Five of the best books about democracy in crisis
It has been called the permacrisis – a state of perpetual turbulence that folds geopolitical tension into cultural polarisation and spins it all around in a furious vortex. It can feel like being knocked over in the sea, unsure which way is up, afraid that another wave will strike the moment you breach the surface. The usual political narratives aren’t adequate to explain what is happening. These books go deeper.
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Why We Get the Wrong Politicians by Isabel Hardman
To even stand a chance of running for parliament, candidates must pass through a party selection process that might as well be designed to put off the best potential lawmakers. Once installed in the Commons, they find all the incentives militate against reasonable debate and sound administration. Hardman’s study of the warping and demoralising power of a dysfunctional political machine is forensic without being polemical; unflinching yet humane.
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Why Politics Fails by Ben Ansell
Ansell is professor of comparative democracy with a ferociously sharp mind and a genial turn of phrase. He has organised pretty much the whole of political practice and theory into five paradoxes (traps, he calls them) from which policymakers and voters around the world struggle to break free. This book is clinical, an MRI scan of the democratic soul in torment.
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The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt
The challenge of polarisation and so-called culture wars is where politics meets psychology. Haidt marshals both disciplines, with added evolutionary biology, to explain how opinions embed themselves in our sense of selfhood, becoming the moral components of identity politics. It is a vital insight for understanding what works, and what really doesn’t, when attempting persuasion across partisan lines.
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The Light that Failed by Ivan
Krastev and Stephen Holmes
To those of us who were there, watching it happen, the corruption of Russian democracy after the cold war and the country’s slide into neo-Soviet authoritarianism felt inevitable. But it was also the function of cultural and ideological misconceptions that the west had about eastern Europe. This lucid, subtle and psychologically astute analysis of the successes and failures of liberal pluralism in former communist countries tells a much wider and essential story about vulnerabilities in more established democracies.
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The Other Pandemic by James Ball
We are so used to describing trends online as going viral that the medical inference of the metaphor is easily forgotten. In telling the story of QAnon – a deranged mega-conspiracy theory – from its organic genesis in niche chatrooms to its infection of the Republican party mainstream, James Ball diagnoses a terrifying pathology in the body politic. It is also a parable of radicalisation and the appeal of irrational belief, explaining the evangelical potency of so many extreme movements. Digital technology is disrupting politics as thoroughly as television, railways, the printing press and every other communications revolution in history. It might be bigger than all of them rolled into one. Seeing how it sickens democracy is a good place to start thinking about how to make it better.
• Politics: A Survivor’s Guide: How to Stay Engaged Without Getting Enraged by Rafael Behr is published by Atlantic (£10.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.