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Democracy May Not Exist, but We'll Miss It When It's Gone
- Narrated by: Kirsten Potter
- Length: 12 hrs and 6 mins
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Publisher's summary
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.
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A major American intellectual makes the historical case that the reforms of the 1960s, reforms intended to make the nation more just and humane, instead left many Americans feeling alienated, despised, misled - and ready to put an adventurer in the White House. Christopher Caldwell has spent years studying the liberal uprising of the 1960s and its unforeseen consequences. Even the reforms that Americans love best have come with costs that are staggeringly high - in wealth, freedom, and social stability - and that have been spread unevenly among classes and generations.
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Do laudable ends justify unconstitutional means?
- By LBJ on 02-08-20
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Democracy Incorporated
- Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism
- By: Sheldon S. Wolin
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 12 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Sheldon Wolin considers the unthinkable: has America unwittingly morphed into a new and strange kind of political hybrid, one where economic and state powers are conjoined and virtually unbridled? Can the nation check its descent into what the author terms "inverted totalitarianism"? Wolin portrays a country where citizens are politically uninterested and submissive - and where elites are eager to keep them that way.
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Essential listening....
- By M. Levine on 02-25-11
By: Sheldon S. Wolin
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Suicide of the West
- How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy
- By: Jonah Goldberg
- Narrated by: Jonah Goldberg
- Length: 16 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Only once in the last 250,000 years have humans stumbled upon a way to lift ourselves out of the endless cycle of poverty, hunger, and war that defines most of history. If democracy, individualism, and the free market were humankind’s destiny, they should have appeared and taken hold a bit earlier in the evolutionary record. The emergence of freedom and prosperity was nothing short of a miracle.
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Put some gratitude in your attitude
- By Amazon Customer on 04-25-18
By: Jonah Goldberg
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The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution
- By: Francis Fukuyama
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 22 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Virtually all human societies were once organized tribally, yet over time most developed new political institutions which included a central state that could keep the peace and uniform laws that applied to all citizens. Some went on to create governments that were accountable to their constituents. We take these institutions for granted, but they are absent or are unable to perform in many of today’s developing countries—with often disastrous consequences for the rest of the world.
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Few forests, but lots of trees
- By Steve Pagano on 10-05-15
By: Francis Fukuyama
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American Secession
- The Looming Threat of a National Breakup
- By: F. H. Buckley
- Narrated by: John Pruden
- Length: 4 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Americans have never been more divided, and we're ripe for a breakup. The bitter partisan animosities, the legislative gridlock, the growing acceptance of violence in the name of political virtue - it all invites us to think that we'd be happier were we two different countries. There's another reason why secession beckons, says F. H. Buckley: we're too big. In population and area, the United States is one of the biggest countries in the world, and American Secession provides data showing that smaller countries are happier and less corrupt.
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GREAT TO MAKE YOU THINK
- By Brian on 03-01-23
By: F. H. Buckley
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The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order
- America and the World in the Free Market Era
- By: Gary Gerstle
- Narrated by: Keith Sellon-Wright
- Length: 13 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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To be sure, neoliberalism has contributed to a number of alarming trends, not least of which has been a massive growth in income inequality. Yet as the eminent historian Gary Gerstle argues in The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, these indictments fail to reckon with the full contours of what neoliberalism was and why its worldview had such persuasive hold on both the right and the left for three decades.
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Cursory, unoriginal, class-blind
- By A Reviewer on 10-24-22
By: Gary Gerstle
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American Character
- A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good
- By: Colin Woodard
- Narrated by: Jonathan Yen
- Length: 9 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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The struggle between individualism and the good of the community as a whole has been the basis of every major disagreement in our history, from the debates at the Constitutional Convention and in the run-up to the Civil War to the fights surrounding the agenda of the Progressives, the New Deal, the civil rights movement, and the Tea Party.
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Biased Misrepresentation
- By Jay Ehret on 06-24-16
By: Colin Woodard
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American Exceptionalism and American Innocence
- A People's History of Fake News - From The Revolutionary War to The War on Terror
- By: Roberto Sirvent, Danny Haiphong, Ajamu Baraka - foreword, and others
- Narrated by: Timothy Andrés Pabon
- Length: 12 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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American Exceptionalism and American Innocence examines the stories we’re told that lead us to think that the U.S. is a force for good in the world, regardless of slavery, the genocide of indigenous people, and the more than a century’s worth of imperialist war that the U.S. has wrought on the planet. Roberto Sirvent and Danny Haiphong detail just what Captain America’s shield tells us about the pretensions of U.S. foreign policy, how Angelina Jolie and Bill Gates engage in humanitarian imperialism, and more.
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Still processing
- By D'Juan Eastman on 07-03-19
By: Roberto Sirvent, and others
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America
- Imagine a World Without Her
- By: Dinesh D'Souza
- Narrated by: Walter Dixon
- Length: 7 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Is America a source of pride, as Americans have long held, or shame, as Progressives allege? Beneath an innocent exterior, are our lives complicit in a national project of theft, expropriation, oppression, and murder? Or is America still the hope of the world? New York Times best-selling author Dinesh D'Souza says these questions are no mere academic exercise.
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We can think for ourselves
- By score bags on 06-21-14
By: Dinesh D'Souza
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Eurotrash
- Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent
- By: David Harsanyi
- Narrated by: Charles Constant
- Length: 7 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Europe has been declining under the weight of its antiquated institutions, economic fatigue, moral anemia, and cultural surrender. Yet American politicians, technocrats, academics, and pundits argue, with increasing popularity, that Americans should look across the Atlantic for solutions to the nation’s problems, including on issues like health care, the welfare state, immigration, and a bloated bureaucracy.
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Details on many ways Europe is lacking
- By Alicia B. on 11-15-21
By: David Harsanyi
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Great book, but why is the narrator so bad?
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Can beliefs make you sick? Consider "The June Bug" incident from a US textile factory in the early 1960s. Many employees began to feel dizzy, had an upset stomach, and vomited. Some were even hospitalized. The illness was attributed to a mysterious bug biting workers. However, when the CDC investigated this outbreak, no bugs or any other cause of the illnesses could be identified. Instead, it appears to be an illness caused by the mind -- that is, sickness due to expectation.
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What listeners say about Democracy May Not Exist, but We'll Miss It When It's Gone
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Chris Brooks
- 04-24-21
Excellent synthesis of politics, philosophy, history, and economics
Astra Taylor has written an accessible and engrossing look at democracy as a historical concept, as a contentious political demand, as a failed aspiration and possible horizon. The book takes us from the slave revolt in Haiti to Occupy Wall Street to the climate crisis that will be inherited by future generations. It is sweeping, yet grounded. A very enjoyable and thought provoking listen.
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