Age of Folly: America Destroys Its Democracy

Resumen del libro

A collection of essays on the frantic retreat of democracy and the war on terror, from America's leading essayist

Lewis Lapham reviews the course of American democracy from the beginning of the War on Terror to the present day: from the bombastic spectacle of US elections, bought and paid for in advance, to the surveillance and suppression of dissent in the age of Snowden and the NSA.

Democracy, of course, is never easy to define. The meaning of the word changes with the vagaries of time, place, and circumstance. American democracy today is not what it was in 1890; democracy in France is not what it was in England or Norway or the United States. What remains more or less constant is a temperament or spirit of mind rather than a code of laws, a set of innumerable virtues or a table of bureaucratic organization. The temperament is skeptical and contentious, and if democracy means anything at all it means the freedom of thought and the perpetual expansion of the discovery that the world is not oneself. Freedom of thought brings the society the unwelcome news that it is in trouble. - 'Democracy in America'