The Myth Of American Democracy

In his current work, Trenton Fervor author of The Last Individual: The Ascendancy of the Sociomaniacal Mindset delivers a critical exposition of democracy and its defects. The Myth of American Democracy is an unapologetic critique of the American political system and an attempt to dismantle the mystique perpetuated to sanctify and sanction it. Fervor entreats the reader to reexamine the notion of democracy and its attendant processes absent the sophistic demagoguery and to more closely consider the actual nature of the institution, and the establishment behemoth which inhabits and advances it. The reader is encouraged to confront the myth and deception which pervade the contemporary conception of democracy, and to accept the reality that the democratic emperor is naked. Democracy today is in truth fundamentally absurd: its premise is that an ideologically coherent, consistent, and efficient social policy program can be constructed by formulating each aspect of the overall program through a process of majoritarian amalgamation of contradictory, incongruent, and confrontational views. The Myth of American Democracy is an important rebuke of conventional democratic orthodoxy which will challenge readers to reevaluate their sympathies for the system. This book is recommended reading for everyone who has wrestled with the troubling suspicion that there is something inherently dubious and defective about the democratic system.

Exposes the conflict between the forces suporting growing corporate power in America and the needs of a democratic society to achieve a just and sustainable future; shows how the priorities of the media and schools in furthering the corporate agenda are undermining rather than helping to achieve ecological sustainability and social justice. [back cover].

The activist state of the New Deal started forming decades before the FDR administration, demonstrating the deep roots of energetic government in America. In the period between the Civil War and the New Deal, American governance was transformed, with momentous implications for social and economic life. A series of legal reforms gradually brought an end to nineteenth-century traditions of local self-government and associative citizenship, replacing them with positive statecraft: governmental activism intended to change how Americans lived and worked through legislation, regulation, and public administration. The last time American public life had been so thoroughly altered was in the late eighteenth century, at the founding and in the years immediately following. William J. Novak shows how Americans translated new conceptions of citizenship, social welfare, and economic democracy into demands for law and policy that delivered public services and vindicated peopleÕs rights. Over the course of decades, Americans progressively discarded earlier understandings of the reach and responsibilities of government and embraced the idea that legislators and administrators in Washington could tackle economic regulation and social-welfare problems. As citizens witnessed the successes of an energetic, interventionist state, they demanded more of the same, calling on politicians and civil servants to address unfair competition and labor exploitation, form public utilities, and reform police power. Arguing against the myth that America was a weak state until the New Deal, New Democracy traces a steadily aggrandizing authority well before the Roosevelt years. The United States was flexing power domestically and intervening on behalf of redistributive goals for far longer than is commonly recognized, putting the lie to libertarian claims that the New Deal was an aberration in American history.

Matthew Hindman reveals here that, contrary to popular belief, the Internet has done little to broaden political discourse in the United States, but rather that it empowers a small set of elites - some new, but most familiar.

"Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide." John Adams These words of one of the most influential men involved in the founding of the United States seem increasingly prescient and relevant today as issue after issue gathers on the horizon to cloud our nation's future. The problems are evident. But as common American's struggle to place the nation on a path to a viable future, their efforts have consistently been met with failure. We find every effort to change the errant direction of our nation frustrated. Are we truly free to chart our own future? Or has the great American experiment failed? The consistency with which government grows and liberty recedes seems the product almost of plan. Yet it is not the result of an unseen hand manipulating events. The study which you are about to embark on is an examination of the legacy of freedom left by the Founding Fathers and the inherent nature of the government they gave us. From the "consent of the governed" to the "division of power," from the "rule of law" to "freedom of religion," these are the pillars of American liberty. But closer inspection finds many of these foundational principles more myth than reality. Democracy itself has come to be the opponent we battle to restore what has become The Myth of American Freedom.

In The Myth of Democratic Failure, Donald A. Wittman refutes one of the cornerstone beliefs of economics and political science: that economic markets are more efficient than the processes and institutions of democratic government.