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. Last updated September 26, 2026.
✨ New & Essential
12The newest books on the shelf, plus the handful we come back to most.
Hayek's Bastards
Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right
Quinn Slobodian · 2025
How libertarians and the far right merged around gold, race science and IQ.
When the Clock Broke
Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s
John Ganz · 2024
The early-'90s prequel to MAGA: Buchanan, Perot, Rothbard and the paleo right.
🏛 Classics on Faction & Democracy
8The political theory behind the republic, and its warnings about faction. Several are free e-books.
Political Parties
A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy
Robert Michels · 1911
The 'iron law of oligarchy': why every organization, however democratic, ends up run by a few.
The Parties Versus the People
How to Turn Republicans and Democrats into Americans
Mickey Edwards · 2012
A former GOP congressman's practical case for weakening the party machines.
On Revolution
Hannah Arendt · 1963
Why the American Revolution founded a lasting republic and the French one didn't — and what we lost when we stopped governing ourselves in councils.
🧠 Minds & Movements
11Crowds, cults, propaganda and the psychology of belief.
The True Believer
Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements
Eric Hoffer · 1951
A longshoreman-philosopher's short, sharp book on why people join mass movements.
Propaganda
The Formation of Men's Attitudes
Jacques Ellul · 1962
Propaganda isn't lies told to the ignorant — it's what educated people in a technological society crave.
Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism
A Study of 'Brainwashing' in China
Robert Jay Lifton · 1961
Lifton's eight criteria of 'totalism' remain the standard lens for cults and closed movements.
The Paranoid Style in American Politics
Richard Hofstadter · 1964
The classic essay on conspiracy thinking as a recurring style of American politics.
Salem Possessed
The Social Origins of Witchcraft
Paul Boyer & Stephen Nissenbaum · 1974
Salem's witch panic, mapped as a feud between two factions of one village.
Pastels and Pedophiles
Inside the Mind of QAnon
Mia Bloom & Sophia Moskalenko · 2021
Two terrorism scholars explain how QAnon recruited moms, wellness influencers and the lonely.
Moral Politics
How Liberals and Conservatives Think
George Lakoff · 1996
Strict father vs. nurturant parent: the family metaphors hiding under our politics.
Imagined Communities
Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
Benedict Anderson · 1983
Nations are communities we imagine into being — through print, maps and museums.
🧲 How We Split Apart
9How Americans sorted into hostile tribes.
The Big Sort
Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart
Bill Bishop · 2008
How Americans quietly sorted themselves into like-minded neighborhoods, churches and counties.
Bowling Alone
The Collapse and Revival of American Community
Robert D. Putnam · 2000
The decline of the civic clubs and leagues that once made strangers into neighbors.
Partisans
The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s
Nicole Hemmer · 2022
How talk radio, Buchanan and Gingrich built the politics we live in now.
When the Clock Broke
Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s
John Ganz · 2024
The early-'90s prequel to MAGA: Buchanan, Perot, Rothbard and the paleo right.
Twilight of Democracy
The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism
Anne Applebaum · 2020
Why some of Applebaum's old friends on the right drifted toward the strongmen.
LikeWar
The Weaponization of Social Media
P. W. Singer & Emerson T. Brooking · 2018
How social media became a battlefield — for militaries, terrorists and trolls alike.
Merchants of Doubt
How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Climate Change
Naomi Oreskes & Erik M. Conway · 2010
The tobacco-to-climate playbook for manufacturing doubt.
🧊 Cold War Roots
8Spies, think tanks, foundations and the intellectual battles of 1945–1991.
Spies
The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West
Calder Walton · 2023
A century of Russian-Western spy war, from Lenin to Putin.
The Cultural Cold War
The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters
Frances Stonor Saunders · 1999
How the CIA secretly funded Western intellectuals and artists.
Foundations of the American Century
The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations in the Rise of American Power
Inderjeet Parmar · 2012
How three private foundations built the networks of American global power.
Soldiers of Reason
The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire
Alex Abella · 2008
The think tank that invented nuclear strategy, game theory in policy, and much of the Cold War mindset.
The Wizards of Armageddon
Fred Kaplan · 1983
The RAND intellectuals who tried to make nuclear war thinkable.
