that are worth reading, though perhaps not for the reasons they were originally written:
William Shirer The Collapse of the Third Republic
Kevin Phillips Post-Conservative America
This is Shirer's other book, less read, but arguably far more important, because it comes far closer to current American problems than did the fate of the Weimar Republic.
Yes, this is another book by that Phillips, completed in 1982. However, he has written a number of books since, each tracing the history of his earlier writings, and this book is an anomaly. It has become an unperson in the eyes of its author, which led me to reread it. I found a summary of his, of his earlier works, and this book dropped off the list. Having written a few books of my own http://3mpub.com/phillies the thought of not mentioning your own work when given a reasonable reason for doing so drew a certain amount of attention. Also...see below
Shirer describes why the Third Republic finally collapsed, starting a century earlier. For current readers, only the first 400 of 1100 pages are central, because they describe a country that became separated from its military, right and left wing parties that could not cooperate, poisoned political invective, and an increasing series of economic problems that could not be faced let alone solved. In 1940, the French army fought bravely and took great casualties, even when its defeat was certain, a detail ignored by the radical right. It was also in bad shape because of political-military interactions. The French had revolving governments and a population that lost faith in their own country; the matching theme here will be the postnuclear option Senate in which neither party will give consent for anything.
The number of different difficulties faced by the French was remarkable. If they had technical retardation, well, there is a modern analogy: this year the USA will apparently graduate 60,000 or so engineers, and China will graduate 300,000. I could readily go on and break all records for length of a post, but for all the grumblings about ultrarightists it would appear to me to be a different European country of the 1920s that is more significant as an example of our current difficulties.
Phillips discusses the failed conservative revolution in America, as seen from the perspective of 1982, why it seemed to have failed, and alternatives for the future. He proposes that matters will become far more chaotic, so that neither party will hold the country for more than a couple terms at a time, that right radicalism may become important, and rather elliptically that new technical electronic means (he does not of course say 'Internet') will become radically important in politics. 'The sunbelt has traits that might move America toward Apple-pie authoritarianism' may sound a bit familiar to some readers. A quarter century later, some of his considerations were better than others.
The most important reason to read this book is to contrast its very dispassionate tone with the tone often heard in modern political analysis.