Last thing I read of this sort was George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia and Road to Wigan Pier. I've put together a wish list on amazon with a lot of historical political books to delve into, but nothing I can afford these days. I would also recommend by Viktor Suvorov: The Liberators, Inside the Soviet Army, and Inside Soviet Military Intelligence. They're assessments of the USSR by a Soviet intelligence officer who defected to Britain in the 1980s. Very interesting, and puts to bed all this intellectually and factually vacant thinking in the west about the way the USSR functioned, which informs understandings of why it collapsed very well.
Speaking of which, can anyone recommend any good, historically and politically important books? Yes there's a lot of the business lessons ones there, which might seem odd, I quite liked the ones of the series I have and would recommend them. (I have Leading by Example, Managing Conflict, Communicating Clearly and Motivating People, of that series.)
Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Change, by Jonah Goldberg. It's a historical piece about American liberalism's roots in European fascism.
That's been recommended to me before (by dubious characters), but given a brief scan of the synopsis and reviews I found the whole premise ridiculous. It's got to be one of these sorts of awful books written that tend to top the New York Times best-seller lists to try and legitimise a populist, slanderous and mentally inferior assessment of modern politics.
Americans are almost entirely classical ("libertarian"/"conservative") or progressive ("liberals"/"socialists"/"progressives") liberals. The arguments used by both sides are exactly the same as the evolution of liberalism in 1800s Britain.
The definition of "liberal" and "conservative" into black and white terms is a thing of degeneracy. For an American to say "I'm a conservative, they are liberals" is to ignore the definition of conservatism being a struggle between the monarchy and landed gentry of the 1700s. Where is their monarch, eh? Exactly; they are not conservatives.
Every time someone honestly harks on about their conservative ideology, or how the liberals are the enemy, I keep being reminded of Saudi clerics, or Hitler saying that the Nazis were there to defend Christianity from the vile Jewish liberal press and media. Not a pinch of hyperbole in that statement, that's literally what those sorts of people have said. And of course the inverse statement is just as inept.