Download or read book The Precipice of Democracy written by S.R. Ross and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2023-11-27 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did the United States of America go through such a traumatic election in 2016? This book traces what led up to the contest between Hillary Clinton and her opponent and how its outcome continues to have repercussions today. The author dares to ask, “How can we ensure our country continues as a thriving democracy?” It also considers questions such as: • Did Trump really attempt to stay in power by assembling a mob on Capitol Hill, and if so, what does that say about him? • Do Trump and his followers remain a threat to democracy? • If democracy is supplanted, what can we expect to take its place? The 2016 election was unlike any before in America: A female candidate graced the election arena and her opponent openly requested foreign interference. With so many democratic ideals having been broken, can we still hold onto our status as a democracy? Find out how close America, the beacon of democracy, came to losing its status and what we can do to safeguard our freedom.
Download or read book The Precipice written by Noam Chomsky and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Precipice, Noam Chomsky sheds light into the phenomenon of Trumpism, exposes the catastrophic nature and impact of Trump’s policies on people, the environment, and the planet as a whole, and captures the dynamics of the brutal class warfare launched by the masters of capital to maintain and even enhance the features of a dog-eat–dog society to the unprecedented mobilization of millions of people against neoliberal capitalism, racism, and police violence/
Download or read book Democracy on the Precipice written by Zygmunt Bauman and published by Council of Europe. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Democracy is well-established and soundly practiced in most European countries. But despite unprecedented progress, there is growing dissatisfaction with the state of democracy and deepening mistrust of democratic institutions; a situation exacerbated by the economic crisis. Are Europe's democracies really under threat? Has the traditional model of European democracy exhausted its potential? A broad consensus is forming as to the urgent need to examine the origins of the crisis and to explore visions and strategies which could contribute to rebuilding confidence in democracy. As Europe's guardian of democracy, human rights and the rule of law, the Council of Europe is committed to exploring the state and practice of European democracy, as well as identifying new challenges and anticipating future trends. In order to facilitate this reflection, the Council of Europe held a series of Democracy Debates with the participation of renowned specialists working in a variety of backgrounds and disciplines. This publication presents the eight Democracy Debate lectures. Each presentation analyses a specific aspect of democracy today, placing the issues not only in their political context but also addressing the historical, technological and communication dimensions. The authors make proposals on ways to improve democratic governance and offer their predictions on how democracy in Europe may evolve. Together, the presentations contribute to improving our understanding of democracy today and to recognising the ways it could be protected and strengthened.
Download or read book Power on the Precipice written by Andrew Imbrie and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-08 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An essential guide to renewing American leadership in a turbulent, polarized, and postdominant world Is America fated to decline as a great power? Can it recover? With absorbing insight and fresh perspective, foreign policy expert Andrew Imbrie provides a road map for bolstering American leadership in an era of turbulence abroad and deepening polarization at home. This is a book about choices: the tough policy trade-offs that political leaders need to make to reinvigorate American money, might, and clout. In the conventional telling, the United States is either destined for continued dominance or doomed to irreversible decline. Imbrie argues instead that the United States must adapt to changing global dynamics and compete more wisely. Drawing on the author’s own experience as an adviser to Secretary of State John Kerry, as well as on interviews and comparative studies of the rise and fall of nations, this book offers a sharp look at American statecraft and the United States’ place in the world today.
Download or read book The Precipice of Democracy written by S R Ross and published by . This book was released on 2023-11-27 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did the United States of America go through such a traumatic election in 2016? This book traces what led up to the contest between Hillary Clinton and her opponent and how its outcome continues to have repercussions today. The author dares to ask, "How can we ensure our country continues as a thriving democracy?" It also considers questions such as: - Did Trump really attempt to stay in power by assembling a mob on Capitol Hill, and if so, what does that say about him? - Do Trump and his followers remain a threat to democracy? - If democracy is supplanted, what can we expect to take its place? The 2016 election was unlike any before in America: A female candidate graced the election arena and her opponent openly requested foreign interference. With so many democratic ideals having been broken, can we still hold onto our status as a democracy? Find out how close America, the beacon of democracy, came to losing its status and what we can do to safeguard our freedom.
