Want a “managed democracy” where citizens don’t have power over the decisions that affect their lives, and corporations do instead? Boy, have we got news for you!
POLITICAL DECAY
Why can't Congress or the President get anything done? Is a collapse of the United States, or a second Civil War, really possible? Was there ever really a democracy here to preserve in the first place? Here, we look at the causes of our discontent, our possible paths out, and what's at stake.
BREAKING THE TWO-PARTY DOOM LOOP – Lee Drutman
Our system of cohesive, ideologically consistent, bitterly opposed parties is a recent development in history, this book argues. With ranked-choice voting, multi-winner districts and other reforms, Lee Drutman charts our way out.
AMERICA: THE FAREWELL TOUR – Chris Hedges
A way to visit America’s abandoned cities, addicts, sex workers, gamblers & more as we lurch toward collapse. Be sure to tip your corporate overlords on your way out.
BOWLING ALONE – Robert Putnam
An obsessively researched and shockingly readable study of how American community life fractured (and why we felt isolated even before social media).
LISTEN, LIBERAL – Thomas Frank
The Democratic Party abandoned working class voters in favor of professional elites and the myth of the “meritocracy”, Frank argues. In the process, they paved the way for Trump.
THE UNWINDING: An Inner History of the New America – George Packer
George Packer, an award-winning journalist of the Iraq War, turns his gaze homeward. From the Carolinas to Silicon Valley, from factories to Occupy Wall Street, he sees our national decline unfold.
THE GREAT DERANGEMENT – Matt Taibbi
Matt Taibbi’s embedded reporting guides us through the George W. Bush years, filled as they were with paranoia, war, dysfunction, and a sense of the Apocalypse rising. Who can imagine what THAT was like anymore?
ON TYRANNY – Timothy Snyder
Looking backward as a way of scouting ahead, historian Timothy Snyder warned us early in Trump’s first year that the lessons of fascism’s past bear repeating.
THE DIVIDED STATES OF AMERICA – Donald Kettl
Federalism may not be a genius invention – more of a compromise necessary in the 1780s that’s now far more trouble than it’s worth. Professor Donald Kettl explains his view in a book that is both underrated and a little unsatisfying.
HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE – Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
Dictators take hold, Ziblatt and Lewitsky claim, in democracies where leaders no longer feel a need to exercise restraint or treat their enemies as fellow citizens.
