No prelude here, Maybe just a quote attributed to Edmund Burke and John Stuart Mill:

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Those of us who care about asset stewardship, are already on the job. Here is a reading list I’ve undertaken which will get longer with more suggestions.

Dark Money, The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, by Jane Mayer. (Absolutely terrific! Must read to understand the secrets of how we are losing our democracy).

Antisocial, Online Extremists,Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation, by Andrew Marantz. (Dark, scary, enlightening. The underworld of the internet.)

Midnight In Washington, How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could, by Adam Schiff (Even more background than the Jan 6 Committee presentedon the build up to that terrible day.)

Antitrust, Taking on Monoppoly Power From the Gilded Age to The Digital Age, by Amy Klobuchar (No wonder billionaires hate regulation and lean libertarian, they’ve got the money to buy our legislators and other ‘public servants’. We have little real regulation left and we pay the price.)

How Civil Wars Start by Barbara F. Walter (Excellent. More data based and cerebral than Antisocial. More international examples. Way more scary.)

Laboratories of Autocracy, A Wake-Up Call From Behind The Lines by David Pepper (As Tip O’Neill said, “All politics is local”. And it’s at the state and local level where the damage is rooted. There’s a plan for action in the last chapter. Earlier chapters show why we need attention to be paid at the state level, perhaps even more than at the federal level.)

We The People, and the Republic We Must Reclaim (Lesterland TED Talk), by Lawrence Lessig https://youtu.be/mw2z9lV3W1g

The “G” Word With Adam Conover, produced by Barak Obama, see on Netflix (BT watched, excellent reminder of just what we get from this “Democracy” deal.)

Servant Of The People, starring Volodymyr Zelensky, a comedy from when that was his job. On Netflix, 3 seasons. (BT watched, loved it. This is what we would have to go through to get back what we now risk losing.)

Unrig: How to Fix Our Broken Democracy, by Daniel G. Newman (A graphic novel. The role wealth and influence play in American democracy.)

Manufacturing Consent, by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky (Published in 1988 but still a classic introduction to the manipulation of the American mind by “oligarch” political agendas.)

The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization, by Peter Zeihan (Missy highly  recommends)

The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in an Age of Disasters, by Juliet Kayyem (What are the mechanics for how we protect our communities when things go bad, natural disasters as well as man made.)

The Storm Before the Calm: America’s Discord, The Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond, by George Friedman (Friedman is famous for his “crystal ball” about the political and economic future.)

The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart by Bill Bishop (Gita says an analysis of the evolution of American polarization. Local and regional planning and zoning first written in the racist 1930’s has some guilt here.)

“Theory of Moral Sentiments” by Adam Smith or the following summary https://www.adamsmith.org/the-theory-of-moral-sentiments. (Gita says Go back to the basics — Capitalism isn’t what we are told it is in school. It’s been perverted by a few to an abomination. Adam Smith wrote this at the same time as the Wealth of Nations and both of them were supposed to be read together.)

The Shareholder Value Myth: How Putting Shareholders First Harms Investors, Corporations, and the Public by Lynn Stout (Gita says Stout debunks the idea that our legal framework tells corporations should be only about shareholder value)

What’s the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America by Thomas Frank (Marvin says its a good read on people acting, based on culture war issues, against their own self-interest.)

Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare by Thomas Rid (story after story of the “disinformation” campaigns and “active measures” waged by governments against other governments beginning around WW1, getting some sophistication in the Russo Japanese war, coming into full practice by all governments including US in Berlin during WWII and then US backed out of active practice ca. early 1960’s while Russia /Soviet Union accelerated. Never underestimate the power and the sources of disinformation. It is crafted to destabilize our nation by other nations as well as groups within America. Rid tells where and how the practices were first perfected.)

Listen Liberal: Or Whatever Happened to the Party of the People by Thomas Frank (Unremittingly snarky. But filled with painful truths about how liberal democratic actions have eviscerated the lives of working people, union members and folks who don’t go to college. Just in case we were wondering why people who “should” be on the liberal Democrats’ side are so very angry.

Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson. How bad can racism get in Alabama and Mississippi? Stevenson tells his experience as a Harvard Law School trained lawyer who goes south to help prisoners get off death row. Seems like they are all Black – and that was likely exactly what got them ON death row. A powerful read. Stevenson also launched Equal Justice Institute, EJI, that, in turn, launched one of the best new museums in the US, a museum that covers race in America, located in Montgomery Alabama.

Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America by Heather Cox Richardson. This is the story of America. History. The back story … why things really happened and what they really meant. It is as engaging as the best crime novel with all the “stranger than fiction” truths about how we got where we are today.

These Truths: A History of the United States by Jill Lepore. Go to a contemporary historian for the best and most readable take on our country’s history. Richardson and Lepore bring to life the motives and tensions that America has faced and continues to wrestle with today. We’re so lucky to have such terrific and nuanced writing by such talented historians in these troubled times!

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson. This is not like her first book, The Warmth of Other Suns, which describes the migration of Black Americans, after the failure of “Reconstruction” in the slave holding South, to the manufacturing centers of the urban north. Caste is deeper and more personal. It hurts to read. She tells the stories of how lives are shaped or ruined by the color of one’s skin. And it is not just an American story.

City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles by Mike Davis. His anger about the warped angles of public policy and human behavior that combine to create contemporary Los Angeles rises off the page in flames. Reading Davis is like listening to good jazz music. He delivers the message with a powerful rhythm.

Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane. This is a novel about a period I lived through. A Boston judge decided that the region would be better served if the White neighborhood of South Boston and the Black neighborhood of Roxbury each put their children on busses and sent them to the others’ neighborhood for each school day. The pain for the Black community was clear. People died. The back story, the personal story Lehane writes is about how it also tore apart white families.

Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond. He describes what he sees. America created poverty for some of its people. He shows how. And he goes a step further to tell how this can be fixed with more housing, health care, etc.

Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy by Adam Jentleson. Some history and some horrific but true stories of how our nation’s path through democracy became corrupted. The Senate morphed from dialogue and deliberations on behalf of the well being of all -as intended by Founders, to broken procedural rules intended to stifle civil rights and further promote interests of large corporations and private capital.

Evil Geniuses: The UnMaking of America, A Recent History by Kurt Andersen. A great corollary to KILL SWITCH. Anderson delivers one example after another of how private corporate interests have undermined our US Constitutions intentions (“We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”) in order to promote the special interests of the wealthiest corporations, associations and individuals acting to purchase legislators and protect their special interests. This is a fun book. Anderson brings a certain “you won’t believe they got away with this!” breathlessness to his telling of the story of how big business tricked Americans into handing over their money and their democratic controls of their country.

American Whitelash: A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress by Wesley Lowery. Focusing on the history and consequences of our nation’s racial divide, Lowery centers on the most visible event, the election of our Black president, and the backlash that resulted as well as the simmering anger in specific segments of American population that are reacting with growing violence to the inexorable demographic changes the race and culture of America. Examples are plentiful. The danger is clear.

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Anne Case, Angus Deaton. Two economists explore the consequences of racial backlash and the corruption of American governance by wealthy capitalist interests to find that in many parts of America white working class people are dying at a younger age than demographics would have suggested. They are unable to make a living wage, to care for themselves and their families. They are frustrated, angry and it has affected their lifespan. Case and Deaton crosswalk between personal tragedies, medical challenges and political messes – all part of the same story.

Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age by Kevin G. Boyle. The grandson of a slave, Dr. Ossian Sweet moved his family to an all-white Detroit neighborhood in 1925, a classic example of Isabel Wilkerson’s story, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration of the movement north by Black southerners after the clear failure of reconstruction. It also dovetails with Richard Rothstein’s classic research in The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America . When his neighbors attempted to drive him out, Sweet defended himself–resulting in the death of a white man and a murder trial for Sweet. There followed one of the most important (and shockingly unknown) cases in Civil Rights history. Also caught up in the intense courtroom drama were legal giant Clarence Darrow and the newly formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science by Benjamin Breen. This book is just amazingly fun! A deeply researched backdrop to what the world went through in the 30’s and 40’s that may (or may not) have deeply shaped where we are today. Margaret Mead was much more widely influential than, no surprise, male historians have previously placed her. The interactions among anthropologists, spies, World War II, scientists, Esalen Institute, Timothy Leary… it just goes on and provides a whole fresh perspective on those years from pre-WWII to post VietNam.

Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild. Reading about how close we are to losing our nation’s hard won “democracy” is discouraging. It makes one hunger to understand the “other side”. Hoschschild steps outside of a “liberal” point of view to bring us a deep and sympathetic understanding of the “average working man” and their conservative right wing perspective. Published in 2016, it is intended as an explainer for the Tea Party Movement (remember that!) but is a good summary of how we got to “MAGA”, as well.

Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America’s Suburbs by Benjamin Herold. Battles over removing books from libraries, limiting ideas and actual history from entering the sweet little heads of our children, the future of our nation, is happening in real time in local school libraries, school board meetings and state legislatures. Published in 2024, Herold, an education journalist, dives into five different local school districts to look at how families who, historically, have depended so much on local schools to rise economically in the nation, now find that access distorted by waves of current contested political theories as well as access to basic education.

Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World by Branko Milanovic. In need of a good modern primer on the origins of capitalism, other competing economic theories, how we got to where we are today and what options there are world wide for economic systems for the future? This is the book for you. It is a tough slog, but as good as its likely to get, to understand the options. A great text for MBAs.

Unrigged: How Americans Are Battling Back to Save Democracy by David Daley. (Gerrymandering our voting districts and other tricks to exclude citizens from the right to vote brought to us by some clever, devious Republican operatives who moved in while the Democrats were…. being democratic.)

American Whitelash: A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress by Wesley Lowery. (The election of Obama, a Black man, as President was a great step forward for a nation with a long history of racism. But the racism hadn’t disappeared and the fear among segments of the white population fed the “replacement theory” of the end of the “white race” as the power in America. The backlash from those “whites” hasn’t been pretty.)

American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump by Tim Alberta. When George Bush’s term ended, there was no clear Republican Party structure or Republican ideology to replace him. Warring factions, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell vs Jim Jordan and Ted Cruz prepared to duke it out. Boehner, Paul Ryan and others stepped out. The resulting vacuum, the implosion of the G.O.P., made room for the likes of Trump to fill the void. Reading this book is like hanging onto the side of a fast moving freight train. What is happening and why. The story blows by fast and in your face. A must read.

Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: the Surreal Heart of the New Russia by Peter Pomerantsev. After Whitelash and Carnage, it was time for a “palate cleanser”, a dip into another country’s woes. Pomerantsev was a great discovery and I’ll be dipping back to him for more humor, irony and insight. A rollicking good read!

Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America by Nancy MacLean. My own research into a book on the Libertarian influence on Orange County governance has led me to many sources that show the anti-government influences were intentional and go back very far. MacLean describes how far, how its intellectual roots to enable American aristocracy, post Civil War, to disenfranchise minorities. including the poor and women, were built into American intellectual thought and codified into public policy. A Virginia gentleman named James McGill Buchanan won a Nobel Prize in 1986 for his work to elevate the rich and powerful in contrast to Supreme Court decisions like Brown v. Board of Education. We didn’t get to the current political, economic situation in the USA by accident.

The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism by Tim Alberta. Hats off to Politico journalist Alberta. “Carnage” was a great read. This is measurably even better. Alberta went back to his roots, the son of an evangelical pastor in a big church, a seminarian, himself, Alberta interviewed the pro-Trump rebel rousing evangelical pastors in major churches and the worried pastors concerned about their “flock” who asked themselves “what would Jesus do”. The rise of these mega churches, along with the rise of the “prosperity gospel” (where churchgoers believe they are healthy and wealthy because God rewards them for being healthy and wealthy, the corollary – people who are not healthy and wealthy are that way because they have displeased God) has sent these evangelicals into some strange directions. Alberta interview the pastors and explores the high rate of sexual misconduct and financial malfeisance in some of the most well known mega-churches.

Leadership: In Turbulent Times by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Another great historian! Goodwin gives us a master class in the childhood and young adult experiences that influenced the leadership abilities of three of her favorite presidents: Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and LBJ. A great read for teens. And for me. A reminder of the importance of “character” in overcoming early disadvantages and in shaping leadership skills.

Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal by George Packer. A great jounalist who has chronicled our political history through wars and presidencies takes a sad but hopeful look at where we are in 2021 and how, with some effort, we just might pull through.

Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism by Anne Applebaum. From the vantagepoint of a European, an Eastern European perspective, Applebaum traces the post WWII rise of authoritarianism in Hungary, Poland and elsewhere. Much of the presentation is through her communications with friends and former friends, dinner parties, conferences and other informal ramblings through contemporary Europe. She brings enough evidence to bear on the real possibility that “it could happen here”. We’ve been warned.

Reaganland: America’s Right Turn 1976-1980 by Rick Perlstein. There’s nothing in this book that I found that gave me any sense of respect for Reagan. He was a user. He was used. He was a lucky guy. Tall, good looking, Caucasian. He became the public face of a much more complicated “deep state” story of alliances, politics, funds transfers, etc. that had been in the works probably back to when Reagan was a Democrat and union leader. But read the book and it seems clear that under his tenure, America lost its way, turned the corner and forgot about “all the people”, giving special status to only “the wealthy owner class” of people. That’s when, under his watch, income inequality in America became so lopsided. (see Living Wage)

Burn Book: A Tech Love Story by Kara Swisher. Can you imagine living through the Industrial Revolution? From pastoral scenes of ox carts bringing crops to local market towns. As it had been for maybe 1000 years. And then weaving machines, ironworks, railroads changed everything. But that would have been well over 100 years. Dear reader, we have lived through a comparable revolution in about 100 months. How lucky we are to have been able to see this! Then just imagine the luck of Kara Swisher to be at the table of all the makers of the Internet Revolution! Our luck runneth over for she has not only told the story, but if you get the audio book, she will speak it herself into your ear! What a story it is. No “tech bro” could give us such an even handed view of the leaders of the companies that have plowed through history. The stories are …. delicious. I can only wonder if there is someone on hand to do the same for the AI Revolution? And could it ever be as interesting?

James by Percival Everett. Thank you Mark Twain for Huckleberry Finn, a great American classic which, inevitably had baked into its story, the racism of America in the 1800’s. Without debating whether the curse of racism had receded since then, we now at least hear a voice that pivots off Twain, a Black voice that we only knew when he spoke in dialect while in white culture, the culture of Twain, the culture of the mid 19th century America, the inescapable racist culture where Huck’s friend Jim was described by a white man. Everett brings us a 21st century “Jim”, a “James” brought to life as a new chapter of that classic, as an intelligent, well read Black man, “James”, a friend to Huck, on the edge of Civil War America. A chapter that could not have been imagined by Twain, nor allowed by the mores of that time. What a new fantasy to imagine more contemporary Black authors adding new ” chapters” to other classic American literature which currently lacks the “voice” or “viewpoint” of Black Americans.

How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future by Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt. Thank you Leslie and Andrea for this terrific recommendation! GoodReads has great things to say about it too: “Donald Trump’s presidency has raised a question that many of us never thought we’d be asking: Is our democracy in danger? Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have spent more than twenty years studying the breakdown of democracies in Europe and Latin America, and they believe the answer is yes. Democracy no longer ends with a bang–in a revolution or military coup–but with a whimper: the slow, steady weakening of critical institutions, such as the judiciary and the press, and the gradual erosion of long-standing political norms. The good news is that there are several exit ramps on the road to authoritarianism. The bad news is that, by electing Trump, we have already passed the first one.
Drawing on decades of research and a wide range of historical and global examples, from 1930s Europe to contemporary Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela, to the American South during Jim Crow, Levitsky and Ziblatt show how democracies die–and how ours can be saved.”

Published in 2018, we need to hurry up and take their advice before it is too late.

How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr. If the description of the shameful, horrible way America has treated its protectorates, territories, commonwealths, etc. – areas considered to be part of USA soil, and be funny and outrageous at the same time…. well Immerwahr has managed it. We have learned, through calculated teaching by the US over time, that America is just that “logo” shape that we think of. But no. We controlled and mistreated Hawaii, the Aluetians, Puerto Rico, Guam and possibly most shamefully, the Philippines who fought for us in the Pacific in WWII and were abandoned to the control of the Japanese and the infamous Bataan death march. What we didn’t learn in school is now available with witty, maybe even snarky, but historically detailed descriptions in this great read.