Download or read book Brazil at the Precipice the Worker s Party Crisis and Resistance written by Robery Sean Purdy and published by . This book was released on with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An essential guide to understanding the current crisis in Brazil. Brazil is currently facing its greatest crisis since democracy was wrested by workers and social movements from the generals in 1985 after a brutal twenty-one-year military dictatorship. In Brazil at the Precipice, Sean Purdy tells the story of how Brazil got here, starting in 2002, when the Workers’ Party (PT) came to power under its founder Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, overseeing a ten-year period of sustained economic growth in the context of a booming world market for Brazilian commodities. Purdy traces the government’s implementation of successful social programs, jobs creation and modest reduction of economic and social inequality. Yet, he shows, the PT maintained the dominant neoliberal economic framework and constructed dubious alliances with a range of centrist and right-wing parties in order to advance its political agenda and effectively tamed unions and social movements, guaranteeing the PT’s victory in four successive elections. Purdy’s engaging narrative brings us to the global economic crisis, which reached the country in 2012, and the point at which the PT’s success began to unravel: the government’s adoption of an outright neoliberal program of cutbacks that undermined their support. Conservative political parties and social movements launched a concerted attack against the government, focusing on a corruption scandal that snowballed in little more than a year to the impeachment of President Dilma Rouseff. In tracing the trajectory and defeat of the Workers’ Party experiment with socialist politics, Brazil at the Precipice offers us valuable lessons for the experiments of the future"--Publisher's description.
Download or read book The Fight to Vote written by Michael Waldman and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-02-23 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Praised by the late John Lewis, this is the seminal book about the long and ongoing struggle to win voting rights for all citizens by the president of The Brennan Center, the leading organization on voter rights and election security, now newly revised to describe today’s intense fights over voting. As Rep. Lewis said, and recent events in state legislatures across the country demonstrate, the struggle for the right to vote is not over. In this “important and powerful” (Linda Greenhouse, former New York Times Supreme Court correspondent) book Michael Waldman describes the long struggle to extend the right to vote to all Americans. From the writing of the Constitution, and at every step along the way, as disenfranchised Americans sought this right, others have fought to stop them. Waldman traces this history from the Founders’ debates to today’s many restrictions: gerrymandering; voter ID laws; the flood of dark money released by conservative organizations; and the concerted effort in many state legislatures after the 2020 election to enact new limitations on voting. Despite the pandemic, the 2020 election had the highest turnout since 1900. In this updated edition, Waldman describes the nationwide effort that made this possible. He offers new insights into how Donald Trump’s false claims of fraud—“the Big Lie”—led to the January 6 insurrection and the fights over voting laws that followed one of the most dramatic chapters in the story of American democracy. As Waldman shows, this fight, sometimes vicious, has always been at the center of American politics because it determines the outcome of the struggle for power. The Fight to Vote is “an engaging, concise history…offering many useful reforms that advocates on both sides of the aisle should consider” (The Wall Street Journal).
Download or read book Uncivil Agreement written by Lilliana Mason and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-04-16 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The psychology behind political partisanship: “The kind of research that will change not just how you think about the world but how you think about yourself.” —Ezra Klein, Vox Political polarization in America has moved beyond disagreements about matters of policy. For the first time in decades, research has shown that members of both parties hold strongly unfavorable views of their opponents. This is polarization rooted in social identity, and it is growing. The campaign and election of Donald Trump laid bare this fact of the American electorate, its successful rhetoric of “us versus them” tapping into a powerful current of anger and resentment. With Uncivil Agreement, Lilliana Mason looks at the growing social gulf across racial, religious, and cultural lines, which have recently come to divide neatly between the two major political parties. She argues that group identifications have changed the way we think and feel about ourselves and our opponents. Even when Democrats and Republicans can agree on policy outcomes, they tend to view one other with distrust and to work for party victory over all else. Although the polarizing effects of social divisions have simplified our electoral choices and increased political engagement, they have not been a force that is, on balance, helpful for American democracy. Bringing together theory from political science and social psychology, Uncivil Agreement clearly describes this increasingly “social” type of polarization, and adds much to our understanding of contemporary politics.
