Publication date:
16 January 2009Length of book:
164 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksDimensions:
240x161mm6x9"
ISBN-13: 9780739128305
The Trouble with America critiques the theory and practice of American government, focusing on the fatal flaws of America's core political arrangements. Institutionalized pluralism, the structural dispersal of power, generates government too weak to solve our public problems. American constitutionalism, the limitation of government power and authority, protects property rights far better than it defends our civil liberties, and it offers little or no protection for non-citizens. Capitalism is a hyper-competitive and grossly unfair economic system, which rewards pre-existing wealth far better than hard work or talent, and encourages petty materialist consumption of mostly low-quality goods, undermining taste as well as fairness.
Taken together, pluralism, constitutionalism, and capitalism in America harm our society in a myriad of ways, leaving us with inadequate representation, poor leadership, social and political paralysis and irresponsibility, unrealistic self-images, and scandalously poor domestic and foreign policies. This book will prove a valuable supplement in American government courses, an alternative to the centrist material currently dominating textbooks on this subject.
Taken together, pluralism, constitutionalism, and capitalism in America harm our society in a myriad of ways, leaving us with inadequate representation, poor leadership, social and political paralysis and irresponsibility, unrealistic self-images, and scandalously poor domestic and foreign policies. This book will prove a valuable supplement in American government courses, an alternative to the centrist material currently dominating textbooks on this subject.
Professor Long is far too modest in presenting this work as an 'ancillary text.' It indeed fulfills that purpose by presenting students with a carefully articulated critical evaluation of American politics and government, but it also offers students, scholars, and laypersons a tightly argued and empirically supported analysis of the nature of our political system. Long forcefully demonstrates how the very values and institutions (pluralism, constitutionalism, and capitalism) which we associate with the success of American democracy contain indigenous pathologies that often subvert our best intentions and hopes. This work, however, is far from a Jeremiad. It is premised on the assumption that the path forward can be discerned by illuminating the political ecology through which it must pass.