The Power of Systems
How Policy Sciences Opened Up the Cold War World
Eglė Rindzevičiūtė · 2016
How systems science opened a working channel between Soviet and Western experts.
Empire of Friends
Soviet Power and Socialist Internationalism in Cold War Czechoslovakia
Rachel Applebaum · 2019
Soviet 'friendship' — exchanges, societies, tourism — as an instrument of power.
🪆 Russia & Political Technology
31The Kremlin's toolkit, its ideologies, and its reach into the West.
Putin's People
How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West
Catherine Belton · 2020
How the KGB men around Putin captured Russia's wealth and turned it outward.
The New Nobility
The Restoration of Russia's Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB
Andrei Soldatov & Irina Borogan · 2010
The FSB's rise to become Russia's new aristocracy.
The Red Web
The Struggle Between Russia's Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries
Andrei Soldatov & Irina Borogan · 2015
How Russia's security services learned to surveil and censor the internet.
The Compatriots
The Brutal and Chaotic History of Russia's Exiles, Émigrés, and Agents Abroad
Andrei Soldatov & Irina Borogan · 2019
A century of Moscow's efforts to manage — and use — Russians abroad.
The Man Without a Face
The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin
Masha Gessen · 2012
The unlikely rise of a gray KGB officer to absolute power.
The Road to Unfreedom
Russia, Europe, America
Timothy Snyder · 2018
How Kremlin ideas about eternity and 'sovereign democracy' reached the West.
Autocracy, Inc.
The Dictators Who Want to Run the World
Anne Applebaum · 2024
Today's autocracies aren't a bloc — they're a network of shared business interests.
Russian Nationalism
Imaginaries, Doctrines, and Political Battlefields
Marlène Laruelle · 2018
The clearest map of Russia's competing nationalisms.
Is Russia Fascist?
Unraveling Propaganda East and West
Marlène Laruelle · 2021
A careful answer to a loaded question.
Russia and the Western Far Right
Tango Noir
Anton Shekhovtsov · 2017
How Moscow cultivated Europe's far-right parties.
The Gumilev Mystique
Biopolitics, Eurasianism, and the Construction of Community in Modern Russia
Mark Bassin · 2016
The ethnographer whose theories feed Russian Eurasianism.
The Moralist International
Russia in the Global Culture Wars
Kristina Stoeckl & Dmitry Uzlaner · 2022
How Moscow joined — and helped fund — the global 'family values' movement.
Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy
Religion, Politics, and Strategy
Dmitry Adamsky · 2019
How the Orthodox Church blessed and embedded itself in Russia's nuclear forces.
Geopolitical Imagination
Ideology and Utopia in Post-Soviet Russia
Mikhail Suslov · 2020
The utopias and ideologies behind Russia's view of its place in the world.
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.
A Very Expensive Poison
The Assassination of Alexander Litvinenko and Putin's War with the West
Luke Harding · 2016
The polonium murder of Alexander Litvinenko in London, and what the inquiry found.
Collusion
Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win
Luke Harding · 2017
The 2017 bestseller tracing the meetings and money between Trump's world and Moscow.
Shadow State
Murder, Mayhem, and Russia's Remaking of the West
Luke Harding · 2020
Poisonings, hacks and influence operations: how the Kremlin took its war to the West.
Invasion
The Inside Story of Russia's Bloody War and Ukraine's Fight for Survival
Luke Harding · 2022
Reporting from Ukraine in the first months of Russia's full-scale war.
Russian Roulette
The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump
Michael Isikoff & David Corn · 2018
The narrative history of the 2016 operation.
Superclass
The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making
David Rothkopf · 2008
The 6,000 people who run the world — and the forums where they meet.
Tradecraft, Tactics, and Dirty Tricks
Russian Intelligence and Putin's Secret War
Sean M. Wiswesser · 2026
A former CIA chief of station on how the SVR, GRU and FSB actually operate.
The Revenge of the Past
Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union
Ronald Grigor Suny · 1993
How Soviet policy built the very nations that later broke it apart.
Fall
The Mystery of Robert Maxwell
John Preston · 2020
The press baron who moved between London, Moscow and Tel Aviv — and his mysterious death.
