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Author: Lee Drutman
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190913851
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 369
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Book Description
American democracy is in deep crisis. But what do we do about it? That depends on how we understand the current threat.In Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop, Lee Drutman argues that we now have, for the first time in American history, a genuine two-party system, with two fully-sorted, truly national parties, divided over the character of the nation. And it's a disaster. It's a party system fundamentally at odds withour anti-majoritarian, compromise-oriented governing institutions. It threatens the very foundations of fairness and shared values on which our democracy depends.Deftly weaving together history, democratic theory, and cutting-edge political science research, Drutman tells the story of how American politics became so toxic and why the country is now trapped in a doom loop of escalating two-party warfare from which there is only one escape: increase the numberof parties through electoral reform. As he shows, American politics was once stable because the two parties held within them multiple factions, which made it possible to assemble flexible majorities and kept the climate of political combat from overheating. But as conservative Southern Democrats andliberal Northeastern Republicans disappeared, partisan conflict flattened and pulled apart. Once the parties became fully nationalized - a long-germinating process that culminated in 2010 - toxic partisanship took over completely. With the two parties divided over competing visions of nationalidentity, Democrats and Republicans no longer see each other as opponents, but as enemies. And the more the conflict escalates, the shakier our democracy feels.Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop makes a compelling case for large scale electoral reform - importantly, reform not requiring a constitutional amendment - that would give America more parties, making American democracy more representative, more responsive, and ultimately more stable.
Author: Lee Drutman
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190913851
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 369
Get Book Here
Book Description
American democracy is in deep crisis. But what do we do about it? That depends on how we understand the current threat.In Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop, Lee Drutman argues that we now have, for the first time in American history, a genuine two-party system, with two fully-sorted, truly national parties, divided over the character of the nation. And it's a disaster. It's a party system fundamentally at odds withour anti-majoritarian, compromise-oriented governing institutions. It threatens the very foundations of fairness and shared values on which our democracy depends.Deftly weaving together history, democratic theory, and cutting-edge political science research, Drutman tells the story of how American politics became so toxic and why the country is now trapped in a doom loop of escalating two-party warfare from which there is only one escape: increase the numberof parties through electoral reform. As he shows, American politics was once stable because the two parties held within them multiple factions, which made it possible to assemble flexible majorities and kept the climate of political combat from overheating. But as conservative Southern Democrats andliberal Northeastern Republicans disappeared, partisan conflict flattened and pulled apart. Once the parties became fully nationalized - a long-germinating process that culminated in 2010 - toxic partisanship took over completely. With the two parties divided over competing visions of nationalidentity, Democrats and Republicans no longer see each other as opponents, but as enemies. And the more the conflict escalates, the shakier our democracy feels.Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop makes a compelling case for large scale electoral reform - importantly, reform not requiring a constitutional amendment - that would give America more parties, making American democracy more representative, more responsive, and ultimately more stable.
Author: Dale Maharidge
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
Much of the contemporary crazy can be traced to the 1980s—America of the 2020s is living with the cultural shapeshifting rooted in that decade. Americans lived in a different reality in 1980: Vermont was the only state that let residents carry a concealed firearm without a permit. Twenty-four states now allow this—and numerous other gun laws have fallen by the wayside. When police were accused of wrongdoing, the default answer from society’s arbiters—courts, politicians, newspaper editors—was: “The police wouldn’t lie.” Editors steered clear of stories about rape and sexual violence. The word “homeless” wasn’t in common use. The fabric of the middle class had not yet begun fraying. America of the 2020s is living with cultural shapeshifting rooted in the 1980s. History, of course, is not a snapshot—it’s a film. To understand the United States today, we have to know the 1980s. American Doom Loop chronicles the first part of that moving picture, then brings the story forward. As a newspaper journalist, Dale Maharidge had a front-row seat to this decade, immersed in disparate worlds. He was in the Philippines during the last days of Dictator Ferdinand Marcos, witnessing the US lose a critical piece of its empire dating to the Spanish–American War; he traveled to Central America where the East-West conflict was playing out by proxy; he smuggled a Salvadoran family marked by death squads, driving them through trackless desert to the US border; he embedded with a group that was a precursor to the Oath Keepers; and he investigated police, who kept trying to get him fired. Through it all, Maharidge gained an invaluable view of a complicated decade that offers insight into our society today.
Author: Robert C. Lieberman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009002929
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 427
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Book Description
Politics in the United States has become increasingly polarized in recent decades. Both political elites and everyday citizens are divided into rival and mutually antagonistic partisan camps, with each camp questioning the political legitimacy and democratic commitments of the other side. Does this polarization pose threats to democracy itself? What can make some democratic institutions resilient in the face of such challenges? Democratic Resilience brings together a distinguished group of specialists to examine how polarization affects the performance of institutional checks and balances as well as the political behavior of voters, civil society actors, and political elites. The volume bridges the conventional divide between institutional and behavioral approaches to the study of American politics and incorporates historical and comparative insights to explain the nature of contemporary challenges to democracy. It also breaks new ground to identify the institutional and societal sources of democratic resilience.
