In the follow-up to the #1 New York Times bestseller Trump's War, Michael Savage makes the case for President Trump in 2020.America rolled into 2020 like a juggernaut, with the strongest economy in its history and a renewed leadership role on the world stage. President Trump was cruising to reelection on the strength of record low unemployment, phase one of a historic trade deal, and a more stable Middle East after the defeat of ISIS.Then, catastrophe struck. A novel coronavirus originating in Wuhan, China, swept the world, taking hundreds of thousands of lives and wreaking economic and social destruction. As America battled to its feet and prepared to reopen its economy, the tragic death of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer lit a powder keg of political tension waiting to explode after months of lockdown. As the November elections approach, America is at war with itself to decide if it will remain a land of freedom and opportunity, or whether a radical new vision will emerge.Americans are searching for answers. Was the American lockdown necessary to defeat Covid-19 or was it a politically motivated strategy to harm President Trump's reelection chances? Does the death of George Floyd represent a systemic problem with American police or is the Left exploiting the tragedy for political purposes? Where does legitimate protest end and insurrection begin?A trained scientist who studied epidemiology for his PhD and one of America's most popular conservative radio hosts for the past twenty-six years, Dr. Michael Savage is uniquely positioned to answer these burning questions. In OUR FIGHT FOR AMERICA: THE WAR CONTINUES, Savage cuts through the propaganda and noise to present a clear analysis of the crises and the political and scientific motivations behind them. Michael Savage tells the truth even when nobody wants to hear it and presents a clear vision of what Americans must do to survive our most turbulent period in decades.

Historically speaking, our vices, like our virtues, have come in two basic forms: intellectual and moral. One of the main purposes of this book is to analyze a set of specifically political vices that have not been given sufficient attention within political theory but that nonetheless pose enduring challenges to the sustainability of free and equitable political relationships of various kinds. Political vices like hubris, willful blindness, and recalcitrance are persistent dispositions of character and conduct that imperil both the functioning of democratic institutions and the trust that a diverse citizenry has in the ability of those institutions to secure a just political order of equal moral standing, reciprocal freedom, and human dignity. Political vices embody a repudiation of the reciprocal conditions of politics and, as a consequence of this, they represent a standing challenge to the principles and values of the mixed political regime we call liberal-democracy. Mark Button shows how political vices not only carry out discrete forms of injustice but also facilitate the habituation in and indifference toward systemic forms of social and political injustice. They do so through excesses and deficiencies in human sensory and communicative capacities relating to voice (hubris), vision (moral blindness), and listening (recalcitrance). Drawing on a wide range of intellectual resources, including ancient Greek tragedy, social psychology, moral epistemology, and democratic theory, Political Vices gives new consideration to a list of "deadly vices" that contemporary political societies can neither ignore as a matter of personal "sin" nor publicly disregard as a matter of mere bad choice, and it provides a democratic account that outlines how citizens can best contend with our most troubling political vices without undermining core commitments to liberalism or pluralism.

Making use of a unique data set that includes more than 1000 leadership elections from over 100 parties in 14 countries over an almost 50 year period, this volume provides the first comprehensive, comparative examination of how parties choose their leaders and the impact of the different decisions they make in this regard. Among the issues examined are how leaders are chosen, the factors that result in parties changing their selection rules, how the rules affect the competitiveness of leadership elections, the types of leaders chosen, the impact of leadership transition on electoral outcomes, the factors affecting the length of leadership tenures, and how leadership tenures come to an end. This volume is situated in the literature on intra-party decision making and party organizational reform and makes unique and important contributions to our understanding of these areas. The analysis includes parties in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Norway, and the United Kingdom. Comparative Politics is a series for students, teachers, and researchers of political science that deals with contemporary government and politics. Global in scope, books in the series are characterised by a stress on comparative analysis and strong methodological rigour. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research. For more information visit: www.ecprnet.eu.

'A gripping and illuminating picture of how strongmen have deployed violence, seduction, and corruption' Daniel Ziblatt, co-author of How Democracies Die 'A timely analysis of how a certain kind of charisma delivers political disaster' Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny Ours is the age of the strongman. Countries from Russia to India, Turkey to America are ruled by men who combine populist appeal with authoritarian policy. They have reshaped their countries around them, creating cults of personality which earn the loyalty of millions. And they do so by drawing on a playbook of behaviour established by figures such as Benito Mussolini, Muammar Gaddafi and Adolf Hitler. So why - despite the evidence of history - do strongmen still hold such appeal for us? Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat draws on analysis of everything from gender to corruption and propaganda to explain who these political figures are - and how they manipulate our own history, fears and desires in search of power at any cost. Strongmen is a fierce and perceptive history, and a vital step in understanding how to combat the forces which seek to derail democracy and seize our rights.

