The Disunited States of America

The Disunited States of America
Author: Harry Turtledove
Publisher: Hachette UK
Total Pages: 181
Release: 2013-10-02
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0575121289

Justin's having the worst trip ever. He and his mother are Time Traders, traveling undercover to different alternate realities of Earth so they can take valuable resources back to their own timeline. In some of these worlds, Germany won World War I or the world has been destroyed by nuclear warfare. Justin and his mother are in an America that never became the United States: each state is like a country, and many of them are at war with one another. Their mission takes them to Virginia, which is on the verge of bloody violence with Ohio. Beckie is from California and, like the rest of her world, is unaware that Time Traders exist. The only reason she's in small-town Virginia is because her grandmother dragged her there to visit old relatives. Beckie is just as horrified by the violence and racism of the alternate Virginia as Justin is, and the two are drawn to each other. But when full-fledged war breaks out between Ohio and Virginia, including a biologically designed plague, will either of them manage to get back home? Forget about home: will they make it out alive?

The Disunited States

The Disunited States
Author: Vladimir Pozner
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2014-09-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 1609805321

Influential French novelist, screenwriter, pioneer in literary genre and Oscar nominee Vladimir Pozner came to the United States in the 1930s. He found the nation and its people in a state of profound material and spiritual crisis, and took it upon himself to chronicle the life of the worker, the striker, the politician, the starlet, the gangster, the everyman; to document the bitter, violent racism tearing our society asunder, the overwhelming despair permeating everyday life, and the unyielding human struggle against all that. Pozner writes about America and Americans with the searing criticism and deep compassion of an outsider who loves the country and its people far too much to render anything less than a brutally honest portrayal. Recalling Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Pozner shatters the rules of reportage to create a complete enduring and profound portrait.

Disunited States

Disunited States
Author: John D. Donahue
Publisher:
Total Pages: 280
Release: 1997-05-29
Genre: History
ISBN:

At best, devolution will prove to be a detour on America's path to renewal.

Disunited Nations

Disunited Nations
Author: Peter Zeihan
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 602
Release: 2020-03-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0062913697

Should we stop caring about fading regional powers like China, Russia, Germany, and Iran? Will the collapse of international cooperation push France, Turkey, Japan, and Saudi Arabia to the top of international concerns? Most countries and companies are not prepared for the world Peter Zeihan says we’re already living in. For decades, America’s allies have depended on its might for their economic and physical security. But as a new age of American isolationism dawns, the results will surprise everyone. In Disunited Nations, geopolitical strategist Peter Zeihan presents a series of counterintuitive arguments about the future of a world where trade agreements are coming apart and international institutions are losing their power. Germany will decline as the most powerful country in Europe, with France taking its place. Every country should prepare for the collapse of China, not North Korea. We are already seeing, as Zeihan predicts, a shift in outlook on the Middle East: It is no longer Iran that is the region’s most dangerous threat, but Saudi Arabia. The world has gotten so accustomed to the “normal” of an American-dominated order that we have all forgotten the historical norm: several smaller, competing powers and economic systems throughout Europe and Asia. America isn’t the only nation stepping back from the international system. From Brazil to Great Britain to Russia, leaders are deciding that even if plenty of countries lose in the growing disunited chaos, their nations will benefit. The world isn’t falling apart—it’s being pushed apart. The countries and businesses prepared for this new every-country-for-itself ethic are those that will prevail; those shackled to the status quo will find themselves lost in the new world disorder. Smart, interesting, and essential reading, Disunited Nations is a sure-to-be-controversial guidebook that analyzes the emerging shifts and resulting problems that will arise in the next two decades. We are entering a period of chaos, and no political or corporate leader can ignore Zeihan’s insights or his message if they want to survive and thrive in this uncertain new time.

Disuniting of America Revised and Enlarged

Disuniting of America Revised and Enlarged
Author: Arthur Meier Schlesinger
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 212
Release: 1998-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780393318548

Examines the lessons of one polyglot country after another tearing itself apart or on the brink of doing so, and points out troubling new evidence that multiculturalism gone awry here in the United States threatens to do the same.

Stranger in a Strange Land

Stranger in a Strange Land
Author: Gary Younge
Publisher:
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2006-01-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9781595580689

A New York foreign correspondent for The Guardian profiles contemporary America as a bitterly divided nation that is increasingly isolated from the rest of the world, in an account that includes discussions with such figures as Warren Beatty, Michael Moore, and Maya Angelou.

Welcome to Dumbfuckistan

Welcome to Dumbfuckistan
Author: Ian Gurvitz
Publisher:
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2016-04-01
Genre:
ISBN: 9781523313952

