Books on the topic 'National Democratic Revolution (NDR)'

Much of the confusion about a central event in United States history begins with the name: the Civil War. In reality, the Civil War was not merely civil--meaning national--and not merely a war, but instead an international conflict of ideas as well as armies. Its implications transformed the U.S. Constitution and reshaped a world order, as political and economic systems grounded in slavery and empire clashed with the democratic process of republican forms of government. And it spilled over national boundaries, tying the United States together with Cuba, Spain, Mexico, Britain, and France in a struggle over the future of slavery and of republics. Gregory P. Downs argues that we can see the Civil War anew by understanding it as a revolution. More than a fight to preserve the Union and end slavery, the conflict refashioned a nation, in part by remaking its Constitution. More than a struggle of brother against brother, it entailed remaking an Atlantic world that centered in surprising ways on Cuba and Spain. Downs introduces a range of actors not often considered as central to the conflict but clearly engaged in broader questions and acts they regarded as revolutionary. This expansive canvas allows Downs to describe a broad and world-shaking war with implications far greater than often recognized.

It is a widespread view that democracy and the advanced nation-state are in crisis, weakened by globalization and undermined by global capitalism, in turn explaining rising inequality and mounting populism. This book argues that this view is wrong: advanced democracies are resilient, and their enduring historical relationship with capitalism has been mutually beneficial. For all the chaos and upheaval over the past century—major wars, economic crises, massive social change, and technological revolutions—the book shows how democratic states continuously reinvent their economies through massive public investment in research and education, by imposing competitive product markets and cooperation in the workplace, and by securing macroeconomic discipline as the preconditions for innovation and the promotion of the advanced sectors of the economy. Critically, this investment has generated vast numbers of well-paying jobs for the middle classes and their children, focusing the aims of aspirational families, and in turn providing electoral support for parties. Gains at the top have also been shared with the middle (though not the bottom) through a large welfare state. Contrary to the prevailing wisdom on globalization, advanced capitalism is neither footloose nor unconstrained: it thrives under democracy precisely because it cannot subvert it. Populism, inequality, and poverty are indeed great scourges of our time, but these are failures of democracy and must be solved by democracy.

The origins of Santa Claus, or so I am told, is that the young Bishop Nicholas secretly delivered three bags of gold as dowries for three young girls to their indebted father to save them from a life of prostitution. Armed with immortality, a factory of elves and a fleet of reindeer, his has been a lasting legacy, inextricably linked to Christmas. Of course, this Christmas looks a little different. Amidst a global pandemic, shimmying down the chimneys of strangers certainly does not adhere to social distancing guidelines. Some borders remain closed, and in some instances, the quarantine period is far too long. After all, he only has 24 hours to spread cheer across the world. As with the rest of us, Santa Claus is likely to get the remote working treatment. The reindeers this year are likely to be self-driving, reminiscent of an Amazon swarm of technology, and the naughty and nice lists are likely to be based on algorithms derived from social media accounts. In the age of the fourth industrial revolution, it is difficult to imagine that letters suffice anymore. How many posts were verified as real before shared? Enough to get you a drone. Fake news? Here is a lump of coal. Will we see elves in personal protective equipment (PPE) and will Santa Claus, high risk because of age and his likely comorbidities from the copious amount of cookies, have to self-isolate in the North Pole? In fact, will there be any toys at all this year? Surely production has been stalled with the restrictions on imports and exports into the North Pole. Perhaps, there is a view to outsourcing, or perhaps, there is a shift towards local production and supply chains. More importantly, as we have done in many instances in this period, maybe we should pause to reflect on the current structures in place. The sanctification of a figure so clearly dismissive of the Global South and to be critical, quite classist must be called into question. From some of the keenest minds, the contributions in this book make a strong case against this holly jolly man. We traverse important topics such as, is the constitution too lenient with a clear intruder who has conveniently branded himself a Good Samaritan? Allegations of child labour under the guise of elves, blatant animal cruelty, constant surveillance in stark contrast to many democratic ideals and his possible threat to national security come to the fore. Nevertheless, as the song goes, he is aware when you are asleep, and he knows when you are awake. Is feminism a farce to this beloved man – what role does Mrs Claus play and why are there inherent gender norms in his toys? Then is the worry of closed borders and just how accurate his COVID-19 tests are. Of course, this brings his ethics into question. While there is an agreement that transparency, justice and fairness, nonmaleficence, responsibility, and privacy are the core ethical principles, the meaning of these principles differs, particularly across countries and cultures. Why are we subject to Santa Claus’ notions of good and evil when he is so far removed from our context? As Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein would tell you, this is fundamentally a nudge from Santa Claus for children to fit into his ideals. A nudge, coined by Thaler, is a choice that predictably changes people’s behaviour without forbidding any options or substantially changing their economic incentives. Even with pinched cheeks and an air of holiday cheer, Santa Claus has to come under scrutiny. In the process of decolonising knowledge and looking at various epistemologies, does Santa still make the cut?