Few Americans and even fewer citizens of other nations understand the electoral process in the United States. Still fewer understand the role played by political parties in the electoral process or the ironies within the system. Participation in elections in the United States is much lower than in the vast majority of mature democracies. Perhaps this is because of the lack of competition in a country where only two parties have a true chance of winning, despite the fact that a large number of citizens claim allegiance to neither and think badly of both. Or perhaps it is because in the U.S. campaign contributions disproportionately favor incumbents in most legislative elections, or that largely unregulated groups such as the now notorious 527 organizations have as much impact on the outcome of a campaign as do the parties or the candidates' campaigns. For instance, in two of the last six presidential elections, the winner of the popular vote lost the election in the Electoral College; in two others, a change of fewer than 100,000 votes in selected states would have led to the same result. These factors offer a very clear picture of the problems that underlie our much trumpeted electoral system. The third edition of this Very Short Introduction analyzes these issues and more. Accounting for changes in electoral coalitions and the extent to which the American electorate is polarized in the wake of Donald Trump, L. Sandy Maisel explains how the system actually works while shining a light on some of its flaws. He also looks closely at turnout questions; efforts both to ease access to the ballot in some states and to restrict access in others; and the role of social media in campaign strategy.

"Engaging and inspiring . . . Reading this book should make you want to vote." Barack Obama In a world of sound bites, deliberate misinformation, and a political scene colored by the blue versus red partisan divide, how does the average educated American find a reliable source that's free of political spin? What You Should Know About Politics . . . But Don't breaks it all down, issue by issue, explaining who stands for what, and why-whether it's the economy, income inequality, Obamacare, foreign policy, education, immigration, or climate change. If you're a Democrat, a Republican, or somewhere in between, it's the perfect book to brush up on a single topic or read through to get a deeper understanding of the often mucky world of American politics. This is an essential volume for understanding the background to the 2016 presidential election. But it is also a book that transcends the season. It's truly for anyone who wants to know more about the perennial issues that will continue to affect our everyday lives. The third edition includes an introduction by Naomi Wolf discussing the themes and issues that have come to the fore during the present presidential cycle.

Shows the maddening difficulties that voter ID requirements create for participants in US democracy and offers concrete solutions for every person's vote and voice to count Over the past decade, and throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of voter ID laws has skyrocketed, limiting the ability of nearly twenty-five million eligible voters from exercising their constitutional right to cast a vote. In States of Confusion, Don Waisanen, Sonia Jarvis, and Nicole Gordon explore this crisis and the difficulties it has created for American voters, offering practical solutions for this increasingly important problem. Focusing on ten states with the strictest voter documentation requirements, the authors show how people face major barriers to exercising their fundamental democratic right to vote and are therefore slipping through the cracks of our electoral system. They explore voter experiences by drawing on hundreds of online surveys, audits of 150 election offices, community focus groups, and more. Waisanen, Jarvis, and Gordon call on policymakers to adopt uniform national voter identification standards that are simple, accessible, and cost-free. States of Confusion offers a comprehensive and up-to-date look at the voter ID crisis in our country, as well solutions for practitioners, government agencies, and citizens.

Since 2008, there has been a flood of literature worrying about the state of democracy in the United States and abroad. Observers complain that democratic institutions are captured by special interests, incompetent in delivering basic services, or overwhelmed by selfish voters. Lurking in the background is the global resurgence of authoritarianism, a wave bolstered by the Western democracies' apparent mishandling of the global financial crisis. In Four Crises of Democracy, Alasdair Roberts locates the recent bout of democratic malaise in the US in historical context. Malaise is a recurrent condition in American politics, but each bout can have distinctive characteristics. Roberts focuses on four "crises of democracy," explaining how they differed and how government evolved in response to each crisis. The "crisis of representation" occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and was centered on the question of whether the people really controlled their government. This period was dominated by fears of plutocracy and debates about the rights of African Americans, women and immigrants. The "crisis of mastery" spanned the years 1917-1948, and was preoccupied with building administrative capabilities so that government could improve its control of economic and international affairs. The "crisis of discipline," beginning in the 1970s, was triggered by the perception that voters and special interests were overloading governments with unreasonable demands. In the final part of his analysis, Roberts asks whether the United States is entering a "crisis of anticipation," in which the question is whether democracies can handle long-term problems like global warming effectively. Democratic institutions are often said to be rigid and slow to change in response to new circumstances. But Roberts suggests that history shows otherwise. Preceding crises have always produced substantial changes in the architecture of American government. The essential features of the democratic model-societal openness, decentralization, and pragmatism-give it the edge over authoritarian alternatives. A powerful account of how successive crises have shaped American democracy, Four Crises of Democracy will be essential reading for anyone interested in the forces driving the current democratic malaise in the US and throughout the world.

