Download or read book Rewriting Democracy written by Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Illuminating and comprehensive, this excellent volume addresses the problematic relationship between democratic institutions and the current critique of enlightenment and modernity. Since at least the beginning of the twentieth century, and across the range of practice from science to politics to art, various cultural shifts have unsettled assumptions that have been fundamental to the development of democratic institutions: assumptions concerning individual identity, the nature of political systems, and the viability of egalitarian ideals. Can democracy survive these changes to the value systems upon which it has been based for over two centuries? This study does not focus on the often repeated particulars of past or current events such as 9/11 or the genocide in Darfur, but instead examines the terms and conditions under which it would be possible to prevent such events in the future.
Download or read book How Democracies Die written by Steven Levitsky and published by Crown. This book was released on 2019-01-08 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Comprehensive, enlightening, and terrifyingly timely.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice) WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITH BOOK PRIZE • SHORTLISTED FOR THE LIONEL GELBER PRIZE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • Time • Foreign Affairs • WBUR • Paste Donald Trump’s presidency has raised a question that many of us never thought we’d be asking: Is our democracy in danger? Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have spent more than twenty years studying the breakdown of democracies in Europe and Latin America, and they believe the answer is yes. Democracy no longer ends with a bang—in a revolution or military coup—but with a whimper: the slow, steady weakening of critical institutions, such as the judiciary and the press, and the gradual erosion of long-standing political norms. The good news is that there are several exit ramps on the road to authoritarianism. The bad news is that, by electing Trump, we have already passed the first one. Drawing on decades of research and a wide range of historical and global examples, from 1930s Europe to contemporary Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela, to the American South during Jim Crow, Levitsky and Ziblatt show how democracies die—and how ours can be saved. Praise for How Democracies Die “What we desperately need is a sober, dispassionate look at the current state of affairs. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, two of the most respected scholars in the field of democracy studies, offer just that.”—The Washington Post “Where Levitsky and Ziblatt make their mark is in weaving together political science and historical analysis of both domestic and international democratic crises; in doing so, they expand the conversation beyond Trump and before him, to other countries and to the deep structure of American democracy and politics.”—Ezra Klein, Vox “If you only read one book for the rest of the year, read How Democracies Die. . . .This is not a book for just Democrats or Republicans. It is a book for all Americans. It is nonpartisan. It is fact based. It is deeply rooted in history. . . . The best commentary on our politics, no contest.”—Michael Morrell, former Acting Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (via Twitter) “A smart and deeply informed book about the ways in which democracy is being undermined in dozens of countries around the world, and in ways that are perfectly legal.”—Fareed Zakaria, CNN
Download or read book One Man s Opinion A Suggested Rewrite for the Constitution of the United States written by and published by Dorrance Publishing. This book was released on with total page 50 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Twilight of Democracy written by Anne Applebaum and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2020-07-21 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • "How did our democracy go wrong? This extraordinary document ... is Applebaum's answer." —Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny The Pulitzer Prize–winning historian explains, with electrifying clarity, why elites in democracies around the world are turning toward nationalism and authoritarianism. From the United States and Britain to continental Europe and beyond, liberal democracy is under siege, while authoritarianism is on the rise. In Twilight of Democracy, Anne Applebaum, an award-winning historian of Soviet atrocities who was one of the first American journalists to raise an alarm about antidemocratic trends in the West, explains the lure of nationalism and autocracy. In this captivating essay, she contends that political systems with radically simple beliefs are inherently appealing, especially when they benefit the loyal to the exclusion of everyone else. Elegantly written and urgently argued, Twilight of Democracy is a brilliant dissection of a world-shaking shift and a stirring glimpse of the road back to democratic values.
