in Russia
Walter Laqueur · 1993
A historian of fascism traces Russia’s far right from the tsarist-era Black Hundreds and the Protocols to Pamyat and the post-Soviet nationalists.
Mafia State
How One Reporter Became an Enemy of the Brutal New Russia
Luke Harding · 2011
The Guardian's Moscow bureau chief on the FSB harassment campaign that ended in his expulsion.
🥾 Fascism, Old and New
15The playbook, its history, and its revivals.
Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party
Domestic Fascist Networks and Their Effect on U.S. Cold War Politics
Russ Bellant · 1988
How Nazi collaborators from Eastern Europe found a home in the Republican Party's ethnic-outreach arm.
Dreamer of the Day
Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International
Kevin Coogan · 1999
The strange American who tried to ally fascists with Moscow after WWII.
Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism
Dennis King · 1989
The investigative history of the LaRouche organization, drawn from its own publications, court records and ex-members.
⛪ God, Money & the Right
11The networks, funders and theologies of the anti-democratic right.
🚀 Tech Barons, Crypto & Exit
18Silicon Valley's libertarian dream of escaping democracy.
🔮 The Weird Roots
15Cults, esoterica, cosmism and psychedelics. Stranger than you'd think, and it matters.
The Biosphere and Noosphere Reader
Global Environment, Society and Change
Paul R. Samson & David Pitt (eds.) · 1999
Primary source: the Gorbachev-fronted anthology of the noosphere idea, from Vernadsky and Teilhard to the post-Soviet global-environment project, in its own words.
400 Years of Imaginary Friends
A Journey into the World of Adepts, Masters, Ascended Masters, and Their Messengers
Kenneth Paolini & Talita Paolini · 2000
Two former members trace the ‘Ascended Master’ lineage behind Elizabeth Clare Prophet's church. Foreword by podcast guest Joe Szimhart.
Changing Images of Man
O. W. Markley & Willis W. Harman (eds.) · 1982
Primary source: the SRI futures report (1974) by Harman, Joseph Campbell, Duane Elgin and others, calling for a new “image of man” to steer industrial society.
🛠 Fixing It
11Ideas for putting it back together.
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