Books with tag: constitution

Give Me Liberty  - by  Naomi Wolf

The best-selling author of The End of America lays out a blueprint for the next administration.

One of our favorite political and cultural gadflies has delivered a concrete plan for America’s future.

As the practice of democracy becomes a lost art, Americans are increasingly desperate for a restored nation. Many have a general sense that the "system" is ...

Give Me Liberty  - by  Naomi Wolf

The best-selling author of The End of America lays out a blueprint for the next administration.

One of our favorite political and cultural gadflies has delivered a concrete plan for America’s future.

As the practice of democracy becomes a lost art, Americans are increasingly desperate for a restored nation. Many have a general sense that the "system" is in disorder—if not on the road to functional collapse. But though it is easy to identify our political problems, the solutions are not always as clear. In Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries, Naomi Wolf illustrates the breathtaking changes that can take place when ordinary citizens engage in the democratic system the way the founders intended. She tells us how to use that system, right now, to change our lives, our communities, and ultimately, the nation.

Among the questions Wolf addresses in Give Me Liberty:

—How has the Pursuit of Happiness become so distorted from the intentions of our founding fathers?

—Why has our right to protest become so marginalized?

—Can we overcome Beltway controls of campaign finance?

—Where in the world must we relight our currently dimming flames of global responsibility?

—What can each of us do to effect change—in our communities, via blogs, by writing to congress-people, members of the media, and producing new media?

Rounding out this powerful tool kit for change is a helpful resource list—for putting our words, and ideas, into action.

“Blasting away myths is one of Naomi Wolf’s great strengths. She firebombs with knowledge and authority.”—New York Times Book Review

 

   

The End of America  - by  Naomi Wolf

An urgent and eloquent call to resist authoritarianism in America.

Our Constitution is the glory of the United States, the protector of our civil liberties and a careful system of checks and balances that safeguard our freedom from tyranny. But as Naomi Wolf shows in this stunning and deeply researched indictment of the Bush administration and Congress, the Constitution and all i ...

The End of America  - by  Naomi Wolf

An urgent and eloquent call to resist authoritarianism in America.

Our Constitution is the glory of the United States, the protector of our civil liberties and a careful system of checks and balances that safeguard our freedom from tyranny. But as Naomi Wolf shows in this stunning and deeply researched indictment of the Bush administration and Congress, the Constitution and all it stands for is under threat as never before—from the government itself.

Wolf grounds her argument in a deep reading of 20th-century history and lays out how the developments of the Bush years—an open-ended war, the demonization of a vague enemy, the rise of corporate paramilitary groups, the use of torture and domestic surveillance, among other grim innovations—parallel steps taken in the early years of the last century's worst dictatorships, especially in Italy and Germany. Taken together, these steps amount to a blueprint for shutting down an open society, and the points of similarity are as shocking as they are consistent, right down to precise verbal echoes. ("Homeland security," anyone?)

Far from a partisan work, the book cuts across political parties and ideologies and speaks directly to those among us—true patriots—who are concerned about the deliberate rollback of freedom in America.

Wolf warns that the authoritarian project is far enough along that in the event of a catastrophic terrorist attack our remaining liberties may be squashed in one go. Writing with urgency and clarity in the tradition of Thomas Paine's revolutionary pamphlets, she calls us to wake up to what's happening in the United States and stand up for true American values, so that our children may enjoy the freedoms we have taken (perhaps too much) for granted.

   

Unruly Americans  - by  Woody Holton

Average Americans Were the True Framers of the Constitution

Woody Holton upends what we think we know of the Constitution’s origins by telling the history of the average Americans who challenged the framers of the Constitution and forced on them the revisions that produced the document we now venerate. The framers who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 were determined to reverse Ame ...

Unruly Americans  - by  Woody Holton

Average Americans Were the True Framers of the Constitution

Woody Holton upends what we think we know of the Constitution’s origins by telling the history of the average Americans who challenged the framers of the Constitution and forced on them the revisions that produced the document we now venerate. The framers who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 were determined to reverse America’s post–Revolutionary War slide into democracy. They believed too many middling Americans exercised too much influence over state and national policies. That the framers were only partially successful in curtailing citizen rights is due to the reaction, sometimes violent, of unruly average Americans.

If not to protect civil liberties and the freedom of the people, what motivated the framers? In Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution, Holton provides the startling discovery that the primary purpose of the Constitution was, simply put, to make America more attractive to investment. And the linchpin to that endeavor was taking power away from the states and ultimately away from the people. In an eye-opening interpretation of the Constitution, Holton captures how the same class of Americans that produced Shays’s Rebellion in Massachusetts (and rebellions in damn near every other state) produced the Constitution we now revere. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

   

Active Liberty  - by  Stephen Breyer
A brilliant liberal jurist argues for a flexible, democratic Constitution equal to today's problems.

The "liberal" Justice Stephen Breyer is one of the Supreme Court's most brilliant thinkers. In this book, he defines "active liberty" as a sharing of the work of self-government between our democratic institutions and the American people. For him, the Constitution is a guide fo ...

Active Liberty  - by  Stephen Breyer
A brilliant liberal jurist argues for a flexible, democratic Constitution equal to today's problems.

The "liberal" Justice Stephen Breyer is one of the Supreme Court's most brilliant thinkers. In this book, he defines "active liberty" as a sharing of the work of self-government between our democratic institutions and the American people. For him, the Constitution is a guide for the application of basic American principles to a living and changing society rather than as a straitjacket restricting it.

Breyer argues that courts should take greater account of the Constitution's democratic nature when they interpret law, and in turn the people must, through civic engagement, develop the experience necessary to govern their own affairs. He writes that Congress, for all its faults, has done a better job than either the executive or the judicial branch at balancing Americans’ conflicting views, especially during times of national crisis.