This highly readable narrative history of the Republican Party profiles the G.O.P. from its emergence as an antislavery party during the 1850s to its current place as champion of political conservatism.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Democracy Awakening, “the most comprehensive account of the GOP and its competing impulses” (Los Angeles Times) When Abraham Lincoln helped create the Republican Party on the eve of the Civil War, his goal was to promote economic opportunity for all Americans, not just the slaveholding Southern planters who steered national politics. Yet, despite the egalitarian dream at the heart of its founding, the Republican Party quickly became mired in a fundamental identity crisis. Would it be the party of democratic ideals? Or would it be the party of moneyed interests? In the century and a half since, Republicans have vacillated between these two poles, with dire economic, political, and moral repercussions for the entire nation. In To Make Men Free, celebrated historian Heather Cox Richardson traces the shifting ideology of the Grand Old Party from the antebellum era to the Great Recession, revealing the insidious cycle of boom and bust that has characterized the Party since its inception. While in office, progressive Republicans like Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower revived Lincoln's vision of economic freedom and expanded the government, attacking the concentration of wealth and nurturing upward mobility. But they and others like them have been continually thwarted by powerful business interests in the Party. Their opponents appealed to Americans' latent racism and xenophobia to regain political power, linking taxation and regulation to redistribution and socialism. The results of the Party's wholesale embrace of big business are all too familiar: financial collapses like the Panic of 1893, the Great Depression in 1929, and the Great Recession in 2008. With each passing decade, with each missed opportunity and political misstep, the schism within the Republican Party has grown wider, pulling the GOP ever further from its founding principles. Expansive and authoritative, To Make Men Free is a sweeping history of the Party that was once America's greatest political hope -- and, time and time again, has proved its greatest disappointment.

Conservatives and liberals alike are currently debating the probable future of the Republican Party. What direction will conservatives and republicans take on foreign policy in the age of Obama? This book tackles this question.

Traces how the Republican Party in the South after Reconstruction transformed from a biracial organization to a mostly all-white one.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the most successful Republican political operative of his generation, a searing, unflinching, and deeply personal exposé of how his party became what it is today “A blistering tell-all history. In his bare-knuckles account, Stevens confesses [that] the entire apparatus of his Republican Party is built on a pack of lies." —The New York Times Stuart Stevens spent decades electing Republicans at every level, from presidents to senators to local officials. He knows the GOP as intimately as anyone in America, and in this new book he offers a devastating portrait of a party that has lost its moral and political compass. This is not a book about how Donald J. Trump hijacked the Republican Party and changed it into something else. Stevens shows how Trump is in fact the natural outcome of five decades of hypocrisy and self-delusion, dating all the way back to the civil rights legislation of the early 1960s. Stevens shows how racism has always lurked in the modern GOP's DNA, from Goldwater's opposition to desegregation to Ronald Reagan's welfare queens and states' rights rhetoric. He gives an insider's account of the rank hypocrisy of the party's claims to embody "family values," and shows how the party's vaunted commitment to fiscal responsibility has been a charade since the 1980s. When a party stands for nothing, he argues, it is only natural that it will be taken over by the loudest and angriest voices in the room.

The Republican Workers Party is the future of American presidential politics, says F.H. Buckley. It’s a socially conservative but economically middle-of-the-road party, offering a way back to the land of opportunity where our children will have it better than we did. That is the American Dream, and Donald Trump’s promise to restore it is what brought him to the White House. As a Trump speechwriter and key transition advisor, Buckley has an inside view on what “Make America Great Again” really means—how it represents a program to restore the American Dream as well as a defense of nationalism rooted in a sense of fraternity with all fellow Americans. The call to greatness was a repudiation of the cruel hypocrisy of America’s New Class, the dominant 10 percent who deploy the language of egalitarianism while jealously guarding their own privileges. The New Class talks like Jacobins but behaves like Bourbons. Its members claim to support equality and social mobility, but resist the very policies that promote mobility and equality: a choice of good schools for everyone’s children, not just the well-to-do; a sensible immigration policy that doesn’t benefit elites at the expense of average Americans; and regulatory reform to trim back the impediments that frustrate competitive enterprise. It isn’t complicated. What’s been lacking is political will. This book pulls no punches in describing how liberals and conservatives had become indifferent to those left behind. On the left, identity politics offered an excuse to hate an ideological enemy. On the right, a tired conservatism defined itself through policies that callously ignored the welfare of the bottom 90 percent. Trump told us that both Left and Right had betrayed the American people, and his Republican Workers Party promises to renew the American Dream. Buckley shows how it will do so.

A “must read” (Joe Scarborough) by a New York Times– best- selling author, The Corrosion of Conservatism presents a necessary defense of American democracy. Praised on publication as “one of the most impressive and unfl inching diagnoses of the pathologies in Republican politics that led to Trump’s rise” (Jonathan Chait, New York), The Corrosion of Conservatism documents a president who has traduced every norm and the rise of a nascent centrist movement to counter his assault on democracy. In this “admirably succinct and trenchant” (Charles Reichman, San Francisco Chronicle) exhumation of conservatism, Max Boot tells the story of an ideological dislocation so shattering that it caused his courageous transformation from Republican foreign policy advisor to celebrated anti- Trump columnist. From recording his political coming- of- age as a young émigré from the Soviet Union to describing the vitriol he endured from his erstwhile conservative colleagues, Boot mixes “lively memoir with sharp analysis” (William Kristol) from its Reagan-era apogee to its corrosion under Donald Trump.