Social Democracy

In his 1992 best-selling book The End of History and the Last Man, American political scientist Francis Fukuyama argued that the dominance of liberal democracy marked the end of humanity's political and ideological development. Thirty years later, with populism on the rise and the number of liberal democracies decreasing worldwide, Fukuyama revisits his classic thesis. A series of in-depth interviews between Fukuyama and editor Mathilde Fasting, After the End of History offers a wide-ranging analysis of liberal democracy today.

In Losing the News, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Alex S. Jones offers a probing look at the epochal changes sweeping the media, changes which are eroding the core news that has been the essential food supply of our democracy. Losing the News depicts an unsettling situation in which the American birthright of fact-based, reported news is in danger. But it is also a call to arms to fight to keep the core of news intact.

In a collection of original essays, the venerated television journalist, Dan Rather, celebrates our shared values and what matters most in our great country, and shows us what patriotism looks like. Writing about the institutions that sustain us, such as public libraries, public schools, and national parks; the values that have transformed us, such as the struggle for civil rights; and the drive toward science and innovation that has made the US great, Rather brings his experience on the frontlines of the world's biggest stories, and offers listeners a way forward.

Writing in response to our current “constitutional crisis”, New York Times best-selling author and Christian activist Jim Wallis urges America to return to the tenets of Jesus once again as the means to save us from the polarizing bitterness and anger of our tribal nation.

More than a hundred lives are lost to firearms every day in America. The cost is more than the numbers—it is the fear, the anxiety, the dread of public spaces that an armed society has created under the tortured rubric of freedom. But the norms of today are not the norms of American history or the values of its founders. They are the product of a gun culture that has imposed its vision on a sleeping nation. Historian Dominic Erdozain argues that we have wrongly ceded the big-picture argument on guns.

In Black Eye for America: How Critical Race Theory Is Burning Down the House, Carol Swain and Christopher Schorr expose the true nature of Critical Race Theory, and they offer concrete solutions for taking back the country's stolen institutions. They describe CRT in theory and practice, accounting for its origins and weaponization within American schools and workplaces; explain how this ideology threatens traditional American values and legal doctrines, including civil rights; and equip everyday Americans with strategies to help them resist and defeat CRT's pernicious influence.

The war on American democracy is at a fever pitch. Such a corrosive state of affairs did not arise spontaneously but instead was pushed, top-down, by six private sector special interest groups. In American Apocalypse Rena Steinzor argues that these groups are nothing more than well-financed armies fighting a battle of attrition against the national government. The book begins at the end of Lyndon Johnson's presidency, when the modern regulatory state was born.

Oligarchy is a threat to the American republic. When too much economic and political power is concentrated in too few hands, we risk losing the "republican form of government" the Constitution requires. But as Joseph Fishkin and William Forbath show in this retelling of constitutional history, a commitment to prevent oligarchy once stood at the center of a robust tradition in American political and constitutional thought.

Barely a year after the self-immolation of a young fruit seller in Tunisia, a vast wave of popular protest has convulsed the Middle East, overthrowing long-ruling dictators and transforming the region’s politics almost beyond recognition. But the biggest transformations of what has been labeled as the “Arab Spring” are yet to come. An insider to both American policy and the world of the Arab public, Marc Lynch shows that the fall of particular leaders is but the least of the changes that will emerge from months of unrest.

Mr. Beat’s The Power of Our Supreme Court is the Supreme Court book of decisions that affect the everyday lives of Americans everywhere. The real democracy of America unveiled. What does the supreme court do? Sure, people care when the court makes a big ruling, but most don’t pay attention to the court’s day-to-day decisions. In this law book, Mr. Beat takes you on a journey through our Supreme Court system, what it is, who is in it and how they got to be there while foreshadowing how it shapes our very future.

Hull House was visited each week by around 2000 people. Her adult night school was a forerunner of the continuing education classes offered by many universities today. In this book, Jane Addams reflects on labor, discrimination, welfare, education, and the role of democracy and government in relation to improving the lives of society's less fortunate.

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.

In Lies the Government Told You, Judge Andrew P. Napolitano reveals how America's freedom, as guaranteed by the US Constitution, has been forfeited by a government more protective of its own power than its obligations to preserve our individual liberties.

Tired of the endless name-calling during political campaigns—and in between, too? Words have meanings, and insults don’t help us understand what socialism or capitalism mean, or how democracy affects both. The mission of Socialism, Capitalism and Democracy is to provide clarity on each philosophy, by providing examples of how each affects our economy and individual lives. Topics include property, profits, optimism (versus pessimism), self- and selfish-interest, economic voting, complexity, and more.

Why do Democrats fail to win voters to their side, and what can they do to develop new winning political strategies—especially as the very fate of democracy hangs in the balance in 2024? Too often the carefully constructed, rational arguments of the Left meet a grisly fate at the polls, where voters are instead swayed by Republican candidates hawking anger, fear, and resentment. Only when Democrats are handed an overwhelming motivational issue—like the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade—have they found a way to counter this effect.

In 1981, a young lawyer, fresh out of Harvard law school, joined the Reagan administration’s Department of Justice, taking up a cause that had been fomenting in Republican circles for over a decade by that point. From his perch inside the Reagan DOJ, this lawyer would attempt to bring down one of the defining pieces of 20th century legislation—the Voting Rights Act. His name was John Roberts.

Democracy, free thought and expression, religious tolerance, individual liberty, political self-determination of peoples, sexual and racial equality - these values have firmly entered the mainstream in the decades since they were enshrined in the 1948 U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. But if these ideals no longer seem radical today, their origin was very radical indeed - far more so than most historians have been willing to recognize.

Our current democratic capitalist system is close to imploding. This book is the first to reveal the secret financial system dominating capitalism today and shows how we can create accountability to restore our democracy.

It has been called the political crime of the century: a foreign government, led by a brutal authoritarian leader, secretly interfering with the American presidential election to help elect the candidate of its choice. Now, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post national security reporter Greg Miller investigates the truth about the Kremlin’s covert attempt to destroy Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump win the presidency, Trump’s steadfast allegiance to Vladimir Putin, and Robert Mueller’s ensuing investigation of the president and those close to him.

Joe Biden has found his way back to Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. After four decades of diminishing prospects for ordinary people, the public likes what Biden is offering. Yet American democracy is in dire peril as Republicans, increasingly the national minority, try to destroy democracy in order to cling to power. It is the best of times and the worst of times. In Going Big, best-selling author and political journalist Robert Kuttner assesses the promise and peril of this critical juncture.