Author: Ross Douthat
Publisher: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 1476785252
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
From the New York Times columnist and bestselling author of Bad Religion, a powerful portrait of how our wealthy, successful society has passed into an age of gridlock, stalemate, public failure and private despair. The era of the coronavirus has tested America, and our leaders and institutions have conspicuously failed. That failure shouldn’t be surprising: Beneath social-media frenzy and reality-television politics, our era’s deep truths are elite incompetence, cultural exhaustion, and the flight from reality into fantasy. Casting a cold eye on these trends, The Decadent Society explains what happens when a powerful society ceases advancing—how the combination of wealth and technological proficiency with economic stagnation, political stalemate, and demographic decline creates a unique civilizational crisis. Ranging from the futility of our ideological debates to the repetitions of our pop culture, from the decline of sex and childbearing to the escapism of drug use, Ross Douthat argues that our age is defined by disappointment—by the feeling that all the frontiers are closed, that the paths forward lead only to the grave. Correcting both optimism and despair, Douthat provides an enlightening explanation of how we got here, how long our frustrations might last, and how, in renaissance or catastrophe, our decadence might ultimately end.
Author: Wendy L. Wall
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199736820
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 395
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Book Description
In the wake of World War II, Americans developed an unusually deep and all-encompassing national unity, as postwar affluence and the Cold War combined to naturally produce a remarkable level of agreement about the nation's core values. Or so the story has long been told. Inventing the "American Way" challenges this vision of inevitable consensus. Americans, as Wendy Wall argues in this innovative book, were united, not so much by identical beliefs, as by a shared conviction that a distinctive "American Way" existed and that the affirmation of such common ground was essential to the future of the nation. Moreover, the roots of consensus politics lie not in the Cold War era, but in the turbulent decade that preceded U.S. entry into World War II. The social and economic chaos of the Depression years alarmed a diverse array of groups, as did the rise of two "alien" ideologies: fascism and communism. In this context, Americans of divergent backgrounds and beliefs seized on the notion of a unifying "American Way" and sought to convince their fellow citizens of its merits. Wall traces the competing efforts of business groups, politicians, leftist intellectuals, interfaith proponents, civil rights activists, and many others over nearly three decades to shape public understandings of the "American Way." Along the way, she explores the politics behind cultural productions ranging from The Adventures of Superman to the Freedom Train that circled the nation in the late 1940s. She highlights the intense debate that erupted over the term "democracy" after World War II, and identifies the origins of phrases such as "free enterprise" and the "Judeo-Christian tradition" that remain central to American political life. By uncovering the culture wars of the mid-twentieth century, this book sheds new light on a period that proved pivotal for American national identity and that remains the unspoken backdrop for debates over multiculturalism, national unity, and public values today.
Author: Ezra Klein
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1476700397
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2022 One of Bill Gates’s “5 books to read this summer,” this New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller shows us that America’s political system isn’t broken. The truth is scarier: it’s working exactly as designed. In this “superbly researched” (The Washington Post) and timely book, journalist Ezra Klein reveals how that system is polarizing us—and how we are polarizing it—with disastrous results. “The American political system—which includes everyone from voters to journalists to the president—is full of rational actors making rational decisions given the incentives they face,” writes political analyst Ezra Klein. “We are a collection of functional parts whose efforts combine into a dysfunctional whole.” “A thoughtful, clear and persuasive analysis” (The New York Times Book Review), Why We’re Polarized reveals the structural and psychological forces behind America’s descent into division and dysfunction. Neither a polemic nor a lament, this book offers a clear framework for understanding everything from Trump’s rise to the Democratic Party’s leftward shift to the politicization of everyday culture. America is polarized, first and foremost, by identity. Everyone engaged in American politics is engaged, at some level, in identity politics. Over the past fifty years in America, our partisan identities have merged with our racial, religious, geographic, ideological, and cultural identities. These merged identities have attained a weight that is breaking much in our politics and tearing at the bonds that hold this country together. Klein shows how and why American politics polarized around identity in the 20th century, and what that polarization did to the way we see the world and one another. And he traces the feedback loops between polarized political identities and polarized political institutions that are driving our system toward crisis. “Well worth reading” (New York magazine), this is an “eye-opening” (O, The Oprah Magazine) book that will change how you look at politics—and perhaps at yourself.
