Democracy May Not Exist, but We'll Miss It When It's Gone

Democracy May Not Exist, but We'll Miss It When It's Gone

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  • Author: Astra Taylor
  • Publisher: Metropolitan Books
  • ISBN: 1250179858
  • Category : Political Science
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 192

What is democracy really? What do we mean when we use the term? And can it ever truly exist? Astra Taylor, hailed as a “New Civil Rights Leader” by the Los Angeles Times, provides surprising answers. 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 compaign 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.


Democracy

Democracy

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  • Author: Henry Adams
  • Publisher:
  • ISBN:
  • Category : Legislators
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 316


Democracy and Education

Democracy and Education

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  • Author: John Dewey
  • Publisher:
  • ISBN:
  • Category : Education
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 456

In this book, Dewey tries to criticize and expand on the educational philosophies of Rousseau and Plato. Dewey's ideas were seldom adopted in America's public schools, although a number of his prescriptions have been continually advocated by those who have had to teach in them.


Democracy Rules

Democracy Rules

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  • Author: Jan-Werner Müller
  • Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
  • ISBN: 0374720711
  • Category : Political Science
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 129

A much-anticipated guide to saving democracy, from one of our most essential political thinkers. Everyone knows that democracy is in trouble, but do we know what democracy actually is? Jan-Werner Müller, author of the widely translated and acclaimed What Is Populism?, takes us back to basics in Democracy Rules. In this short, elegant volume, he explains how democracy is founded not just on liberty and equality, but also on uncertainty. The latter will sound unattractive at a time when the pandemic has created unbearable uncertainty for so many. But it is crucial for ensuring democracy’s dynamic and creative character, which remains one of its signal advantages over authoritarian alternatives that seek to render politics (and individual citizens) completely predictable. Müller shows that we need to re-invigorate the intermediary institutions that have been deemed essential for democracy’s success ever since the nineteenth century: political parties and free media. Contrary to conventional wisdom, these are not spent forces in a supposed age of post-party populist leadership and post-truth. Müller suggests concretely how democracy’s critical infrastructure of intermediary institutions could be renovated, re-empowering citizens while also preserving a place for professionals such as journalists and judges. These institutions are also indispensable for negotiating a democratic social contract that reverses the secession of plutocrats and the poorest from a common political world.


A World of Women

A World of Women

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  • Author: J. D. Beresford
  • Publisher: MIT Press
  • ISBN: 0262543354
  • Category : Fiction
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 340

When a plague wipes out most of the world’s male population and civilization crumbles, women struggle to build an agrarian community in the English countryside. Imagine a plague that brings society to a standstill by killing off most of the men on Earth. The few men who survive descend into lechery and atavism. Meanwhile, a group of women (accompanied by one virtuous male survivor) leave the wreckage of London to start fresh, establishing a communally run agrarian outpost. But their sexist society hasn’t permitted most of them to learn any useful skills—will the commune survive their first winter? This is the bleak world imagined in 1913 by English writer J. D. Beresford—one that has particular resonance for the planet’s residents in the 2020s. This edition of A World of Women offers twenty-first century readers a new look at a neglected classic. Beresford introduces us to the solidly bourgeois, prim and proper Gosling family. As once-bustling London shuts down—Parliament closes, factories grind to a halt, nature reclaims stone and steel—the paterfamilias Mr. Gosling adopts a life of libertinism while his daughters in the countryside struggle to achieve a radically transformed and improved egalitarian and feminist future.


Internet for the People

Internet for the People

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  • Author: Ben Tarnoff
  • Publisher: Verso Books
  • ISBN: 1839762039
  • Category : Political Science
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 245

In Internet for the People, leading tech writer Ben Tarnoff offers an answer. The internet is broken, he argues, because it is owned by private firms and run for profit. Google annihilates your privacy and Facebook amplifies right-wing propaganda because it is profitable to do so. But the internet wasn't always like this-it had to be remade for the purposes of profit maximization, through a years-long process of privatization that turned a small research network into a powerhouse of global capitalism. Tarnoff tells the story of the privatization that made the modern internet, and which set in motion the crises that consume it today. The solution to those crises is straightforward: deprivatize the internet. Deprivatization aims at creating an internet where people, and not profit, rule. It calls for shrinking the space of the market and diminishing the power of the profit motive. It calls for abolishing the walled gardens of Google, Facebook, and the other giants that dominate our digital lives and developing publicly and cooperatively owned alternatives that encode real democratic control. To build a better internet, we need to change how it is owned and organized. Not with an eye towards making markets work better, but towards making them less dominant. Not in order to create a more competitive or more rule-bound version of privatization, but to overturn it. Otherwise, a small number of executives and investors will continue to make choices on everyone's behalf, and these choices will remain tightly bound by the demands of the market. It's time to demand an internet by, and for, the people now.