The Politics of Corruption examines the U.S. presidential election of 1824 as a critical contest in the nation's political history, full of colorful characters and brimming with unexpected twists. This election inaugurated the transition from the sedate, elitist elections of the Jeffersonian era and propelled developments toward the showier yet also more democratized presidential races that came to characterize Jacksonian America. The Republican Party fielded all five candidates in 1824, a veritable who's who of early republic notables: treasury secretary William Crawford, secretary of state John Quincy Adams, secretary of war John C. Calhoun, speaker of the House Henry Clay, and War of 1812 hero Andrew Jackson. This book recasts the 1824 election-conventionally regarded as a dull, intraparty affair-as one of the most exciting contests in American history. Using the correspondence and diaries of the principals involved, Callahan chronicles the ways in which the five candidates innovated political practices by creating dynamic organizations, sponsoring energetic newspaper networks, staging congressional legislative battles, and spreading vicious personal attacks against each other. In the end, Calhoun's smear campaign fatally undermined front-runner Crawford, while self-styled political outsider Jackson successfully equated regular politics with corruption yet still lost the contest to Washington's ultimate insider, John Quincy Adams. It was a defeat Jackson would not forget, animating him to fundamentally change the ways American politics was conducted ever after.

Key book on the debates surrounding the knowledge economy and decolonialization of African Studies, that brings the subject up to date for the 21st century. Decolonization of knowledge has become a major issue in African Studies in recent years, brought to the fore by social movements such as #RhodesMustFall and #BlackLivesMatter. This timely book explores the politics and disputed character of knowledge production in colonial and postcolonial Uganda, where efforts to generate forms of knowledge and solidarity that transcend colonial epistemologies draw on long histories of resistance and refusal. Bringing together scholars from Africa, Europe and North America, the contributors in this volume analyse how knowledge has been created, mobilized, and contested across a wide range of Ugandan contexts. In so doing, they reveal how Ugandans have built, disputed, and reimagined institutions of authority and knowledge production in ways that disrupt the colonial frames that continue to shape scholarly analyses and state structures. From the politics of language and gender in Bakiga naming practices to ways of knowing among the Acholi, the hampering of critical scholarship by militarism and authoritarianism, and debates over the names of streets, lakes, mountains, and other public spaces, this book shows how scholars and a wide range of Ugandan activists are reimagining the politics of knowledge in Ugandan public life.

The 'Cedar Revolution' in Lebanon, which was sparked by the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri on 14 February 2005, was seen by many as an opportunity for Lebanon's fragile political system to move towards a more stable form of democracy. But contrary to these expectations, in the years since Syrian military withdrawal in April 2005, Lebanon has been plagued with sectarian and political unrest and conflict. Abbas Assi here explores the obstacles that impeded the democratic transition process and how subsequent events since 2005 (such as the passing of UNSCR 1559, the 2006 Hizbullah-Israel war and the Syrian conflict) have bolstered this trend. By looking at these, Assi examines how the intersection of the influence of external factors and powers with domestic conflicts has shaped the behaviour of political parties and has had implications on their ability to reach compromises and initiate democratic reforms. By analysing the impact of the intersection of domestic and external factors on democracy, this book is a vital reference for those studying politics of Lebanon and the Middle East more broadly.

Turkey's Difficult Journey to Democracy provides a thorough examination of the evolution of Turkey's democracy to the present day. After the Second World War, Turkey was considered to have made a highly successful transition from a single party authoritarian state to political competition. Yet, within ten years, Turkey had experienced its first military intervention. During the next forty years, the country vacillated between democratic openings and direct or indirect military interventions. The ascendance in the importance of questions of economic prosperity has helped the deepening and maturing of Turkish democracy, but some impediments persist to produce malfunctions in the operation of a fully democratic system. Through studying the Turkish experience of democratization, Turkey's Difficult Journey to Democracy seeks to provide understanding of the challenges countries that are trying to become democracies encounter in this process. Oxford Studies in Democratization is a series for scholars and students of comparative politics and related disciplines. Volumes concentrate on the comparative study of the democratization process that accompanied the decline and termination of the cold war. The geographical focus of the series is primarily Latin America, the Caribbean, Southern and Eastern Europe, and relevant experiences in Africa and Asia. The series editor is Laurence Whitehead, Senior Research Fellow, Nuffield College, University of Oxford.