Why do democracies keep lurching from success to failure? The
current financial crisis is just the latest example of how things
continue to go wrong, just when it looked like they were going
right. In this wide-ranging, original, and compelling book, David
Runciman tells the story of modern democracy through the history of
moments of crisis, from the First World War to the economic crash
of 2008.
A global history with a special focus on the United States, "The
Confidence Trap" examines how democracy survived threats ranging
from the Great Depression to the Cuban missile crisis, and from
Watergate to the collapse of Lehman Brothers. It also looks at the
confusion and uncertainty created by unexpected victories, from the
defeat of German autocracy in 1918 to the defeat of communism in
1989. Throughout, the book pays close attention to the politicians
and thinkers who grappled with these crises: from Woodrow Wilson,
Nehru, and Adenauer to Fukuyama and Obama.
"The Confidence Trap" shows that democracies are good at
recovering from emergencies but bad at avoiding them. The lesson
democracies tend to learn from their mistakes is that they can
survive them--and that no crisis is as bad as it seems. Breeding
complacency rather than wisdom, crises lead to the dangerous belief
that democracies can muddle through anything--a confidence trap
that may lead to a crisis that is just too big to escape, if it
hasn't already. The most serious challenges confronting democracy
today are debt, the war on terror, the rise of China, and climate
change. If democracy is to survive them, it must figure out a way
to break the confidence trap.
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