Perfectionist Politics

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Martin Shefter

This book collects a number of Martin Shefter's most important articles on political parties. They address three questions: Under what conditions will strong party organizations emerge? What influences the character of parties - in particular, their reliance on patronage? In what circumstances will the parties that formerly dominated politics in a nation or city come under attack? Shefter's work exemplifies the "new institutionalism" in political science, arguing that the reliance of parties on patronage is a function not so much of mass political culture as of their relationship with public bureaucracies. The book's opening chapters analyze the circumstances conducive to the emergence of strong political parties and the changing balance between parties and bureaucracies in Europe and America. The middle chapters discuss the organization and exclusion of the American working classes by machine and reform regimes. The book concludes by examining party organizations as instruments of political control in the largest American city, New York.

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Jonathan Rauch

It is no secret that the American people are dissatisfied with government. But while the frustration and anger are real, the way we tend to view the problem is all wrong. In this powerful diagnosis, Jonathan Rauch reveals that the problem with government is not "gridlock" or "special interests"; it's that despite ever-increasing levels of activity, government has lost its ability to make things work and solve problems effectively. That's "demosclerosis.". Rauch looks beyond the politics and personalities of the moment, taking the reader on a fascinating tour of how American government has been crippled by its own success. He shows how, year after year, the American public forms more interest groups making more demands on government - until gradually government itself has calcified. No program can be cut, no tax break eliminated, without incurring the wrath of one group or another, and they care more about saving a program than the general public cares about killing it. The truly insidious thing, Rauch shows, is that these groups and associations are not the wicked "special interests" of politicians' rhetoric; seven out of ten Americans belong to at least one association and one in four belongs to four or more. We have met the special interests, and they are us. . Escaping from the trap Rauch describes will not be easy. His keen assessment of Bill Clinton's first year in office shows that just changing the faces in Washington is no cure, nor is it sufficient just to pass new laws or cut taxes, for these actions generate their own interest groups, calcifying government even further. Rauch offers his own bracing tonic for unclogging the public arteries, turning our conventional ideas of liberalism and conservatism on their heads and making Demosclerosis an indispensable guide to how Washington really works - or doesn't.

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Adam Garfinkle

More than two decades after the end of the Vietnam War, America's wounds have yet to heal; the war's divisiveness continues. Yet today, even the most hard-line hawks and doves share the conviction that, for better or worse, the antiwar movement played an important role in turning American opinion against the war, thereby limiting and ultimately ending U.S. military activity in Southeast Asia. In Telltale Hearts, Adam Garfinkle convincingly demonstrates that this widely accepted view is wrong. Garfinkle argues that the movement, even at its radical height, had but a marginal impact on limiting and ending the war and in fact unwittingly helped to prolong it, thereby killing more people on both sides. The movement, in the end, was simply not as important as other factors, such as the contours of normal electoral politics, the ebb and flow of battle, and the devastating misjudgments made by a series of American civil and military leaders. However, by following the movement into the present, the author concludes that it has in fact had a powerful, and greatly underestimated, postwar influence.

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Zarah Ghahramani with Robert Hillman

Ghahramani, 20, an Iranian student, was swept off the streets of Tehran and taken to the notorious Evin prison, where criminals and political dissidents were held side by side in conditions of legendary brutality. Her crime, she asserts, was sliding back her headscarf to feel the sun on her hair. This led to a political activism fueled by the fearless idealism of the young. Her parents begged her to be prudent, but even they could not have imagined the horrors she faced in prison. She underwent psychological and physical torture, fighting despair by recalling her idyllic childhood in an affectionate family that prized tolerance and freedom of thought. After a show trial, Ghahramani was driven deep into the desert outside Tehran, uncertain if she was to be executed or freed. There she was abandoned to begin the long walk back.--From publisher description.