Social Democracy

Tocqueville n'est pas seulement un analyste politique exceptionnel, c'est aussi un philosophe politique qui aide à comprendre les problèmes se posant dans les démocraties modernes. L'égalité des conditions, l'individualisme, le despotisme démocratique, les relations entre maîtres et serviteurs, l'esprit de liberté et l'esprit de religion, autant de notions qui dessinent aujourd'hui encore les contours d'une philosophie de la démocratie.

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) was a Scottish philosopher, social commentator, satirical writer, essayist, mathematician, and historian. Latter-Day Pamphlets is a series of essays published in 1850, in which he harshly denounces the political, social, and religious injustices and stupidities of the period. The target of many of the essays is the effect of greed on the culture. Carlyle also attacked the British parliament, democracy and the prison system.

Christopher Hitchens was for many years considered one of the fiercest and most eloquent left-wing polemicists in the world. But on much of today's left, he's remembered as a defector, a warmonger, and a sellout—a supporter of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq who traded his left-wing principles for neoconservatism after the September 11 attacks. In How Hitchens Can Save the Left, Matt Johnson argues that this easy narrative gets Hitchens exactly wrong. Hitchens was a lifelong champion of free inquiry, humanism, and universal liberal values.

During his years as a public official, Mitchell Weiss was told that government can't do new things or solve tough challenges - it's too big and slow and bureaucratic. Sadly, this is what so many of us have come to believe. But in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings, he and his city hall colleagues raced to support survivors in new, innovative ways. This kind of entrepreneurial spirit and savvy in government is growing, transforming the public sector's response to big problems at all levels.

In What It Took to Win, the eminent historian Michael Kazin identifies and assesses the Democratic Party's long-running commitment to creating "moral capitalism" - a system that mixed entrepreneurial freedom with the welfare of workers and consumers. And yet the same party that championed the rights of the white working man also vigorously protected or advanced the causes of slavery, segregation, and Indian removal.

In The Republican Noise Machine, David Brock skillfully documents perhaps the most important but least understood political development of the last 30 years: how the Republican Right has won political power and hijacked public discourse in the United States. Brock, a former right-wing insider and the author of the New York Times best seller Blinded by the Right, uses his keen understanding of the strategies, tactics, financing, and personalities of the American right wing to demonstrate how right-wing media has all but subsumed the regular media conversation.

Many Americans believe that their own government is guilty of shocking crimes. Although paranoia has been a feature of the American scene since the birth of the Republic, in Real Enemies, Kathryn Olmsted tells us that it was only in the 20th century that strange and unlikely conspiracy theories became central to American politics, In particular, she posits World War I as a critical turning point and shows that as the federal bureaucracy expanded, Americans grew more fearful of the government itself.

In We’ve Got To Try, O’Rourke shines a spotlight on the heroic life and work of Dr. Lawrence Aaron Nixon and the west Texas town where he made his stand. The son of an enslaved man, Nixon grew up in the Confederate stronghold of Marshall, Texas before moving to El Paso, becoming a civil rights leader, and helping to win one of the most significant civil and voting rights victories in American history: the defeat of the all-white primary. His fight for the ballot spanned 20 years and twice took him to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In democracies, citizens must accept loss; we can’t always be on the winning side. But in the United States, the fundamental civic capacity of being able to lose is not distributed equally. Propped up by white supremacy, whites (as a group) are accustomed to winning. Black citizens, on the other hand, are expected to be political heroes whose civic suffering enables progress toward racial justice. In this book, Juliet Hooker, a leading thinker on democracy and race, argues that the two most important forces driving racial politics in the United States today are Black grief and white grievance.

The demon is a mob, and the mob is demonic. The Democratic Party activates mobs, depends on mobs, coddles mobs, publicizes and celebrate mobs - it is the mob. Sweeping in its scope and relentless in its argument, Demonic explains the peculiarities of liberals as standard groupthink behavior. To understand mobs is to understand liberals.