Author: Richard Dauch
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1250010837
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
Politicians, voters, executives, and employees all want the answer to one question: How can America compete with cheap foreign labor, and restore skilled, well-paying jobs to our economy? American Drive answers that question. An executive with nearly thirty years in the trenches of the hard-nosed Detroit automobile industry, Richard E. "Dick" Dauch had long dreamed of running his own manufacturing company. From his first job on the plant floor at General Motors to his crucial role in helping to rescue Chrysler from the brink of bankruptcy, Dauch focused passionately, and relentlessly, on quality, productivity, and flexibility in manufacturing. In 1993 he took on the challenge of his life, buying a lagging axle supply and parts business from GM, along with five rusting, unprofitable, union-controlled, near-decrepit plants in the heart of a crime-ridden Detroit and a deteriorating environment in Buffalo, New York. The newly created "stand-alone" company was named American Axle and Manufacturing. Dauch set out to create a world-class industrial automotive manufacturer. He bought and bulldozed the crack, liquor, and prostitution businesses that surrounded the company and rebuilt the plants. He upward educated, trained, and expanded the skill sets of the workforce, struck tough bargains with unions, and solved massive quality problems that were costing tens of millions every year and undermining customer satisfaction. Within one year of opening the doors, AAM had turned an astounding $66 million in profit. In American Drive, Dauch narrates the story of AAM against the backdrop of his nearly fifty years in the auto industry, from its glory days to its decline in the face of foreign competition, government bailouts, battles with unions, and the recent Great Recession. Tough, smart, inspiring, high-energy, and opinionated, Dauch offers memorable lessons on leadership, advanced product technology, communication, negotiation, and making profits in the most difficult times. Dauch's story transcends the auto industry and draws a blueprint for job creation, manufacturing competitiveness, economic growth, and excellence in America.
Author: Jim Collins
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0066620996
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
The Challenge Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the verybeginning. But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness? The Study For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great? The Standards Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world's greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck. The Comparisons The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good? Over five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness -- why some companies make the leap and others don't. The Findings The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include: Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness. The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence. A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results. Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology. The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap. “Some of the key concepts discerned in the study,” comments Jim Collins, "fly in the face of our modern business culture and will, quite frankly, upset some people.” Perhaps, but who can afford to ignore these findings?
Author: Frank R. Baumgartner
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226039463
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 357
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Book Description
During the 2008 election season, politicians from both sides of the aisle promised to rid government of lobbyists’ undue influence. For the authors of Lobbying and Policy Change, the most extensive study ever done on the topic, these promises ring hollow—not because politicians fail to keep them but because lobbies are far less influential than political rhetoric suggests. Based on a comprehensive examination of ninety-eight issues, this volume demonstrates that sixty percent of recent lobbying campaigns failed to change policy despite millions of dollars spent trying. Why? The authors find that resources explain less than five percent of the difference between successful and unsuccessful efforts. Moreover, they show, these attempts must overcome an entrenched Washington system with a tremendous bias in favor of the status quo. Though elected officials and existing policies carry more weight, lobbies have an impact too, and when advocates for a given issue finally succeed, policy tends to change significantly. The authors argue, however, that the lobbying community so strongly reflects elite interests that it will not fundamentally alter the balance of power unless its makeup shifts dramatically in favor of average Americans’ concerns.
Author: Karen Petrou
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119726743
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 291
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Book Description
The first book to reveal how the Federal Reserve holds the key to making us more economically equal, written by an author with unparalleled expertise in the real world of financial policy Following the 2008 financial crisis, the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy placed much greater focus on stabilizing the market than on helping struggling Americans. As a result, the richest Americans got a lot richer while the middle class shrank and economic and wealth inequality skyrocketed. In Engine of Inequality, Karen Petrou offers pragmatic solutions for creating more inclusive monetary policy and equality-enhancing financial regulation as quickly and painlessly as possible. Karen Petrou is a leading financial-policy analyst and consultant with unrivaled knowledge of what drives the decisions of federal officials and how big banks respond to financial policy in the real world. Instead of proposing legislation that would never pass Congress, the author provides an insider's look at politically plausible, high-impact financial policy fixes that will radically shift the equality balance. Offering an innovative, powerful, and highly practical solution for immediately turning around the enormous nationwide problem of economic inequality, this groundbreaking book: Presents practical ways America can and should tackle economic inequality with fast-acting results Provides revealing examples of exactly how bad economic inequality in America has become no matter how hard we all work Demonstrates that increasing inequality is disastrous for long-term economic growth, political action, and even personal happiness Explains why your bank's interest rates are still only a fraction of what they were even though the rich are getting richer than ever, faster than ever Reveals the dangers of FinTech and BigTech companies taking over banking Shows how Facebook wants to control even the dollars in your wallet Discusses who shares the blame for our economic inequality, including the Fed, regulators, Congress, and even economists Engine of Inequality: The Fed and the Future of Wealth in America should be required reading for leaders, policymakers, regulators, media professionals, and all Americans wanting to ensure that the nation’s financial policy will be a force for promoting economic equality.
