(Part 2) Reddit mentions: The best democracy books

Mytościana możliwa, zatem:

​

An Independence Day parade might sound uncontroversial, but in Poland it has proven anything but. The parade in question is a nationalist march in Warsaw organized by far-right groups that was scheduled to take place on Sunday to mark 100 years of Polish independence. That was before it became a political football surrounded by confusion and uncertainty—and a useful window deep into the Polish psyche.

On Wednesday, Warsaw Mayor Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz of the center-right Civic Platform party announced she would be canceling the march, citing as justification a history of previousIndependence Day marches marred by xenophobia and violence. “This is not how the celebrations should look on the 100th anniversary of regaining our independence,” she said. “Warsaw has suffered enough because of aggressive nationalism.”

Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, a member of the ruling Law and Justice party, quickly declared he would now be organizing a state-sanctioned march along the same route the far-right groups had planned to take. “Everyone is invited, come only with red-and-white flags,” he wrote on Twitter, an allusion to the Polish national flag, and an indirect reference to the white-supremacist banners and slogans from last year’s Independence Day march.

But that was before a court overturned Gronkiewicz-Waltz’s ban. Sunday’s centennial events, which should ordinarily herald a day of national celebration, are now being awaited with dread—not least because many Poles believe their country’s president and prime minister, have done little or nothing in the past to discourage marchers calling for a “white Europe” and spouting anti-Semitic chants. In his announcement this week, Duda did not mention the reasons that Poles might doubt his sincerity—above all, Law and Justice’s long-running flirtation with Polish far-right groups.

The question is why, in Europe’s most economically successful post-communist country, has a ruling party ended up struggling to separate itself from openly extremist nationalists? In answering that question, and deciding what to do about it, it’s not enough to examine Law and Justice’s rise to power—one must also understand the peculiar culture of Polish nationalism that the party appeals to. In Poland, perhaps more than anywhere else in Europe, there is no necessary contradiction between a commitment to democracy and to the most extreme forms of nationalism.

123 years of subjugation

After enjoying the status of major European power in the 16th and 17th centuries, poor leadership and internal strife led to Poland being partitioned by the Austrian, Prussian, and Russian empires in 1795. The country that had produced Europe’s first written constitution and at its height spanned a territory three times the size of today’s Germany disappeared from the map for 123 years.

During this period, the Polish nation, bereft a sovereign state, immersed itself in the arts. The cultural soon became political as poets and writers strove not just to preserve Polish culture, but also to propagate the dream of an independent Poland, ultimately inspiring several unsuccessful insurrections in the 19th century. The Catholic Church also played a key role in preserving Polish culture and the dream of an independent state during this period. This marriage between culture, politics, and religion eventually birthed a new interpretation of “Polishness,” one that constitutes the core of that propagated by Poland’s present-day nationalists.

This new identity was summed up by Adam Mickiewicz, Poland’s foremost poet, who described Poland as the “Christ of nations.” The parareligious Messianic assertion of Polish exceptionalism portrayed Poles as a morally superior collective suffering iniquity at the hands of immoral others yet destined to ultimately triumph and save Europe from its sinful self.

By the time Poland finally regained independence in 1918, this interpretation of Polishness had firmly entrenched itself in wider societal consciousness, symbolized by a slogan always present at the Independence Day marches organized by Poland’s far-right groups: “God, Honor, Fatherland.”

​

The much fought-for independence of 1918, however, was to prove cruelly brief, cut short by Adolf Hitler’s 1939 invasion of Poland. That was followed by Soviet occupation and the post-World War II transformation of the country into a Soviet satellite state. While Poles will officially mark their 100-year independence anniversary this Sunday, few consider Poland to have been genuinely independent during the communist era of 1945 to 1989. The communist era is important to understanding contemporary events in Poland, as that period familiarized Poles with the idea that a country could be formally independent without being truly autonomous.

But even totalitarian communism failed to reorient Poles toward an understanding of Polishness different from that popularized in the 19th and early 20th centuries. As Brian Porter-Szucs, a history professor at the University of Michigan, has observed, faced with the stubborn refusal of Poles to forgo the ideals of “God, Honor, Fatherland” in favor of an atheist internationalist communist identity, by 1956, Poland’s communist party had given up “any serious ambition to fundamentally transform Polish culture and society.”