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 Democracy and Education written by John Dewey and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 1916 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: . Renewal of Life by Transmission. The most notable distinction between living and inanimate things is that the former maintain themselves by renewal. A stone when struck resists. If its resistance is greater than the force of the blow struck, it remains outwardly unchanged. Otherwise, it is shattered into smaller bits. Never does the stone attempt to react in such a way that it may maintain itself against the blow, much less so as to render the blow a contributing factor to its own continued action. While the living thing may easily be crushed by superior force, it none the less tries to turn the energies which act upon it into means of its own further existence. If it cannot do so, it does not just split into smaller pieces (at least in the higher forms of life), but loses its identity as a living thing. As long as it endures, it struggles to use surrounding energies in its own behalf. It uses light, air, moisture, and the material of soil. To say that it uses them is to say that it turns them into means of its own conservation. As long as it is growing, the energy it expends in thus turning the environment to account is more than compensated for by the return it gets: it grows. Understanding the word "control" in this sense, it may be said that a living being is one that subjugates and controls for its own continued activity the energies that would otherwise use it up. Life is a self-renewing process through action upon the environment.
Download or read book Rewriting the Chicano Movement written by Mario T. García and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2021-03-09 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Chicano Movement, el movimiento, is known as the largest and most expansive civil rights and empowerment movement by Mexican Americans up to that time. It made Chicanos into major American political actors and laid the foundation for today’s Latino political power. Rewriting the Chicano Movement is a collection of powerful new essays on the Chicano Movement that expand and revise our understanding of the movement. These essays capture the commitment, courage, and perseverance of movement activists, both men and women, and their struggles to achieve the promises of American democracy. The essays in this volume broaden traditional views of the Chicano Movement that are too narrow and monolithic. Instead, the contributors to this book highlight the role of women in the movement, the regional and ideological diversification of the movement, and the various cultural fronts in which the movement was active. Rewriting the Chicano Movement stresses that there was no single Chicano Movement but instead a composite of movements committed to the same goal of Chicano self-determination. Scholars, students, and community activists interested in the history of the Chicano Movement can best start by reading this book. Contributors: Holly Barnet-Sanchez, Tim Drescher, Jesús Jesse Esparza, Patrick Fontes, Mario T. García, Tiffany Jasmín González, Ellen McCracken, Juan Pablo Mercado, Andrea Muñoz, Michael Anthony Turcios, Omar Valerio-Jiménez
Download or read book Gods in the Time of Democracy written by Kajri Jain and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-08 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2018 India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, inaugurated the world's tallest statue: a 597-foot figure of nationalist leader Sardar Patel. Twice the height of the Statue of Liberty, it is but one of many massive statues built following India's economic reforms of the 1990s. In Gods in the Time of Democracy Kajri Jain examines how monumental icons emerged as a religious and political form in contemporary India, mobilizing the concept of emergence toward a radical treatment of art historical objects as dynamic assemblages. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork at giant statue sites in India and its diaspora and interviews with sculptors, patrons, and visitors, Jain masterfully describes how public icons materialize the intersections between new image technologies, neospiritual religious movements, Hindu nationalist politics, globalization, and Dalit-Bahujan verifications of equality and presence. Centering the ex-colony in rethinking key concepts of the image, Jain demonstrates how these new aesthetic forms entail a simultaneously religious and political retooling of the “infrastructures of the sensible.”
Download or read book Institutionalizing Agonistic Democracy written by Edward C. Wingenbach and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2011 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary politics are characterised by the impossibility of agreement on fundamental values. This book examines the institutional alternatives available to democratic politics to determine which institutional structures are most likely to produce a democratic social order in which agonistic citizenship might flourish.
Download or read book Institutionalizing Agonistic Democracy written by Ed Wingenbach and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-23 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book length study of agonism as a mature account of democratic politics, Institutionalizing Agonistic Democracy provides a lucid overview of agonistic democratic theories and demonstrates the viability of this approach for institutional politics. Situating agonistic democracy within and against debates about radical democracy, foundationalism, liberal democracy, and pluralism, Institutionalizing Agonistic Democracy engages the texts of Mouffe, Connolly, Ranciere, Tully, Honig, Owen, and others to fully map the contours of agonistic democratic theories. Organizing this diverse literature into a coherent typology enables sophisticated analysis of the assumptions, distinctions, and aspirations of the often conflicting theoretical positions gathered within the constellation of agonistic democratic theory. Using this framework to explore the concrete institutional possibilities appropriate to agonistic democracy, Wingenbach argues that a modified version of Rawlsian political liberalism describes the institutional conditions most likely to sustain agonistic political practices. Once shorn of metaphysical commitments and detached from aspirations to consensus, political liberalism offers a contingent and historically viable framework within which agonistic contestation can occur. Such a reinterpretation of Rawls produces not the sublimation of agonism but a transformation of liberalism, so that it more adequately accommodates the deep pluralism of the post-foundational condition.
