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Author: H. L. Mencken
Publisher: Dissident Books
ISBN: 9780977378838
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
The perfect book for the 2012 elections. . . and beyond![Democracy] [i]is based on propositions that are palpably not true-and what is not true, as everyone knows, is always immensely more fascinating and satisfying to the vast majority of men than what is true...[/i]H.L. Mencken wrote [i]Notes on Democracy[/i] over 80 years ago. His time, the paranoid and intolerant years of World War I, Prohibition, and the Scopes trial, is strikingly like our own. [i]Notes[/i] isn't just a blast from the past; it's a perceptive report on today.In Notes, Mencken conducts a bold, libertarian attack on intrusive government, special interest groups, and mob rule that's as relevant today as it was in the 1920s.Notes has something that will appeal to -- and offend -- everyone. Liberals will love Mencken's denunciation of jingoism; conservatives and libertarians will root for his attacks on meddling laws, hand-outs, and equality.The new edition includes an introduction and annotations by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, author of Mencken: The American Iconoclast, and an afterword by two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Anthony Lewis.
Author: H. L. Mencken
Publisher: Dissident Books
ISBN: 9780977378838
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 208
Get Book Here
Book Description
The perfect book for the 2012 elections. . . and beyond![Democracy] [i]is based on propositions that are palpably not true-and what is not true, as everyone knows, is always immensely more fascinating and satisfying to the vast majority of men than what is true...[/i]H.L. Mencken wrote [i]Notes on Democracy[/i] over 80 years ago. His time, the paranoid and intolerant years of World War I, Prohibition, and the Scopes trial, is strikingly like our own. [i]Notes[/i] isn't just a blast from the past; it's a perceptive report on today.In Notes, Mencken conducts a bold, libertarian attack on intrusive government, special interest groups, and mob rule that's as relevant today as it was in the 1920s.Notes has something that will appeal to -- and offend -- everyone. Liberals will love Mencken's denunciation of jingoism; conservatives and libertarians will root for his attacks on meddling laws, hand-outs, and equality.The new edition includes an introduction and annotations by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, author of Mencken: The American Iconoclast, and an afterword by two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Anthony Lewis.
Author: Henry Louis Mencken
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Democracy
Languages : en
Pages : 228
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Book Description
Author: Eboo Patel
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807024066
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 226
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Book Description
“You don’t create societies by burning things down, You create societies by building things.” From the former faith adviser to President Obama comes a fresh manifesto for those who seek to promote positive change and build a more diverse and just democracy The goal of social change work is not a more ferocious revolution; it is a more beautiful social order. It is harder to organize a fair trial than it is to fire up a crowd, more challenging to build a good school than it is to tell others they are doing education all wrong. But every decent society requires fair trials and good schools, and that’s just the beginning of the list of institutions and structures that need to be efficiently created and effectively run in large-scale diverse democracy. We Need to Build is a call to create those institutions and a guide for how to run them well. In his youth, Eboo Patel was inspired by love-based activists like John Lewis, Martin Luther King Jr., Badshah Khan, Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Dorothy Day, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Thich Nhat Hanh. Their example, and a timely challenge to build the change he wanted to see, led to a life engaged in the particulars of building, nourishing, and sustaining an institution that seeks to promote positive social change—Interfaith America. Now, drawing on his twenty years of experience, Patel tells the stories of what he’s learned and how, in the process, he came to construct as much as critique and collaborate more than oppose. His challenge to us is clear: those of us committed to refounding America as a just and inclusive democracy need to defeat the things we don’t like by building the things we do.
Author: Astra Taylor
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
ISBN: 1250179858
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 219
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Book Description
“A New Civil Rights Leader” explores what we mean when we speak of democracy and if democracy can truly ever exist (LA Times). There is no shortage of democracy, at least in name, and yet it is in crisis everywhere we look. From a cabal of plutocrats in the White House to gerrymandering and dark-money campaign contributions, it is clear that the principle of government by and for the people is not living up to its promise. The problems lie deeper than any one election cycle. As Astra Taylor demonstrates, real democracy—fully inclusive and completely egalitarian—has in fact never existed. In a tone that is both philosophical and anecdotal, weaving together history, theory, the stories of individuals, and interviews with such leading thinkers as Cornel West and Wendy Brown, Taylor invites us to reexamine the term. Is democracy a means or an end, a process or a set of desired outcomes? What if those outcomes, whatever they may be—peace, prosperity, equality, liberty, an engaged citizenry—can be achieved by non-democratic means? In what areas of life should democratic principles apply? If democracy means rule by the people, what does it mean to rule and who counts as the people? Democracy’s inherent paradoxes often go unnamed and unrecognized. Exploring such questions, Democracy May Not Exist offers a better understanding of what is possible, what we want, why democracy is so hard to realize, and why it is worth striving for. “Astra Taylor will change how you think about democracy. . . . She unpacks it, wrestles with it, with the question of who gets included and how, and excavates the invisible assumptions that have been bred into our idea of democracy.” —Ezra Klein, The Ezra Klein Show “An impressive contribution. . . . Taylor sets out to impart some coherence and substance to the term in order to rescue it from ignorance and obfuscation and displays considerable intellectual nimbleness.” —Randall Kennedy, The New York Times Book Review “Magnificent, paradigm-shifting . . . Taylor’s deep and wide examination of democratic movements, conversations, and grassroots institutions makes the reader feel . . . democracy as pleasure of thinking and acting.” —The Los Angeles Review of Books
Author: Arundhati Roy
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141931124
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 260
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Book Description
This series of essays examines the dark side of democracy in contemporary India. It looks closely at how religious majoritarianism, cultural nationalism and neo-fascism simmer just under the surface of a country that projects itself as the world's largest democracy. Beginning with the state-backed pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, Arundhati Roy writes about how the combination of Hindu Nationalism and India's Neo-liberal economic reforms which began their journey together in the early 1990s are now turning India into a police state. She describes the systematic marginalization of religious and ethnic minorities - Muslim, Christian, Adivasi and Dalit, the rise of terrorism and the massive scale of displacement and dispossession of the poor by predatory corporations. The collection ends with an account of the of the August 2008 uprising of the people of Kashmir against India's military occupation and an analysis of the November 2008 attacks on Mumbai. The Dark Side of Democracy tracks the fault-lines that threaten to destroy India's precarious democracy and send shockwaves through the region and beyond.
