Social Democracy

Every major decision governing our diverse, majority-female, and increasingly liberal country bears the stamp of the US Senate, yet the Senate allows an almost exclusively White, predominantly male, and radically conservative minority of the American electorate to impose its will on the rest of us. How did we get to this point? In Kill Switch, Adam Jentleson argues that shifting demographics alone cannot explain how Mitch McConnell harnessed the Senate and turned it into a powerful weapon of minority rule.

Alexis de Tocqueville est célèbre pour ses analyses de la révolution française, de la démocratie américaine et de l'évolution des démocraties occidentales en général...

Forty years ago, a majority of Americans were highly engaged in issues of war and peace. Whether to go to war or keep out of conflicts was a vital question at the heart of the country's vibrant, if fractious, democracy. But American political consciousness has drifted. In the last decade, America has gone to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, while pursuing a new kind of warfare in Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and Pakistan.

Hong Kong was an experiment in governance. Handed back to China in 1997 after 156 years of British rule, it was meant to be a carve-out between hostile systems: a bridge between communism and capitalism, authoritarianism and liberal democracy. “One country, two systems” kept its media free, its courts independent and its protests boisterous, designed also to convince Taiwan of a peaceful solution to Beijing’s desire for reunification. In Among the Braves, Shibani Mahtani and Timothy McLaughlin tell the story of Hong Kong’s past.

The election of Donald Trump in 2016, like most of his campaign, came as a shock to many Americans. How could a man so lacking in capacity, so void of any intellectual heft, become the president of the United States? How could a man with no detectable personal qualities outside of resentment and the will to dominate appeal to millions of Americans, enough so that he was able to win the highest office in the land? With this book, journalist Amanda Marcotte will outline how Trump was the inevitable result of American conservatism’s degradation into an ideology of blind resentment.

In Dissent, award-winning investigative journalist Jackie Calmes brings listeners closer to the truth of who Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh is, where he came from, and how he and the Republican party at large managed to secure one of the highest seats of power in the land.

Jeff Sharlet is the only journalist to have reported from inside the C Street House, the Fellowship residence known simply by its Washington, D.C., address. The house has lately been the scene of notorious political scandal, but more crucially, it is home to efforts to transform the very fabric of American democracy. And now, after laying bare its tenants' past in The Family, Sharlet reports from deep within fundamentalism in today's world.

Defying the Dragon tells a remarkable story of audacity—of how the people of Hong Kong challenged the PRC's authority, just as its president reached the height of his powers. Is China as unshakeable as it seems? What are its real interests in Hong Kong? Why are Beijing's means of control no longer working? Where does this leave Hongkongers themselves? Stephen Vines has lived in Hong Kong for over three decades. His book unpacks the Hong Kong-China relationship and its wider significance—right up to the astonishing convergence of political turmoil and international crisis.

Reclaiming Our Democracy provides a powerful way to make a difference and heal our democracy in the process. It’s not the only solution needed, but is one essential, missing piece: citizens awakening to their power.

The United States of America has been the most powerful country in the world for more than 70 years, but recently the US National Security Strategy declared that the return of great power competition with Russia and China is the greatest threat to US national security. Further, many analysts predict that America's autocratic rivals will have at least some success in disrupting - and, in the longer term, possibly even displacing - US global leadership. Brilliant and engagingly written, The Return of Great Power Rivalry argues that this conventional wisdom is wrong.

Ordinary people often don’t recognize themselves in the stories liberal politicians tell about them, while the authoritarians speak a language of dominance and national greatness that connects. The Democrats need a new approach to messaging. Comeback spells it out—and provides a roadmap for trouncing Trumpism.

Thomas Paine was born in Great Britain; he came to America at the age of 37 for the first time. He is rightly considered to be the Anglo-American writer, philosopher, publicist, as well as "American godfather" for supporting separatist spirits and inspiring Americans to fight for their independence (at that very moment, the break between America and England was imminent). He described his thoughts in a wonderful tract Common Sense, that according to G. Washington, revolutionized the minds. Later, Thomas Paine's arguments were reflected in The Independence Declaration, written by Jefferson.

How did such a major international public service media network become intensely politicized by government allies in such a short time, despite having its editorial independence protected by law? Capturing News, Capturing Democracy puts these events in historical and international context-and develops a new analytical framework for understanding government capture and its connection to broader processes of democratic backsliding.

Listener beware: Kevin D. Williamson - the lively, literary firebrand from National Review who was too hot for The Atlantic to handle - comes to bury democracy, not to praise it. With electrifying honesty and spirit, Williamson takes a flamethrower to mob politics, the “beast with many heads” that haunts social media and what currently passes for real life. It’s destroying our capacity for individualism and dragging us down “the Road to Smurfdom, the place where the deracinated demos of the Twitter age finds itself feeling small and blue.”

The American Revolution signalled a great change in the course of world history and progress. From this colonial revolt sprouted ideals of liberty and democracy, and all the aspirations and ambitions of a new people. In this work, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Gordon S. Wood discusses the character and consequences of the revolution, grounding the events and ideas that shaped the American consciousness.

Authenticity. Vulnerability. Humility. Transparency. These are some of the 21st-century virtues proselytized by mindset gurus, paraded (if not practiced) by big corporations, and lauded by professionals on LinkedIn. The quest for authenticity, for example, is central to progressive campaigns for greater diversity and inclusion, while our political and business leaders are highest praised if they appear to be humble. But are Australia’s newest virtues fit for purpose? In this provocative book, Lucinda Holdforth questions the new orthodoxy.

Este libro es una obra esencial para aquellos que buscan comprender el crecimiento significativo del populismo en todo el mundo y sus profundas implicaciones para las democracias liberales. Explorando las raíces históricas, las características distintivas y las dinámicas contemporáneas del populismo, tanto de derecha como de izquierda, el libro ofrece un análisis detallado de los impactos de este fenómeno sobre las instituciones democráticas, el Estado de Derecho y la cohesión social.

In The Four Threats, Lieberman and Mettler explore five historical episodes when democracy in the United States was under siege: the 1790s, the Civil War, the Gilded Age, the Depression, and Watergate. These episodes risked profound, even fatal, damage to the American democratic experiment, and on occasion antidemocratic forces have prevailed. From this history, four distinct characteristics of democratic disruption emerge. Political polarization, racism and nativism, economic inequality, and excessive executive power...have threatened the survival of the republic.

In this audacious recasting of the American Revolution, distinguished historian Gary Nash offers a profound new way of thinking about the struggle to create this country, introducing listeners to a coalition of patriots from all classes and races of American society. From millennialist preachers to enslaved Africans and disgruntled women to aggrieved Indians, the people so vividly portrayed in this book laid down ideas that have become part of our inheritance and ideals toward which we still strive today.

From the hosts of New Hampshire Public Radio’s Civics 101 and New Yorker cartoonist Tom Toro comes A User's Guide to Democracy, a lively crash course in everything you should know about how the US government works.