🥾 Fascism, Old and New
11The playbook, its history, and its revivals.
How Fascism Works
The Politics of Us and Them
Jason Stanley · 2018
Ten tactics of fascist politics, each in a short readable chapter.
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.
Against the Modern World
Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century
Mark Sedgwick · 2004
The esoteric 'Traditionalist' school behind Dugin, Bannon and more.
Blood and Politics
The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream
Leonard Zeskind · 2009
The definitive history of American white nationalism since the 1970s.
Bring the War Home
The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America
Kathleen Belew · 2018
How Vietnam veterans built a white-power paramilitary movement.
Right-Wing Populism in America
Too Close for Comfort
Chip Berlet & Matthew N. Lyons · 2000
The long tradition of producerist, conspiracist populism.
Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism
George Hawley · 2016
A map of the dissident right — paleocons, paleolibertarians, white nationalists — just before Trump.
Lone Wolf Terror and the Rise of Leaderless Resistance
George Michael · 2012
Where 'leaderless resistance' came from, and how it became a terror doctrine.
⛪ God, Money & the Right
10The networks, funders and theologies of the anti-democratic right.
The Family
The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power
Jeff Sharlet · 2008
The Fellowship, the National Prayer Breakfast and power in Washington.
C Street
The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy
Jeff Sharlet · 2010
The Family's Capitol Hill townhouse and its global reach.
Dark Money
The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right
Jane Mayer · 2016
How the Kochs and allies built a private political machine.
Democracy in Chains
The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America
Nancy MacLean · 2017
James Buchanan's economics and the libertarian plan to constrain majorities.
Rich People's Movements
Grassroots Campaigns to Untax the One Percent
Isaac William Martin · 2013
A century of the wealthy organizing like populists to cut their own taxes.
🚀 Tech Barons, Crypto & Exit
14Silicon Valley's libertarian dream of escaping democracy.
Crack-Up Capitalism
Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy
Quinn Slobodian · 2023
Charter cities, free zones and the libertarian dream of escaping democracy.
Hayek's Bastards
Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right
Quinn Slobodian · 2025
How libertarians and the far right merged around gold, race science and IQ.
Team Human
Douglas Rushkoff · 2019
A manifesto for putting people ahead of platforms.
Globalists
The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism
Quinn Slobodian · 2018
How the neoliberals designed institutions to protect markets from democracy.
🔮 The Weird Roots
8Cults, esoterica, cosmism and psychedelics. Stranger than you'd think, and it matters.
The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture
Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal (ed.) · 1997
Theosophy, mysticism and the occult in Russian culture before and after 1917.
The Russian Cosmists
The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers
George M. Young · 2012
Resurrecting the dead and colonizing space: Russian cosmism explained.
Red Shambhala
Magic, Prophecy, and Geopolitics in the Heart of Asia
Andrei Znamenski · 2011
Bolsheviks, Buddhists and the Roerichs hunting for a mythical kingdom.
Acid Dreams
The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond
Martin A. Lee & Bruce Shlain · 1985
From MKULTRA to the Summer of Love.
Storming Heaven
LSD and the American Dream
Jay Stevens · 1987
The people who thought LSD would change the world.
The Future of Immortality
Remaking Life and Death in Contemporary Russia
Anya Bernstein · 2019
Russian cosmists, transhumanists and the quest to abolish death.
🛠 Fixing It
10Ideas for putting it back together.
Open Democracy
Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century
Hélène Landemore · 2020
Citizens' assemblies and sortition as a real alternative to party politics.
The Upswing
How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again
Robert D. Putnam & Shaylyn Romney Garrett · 2020
The Progressive Era pulled America out of a Gilded Age. Putnam asks if we can do it again.
High Conflict
Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out
Amanda Ripley · 2021
How ordinary disagreement turns into feuds that feed themselves — and how people escape.
The Reunited States of America
How We Can Bridge the Partisan Divide
Mark Gerzon · 2016
A veteran facilitator's practical guide to working across the divide.
The Next Revolution
Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy
Murray Bookchin · 2015
The case for rebuilding politics around neighborhood assemblies.
Inclusion and Democracy
Iris Marion Young · 2000
How to make democratic deliberation include people it usually shuts out.
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