Author: Martha C. Nussbaum
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691264414
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 200
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Book Description
A passionate defense of the humanities from one of today's foremost public intellectuals In this short and powerful book, celebrated philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum makes a passionate case for the importance of the liberal arts at all levels of education. Historically, the humanities have been central to education because they have been seen as essential for creating competent democratic citizens. But recently, Nussbaum argues, thinking about the aims of education has gone disturbingly awry in the United States and abroad. We increasingly treat education as though its primary goal were to teach students to be economically productive rather than to think critically and become knowledgeable, productive, and empathetic individuals. This shortsighted focus on profitable skills has eroded our ability to criticize authority, reduced our sympathy with the marginalized and different, and damaged our competence to deal with complex global problems. And the loss of these basic capacities jeopardizes the health of democracies and the hope of a decent world. In response to this dire situation, Nussbaum argues that we must resist efforts to reduce education to a tool of the gross national product. Rather, we must work to reconnect education to the humanities in order to give students the capacity to be true democratic citizens of their countries and the world. Translated into twenty-five languages, Not for Profit draws on the stories of troubling—and hopeful—global educational developments. Nussbaum offers a manifesto that should be a rallying cry for anyone who cares about the deepest purposes of education.
Author: Benjamin I. Page
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022672994X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 400
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Book Description
“Important and riveting . . . The solution isn’t to redistribute wealth from the have-mores to the have-lesses. It’s to redistribute political power to everyone.” —Robert B. Reich America faces daunting problems—stagnant wages, high health care costs, neglected schools, deteriorating public services. How did we get here? Through decades of dysfunctional government. In Democracy in America? veteran political observers Benjamin I. Page and Martin Gilens marshal an unprecedented array of evidence to show that while other countries have responded to a rapidly changing economy by helping people who’ve been left behind, the United States has failed to do so. Instead, we have actually exacerbated inequality, enriching corporations and the wealthy while leaving ordinary citizens to fend for themselves. What’s the solution? More democracy. More opportunities for citizens to shape what their government does. To repair our democracy, Page and Gilens argue, we must change the way we choose candidates and conduct our elections, reform our governing institutions, and curb the power of money in politics. By doing so, we can reduce polarization and gridlock, address pressing challenges, and enact policies that truly reflect the interests of average Americans. Updated with new information, this book lays out a set of proposals that would boost citizen participation, curb the power of money, and democratize the House and Senate. “Brilliant, indispensable, and highly accessible.” —New York Journal of Books
Author: James L. Leloudis
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469660407
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 191
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Book Description
America is at war with itself over the right to vote, or, more precisely, over the question of who gets to exercise that right and under what circumstances. Conservatives speak in ominous tones of voter fraud so widespread that it threatens public trust in elected government. Progressives counter that fraud is rare and that calls for reforms such as voter ID are part of a campaign to shrink the electorate and exclude some citizens from the political life of the nation. North Carolina is a battleground for this debate, and its history can help us understand why — a century and a half after ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment — we remain a nation divided over the right to vote. In Fragile Democracy, James L. Leloudis and Robert R. Korstad tell the story of race and voting rights, from the end of the Civil War until the present day. They show that battles over the franchise have played out through cycles of emancipatory politics and conservative retrenchment. When race has been used as an instrument of exclusion from political life, the result has been a society in which vast numbers of Americans are denied the elements of meaningful freedom: a good job, a good education, good health, and a good home. That history points to the need for a bold new vision of what democracy looks like.
Author: Nicholas T. Davis
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472133128
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 255
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Book Description
How do the people who make up American democracy view and judge its process?
Author: Robert Goodrich
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469665557
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 194
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Book Description
Democracy in Crisis explores one of the world's greatest failures of democracy in Germany during the so-called Weimar Republic, 1919–33—a failure that led to the Third Reich. For more than a decade after World War I, liberalism, nationalism, conservatism, social democracy, Christian democracy, communism, fascism, and every variant of these movements struggled for power. Although Germany's constitutional framework boldly enshrined liberal democratic values, the political spectrum was so broad and fully represented that a stable parliamentary majority required constant negotiations. The compromises that were made subsequently alienated citizens, who were embittered by national humiliation in the war and the ensuing treaty and struggling to survive economic turmoil and rapidly changing cultural norms. As positions hardened, the door was opened to radical alternatives. In this game, students, as delegates of the Reichstag (parliament), must contend with intense parliamentary wrangling, uncontrollable world events, street fights, assassinations, and insurrections. The game begins in late 1929, just after the U.S. stock market crash, as the Reichstag deliberates the Young Plan (a revision to the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I). Students belonging to various political parties must debate these matters and more as the combination of economic stress, political gridlock, and foreign pressure turn Germany into a volcano on the verge of eruption.