Download or read book Democracy in Chains written by Nancy MacLean and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist for the National Book Award The Nation's "Most Valuable Book" “[A] vibrant intellectual history of the radical right.”—The Atlantic “This sixty-year campaign to make libertarianism mainstream and eventually take the government itself is at the heart of Democracy in Chains. . . . If you're worried about what all this means for America's future, you should be.”—NPR An explosive exposé of the right’s relentless campaign to eliminate unions, suppress voting, privatize public education, stop action on climate change, and alter the Constitution. Behind today’s headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. Democracy in Chains names its true architect—the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan—and dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed over six decades to alter every branch of government to disempower the majority. In a brilliant and engrossing narrative, Nancy MacLean shows how Buchanan forged his ideas about government in a last gasp attempt to preserve the white elite’s power in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. In response to the widening of American democracy, he developed a brilliant, if diabolical, plan to undermine the ability of the majority to use its numbers to level the playing field between the rich and powerful and the rest of us. Corporate donors and their right-wing foundations were only too eager to support Buchanan’s work in teaching others how to divide America into “makers” and “takers.” And when a multibillionaire on a messianic mission to rewrite the social contract of the modern world, Charles Koch, discovered Buchanan, he created a vast, relentless, and multi-armed machine to carry out Buchanan’s strategy. Without Buchanan's ideas and Koch's money, the libertarian right would not have succeeded in its stealth takeover of the Republican Party as a delivery mechanism. Now, with Mike Pence as Vice President, the cause has a longtime loyalist in the White House, not to mention a phalanx of Republicans in the House, the Senate, a majority of state governments, and the courts, all carrying out the plan. That plan includes harsher laws to undermine unions, privatizing everything from schools to health care and Social Security, and keeping as many of us as possible from voting. Based on ten years of unique research, Democracy in Chains tells a chilling story of right-wing academics and big money run amok. This revelatory work of scholarship is also a call to arms to protect the achievements of twentieth-century American self-government.
Download or read book Safe and free written by Council of Europe and published by Council of Europe. This book was released on 2018-03-23 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does democratic security interact with democracy, human rights and the rule of law? How can the Council of Europe help its member states guarantee security for citizens through their commitment to democratic norms? The European continent is facing today a democratic crisis and fresh impetus is required to enhance democratic security. As the most comprehensive pan-European organisation, the Council of Europe is uniquely placed to play a substantial role in this regard, thanks both to its specific mandate and its vast expertise in the field. In partnership with the Strasbourg-based National School of Administration (ENA) the Council of Europe organised a series of debates providing an intellectual framework to examine the challenges facing democratic security. Eminent personalities from politics, civil society and the academic world shared their views, and their contributions are collected in this publication.
Download or read book Public Opinion written by Walter Lippmann and published by . This book was released on 1922 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In what is widely considered the most influential book ever written by Walter Lippmann, the late journalist and social critic provides a fundamental treatise on the nature of human information and communication. The work is divided into eight parts, covering such varied issues as stereotypes, image making, and organized intelligence. The study begins with an analysis of "the world outside and the pictures in our heads", a leitmotif that starts with issues of censorship and privacy, speed, words, and clarity, and ends with a careful survey of the modern newspaper. Lippmann's conclusions are as meaningful in a world of television and computers as in the earlier period when newspapers were dominant. Public Opinion is of enduring significance for communications scholars, historians, sociologists, and political scientists. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.
Download or read book The New Fire written by Ben Buchanan and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2024-03-05 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: AI is revolutionizing the world. Here’s how democracies can come out on top. Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the modern world. It is ubiquitous—in our homes and offices, in the present and most certainly in the future. Today, we encounter AI as our distant ancestors once encountered fire. If we manage AI well, it will become a force for good, lighting the way to many transformative inventions. If we deploy it thoughtlessly, it will advance beyond our control. If we wield it for destruction, it will fan the flames of a new kind of war, one that holds democracy in the balance. As AI policy experts Ben Buchanan and Andrew Imbrie show in The New Fire, few choices are more urgent—or more fascinating—than how we harness this technology and for what purpose. The new fire has three sparks: data, algorithms, and computing power. These components fuel viral disinformation campaigns, new hacking tools, and military weapons that once seemed like science fiction. To autocrats, AI offers the prospect of centralized control at home and asymmetric advantages in combat. It is easy to assume that democracies, bound by ethical constraints and disjointed in their approach, will be unable to keep up. But such a dystopia is hardly preordained. Combining an incisive understanding of technology with shrewd geopolitical analysis, Buchanan and Imbrie show how AI can work for democracy. With the right approach, technology need not favor tyranny.
