MIT Press makes 82 additional books open access

Title styling aside, MIT Press is an excellent publisher.

Most academic textbooks are not for general audience.

If the main title and subtitle don’t make any sense to some people, then the author did not write the textbook for that audience.

This feels like the same complaint that you can't gain all the nuance in an article from reading it's headline. A title is there to be eye catching and get you interested in the subject. If you want to know what the book is about read a short synopsis or the table of contents.

I wrote a paper for a class a few months ago. In a previous life, I was a tech-audience editor that required writing article titles with a hook to lure people into reading. On my first draft of the paper, I used one of these styled titles and the comments that came back said that it was too "flowery"; since it was an academic paper, it should be more like the pattern you indicated. And sure enough, I changed it and all my subsequent papers to that pattern and never got dinged again.

This is a legit showcase of how broken American publishing is in case of making titles. This pattern is so typically American than I can immediately identify it, the same way American TV shows or documentaries are esthetically strongly peculiar.

Right wing politics generally has a lot less affinity for reading. Also they’re not the ones getting their books banned in half the country, so accessibility isn’t a problem.

I counted maybe five or six books which might have a "distinct slant" based on nothing but the title, and nearly all of those were of the "viewing this topic from this perspective" variety. The vast majority of those titles seem distinctly technical and/or non-political.

Claiming that this was "intentionally curated with some ideological goal in mind" is a stretch. Baader-Meinhoff maybe?