Wladyslaw Gomulka, the communist party leader from 1956 to 1970, thus promised communism would be implemented the “Polish way.” In practice, this entailed blending nationalism with communism, the former aimed at reassuring Poles the national identity forged in the 19th century would be preserved in the new order. From the late 1950s, the red-and-white Polish flag thus “became much more prominent than the red communist flag,” while “state propaganda intensified the use of the adjective ‘Polish’ before standard communist slogans,” Porter-Szucs wrote.

The fact that Poland’s communists concluded that to sell communism to Poles, they needed to incorporate the vocabulary of Polish nationalism developed in the 19th and early 20th centuries shows how deeply it had permeated popular consciousness. It is also no coincidence that the Solidarity trade-union movement of the 1980s, which eventually triggered the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, was led by a figure like Lech Walesa. Walesa’s defiant victory salutes, ever-present Virgin Mary lapel pin, and repeated declarations of love for Poland captured the essence of Polish patriotism understood as loyalty to God, honor, and the Fatherland. When Solidarity eventually prevailed and communism collapsed in 1989, Poles roundly heralded their regaining of independence, just like in 1918.

PLEASE read this book

Its not that long and an easy read, but it is SUPER important.

After that I suggest you read this book

Welcome to the side of true liberty friend

First off, thank you! Please consider making a contribution so I can keep this campaign rolling. I spent some time out in Pierre a few months ago, watching the legislative sessions, that was really helpful. I recommended to another reader some books that I found useful: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns and It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism.

Start keeping an eye on the local news through radio, newspapers (online), and television. Dig into some past legislation. I'm just trying to keep my eyes open to as many sources of information that I can.

You're probably much more qualified than you think, first and foremost because you care enough to ask that question. Should you run, it's going to be a learning experience whether or not you're elected. Going out to Pierre as a legislator will take some time to get used to, but if your heart is in it, you can acquire the knowledge necessary to do a good job out there.

I've only been at this for a few months and it's been so incredibly rewarding, if I'm elected I know I'll carry the weight of my role as a badge of honor. Please consider getting involved where you can.

Welcome. Lots to read, yes. But well worth it.

If you're totally unfamiliar with NRx, the movement coalesced around the writings of Mencius Moldbug, a blogger who has written several excellent book-length series' of posts, the foremost of which are his Open Letter and Gentle Introduction. Someone has helpfully compiled them on Amazon for the Kindle e-book reader.

Speaking of Kindle, I'd recommend getting one. NRx is about reading old books that tell you the uncomfortable truth, in a world that has become weary of truth. Amazon has an incredible number of old books available for free on Kindle, and someone has made Moldbug's Open Letter and Gentle Introduction available for Kindle [here](
https://www.amazon.com/Open-Letter-Open-Minded-Progressives-ebook/dp/B011DPHUDU/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1474693484&sr=8-1&keywords=moldbug+open+letter) and here.

Enjoy.

---

P.S. Hestia if you're listening, we could use more core NRx works in Kindle format, e.g. the Land DE essay.

> Is maximizing democracy always a benefit? If it were, a democracy of one would be ideal. Yet generally people recognize that there are problems that can't be solved without covenants of responsibilities enforced by an organization with the ability to override an individual's preference when it serves to ameliorate those problems.

A complicated question. There are tons of problems associated with democracy. In a democracy, with the right to vote, we are all capable of making binding decisions. In other words, I can force you to follow a law if I got a majority supporting me.

That is a pretty big deal. At the very least, you and me should demand that every person with the right to vote must be a competent person that knows to a reasonable extent what they are voting on. But that is not the case.

Then there is deliberation. In a mega democracy, debates and media play a vital role. They give us the information of which we make our choices. But the media does not give every opinion a balanced chance.

