Social Democracy

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.”

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.

Originally published in 2000, The Right to Vote was widely hailed as a magisterial account of the evolution of suffrage from the American Revolution to the end of the 20th century. In this revised and updated edition, Keyssar carries the story forward, from the disputed presidential contest of 2000 through the 2008 campaign and the election of Barack Obama. The Right to Vote is a sweeping reinterpretation of American political history as well as a meditation on the meaning of democracy in contemporary American life.

In Words for Warriors, with her trademark wit and intelligence, Sam Sorbo shows exactly how radical left-wingers have manipulated language to fit their own socialistic and anti-freedom agenda. Sam Sorbo is on a mission to reclaim today’s hot button/culture war words for all freedom-loving Americans. Arranged in an accessible “A-Z” glossary style, listeners can dip in to discover the real meanings behind the acronyms, words, and phrases that the toxic liberal left loves to force on the rest of us.

Do you wonder why government keeps growing bigger and the public debt keeps getting higher, while your freedom and prosperity look ever more threatened? After reading his book, you won't wonder anymore - you'll know why it is happening and what can be done about it. Beyond Democracy is a groundbreaking and fascinating book for everyone who wants to better understand current social problems and the economic crisis.

During his years as a public official, Mitchell Weiss was told that government can't do new things or solve tough challenges - it's too big and slow and bureaucratic. Sadly, this is what so many of us have come to believe. But in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings, he and his city hall colleagues raced to support survivors in new, innovative ways. This kind of entrepreneurial spirit and savvy in government is growing, transforming the public sector's response to big problems at all levels.

With the ideology under more global scrutiny than ever in the wake of the war on Iraq and suspicions over election results, David Beetham offers new insights into democracy. He looks at real examples, such as the role of the citizen and how large corporations affect democracy. He also contemplates the future of democracy in the developed and developing worlds.

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.

From award-winning journalist Jack Shenker, The Egyptians is the essential book about Egypt and radical politics. In early 2011 Cairo's Tahrir Square briefly commanded the attention of the world. Half a decade later, the international media has largely moved on from Egypt's explosive cycles of revolution and counter-revolution - but the Arab world's most populous nation remains as volatile as ever, its turmoil intimately bound up with forms of authoritarian power and grassroots resistance that stretch right across the globe.

Beautiful Country Burn Again narrates a shocking year in American politics, moving from the early days of the Iowa Caucus to the crystalizing moments of the Democratic and Republican national conventions, and culminating in the aftershocks of the weeks following election night. Along the way, Fountain probes deeply into history, illuminating the forces and watershed moments of the past that mirror and precipitated the present, from the hollowed-out notion of the American Dream, to Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy, to the cult of celebrity that gave rise to Donald Trump.

Robert P. Jones, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), challenges us to grasp the profound political and cultural consequences of a new reality - that America is no longer a majority white Christian nation.

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.

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.

For the last 60 years, fear has seeped into every area of American life: Americans own more guns than citizens of any other country, sequester themselves in gated communities, and retreat from public spaces. And yet, crime rates have plummeted, making life in America safer than ever. Why, then, are Americans so afraid - and where does this fear lead to? In this remarkable work of social history, May demonstrates how our obsession with security has made citizens fear each other and distrust the government, making America less safe and less democratic.

American democracy was never supposed to give the nation a president like Donald Trump. We have never had a president who gave rise to such widespread alarm about his lack of commitment to the institutions of self-government, to the norms democracy requires, and to the need for basic knowledge about how government works. We have never had a president who raises profound questions about his basic competence and his psychological capacity to take on the most challenging political office in the world.

American democracy is at an impasse. After years of zero-sum partisan trench warfare, our political institutions are deteriorating. Our norms are collapsing. Democrats and Republicans no longer merely argue; they cut off contact with each other. In short, the two-party system is breaking our democracy, and driving us all crazy.

In light of concerns about food and human health, fraying social ties, economic uncertainty, and rampant consumerism, some people are foregoing a hurried, distracted existence and embracing a mindful way of living. Intentional residential communities across the United States are seeking the freedom to craft their own societies and live based on the values of nonviolence, self-sufficiency, equality, and voluntary simplicity.

A Feast of Vultures is an unprecedented, multiple-level inquiry into modern India, and the picture it reveals is both explosive and frightening. Within these covers is unimpeachable evidence against some of the country's biggest business houses and political figures, and the reopening of major scandals that have shaped its political narratives.

Propelled by the belief that government has slipped out of the hands of ordinary citizens, a surging wave of populism is destabilizing democracies around the world. As John Matsusaka reveals in Let the People Rule, this belief is based in fact. Over the past century, while democratic governments have become more efficient, they have also become more disconnected from the people they purport to represent. The solution Matsusaka advances is familiar but surprisingly underused: direct democracy, in the form of referendums.

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.