Woocast's Politics & Polls

Joining today’s episode is Nancy MacLean, an award-winning scholar of the twentieth-century United States, whose new book, “Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America,” has been described by Publishers Weekly as “a thoroughly researched and gripping narrative… [and] a feat of American intellectual and political history.” Booklist called it “perhaps the best explanation to date of the roots of the political divide that threatens to irrevocably alter American government.” McClean discusses her book with Professors Julian Zelizer and Sam Wang, as well as the widely-publicized controversial debates that have surrounded its publication. McClean responds to some of her critics in an illuminating conversation. The author of four other books, including “Freedom is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace” (2006) called by the Chicago Tribune "contemporary history at its best,” and “Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan,” named a New Yor