Before the lights go out

Sample

Carl Minzner

"China's reform era is ending. Core factors that characterized it-political stability, ideological openness, and rapid economic growth-are unraveling. Since the 1990s, Beijing's leaders have firmly rejected any fundamental reform of their authoritarian one-party political system, even as a decades-long boom has reshaped China's economy and society. On the surface, their efforts have been a success. Political turmoil has toppled former Communist East bloc regimes, internal unrest overtaken Middle East nations, and populist movements risen to challenge established Western democracies. China, in contrast, has appeared a relative haven of stability and growth. But as [the author] shows, a closer look at China's reform era reveals a different truth. Over the past three decades, a frozen political system has fueled both the rise of entrenched interests within the Communist Party itself, and the systematic underdevelopment of institutions of governance among state and society at large. Economic cleavages have widened. Social unrest has worsened. Ideological polarization has deepened. Now, to address these looming problems, China's leaders are progressively cannibalizing institutional norms and practices that have formed the bedrock of the regime's stability in the reform era. Technocratic rule is giving way to black-box purges; collective governance sliding back towards single-man rule. The post-1978 era of 'reform and opening up' is ending. China is closing down. Uncertainty hangs in the air as a new future slouches towards Beijing to be born. End of an Era explains how China arrived at this dangerous turning point, and outlines the potential outcomes that could result."--

Sample

Michael Kazin

Our Constitution promises a government of the people, by the people, and for the people - but who are "the people"? And who can honestly claim to speak for "the people"? Here, in the first comprehensive history of populism in our nation, Michael Kazin examines the strange career of populist politics from the era of Thomas Jefferson to the era of William Jefferson Clinton. Once identified with the dispossessed, the poor and exploited workers from farm and factory, populism in recent years has been brought to the forefront of the political landscape, embraced by the likes of Ronald Reagan and Jesse Jackson and glibly applied to figures ranging from Bruce Springsteen to Rush Limbaugh. Kazin calls populism an impulse rather than an ideology. He defines it as a mode of political persuasion that combines anti-elitism, adoration of the common people (usually defined as hardworking, pious, and, until quite recently, white), and a belief in the American ideal of democracy that the power brokers in business, government, and academia have betrayed. Kazin argues that populism has undergone two major transformations since the defeat of the People's Party, the original Populists, in the mid-1890s. The first was a split between those who viewed "the people" as a group belonging above all to God and those who viewed ordinary Americans in primarily economic terms. The second, an ongoing shift to the Right, began in the McCarthy era. The movement was transformed by the onset of the Cold War, the ideological mellowing of the labor movement, and the New Left's self-imposed alienation from the American mainstream. In the 1960s, George Wallace showed how to attract blue-collar Democrats with populist rhetoric. Then Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan captured and refined populist themes for the benefit of the Republican Party. Kazin shows that the Right's conception of a struggling middle class beset by an inept, immoral state remains vigorous and limits what Bill Clinton or anyone to his left can accomplish. The Populist Persuasion unrolls a fascinating narrative of our country's history, richly endowed with examples demonstrating the flexibility of populist rhetoric. Bringing to life the powerful voices of past leaders, Kazin shows how they both inform the political debates of our own time and point with hope toward a future in which the country will live up to its original democratic ideals.

Sample

Jeffrey E. Garten

No issue may be more crucial to America's standing in the world and to its ability to solve its social and economic problems at home than its widening competition with Japan and Germany. In A Cold Peace, Jeffrey E. Garten, an investment banker who has served in the White House and the State Department, shines an intense light on the growing conflicts with our two most important allies and rivals--and on the critical impact they will have on America's future. Garten explains how the often irreconcilable agendas of Washington, Tokyo, and Berlin stem from over a century of deeply held cultural, institutional, and political traditions. Whether the issue is trade, banking, technology, defense policy, immigration, or the environment, in the coming decade we could well see grueling struggles among the three countries including new forms of economic warfare, differing notions of national security, the formation of new regional empires, and destructive rivalries in global organizations. Going beyond today's headlines and sound bites, beyond the sterile debates over protectionism versus free trade, and beyond the dead-end arguments over whether America is the lone superpower or whether it is in decline, A Cold Peace reveals the most fundamental dilemmas for America in the years ahead. In a powerful analysis drawn from two decades of high-level experience in both the public and private sectors, Garten shows that the greatest threat to the United States is home grown--in our reluctance to recognize the links between our domestic and foreign policies, in our inability to see how the global rules of the game have changed, and in our failure to adopt a new mind-set not only toward Japan and Germany but toward ourselves as well.

Sample

Harry L. Watson

The raucous political debates of Jacksonian America often seemed to pit those who defended the ideals of liberty against those who asserted power. The author argues that these were serious policy disputes about the future of the Republic and the nature of its society and economy, and they led to intensified public involvement in politics and enduring political parties. His narrative shows how religious revivalism, new waves of immigration, westward expansion, the deeply divisive issue of Afro-American slavery, nascent industrialism, and other socioeconomic forces put strains on America's political framework and, in the end, transformed it.