Constitutional law must integrate the changes in the structure of social communication in the course of the digital revolution into the edifice of constitutional law and general constitutional doctrine, just as it must integrate the increasing dehumanisation of decisions by algorithms and artificial intelligence in both the public and private law spheres. The discussion on these multi-layered and complicated issues were lively debated by experts from theory and practice at the Societas Iuris Publici Europaei (SIPE) conference. Another topic of the conference was the acceptance of the primacy of Union law by the national supreme courts and the question of whether and how a convergence of the different points of view would be possible here.

This book traces the reorientation of modern liberalism and the Democratic Party away from their roots in labor union halls of northern cities to white-collar professionals in postindustrial high-tech suburbs, and casts new light on the importance of suburban liberalism in modern American political culture. Focusing on the suburbs along the high-tech corridor of Route 128 around Boston, the book challenges conventional scholarly assessments of Massachusetts exceptionalism, the decline of liberalism, and suburban politics in the wake of the rise of the New Right and the Reagan Revolution in the 1970s and 1980s. Although only a small portion of the population, knowledge professionals in Massachusetts and elsewhere have come to wield tremendous political leverage and power. By probing the possibilities and limitations of these suburban liberals, this rich and nuanced account shows that—far from being an exception to national trends—the suburbs of Massachusetts offer a model for understanding national political realignment and suburban politics in the second half of the twentieth century.

The United States was a pioneer in the development of women’s rights ideas and activism. Far-seeing women, determined to find an active and equal place in the nation’s political affairs, pushed long and hard to realize America’s democratic promise. Over three-quarters of a century, women’s rights and suffrage leaders steadily agitated their cause through a shifting American political landscape, from the careful innovations of the early national period, through the expansive involvements of antebellum politics, into the dramatic shifts of revolution and reaction in the post–Civil War years, up to the modernization of the Progressive Era. The meaning and content of “womanhood,” the sign under which these campaigns were conducted, also shifted. Labor, class, and especially race inclusions and exclusions were contentious dimensions of the American women’s rights movement, as they were of American liberal democracy in general.

This book argues that explaining judicial independence—considered the fundamental question of comparative law and politics—requires a perspective that spans the democracy/autocracy divide. Rather than seeking separate explanations in each regime context, in The Political Foundations of Judicial Independence in Dictatorship and Democracy, Brad Epperly argues that political competition is a salient factor in determining levels of de facto judicial independence across regime type, and indeed of greater import in autocracies. This is because a full “insurance” account of independence requires looking not only at the likelihood those in power might lose elections but also the variable risks associated with such an outcome, risks that are far higher for autocrats. First demonstrating that courts can and do provide insurance to former leaders, he then shows via exhaustive cross-national analyses that competition’s effects are far higher in autocratic regimes, providing the first evidence for the causal nature of the relationship. Epperly argues that these findings differ from existing case study research because in democratic regimes, a lack of political competition means incumbents target the de jure independence of courts. This argument is developed via in-depth case study of the Hungarian Constitutional Court after the country’s 2010 “constitutional revolution,” and then tested globally. Blending formal theory, observational and instrumental variables models, and elite interviews of leading Hungarian legal scholars and judges, Epperly offers a new framework for understanding judicial independence that integrates explanations of both de jure and de facto independence in both democratic and autocratic regimes.

This chapter examines how the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia contributed to the rise of the Red Scare. On November 7, 1917, revolutionaries from the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party seized power in Petrograd and proclaimed the world's first socialist government. The Bolsheviks endorsed violent, class-based insurrection and policies of land and resource nationalization. News of the Bolshevik uprising intensified the wartime atmosphere in the United States, in which fear of treachery was rampant. This chapter first considers American intervention in Russia during the period 1917–1920 before discussing the emergence of the Red Scare in 1919–1920 and of anticommunism in the labor movement. It also looks at the strikes, bombings, and deportations in 1919 that offset whatever prestige the American Federation of Labor (AFL) accrued during the First World War. Finally, it describes the end of the Red Scare following US attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer's fall and the release of the National Popular Government League report.

For decades, the United States has funded democracy promotion programs in the Middle East to little avail. Delta Democracy: Pathways to Incremental Civic Revolution in Egypt and Beyond argues that there is another way forward for US democracy aid. Drawing upon the author’s ethnographic research on Egypt’s nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the wake of the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings, Delta Democracy uncovers the strategies that local NGOs used to incrementally build a more democratic and just society. As it takes the reader inside the walls of Egypt’s NGOs, the book illuminates local activists’ perspectives on democracy in Egypt and reveals how savvy organizations promoted it as they navigated rapidly evolving opportunities and constraints in the years following the uprisings. Departing from US democracy brokers’ heavy-handed attempts to reform national political institutions, local organizations worked with grassroots communities to build a culture of democracy through public discussion and debate, free expression, and rights claiming. By weaving this democracy building work into public-facing economic development projects, Egypt’s NGOs managed to persevere through years of government crackdowns on civil society. Taking lessons learned from the Egyptian case, Delta Democracy advances our scholarly understanding of how civil society organizations maneuver state repression to combat political authoritarianism. It also offers a concrete set of recommendations on how US policymakers can restructure foreign aid to better connect with global contemporary civic revolutions for democracy.