You point out that progress is a result of humans solving problems in groups, that would be impossible to solve alone. Therefor, most have recognized that individual preferences must be overridden by a system of law. The common answer to democracy relies mostly of the assumption that humans have an intrensic value, and from there we can gather what rights and values protect the intrensic worth of a human, and then see that a system which protect all rights and values of a human is likely a democracy. At least that is roughly what we gather from Robert Dahl. (From here, here and here, if you have access to any of them I can help finding relevant chapters/pages)

---
I recognize that democracy is a functional system to drive human progress, we cannot all have our way and democracy given that the system strives to follow the 5 democratic criteria of Dahl seems to do a good job of sharing burdens and boons among its members. The problem comes when you mix dictatorship and democracy. Let us say for instance, that the position of minister of health was auctioned off every fourth year instead of voted on. Who would be in charge? I'd wager it would be tobacco interests every period. I claim that a system where you auction off positions of power in a democracy would taint it and make the democracy dysfunctional. That is a problem today, because some of the most powerful positions are not within the government, but rather in the private sector. And there are no democracy in the private sector. We are all blinded by the fact that the government can issue laws over the private sector. In practicality, it hardly can. This mix of two worlds, one where power is given by capital and another where power is given by convincing large masses of people to vote on you (which often costs capital) gives us the tainted modern mega democracies where the tobacco industry is one of the largest lobbyists in the EU and two persons from the upper class ran to be the representative of the people.

But there is a reason not to include democracy in the workplace, or at least a reason for the wealthiest to resist it. Democracy will over time eventually lead to socialism (worker ownership, the proper definition of socialism, not the 'the more a state does, the socialester it is definition) which is why our system must not be fully democratic.

these topics are interesting, and there are a lot of related subjects which would be beneficial to learn. I hope it's correct to assume you're in America.

i haven't actually read these linked books, just doing a little search for you because I miss my days studying politics

The American Political Party System: Continuity and Change Over Ten Presidential Elections

The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700-2000

Political Scandal: Power and Visability in the Media Age

Mass Media and American Politics

Demographic Gaps in American Political Behavior

Religion and Politics in the United States

Words Like Loaded Pistols: Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama

Soviet Society in the Era of Late Socialism, 1964-1985

How Russia Really Works: The Informal Practices That Shaped Post-Soviet Politics and Business (Culture and Society after Socialism)

The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers

I think using the political scandals books would be really important. Because let's face it, yes politicians do lie but they don't always get off the hook. I think the book on rhetoric would also be super interesting. Learning about soviet / chinese society is interesting because they have it worse than us in terms of lying politicians (I'm a good patriot)

You should try and use historical-overview type texts for the bulk of citation. If you are quoting opinionated pieces, you can't just present their opinion as fact. You should reference the topic using the neutral sources as well.

By the way, an incredibly useful tool for constructing this kind of reading list is looking at the bibliographies of other books.

u/PopularWarfare's list looks good for "politics and economics" version of political economy. I would only add that there is some truly terrific work on social choice theory (mainly by economists in the early days) that I would consider political economy as well and wouldn't want you to miss out on.

Arrow's work is about as important and foundational as it gets. It raises the issue of whether there even is such a thing as the "will of the people" in any voting system or democracy and continues to be relevant and insightful today. It may be tough sledding depending on your comfort with notation and proofs, but as an econ major you hopefully have that already.

This looks like a decent primer as well. Have fun!

I read The New Radicals in the Multiversity and other SDS Writings on Student Syndicalism this year in my Women Studies course. Their main goal was to rid the university of grades. They linked so many problems that plagued the university to grading students. I would encourage any student or former student to read this book. It was wrote in the 60's but so much of it still rings true. Especially now with things like UC Davis and Berkeley.

Also, don't let OP represent all students. I've spend a lot of time and effort to be in college and I'll be damned if I don't put every ounce of effort into my education. I take my education extremely serious. But, I'm sure you probably can spot the students who care and the students who don't care in the first week of class.

Right now I'm sitting back smoking a bowl because all my papers have been wrote for finals week, all my projects done, and I know the material inside and out for the exams. People who claim that grades don't matter are full of shit. I'm about to graduate college debt free because I came here on a full ride academic scholarship, and I've already been awarded a full ride fellowship for gradschool starting in August. I'm going to finish my Masters without ever paying a single cent to be in school. I'm just saying don't get too discouraged there is lots of students who take their education seriously, and have a true desire to learn.

Edit for clarity.

It has been in India's interest to promote a certain narrative about Kashmir. And our media has played along with it for decades.

I can understand the government's desire to have Kashmir completely within our national boundaries, as its mountains provide a fantastic natural boundary against Pakistan and China. There is nothing wrong with this desire.

