Social Democracy

This book, a manifesto for a movement to reunite America, will help us put a stop to the seemingly endless Left-Right fistfight while honoring the vital role of healthy political debate. Mark Gerzon describes how citizens all over the country - Republicans, Democrats, and independents - are finding common ground on some of the most divisive and difficult issues we face today.

The effort to destroy facts and make America ungovernable didn't come out of nowhere. It is the culmination of seventy years of strategic denialism. In On Disinformation, Lee McIntyre shows how the war on facts began, and how ordinary citizens can fight back against the scourge of disinformation that is now threatening the very fabric of our society.

Major Garrett and David Becker completely upend The Big Lie that has infected the Far Right with firsthand stories of election officials like Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Bucks County, Pennsylvania, election director Thomas Freitag. And they reveal the concrete evidence proving that 2020 may have been the most secure US election ever. Garrett and Becker lay bare the methods being undertaken right now to undercut faith, belief, and effectiveness of elections, identifying the places where the most dire actions have been taken since 2020.

In 1996 Amy Goodman started a radio show called Democracy Now! to focus on the issues that are underreported or ignored by mainstream news coverage. Shortly after September 11, 2001, they were broadcasting on television every weekday. Today it is the only public media in the US that airs simultaneously on satellite and cable television, radio, and the Internet. Now Amy and her journalist brother, David, share stories of the progressive heroes - the whistleblowers, the organizers, the protestors - who have brought about remarkable, often invisible change.

Many Americans believe that their own government is guilty of shocking crimes. Although paranoia has been a feature of the American scene since the birth of the Republic, in Real Enemies, Kathryn Olmsted tells us that it was only in the 20th century that strange and unlikely conspiracy theories became central to American politics, In particular, she posits World War I as a critical turning point and shows that as the federal bureaucracy expanded, Americans grew more fearful of the government itself.

Interventions, by Noam Chomsky, is getting new press after the Pentagon banned the book from Guantanamo Bay's prison library. Interventions is Noam Chomsky at his best. Not since his all-time best-selling title, 9/11, published in the Open Media series in 2001, have readers and listeners had a timely, short, affordable Chomsky. Unlike 9/11, Interventions is a writerly work - a series of more than 30 tightly argued essays aimed at various aspects of U.S. power and politics in the post-9/11 world. While critical of U.S. military interventions around the globe, each piece in the book is in itself an intellectual intervention.

When he was 14, Joshua Wong made history. He staged the first-ever student protest in Hong Kong to oppose National Education, a "reform" which would have stifled free speech - and won. Since then, Joshua has led the Umbrella Movement, founded a political party, and rallied the international community around the anti-extradition bill protests, which have seen two million people - more than a quarter of the population - take to Hong Kong's streets. His actions have sparked worldwide attention, earned him a Nobel Peace Prize nomination, and landed him in jail twice.

Renegade thinkers are crashing the gates of a venerable American institution, shoving aside its so-called wise men and replacing them with a radical new data-driven order. We’ve seen it in sports, and now in The Victory Lab, journalist Sasha Issenberg tells the hidden story of the analytical revolution upending the way political campaigns are run in the 21st century.

Should we draw an analogy between Shakespeare’s tyrants—Richard III, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and King Lear—and Donald Trump? In Shakespeare and Trump, Jeffrey Wilson applies literary criticism to real life, examining plot, character, villainy, soliloquy, tragedy, myth, and metaphor to identify the formal features of the Trump phenomenon, and its hidden causes, structure, and meanings.

Acclaimed National Book Award-winning author George Packer diagnoses America’s descent into a failed state and envisions a path toward overcoming our injustices, paralyses, and divides.

American Exceptionalism and American Innocence examines the stories we’re told that lead us to think that the U.S. is a force for good in the world, regardless of slavery, the genocide of indigenous people, and the more than a century’s worth of imperialist war that the U.S. has wrought on the planet. Roberto Sirvent and Danny Haiphong detail just what Captain America’s shield tells us about the pretensions of U.S. foreign policy, how Angelina Jolie and Bill Gates engage in humanitarian imperialism, and more.

It's Not Free Speech considers the ideal of academic freedom in the wake of the activism inspired by outrageous police brutality, white supremacy, and the #MeToo movement. Arguing that academic freedom must be distinguished from freedom of speech, Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth take aim at explicit defenses of colonialism and theories of white supremacy that have no intellectual legitimacy. They argue that the democracy-destroying potential of social media makes it very difficult to uphold the traditional liberal view that the best remedy for hate speech is more speech.

Over the past generation, the Democratic and Republican parties have each become nationally coordinated political teams. American political institutions, on the other hand, remain highly decentralized. Laboratories against Democracy shows how national political conflicts are increasingly flowing through the subnational institutions of state politics—with profound consequences for public policy and American democracy.

One of the most fiercely debated issues of this era is what to do about "bad" speech—hate speech, disinformation and propaganda campaigns, and incitement of violence—on the internet, and in particular speech on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. In Social Media, Freedom of Speech, and the Future of Our Democracy, Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey R. Stone have gathered an eminent cast—including Hillary Clinton, Sheldon Whitehouse, Mark Warner, Cass Sunstein, and others—to explore the various dimensions of this problem in the American context.

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) was a Scottish philosopher, social commentator, satirical writer, essayist, mathematician, and historian. Latter-Day Pamphlets is a series of essays published in 1850, in which he harshly denounces the political, social, and religious injustices and stupidities of the period. The target of many of the essays is the effect of greed on the culture. Carlyle also attacked the British parliament, democracy and the prison system.

In his four years since joining the Senate, Rand Paul has risen to the forefront of the national discussion. He's being called "the most interesting man in politics" by TIME magazine. When Senator Paul believes in an issue, he reaches across the aisle to collaborate with his colleagues. He's worked with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand on an antiwar bill, a financial assistance for childcare bill, and a protection for women in the military bill.

"Democracy: The Political Tale" pulls listeners into an exciting exploration of government complexities, directed by the author's own intimate experiences with democracy and tyranny. Leaning upon real-life events, the account digs deep into the profound effects of being forced out from a dictatorship nation and thereafter growing up in a democracy. The striking distinction between these structures influences the author's thorough study of representative democracy.

Donald Trump is the first American president to regard liberal values with open contempt. He has company: the leaders of Italy, Hungary, Poland, and Turkey, among others, are also avowed illiberals. What happened? Why did liberalism lose the support it once enjoyed? In What Was Liberalism?, James Traub returns to the origins of liberalism, in the aftermath of the American and French revolutions and in the works of such great thinkers as John Stuart Mill and Isaiah Berlin.

What happens when democracy produces "bad" outcomes? Is democracy good because of its outcomes or despite them? This "democratic dilemma" is one of the most persistent, vexing problems for America abroad, particularly in the Middle East. When Islamist parties rise to power through free elections, the United States has too often been ambivalent or opposed, preferring instead pliable dictators. With this legacy of democratic disrespect in mind, and drawing on new interviews with top American officials, Shadi Hamid explores universal questions of morality, power, and hypocrisy.

Is philanthropy, by its very nature, a threat to today's democracy? Though we may laud wealthy individuals who give away their money for society's benefit, Just Giving reveals how such generosity not only isn't the unassailable good we think it to be but might also undermine democratic values and set back aspirations of justice.