"A lot of what I believe, Ian Gurvitz has silver-tongued into a most readable, cathartic and funny book - congratulations, Ian Gurvitz, whoever you are!" Bill Maher Welcome to Dumbfuckisan is an unapologetic liberal screed about the deteriorating state of our national dialogue, which is dragging down our culture, our politics, and our lives. It contains strong opinions, snarky comments, and gratuitous insults directed at people and ideas I disagree with, disrespect and, in some cases, despise. Although the Western philosophical tradition may be grounded in a Socratic search for truth, American political life has devolved into a mosh pit of willful ignorance, talking points, disinformation, and lies, while the culture has descended into a celebration of the dumbest common denominator. Burning Man for the brain dead. While there has always been an element of stupidity in America, only now it's become a valid intellectual stance. Fact has been relegated to "just another opinion." Voices that, at one time in our history, would have been laughed off the national stage have now been afforded mainstream legitimacy. Idiotic remarks that would have been walked back when the speaker sobered up are now backed up with even more bluster than when they were uttered. Even racist and sexist taunts proudly ride in under the banner of flouting political correctness. And it's all been spearheaded by Rupert Murdoch taking a giant shit in the mouth of the American conversation with Fox News. We assume Orwell's 1984 dystopian nightmare can't happen here, yet we've been narcotized into a more ominous Orwellian somnambulism. We're inebriated on our own mythology, priapic at our military supremacy, and malleable via our ionic imagery, whether it's Jesus or the flag. Jacked up on Adderall, Red Bull and patriotism, we only unite in war, tragedy and the Super Bowl. We've become style over substance, image over reality, propaganda over truth, and symbol over meaning. We claim to value education, yet mistrust intelligence. Immune to facts, frightened of change, we think magically. Magic potions that will heal us, magic diets that will shrink us, and magic beliefs that will save us. And we think all this behavior has been blessed by a big daddy in the sky who lovingly placed us here for profit, guns, and heterosexual marriage. Perhaps evolution is a myth, in that we seem to be devolving. The Roman Empire collapsed due to war, overexpansion and rampant corruption. The British Empire dissolved due to cultural arrogance and imperialistic hubris. Sadly, as we devolve from Democracy to Idiocracy, America may become the first world power to crumble under the weight of its own stupidity.

Why Did the United States Invade Iraq?

Why Did the United States Invade Iraq?
Author: Jane K. Cramer
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2013-03-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1136641505

This edited volume presents the foremost scholarly thinking on why the US invaded Iraq in 2003, a pivotal event in both modern US foreign policy and international politics. In the years since the US invasion of Iraq it has become clear that the threat of weapons of mass destruction was not as urgent as the Bush administration presented it and that Saddam Hussein was not involved with either Al Qaeda or 9/11. Many consider the war a mistake and question why Iraq was invaded. A majority of Americans now believe that the public were deliberately misled by the Bush administration in order to bolster support for the war. Public doubt has been strengthened by the growing number of critical scholarly analyses and in-depth journalistic investigations about the invasion that suggest the administration was not candid about its reasons for wanting to take action against Iraq. This volume begins with a survey of private scholarly views about the war’s origins, then assesses the current state of debate by organising the best recent thinking by foreign policy and international relations experts on why the US invaded Iraq. The book covers a broad range of approaches to explaining Iraq – the role of the uncertainty of intelligence, cognitive biases, ideas, Israel, and oil, highlighting areas of both agreement and disagreement. This book will be of much interest to students of the Iraq War, US foreign and security policy, strategic studies, Middle Eastern politics and IR/Security Studies in general.

Uncivil Agreement

Uncivil Agreement
Author: Lilliana Mason
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2018-04-16
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 022652468X

The psychology behind political partisanship: “The kind of research that will change not just how you think about the world but how you think about yourself.” —Ezra Klein, Vox Political polarization in America has moved beyond disagreements about matters of policy. For the first time in decades, research has shown that members of both parties hold strongly unfavorable views of their opponents. This is polarization rooted in social identity, and it is growing. The campaign and election of Donald Trump laid bare this fact of the American electorate, its successful rhetoric of “us versus them” tapping into a powerful current of anger and resentment. With Uncivil Agreement, Lilliana Mason looks at the growing social gulf across racial, religious, and cultural lines, which have recently come to divide neatly between the two major political parties. She argues that group identifications have changed the way we think and feel about ourselves and our opponents. Even when Democrats and Republicans can agree on policy outcomes, they tend to view one other with distrust and to work for party victory over all else. Although the polarizing effects of social divisions have simplified our electoral choices and increased political engagement, they have not been a force that is, on balance, helpful for American democracy. Bringing together theory from political science and social psychology, Uncivil Agreement clearly describes this increasingly “social” type of polarization, and adds much to our understanding of contemporary politics.

Break It Up

Break It Up
Author: Richard Kreitner
Publisher: Hachette UK
Total Pages: 505
Release: 2020-08-18
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0316510599

From journalist and historian Richard Kreitner, a "powerful revisionist account"of the most persistent idea in American history: these supposedly United States should be broken up (Eric Foner). The novel and fiery thesis of Break It Up is simple: The United States has never lived up to its name—and never will. The disunionist impulse may have found its greatest expression in the Civil War, but as Break It Up shows, the seduction of secession wasn’t limited to the South or the nineteenth century. It was there at our founding and has never gone away. With a scholar’s command and a journalist’s curiosity, Richard Kreitner takes readers on a revolutionary journey through American history, revealing the power and persistence of disunion movements in every era and region. Each New England town after Plymouth was a secession from another; the thirteen colonies viewed their Union as a means to the end of securing independence, not an end in itself; George Washington feared separatism west of the Alleghenies; Aaron Burr schemed to set up a new empire; John Quincy Adams brought a Massachusetts town’s petition for dissolving the United States to the floor of Congress; and abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison denounced the Constitution as a pro-slavery pact with the devil. From the “cold civil war” that pits partisans against one another to the modern secession movements in California and Texas, the divisions that threaten to tear America apart today have centuries-old roots in the earliest days of our Republic. Richly researched and persuasively argued, Break It Up will help readers make fresh sense of our fractured age.