However, the way we've tried to wrest control of it (while ignoring our own promise of offering a plebiscite to its people), is the reason why most Kashmiris do not trust the government. If you visit Kashmir, you will hear many locals say, "We are against India, not Indians". And I have seen this love and regard for Indians time and time again on my many visits to this gorgeous region.

Try and find Sumantara Bose's book, The Challenge in Kashmir. This is an extremely well researched analysis of why the Kashmir imbroglio has persisted for 70 years. It's not easily available in India... I think we both know why.

As for your question about the constitutionality of the BJP's decision, I would think it is still very much unconstitutional. Judging from the way they have rammed it through without offering the Opposition any opportunity to read through their proposal (apart from arresting Kashmiri leaders for no reason), it looks like they don't really care about following their own government's laws enshrined in the Constitution.

You will get a good number of right-libertarian reading materials; here is some stuff from the other standpoint of libertarians, left-libertarianism, which can be glanced over at times. Left-libertarians are opposed to all government regulations, which we see as empowering corporations over workers, opposed to the state-dominated socialism that many countries have tried and failed at, and in support of a market and mutual-aid(think of how you do favors for your friends) based approach.

Anarchist Collective

Elinor Olstrom lecture on polycentric governance

Governing Commons by Elinor Olstrom

Video series on the Cultural Commons, how government regulation can affect culture

Noam Chomsky's "On Anarchism" or any of his other books - he's somewhat of a socialist but ultimately wants an anarchistic society

Book: Manifesto for a New World Order(democratizing global systems)

Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution

Kevin Carson's blog. Carson is probably the top market anarchist/mutualist out there today.

C4SS and their Market Anarchism FAQ. The site seems to be down right now but it's a good resource with many articles, including some by Carson.

Books by Henry George. George isn't nesecarily a left-libertarian but has good ideas for sure.

Anarchy Works - FAQ by Peter Geldaroo

An Anarchist FAQ(This one is very in depth, highly recommend looking through it.)

Roderick T. Long article against a government-controlled military

Confiscation and the Homestead Principle

Gary Chartier - The Conscience of an Anarchist

Markets not capitalism

Clarence Lee Swartz - What is Mutualism?

>a political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.

The means of production in Cuba are either owned publicly or through cooperative enterprise, which fits your definition. That definition doesn't apply at all to Denmark, where the means of production are owned privately - which is antithetical to the core tenet of socialism.

>. You might as well call Castro a monarch. He is looking out for everybody's best interest, he is infallible. This is not allowing for the free expression of the community. Socialism is free expression, not "I won the revolution and now it is my way or the highway." That is authoritarianism.

This is a straw man argument. This is an ignorant interpretation not supported by any actual facts. Give me specific examples of his supposed authoritarianism, I've heard and refuted many before.

>An election every 6 years with one candidate is not community empowerment. It is more or less a coronation.

Again, this is not at all how Cuban elections work. This is the propaganda version popular in the United States. You can see this book for an analysis of how Cuban elections actually function. In short, national elections consist of election of municipal representatives (who have been elected at the community level) and appointments of community organizations, labor unions, workers associations, etc. The representatives elected to the national assembly of people's power then elect a Council of State which includes posts including President.

Regardless, if you favor a Social Democratic welfare state like Denmark then fine. But don't call it socialism because it has no features of socialism at all.

This. For everyone who reads /r/politics, pick a party, find the nearest club for your party, attend the meetings, meet and talk with either the people who make the decisions that affect the world you interact with, or the people challenging. The group of 15 people we have in my town is deigned important enough that every primary candidate from our party for every office in our part of the county, as well as county-wide, state-wide office, and our congressional level elections come to talk with us and answer our questions. This is because these people know each of us is worth 50 votes in the election, since our friends and family all ask who they should vote for.

 

Highly recommend this book from Robert Heinlein on the subject.

In one sense it's a check on the power of the judiciary over imprisonment, inasmuch as the President can curtail verdicts or sentences imposed by judges, but only in the direction of mercy. It's important also to recognize that in the early Republic, private prosecutions were pretty common and so the current executive power over the charging process wouldn't necessarily be there, and in the case of a private prosecution, the only intervention by the executive might be through the pardon power.

Separately, it reflects the history of the American Presidency as reflecting the contemporary powers of the British crown at the time and the power of the pardon was one of total royal prerogative at the time. Since the US constitution arose before the system of responsible government the royal prerogatives truly were vested in the Crown/President, and not exercised by them but on advice of the legislative leaders, as is the current scheme in the UK.