Download or read book How Democracy Ends written by David Runciman and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2018-05-10 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Scintillating ... thought-provoking ... one of the very best of the great crop of recent books on the subject.' Andrew Rawnsley, Observer Democracy has died hundreds of times, all over the world. We think we know what that looks like: chaos descends and the military arrives to restore order, until the people can be trusted to look after their own affairs again. However, there is a danger that this picture is out of date. Until very recently, most citizens of Western democracies would have imagined that the end was a long way off, and very few would have thought it might be happening before their eyes as Trump, Brexit and paranoid populism have become a reality. David Runciman, one of the UK's leading professors of politics, answers all this and more as he surveys the political landscape of the West, helping us to spot the new signs of a collapsing democracy and advising us on what could come next.
Download or read book Necessary Trouble written by Sarah Jaffe and published by Bold Type Books. This book was released on 2016-08-23 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Necessary Trouble is the definitive book on the movements that are poised to permanently remake American politics. We are witnessing a moment of unprecedented political turmoil and social activism. Over the last few years, we've seen the growth of the Tea Party, a twenty-first-century black freedom struggle with BlackLivesMatter, Occupy Wall Street, and the grassroots networks supporting presidential candidates in defiance of the traditional party elites. Sarah Jaffe leads readers into the heart of these movements, explaining what has made ordinary Americans become activists. As Jaffe argues, the financial crisis in 2008 was the spark, the moment that crystallized that something was wrong. For years, Jaffe crisscrossed the country, asking people what they were angry about, and what they were doing to take power back. She attended a people's assembly in a church gymnasium in Ferguson, Missouri; walked a picket line at an Atlanta Burger King; rode a bus from New York to Ohio with student organizers; and went door-to-door in Queens days after Hurricane Sandy. From the successful fight for a 15 minimum wage in Seattle and New York to the halting of Shell's Arctic drilling program, Americans are discovering the effectiveness of making good, necessary trouble. Regardless of political alignment, they are boldly challenging who wields power in this country.
Download or read book Power Politics written by Darrell M. West and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2022-08-09 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Curing the causes and consequences of Trumpism It's no secret that the United States faces extraordinary political and societal challenges, even as it recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic. Political polarization and extremism are the most apparent symptoms, resulting from long-term economic and social inequities as well as a toxic information ecosystem. It is easy to blame Donald Trump for the sad state of American democracy. After all, he abused his executive authority, spread false claims, and even incited violence. But Trumpism is almost certain to outlast Trump himself. The grievances he exploited and the aggrieved to whom he appealed existed well before he became president and likely will endure after he is gone from the political scene. The current political atmosphere is poisonous for those who operate on the basis of facts, reason, and logic. It is time to step back from this dangerous precipice and reflect on the causes of the serious threats to American democracy, procedural justice, and a reason-based society. With polarization now entrenched and authoritarianism gaining strength, no one should assume that facts somehow will triumph over falsehoods and reason will prevail over emotion. Drawing on his personal experiences in the D.C. policy world, Darrell West offers advice for protecting people, organizations, and the country as a whole from our contemporary challenges. This book makes the risks to democracy understandable by explaining specific threats and offering concrete ideas for ameliorating them. It will appeal to anyone interested in American politics, democracy, elections, mass media, technology, and governance.
Download or read book Climate Change Capitalism and Corporations written by Christopher Wright and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-23 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Climate change is one of the greatest threats facing humanity, a definitive manifestation of the well-worn links between progress and devastation. This book explores the complex relationship that the corporate world has with climate change and examines the central role of corporations in shaping political and social responses to the climate crisis. The principal message of the book is that despite the need for dramatic economic and political change, corporate capitalism continues to rely on the maintenance of 'business as usual'. The authors explore the different processes through which corporations engage with climate change. Key discussion points include climate change as business risk, corporate climate politics, the role of justification and compromise, and managerial identity and emotional reactions to climate change. Written for researchers and graduate students, this book moves beyond descriptive and normative approaches to provide a sociologically and critically informed theory of corporate responses to climate change.
Download or read book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism written by Shoshana Zuboff and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 658 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior. In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth. Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new "behavioral futures markets," where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new "means of behavioral modification." The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a "Big Other" operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff's comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled "hive" of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit -- at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future. With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future -- if we let it.