Download or read book Liberal Democracy as the End of History written by Christopher Hughes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-02-20 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Francis Fukuyama claims that liberal democracy is the end of history. This book provides a theoretical re-examination of this claim through postmodernist ideas. The book argues that postmodern ideas provide a valuable critique to Fukuyama’s thesis, and poses the questions: can we talk about a universal and teleological history; a universal human nature; or an autonomous individual? It addresses whether postmodern theories - concerning the movement of time, what it means to be human, and what it means to be an individual/subject - can be accommodated within a theory of a history that ends in liberal democracy. The author argues that incorporating elements of postmodern thought into Fukuyama’s theory makes it possible to produce a stronger and more compelling account of the theory that liberal democracy is the end of history. The result of this is to underpin Fukuyama’s theory with a more complex understanding of the movement of time, the human and the individual, and to show that postmodern concepts can, paradoxically, be used to strengthen Fukuyama’s theory that the end of history is liberal democracy. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of political theory, postmodernism and the work of Francis Fukuyama.
Download or read book Latin American Democracy written by Richard L. Millett and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-04-26 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nearly thirty years have passed since Latin America began the arduous task of transitioning from military-led rule to democracy. In this time, more countries have moved toward the institutional bases of democracy than at any time in the region’s history. Nearly all countries have held free, competitive elections and most have had peaceful alternations in power between opposing political forces. Despite these advances, however, Latin American countries continue to face serious domestic and international challenges to the consolidation of stable democratic governance. The challenges range from weak political institutions, corruption, legacies of militarism, transnational crime and globalization among others. In Latin American Democracy contributors – both academics and practitioners, North Americans and Latin Americans – explore and assess the state of democratic consolidation in Latin America by focusing on the specific issues and challenges confronting democratic governance in the region.
Download or read book Behavioral Political Economy and Democratic Theory written by Petr Špecián and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-06-08 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on current debates at the frontiers of economics, psychology, and political philosophy, this book explores the challenges that arise for liberal democracies from a confrontation between modern technologies and the bounds of human rationality. With the ongoing transition of democracy’s underlying information economy into the digital space, threats of disinformation and runaway political polarization have been gaining prominence. Employing the economic approach informed by behavioral sciences’ findings, the book’s chief concern is how these challenges can be addressed while preserving a commitment to democratic values and maximizing the epistemic benefits of democratic decision-making. The book has two key strands: it provides a systematic argument for building a behaviorally informed theory of democracy; and it examines how scientific knowledge on quirks and bounds of human rationality can inform the design of resilient democratic institutions. Drawing these together, the book explores the centrality of the rationality assumption in the methodological debates surrounding behavioral sciences as exemplified by the dispute between neoclassical and behavioral economics; the role of (ir)rationality in democratic social choice; behaviorally informed paternalism as a response to the challenge of irrationality; and non-paternalistic avenues to increase the resilience of the democratic institutions toward political irrationality. This book is invaluable reading for anyone interested in behavioral economics and sciences, political philosophy, and the future of democracy.
Download or read book The State of Democracy in Latin America written by Jonathan R. Barton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-11-04 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The State of Democracy in Latin America critically examines the nature of the post-transitional Latin American state, with a more specific engagement with the cases of Argentina and Chile.