I’ve mainly just picked this all up here and there, but I am very much looking forward to reading NYT editorial board member Jesse Wegman’s book-length case against the EC, the aptly-titled Let the People Pick the President . Coming out next March.

Edit: I know of Wegman through his advocacy for the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which is a fascinating attempt to render the EC useless without an amendment (by using states’ rights, which conservatives should love, right?). Definitely a rabbit hole of reading around that.

hey, good luck.

The Public Schools

Jim Crow's Children

Ghetto Schooling

We Make the Road By Walking

Teacher in America

Women's Education in the United States, 1740-1840

Savage Inequalities

Shame of the Nation

also, i'll second Tyack's One Best System

a few authors to read/study: John Dewey, Horace Mann, W.E.B. Du Bois, Maria Montessori, Myles Horton, Dianne Ravitch, Jeannie Oakes, bell hooks, Howard Gardner, Betty Reardon, Howard Zinn, Cathy Davidson

topics: Native American boarding schools, ethnic/racial biases of original IQ test designs, desegregation, resegregation, Vygotsky's zone of proximal development, Bloom's taxonomy, multiple intelligences, tracking, career and technical education, the Common Core, school choice, special education, peace education, types of schools: traditional public, charter, contract, private, independent; the superintendency and school governance, elected/appointed boards, mayoral control, teacher cooperatives; resource inequalities, the incorporation of technology, teacher training, mind brain education, learning environments, standardized testing, accountability, teacher evaluation...

a list like you've requested could never be exhaustive, but that should be enough to keep you busy for awhile.

In the post-Soviet 'society of the spectacle', the people have the vote but are otherwise only spectators. Their ability to influence the action on the stage in front of them is minimal. The electorate is more radically disengaged from real politics than Burke can ever have imagined.

The practice of 'control' now extends right across the political spectrum. By 2003-04 in Russia it was clear that the Kremlin sought to control all significant political agents, both real and potential.

In this task it is not always successful, but its ambitions are clear. pg 221: https://www.amazon.com/Virtual-Politics-Faking-Democracy-Post-Soviet/dp/0300244193/ref=pd_ybh_a_23?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=TPZBC3V2R9NH3AY434WX

You're welcome, I'm recently learning about this myself. I highly recommend getting Models of Democracy by David Held, it's the best book I've read for my Political Science major.

How local? Should NYC have the population voting on its laws? Should each borough have a separate code?

There are also significant problems with local laws varying. People travel quite a bit these days, and they trade things, too. There is value in having a consistent set of laws across a reasonably-sized region.

Actually, I'm tired of rehashing the foundational arguments of democratic governance. There are a number of books that address these questions way better than I will, and they might lead to a more nuanced view than your naively libertarian one:

This book is excellent

This is one of the best basic textbooks. I think everyone should read it, especially for its coverage of the very debate inspired above: majoritarianism vs pluralism.

I want to remind readers that there is another great guide for political revolution by Robert Heinlein called Take Back Your Government and it begins with us in our communities. Everybody has a job that needs to get done.

>Pretty sure the slaves didn't get a vote in that democracy

Because democracy is tyranny of the majority, and any sufficiently small group that can never muster a majority is literally at the whim of the majority. It's the same way that the Nazis made it legal by German law to murder the Jews, as a way of trying to whitewash their crimes against humanity and force their law-abiding citizens to commit heinous genocide against the Jews and others.

r/EndDemocracy

What we need is a political system that does not have a tyranny of the minority nor the majority, one that respects individual choice.

I recommend Karsten's "Beyond Democracy"

https://smile.amazon.com/Beyond-Democracy-solidarity-prosperity-tyrannical/dp/1467987697/

This is a good book on the topic. Beyond Democracy.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Beyond-Democracy-solidarity-prosperity-tyrannical/dp/1467987697

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zt8qAwslozM

Also checkout /r/enddemocracy sub

Take Back Your Government!: A Practical Handbook for the Private Citizen Who Wants Democracy to Work was an early work by Robert A. Heinlein. It was published in 1992 after his death in 1988.

https://www.amazon.com/Take-Back-Government-Robert-Heinlein/dp/1612420613

Go.