Newsweek Excerpt: The Lie that Binds

In the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election, as the American public reeled from Donald Trump’s upset, political strategists and commentators alike reached for answers. Who were Trump voters? Was their vote based on race, gender bias, “economic anxiety” or another factor yet uncovered? Even worse, had American politics finally been subsumed by reality TV culture or pervasive social media? While each question unveiled some grain of truth, one key factor was overlooked time and again: Trump had a political apparatus that Democrats underestimated and the media largely dismissed. A trap that we could easily fall into again in November.

Our new book, The Lie That Binds, offers an analysis of the wide-reaching political machinery that conservative leaders activated to push Trump to victory—which progressives ignore at their peril.

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Published in September, Veterans Magazine just released a glowing review of “Guts: The Lane Evans Story”

“Very well written, deeply researched, and creatively told Guts is an excellent, admiring….warts-and-all tribute to a great human being. — And fair warning: Hansen’s detailed depictions of the depredations of Lane Evans’ Parkinson’s and dementia can be extremely tough to read.”

Full review in Veterans Magazine: http://vvaveteran.org/40-1/40-1_books.html

New Dominion Bookshop, Charlottesville, VA. Saturday, November 02 from 11:00am to 12:00pm.

The Saturday before Election Day, join us for a special Storytime with Stephanie Taylor, who will be reading from her picture book, I Can Change Everything. This event will be free and open to the public. All ages are welcome!

Learn more.

A political book offers a history of the populist left in America from 1988 to the present.

As Joe Biden leads the Democratic primary field, some voters may recall his first, failed campaign for president back in 1988. But Grim (This Is Your Country on Drugs, 2009) argues that the most influential candidate in that race was not Biden or even the ultimate Democratic nominee, Michael Dukakis. Rather, it was the man challenging Dukakis from the left, the civil rights leader and minister Jesse Jackson. Though Jackson ran a competitive but unsuccessful campaign, his call for a “Rainbow Coalition” of voters from across the racial and gender spectrum in order to confront the “economic violence” that affected them all proved prophetic of leftist politics to come.
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Newly elected Democrats in the House of Representatives spent June 27 with the sinking feeling that it was happening again: Their party was going to cave to President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on a viscerally emotional issue. Just after a searing photo circulated of a father and his young daughter who had drowned in each other’s arms while fleeing for the sanctuary of U.S. shores, Democrats in Congress let a GOP-drafted spending bill go through that did nothing to address conditions for detained immigrant children — abandoning a House version that would have ordered improvements. House leaders blamed Senate Democrats for capitulating; Senate Democrats attacked the House for poor negotiating.
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If the triumph of Trumpism is the most important recent development in American political history, then the second most important is the mobilization of liberal and left-wing voters to challenge the president’s authoritarian politics.

This mobilization drove the Women’s March, where a day after Trump’s inauguration, hundreds of thousands came to Washington to protest against his nascent administration. Millions of others joined them in cities across the country — a remarkable demonstration of opposition to a new president. It stiffened Democratic resolve to oppose the president at a time when some of the party’s leaders were looking for bipartisan cooperation. It helped halt the Republican drive to repeal the Affordable Care Act — peeling critical support away from Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader — and last year powered an electoral wave that gave the Democratic Party its first majority in the House of Representatives since 2010.

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When Democrats retook the House in the 2018 midterms, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer hailed it as a triumph of Democratic strategy. “Having a Democratic House puts our caucus in a much better position when it comes to both holding the president accountable and getting things done,” Schumer, who lost three Democratic seats in his own chamber, told Politico. “As in the last two years, the secret to our success will be unity.”
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As the 2020 election heats up and calls for President Trump’s impeachment continue, we look at the deepening divide within the Democratic Party with Ryan Grim, Washington, D.C., bureau chief for The Intercept. He is the author of the new book “We’ve Got People: From Jesse Jackson to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the End of Big Money and the Rise of a Movement.” In it, he writes, “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may seem like she came from nowhere, but the movement that propelled her to office—and to global political stardom—has been building for 30 years.”
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