Can't Pay, Won't Pay

Can't Pay, Won't Pay

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  • Author: Collective Debt
  • Publisher: Haymarket Books
  • ISBN: 1642593826
  • Category : Social Science
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 98

Debtors have been mocked, scolded and lied to for decades. We have been told that it is perfectly normal to go into debt to get medical care, to go to school, or even to pay for our own incarceration. We’ve been told there is no way to change an economy that pushes the majority of people into debt while a small minority hoard wealth and power. The coronavirus pandemic has revealed that mass indebtedness and extreme inequality are a political choice. In the early days of the crisis, elected officials drew up plans to spend trillions of dollars. The only question was: where would the money go and who would benefit from the bailout? The truth is that there has never been a lack of money for things like housing, education and health care. Millions of people never needed to be forced into debt for those things in the first place. Armed with this knowledge, a militant debtors movement has the potential to rewrite the contract and assure that no one has to mortgage their future to survive. Debtors of the World Must Unite. As isolated individuals, debtors have little influence. But as a bloc, we can leverage our debts and devise new tactics to challenge the corporate creditor class and help win reparative, universal public goods. Individually, our debts overwhelm us. But together, our debts can make us powerful.


The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age

The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age

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  • Author: Astra Taylor
  • Publisher: HarperCollins UK
  • ISBN: 0007525605
  • Category : Computers
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 288

From a cutting-edge cultural commentator, a bold and brilliant challenge to cherished notions of the internet as the great leveler of our age.


Remake the World

Remake the World

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  • Author: Astra Taylor
  • Publisher: Haymarket Books
  • ISBN: 164259475X
  • Category : Political Science
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 183

Over the last decade, author and activist Astra Taylor has helped shift the national conversation on topics including technology, inequality, indebtedness, and democracy. The essays collected here reveal the range and depth of her thinking, with Taylor tackling the rising popularity of socialism, the problem of automation, the politics of listening, the possibility of rights for the natural and non-human world, the future of the university, the temporal challenge of climate catastrophe, and more. Addressing some of the most pressing social problems of our day, Taylor invites us to imagine how things could be different while never losing sight of the strategic question of how change actually happens. Curious and searching, these historically informed and hopeful essays are as engaging as they are challenging and as urgent as they are timeless. Taylor 's unique philosophical style has a political edge that speaks directly to the growing conviction that a radical transformation of our economy and society is required.


The Emerging Democratic Majority

The Emerging Democratic Majority

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  • Author: John B. Judis
  • Publisher: Simon and Schuster
  • ISBN: 0743254783
  • Category : Political Science
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 244

ONE OF THE ECONOMIST'S BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR AND A WINNER OF THE WASHINGTON MONTHLY'S ANNUAL POLITICAL BOOK AWARD Political experts John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira convincingly use hard data -- demographic, geographic, economic, and political -- to forecast the dawn of a new progressive era. In the 1960s, Kevin Phillips, battling conventional wisdom, correctly foretold the dawn of a new conservative era. His book, The Emerging Republican Majority, became an indispensable guide for all those attempting to understand political change through the 1970s and 1980s. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, with the country in Republican hands, The Emerging Democratic Majority is the indispensable guide to this era. In five well-researched chapters and a new afterword covering the 2002 elections, Judis and Teixeira show how the most dynamic and fastest-growing areas of the country are cultivating a new wave of Democratic voters who embrace what the authors call "progressive centrism" and take umbrage at Republican demands to privatize social security, ban abortion, and cut back environmental regulations. As the GOP continues to be dominated by neoconservatives, the religious right, and corporate influence, this is an essential volume for all those discontented with their narrow agenda -- and a clarion call for a new political order.