Social Democracy

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.

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.

Latin America has often been condemned to failure. Neither poor enough to evoke Africa’s moral crusade nor as explosively booming as India and China, it has largely been overlooked by the West. Yet this vast continent, home to half a billion people, the world’s largest reserves of arable land, and 8.5 percent of global oil, is busily transforming its political and economic landscape.

These days it seems that nobody is satisfied with American democracy. Critics across the ideological spectrum warn that the country is heading toward catastrophe but also complain that nothing seems to change. At the same time, many have begun to wonder if the gulf between elites and ordinary people has turned democracy itself into a myth. The urge to defend the country’s foundations and to dismantle them coexist—often within the same people. How did we get here? Why does it feel like the country is both grinding to a halt and falling to pieces?

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.

For years, hedge-fund tycoon George Soros has been demonized by GOP politicians, fringe outlets, and right-wing media personalities, who claim Soros often manipulates the global economy and masterminds the radical left. He has been accused of using his billions to foment violence, support “white genocide”, and pay migrants to seek asylum in the United States. Right-wing media personalities have described him as working to hijack our democracy and undermining sovereignty.

With Barack Obama's historic election in 2008, pundits proclaimed the Republicans as dead as the Whigs of yesteryear. Yet even as Democrats swooned, a small cadre of Republican operatives, including Karl Rove, Ed Gillespie, and Chris Jankowski, began plotting their comeback with a simple yet ingenious plan. These men had devised a way to take a tradition of dirty tricks - known to political insiders as "ratf**king" - to a whole new unprecedented level.

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.

En el actual panorama político convulso, el libro nos recuerda que la responsabilidad política nos pertenece a todos. La democracia es algo vivo, que respira, y Erica Benner ha pasado toda una vida pensando en el papel que juegan los ciudadanos comunes para mantenerla viva: desde su infancia en el Japón de la posguerra, donde la democracia fue impuesta en un país vencido, hasta trabajar en la Polonia postcomunista, con sus repentinas brechas de riqueza y seguridad.

Die offenen Gesellschaften des Westens sind bedroht, durch autoritäre, äußere Gegner, aber auch durch rechte, linke und religiöse Fundamentalisten im Inneren. Jahrzehntelang hat man radikale Minderheiten unterschätzt, durch Migration ins Land gelassen, teilweise mit einem Mulikulti-Mäntelchen kaschiert. Aber sie tolerieren nicht, wodurch sie groß geworden sind: Meinungsfreiheit und Gleichheit Aller. Identitäre von rechts und von links vergiften das öffentliche Klima, Antisemiten und Staatsfeinde haben die Masken abgeworfen.

Authoritarian regimes in many countries, and the men that lead them, depend on the international management of licit and illicit funds under their control. Frank Vogl shows that curbing their activities for their kleptocratic clients is critical to secure democracy, enhance national security, and ensure international financial stability.

America's two greatest strengths - her liberal democratic culture and her free market economy - have made her a global superpower. But left unchecked, these two strengths can become great cultural weaknesses, sowing selfishness, recklessness, and apathy. In Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society, theologian R. R. Reno argues that America needs a renewal of Christian ideals - ideals that encourage self-sacrifice, responsibility, and solidarity.

Lottocracy argues that the problem is with the heart of modern democracy: the election. Elections are failing as accountability mechanisms. Elections provide short-term incentives, leading elected politicians to downplay long-term catastrophic concerns. Elections create division where none need exist. The most powerful among us take advantage of this to control who is elected, what policies are enacted, and which problems are ignored. What should we do?

Was unsere Demokratie bedroht: Joachim Gauck über die Gefahren von außen und innen – der Bestseller in aktualisierter Fassung Der russische Überfall auf die Ukraine bedroht unsere liberale Demokratie in einem Moment, in dem sie zugleich auch von innen unter Druck steht. Wie ist es dazu gekommen? Der ehemalige Bundespräsident Joachim Gauck geht gemeinsam mit seiner Co-Autorin Helga Hirsch der Frage nach, weshalb das Vertrauen vieler Bürger in unsere liberale Demokratie erschüttert ist.

The Internet was meant to set us free. But have we unwittingly handed too much away to shadowy powers behind a wall of code, all manipulated by a handful of Silicon Valley utopians, ad men, and venture capitalists? And, in light of recent data breach scandals around companies like Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, what does that mean for democracy, our delicately balanced system of government that was created long before big data, total information, and artificial intelligence? In this urgent polemic, Jamie Bartlett argues that through our unquestioning embrace of big tech, the building blocks of democracy are slowly being removed.

The myths about Franklin Delano Roosevelt live on. For the left, FDR was a champion of the working class and the oppressed, suffering abuse as a “traitor to his class.” He gave up the lifestyle of the Hudson River gentry to lead his country out of the Depression and to victory against fascism. For many on the right, FDR was out of his depth on economics but provided Americans with the optimism and confidence necessary to prevail during the Depression and gain victory in World War II.

The electronic age compels us to confront the delicate balance between the convenience of constant connectivity and the protection of personal privacy, security, and democracy itself. Presented as a two-fold concern of digital and civic literacy, surveillance and privacy expert Heidi Boghosian argues that our fight to uphold democracy must extend to the online world. As “smart” citizens, our best chance of thriving in the digital era lies in taking care of our “smart” selves as diligently as we maintain our smart devices.

"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.

A century ago, the idea of 'the economy' didn't exist. Now economics is the supreme ideology of our time, with its own rules and language. The trouble is most of us can't speak it. This is damaging democracy. Dangerous agendas are hidden inside mathematical wrappers; controversial policies are presented as 'proven' by the models of economic 'science'. Government is being turned over to a publicly unaccountable technocratic elite. The Econocracy reveals that economics is too important to be left to the economists

Does democracy die in darkness, as the saying suggests? This book reveals that modern democracy was born in secrecy, despite the widespread conviction that transparency was its very essence.