In the shadows of global politics, a hidden war is being waged. From disinformation campaigns to economic coercion, subversive tactics are reshaping our world. 'Subversion: The Hidden War - Defending Democracy in the Age of Information Warfare' reveals global powers' covert strategies to destabilize nations and influence public opinion. With insightful analysis and real-world case studies, this book not only exposes the threats but also offers a roadmap for building resilience and protecting the future of democracy—a must-listen for anyone concerned about the integrity of our world order.

A provocative manifesto for an interpretation of Islam that synthesizes liberal ideas and respect for the Islamic tradition. Persuasive and inspiring, Islam Without Extremes offers a desperately needed intellectual basis for the reconcilability of Islam and religious, political, economic, and social freedoms.

The chaotic events leading up to Mitt Romney's defeat in the 2012 election indicated how far the Republican Party had rocketed rightward away from the center of public opinion. Republicans in Congress threatened to shut down the government and force a U.S. debt default. Tea Party activists mounted primary challenges against Republican officeholders who appeared to exhibit too much pragmatism or independence. Moderation and compromise were dirty words in the Republican presidential debates. The GOP, it seemed, had suddenly become a party of ideological purity. Except this development is not new at all.

Maria Ressa has spent decades speaking truth to power. But her work tracking disinformation networks seeded by her own government, spreading lies to its own citizens laced with anger and hate, has landed her in trouble with the most powerful man in the country: President Duterte. Now, hounded by the state, she has 10 arrest warrants against her name, and a potential 100+ years behind bars to prepare for - while she stands trial for speaking the truth.

The decline and fall of America's global empire is the central feature of today's geopolitical landscape, and the nature of our response to it will determine much of our future trajectory, with implications that reach far beyond the limits of one nation's borders. Decline and Fall: The End of Empire and the Future of Democracy in 21st Century America challenges the conventional wisdom of empire, using a wealth of historical examples combined with groundbreaking original analysis.

The past is another country, the old saying goes. The same might be said of the future. But which country? For Europeans and Americans today, the answer is Russia.Today's Russia is an oligarchy propped up by illusions and repression. But it also represents the fulfilment of tendencies already present in the West. And if Moscow's drive to dissolve Western states and values succeeds, this could become our reality, too. In this visionary work of contemporary history, Timothy Snyder shows how Russia works within the West to destroy the West.

A conventional wisdom has emerged since the election of Donald Trump in 2016 that new technologies and their manipulation by foreign actors played a decisive role in his victory and are responsible for the sense of a "post-truth" moment in which disinformation and propaganda thrives. Network Propaganda challenges that received wisdom through the most comprehensive study yet published on media coverage of American presidential politics from the start of the election cycle in April 2015 to the one-year anniversary of the Trump presidency.

Major Garrett and David Becker completely upend The Big Lie that has infected the Far Right with firsthand stories of election officials like Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Bucks County, Pennsylvania, election director Thomas Freitag. And they reveal the concrete evidence proving that 2020 may have been the most secure US election ever. Garrett and Becker lay bare the methods being undertaken right now to undercut faith, belief, and effectiveness of elections, identifying the places where the most dire actions have been taken since 2020.

The United States is being bombarded with cyber-attacks. From the surge in ransomware groups targeting critical infrastructure to nation states compromising the software supply chain and corporate email servers, malicious cyber activities have reached an all-time high. Russia attracts the most attention, but China is vastly more sophisticated. They have a common interest in exploiting the openness of the Internet and social media—and our democracy—to erode confidence in our institutions and to exacerbate our societal rifts to prevent us from mounting an effective response.

Donald Trump's false claims of election fraud and the violence of the Capitol riot have made it unavoidably clear that the future of American democracy is in peril. Unseen political actors and untraceable dark money influence our elections, while anti-democratic rhetoric threatens a tilt towards authoritarianism. In Corporatocracy, Ciara Torres-Spelliscy reveals the role corporations play in this dire state of political affairs, and explains why and how they should be held accountable by the courts, their shareholders, and citizens themselves.