Download or read book Me the People written by Kevin Bleyer and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2013-07-02 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The United States Constitution promised a More Perfect Union. It’s a shame no one bothered to write a more perfect Constitution—one that didn’t trigger more than two centuries of arguments about what the darn thing actually says. Until now. Perfection is at hand. A new, improved Constitution is here. And you are holding it. But first, some historical context: In the eighteenth century, a lawyer named James Madison gathered his friends in Philadelphia and, over four long months, wrote four short pages: the Constitution of the United States of America. Not bad. In the nineteenth century, a president named Abraham Lincoln freed an entire people from the flaws in that Constitution by signing the Emancipation Proclamation. Pretty impressive. And in the twentieth century, a doctor at the Bethesda Naval Hospital delivered a baby—but not just any baby. Because in the twenty-first century, that baby would become a man, that man would become a patriot, and that patriot would rescue a country . . . by single-handedly rewriting that Constitution. Why? We think of our Constitution as the painstakingly designed blueprint drawn up by, in Thomas Jefferson’s words, an “assembly of demigods” who laid the foundation for the sturdiest republic ever created. The truth is, it was no blueprint at all but an Etch A Sketch, a haphazard series of blunders, shaken clean and redrawn countless times during a summer of petty debates, drunken ramblings, and desperate compromise—as much the product of an “assembly of demigods” as a confederacy of dunces. No wonder George Washington wished it “had been made more perfect.” No wonder Benjamin Franklin stomached it only “with all its faults.” The Constitution they wrote is a hot mess. For starters, it doesn’t mention slavery, or democracy, or even Facebook; it plays favorites among the states; it has typos, smudges, and misspellings; and its Preamble, its most famous passage, was written by a man with a peg leg. Which, if you think about it, gives our Constitution hardly a leg to stand on. [Pause for laughter.] Now stop laughing. Because you hold in your hands no mere book, but the most important document of our time. Its creator, Daily Show writer Kevin Bleyer, paid every price, bore every burden, and saved every receipt in his quest to assure the salvation of our nation’s founding charter. He flew to Greece, the birthplace of democracy. He bused to Philly, the home of independence. He went toe-to-toe (face-to-face) with Scalia. He added nightly confabs with James Madison to his daily consultations with Jon Stewart. He tracked down not one but two John Hancocks—to make his version twice as official. He even read the Constitution of the United States. So prepare yourselves, fellow patriots, for the most significant literary event of the twenty-first, twentieth, nineteenth, and latter part of the eighteenth centuries. Me the People won’t just form a More Perfect Union. It will save America. Praise for Me the People “I would rather read a constitution written by Kevin Bleyer than by the sharpest minds in the country.”—Jon Stewart “Bleyer takes a red pencil to democracy’s most hallowed laundry list. . . . Uproarious and fascinating.”—Reader’s Digest “I knew James Madison. James Madison was a friend of mine. Mr. Bleyer, you are no James Madison. But you sure are a heck of a lot more fun.”—Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Team of Rivals
Download or read book Publics for Public Schools written by Kathleen Knight Abowitz and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-11-17 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book articulates a path for a renewed conception of-and commitment to-the public dimensions of schooling. It is an interdisciplinary book of philosophy and politics, written for educational leaders working in or on behalf of public schooling. Publics for Public Schools introduces a fresh view on how educational leaders might view the public ideal. In this conception of public work and leadership, educational leaders do not work with the public but help to achieve publics for public schools. The demos, or "the people" in the case of democratic governance of schools, mobilize around particular problems related to young people and schooling; they are best understood not as "the public" but as multiple publics. This book provides a conception of public life and of public leadership that can enable educational leaders of all types to help achieve publics for their schools.
Download or read book Off Center written by Jacob S. Hacker and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Republicans who run American government today have defied the normal laws of political gravity. They have ruled with the slimmest of majorities and yet have transformed the nation’s governing priorities. They have strayed dramatically from the moderate middle of public opinion and yet have faced little public backlash. Again and again, they have sided with the affluent and ideologically extreme while paying little heed to the broad majority of Americans. And much more often than not, they have come out on top. This book shows why—and why this troubling state of affairs can and must be changed. Written in a highly accessible style by two professional political scientists, Off Center tells the story of a deliberative process restricted and distorted by party chieftains, of unresponsive power brokers subverting the popular will, and of legislation written by and for powerful interests and deliberately designed to mute popular discontent. In the best tradition of engaged social science, Off Center is a powerful and informed critique that points the way toward a stronger foundation for American democracy.
