Lights Camera Democracy

For fifteen years, Lewis Lapham has written a monthly column in Harper's Magazine, for which he won a 1995 National Magazine Award for his "exhilarating point of view in an age of conformity." This major collection of Lapham's essays defines his distinct view of the way the world really works, through vivid analysis of media, language, culture, and education. Lapham brings an acute eye to the ways of Washington, the manners of the money class, and the stirrings of the global economy. With originality and breadth, he illuminates the quirks and essential truths of the American character.

Political scientists investigate the impact that political advertisements have on political campaigns and elections. They use case studies, interviews, and analysis of specific campaigns and ads--mostly in the US but also in Canada--to explain how ads are constructed, why some work and some fail, and the factors about political ads that allow them

Celebrities in the United States have drawn significant attention and resources to the complex issue of human trafficking--a subject of feminist concern--and they are often criticized for promoting sensationalized and simplistic understandings of the issue. In this comprehensive analysis of celebrities' anti-trafficking activism, however, Samantha Majic finds that this phenomenon is more nuanced: even as some celebrities promote regressive issue narratives and carceral solutions, others use their platforms to elevate more diverse representations of human trafficking and feminist analyses of gender inequality. Lights, Camera, Feminism? thus argues that we should understand celebrities as multilevel political actors whose activism is shaped and mediated by a range of personal and contextual factors, with implications for feminist and democratic politics more broadly.

Assesses the influence of worldwide media coverage on political decisions, and discusses how the political process adapts to new technologies

This collection of essays assesses the record of American foreign policy over the course of the twentieth century. The essays comprise the work of political scientists as well as historians, conservatives as well as liberals, foreign scholars as well as Americans. Taking off from Henry Luce's vision of an 'American century', the authors discuss such important topics as the American conception of the national interest, the tension between democracy and capitalism, the US role in both the developed and underdeveloped worlds, party politics and foreign policy, the significance of race in American foreign relations, and the cultural impact of American diplomacy on the world at large. The result is a lively collection of essays by authors who often disagree but who nonetheless provide the reader with keen insights about the past and provocative views of the future.

America’s leading essayist on the frantic retreat of democracy, in the fire and smoke of the war on terror In office as President of the United States, Donald J. Trump is undoubtedly a menace, but he isn’t a surprise. He embodies the spirit of an age of folly abandoned to conspicuous consumption of vanity and greed. A self-glorifying photo-op, Trump is made to the measure of an infotainment media in which presidential candidates are game show contestants brought to judgment on election day before the throne of cameras by whom and for whom they are produced. To regard Trump as an amazement beyond belief is to give him credit where none is due, to mistake a symptom for the cause. Trump’s presence in the White House follows from an American regime change over the last twenty-five years during which a weakened but still operational democracy gave way to a stupefied and dysfunctional plutocracy. The history of that change is a hedge against the despair of the present, making possible the revolt against what G. K. Chesterton called “the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.”

This title explores the remarkable religious renaissance that has reformed, revitalized and renewed the practices of Buddhism and Daoism in Taiwan. Madsen connects these developments to Taiwan's transition to democracy and the burgeoning needs of its new middle classes.

With invective all the more deadly for its grace and wit, Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper's magazine, presents a portrait of a feckless American establishment gone large in the stomach and soft in the head. This acerbic commentary on the insouciance of the monied ruling class concludes with a forewarning piece where Lapham looks at the fate of indolent ruling classes throughout history.