The Best Republican Party Books of All Time

“This is the first must-read of the 2024 election cycle if you want to understand the stakes.” –Nicolle Wallace. Former chief Republican strategist, Lincoln Project adviser, and bestselling author of It Was All a Lie, Stuart Stevens offers an ominous warning that the GOP is dragging our country toward autocracy—and if we don’t wake up to the crisis in our system, 2024 may well be our last free and fair election. Today’s Republican party is not a “normal” political party in the American tradition. It has become an autocratic movement masquerading as a political party.

As Stuart Stevens argues in THE CONSPIRACY TO END AMERICA, if we look away from that truth, we greatly increase the likelihood that the America we love will slip away, never to return. Whenever a democracy slides into autocracy, there are five critical elements at work: financers, propagandists, party support, legal theories to legitimize, and shock troops. THE CONSPIRACY TO END AMERICA examines each of these driving forces on the Right and makes clear how they are working in concert to end our democracy as we know it. In the tradition of It Can’t Happen Here and On Tyranny, THE CONSPIRACY TO END AMERICA is a blinking red distress call about the dark intentions lurking within Stevens’ old party and a rallying cry to beat back this perilous threat and save the Republic.

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. "In his bare-knuckles account, Stevens confesses to the reader that the entire apparatus of his Republican Party is built on a pack of lies... This reckoning inspired Stevens to publish this blistering, tell-all history... Although this book will be a hard read for any committed conservatives, they would do well to ponder it.". --Julian E. Zelizer, The New York Times. 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.

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. It Was All a Lie is not just an indictment of the Republican Party, but a candid and often lacerating mea culpa. Stevens is not asking for pity or forgiveness; he is simply telling us what he has seen firsthand. He helped to create the modern party that kneels before a morally bankrupt con man and now he wants nothing more than to see what it has become burned to the ground.

#1 New York Times bestselling author and investigative reporter David Corn tells the wild and harrowing story of the Republican Party’s decades-long relationship with far-right extremism, bigotry, and paranoia.​. A fast-paced, rollicking, behind-the-scenes account of how the GOP since the 1950s has encouraged and exploited extremism, bigotry, and paranoia to gain power, American Psychosis offers readers a brisk, can-you-believe-it journey through the netherworld of far-right irrationality and the Republican Party’s interactions with the darkest forces in America.

In a compelling and thoroughly-researched narrative, Corn reveals the hidden history of how the Party of Lincoln forged alliances with extremists, kooks, racists, and conspiracy-mongers and fostered fear, anger, and resentment to win elections—and how this led to Donald Trump’s triumph and the transformation of the GOP into a Trump personality cult that foments and bolsters the crazy and dangerous excesses of the right. The Trump-incited insurrectionist attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, was no aberration. American Psychosis shows it was a continuation of the long and deep-rooted Republican practice of boosting and weaponizing the rage and derangement of the right. The gripping tale in American Psychosis covers the last seven decades. From McCarthyism to the John Birch Society to segregationists to the New Right to the religious right to Rush Limbaugh to Newt Gingrich to the militia movement to Fox News to Sarah Palin to the Tea Party to Trumpism, the Republican Party has deliberately nurtured and exploited rightwing fear and loathing fueled by paranoia, grievance, and tribalism. This powerful and important account explains how one political party has harnessed the worst elements in politics to poison the nation’s discourse and threaten American democracy. "[Corn is] a great journalist. I love the way he thinks. I love the way he writes. I'm so glad he's done a super-readable, modern history of the right...We just need smart, digestible history about this stuff right now...[American Psychosis] is perfectly timed...Relevant history for where we are right now." —Rachel Maddow, host, The Rachel Maddow Show. "With American Psychosis, David Corn 'did the full homework to take us all the way back to where it really begins.’" —Lawrence O'Donnell, host, The Last Word.