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.

This pathbreaking book pinpoints forces behind the rise of the "rural voter"—a new political identity that combines a deeply felt sense of place with an increasingly nationalized set of concerns. Nicholas F. Jacobs and Daniel M. Shea uncover how this overwhelmingly crucial voting bloc emerged and how it has roiled American politics. They show how perceptions of economic and social change, racial anxieties, and a traditional way of life under assault have converged into a belief in rural uniqueness and separateness.

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.

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.

The respected Italian economist and journalist offers a bold and provocative argument that the speed of technological transformation is threatening our future.

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.

Drawing on original survey and experimental data, Berinsky shows that a tendency toward conspiratorial thinking and vehement partisan attachment fuel belief in rumors. Berinsky argues that in fighting misinformation, it is as important to target the undecided and the uncertain as it is the true believers.

Early Americans were suspicious of centralized authority and executive power. Casting away the yoke of England and its king, the founding fathers shared in this distrust as they set out to pen the Constitution. Weighing a need for consolidated leadership with a demand for states' rights, they established a large federal republic with limited dominion over the states. This Very Short Introduction audiobook provides a concise overview of federalism, from its origins and evolution to the key events and constitutional decisions that have defined its framework.

From one of the foremost authorities on education and the history of education in the United States, Slaying Goliath is an impassioned, inspiring look at the ways in which parents, teachers, and activists are successfully fighting back to defeat the forces that are trying to privatize America’s public schools.

We are living in a time of mounting political segregation that threatens to tear us apart as a unified society. The result is that we are becoming increasingly tribal, and the narratives of life that we get exposed to on a daily basis have become echo chambers in which we hear our beliefs reinforced and others' beliefs demonized. Global diversity and inclusion expert Howard J. Ross, with coauthor JonRobert Tartaglione, explores how our human need to belong is the driving force for why we are living in a world so extremely divided.

The struggle between individualism and the good of the community as a whole has been the basis of every major disagreement in our history, from the debates at the Constitutional Convention and in the run-up to the Civil War to the fights surrounding the agenda of the Progressives, the New Deal, the civil rights movement, and the Tea Party.

P.J. O’Rourke began writing funny things in 1960s underground newspapers, became editor-in-chief of National Lampoon, then spent 20 years reporting for Rolling Stone and The Atlantic Monthly as the world’s only trouble spot humorist, going to wars, riots, rebellions, and other "Holidays in Hell” in more than 40 countries.

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.

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.”

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.

In They Don’t Represent Us, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig charts the way in which the fundamental institutions of our democracy, including our media, respond to narrow interests rather than to the needs and wishes of the nation’s citizenry. But the blame does not only lie with “them” - Washington’s politicians and power brokers, Lessig argues. The problem is also “us.”

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.

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.

Robert B. Reich urges Americans to get beyond mere outrage about the nation’s increasingly concentrated wealth and corrupt politics in order to mobilize and to take back our economy and democracy. Americans can’t rely only on getting good people elected, Reich argues, because nothing positive happens in Washington unless good people outside Washington are organized to help make those things happen after the election. But in order to be effectively mobilized, we need to see the big picture.

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?