Description
Designed for general readers interested in politics, this strongly researched book by a British author looks at democracy in the US since WWI. Rather than being a history, it offers a theory about how democracy works. The book's thesis is that democracies in general are bad at avoiding emergencies but good at resolving them. As a result, the book claims, the US approaches emergencies as normal events, assuming they are survivable and ultimately not very important. For any given crisis, this may or may not be true. The concern of this theory is that because both citizens and governments become overconfident about muddling through a crisis, they do not find out what caused it and change the system to solve the problem. Therefore new crises may become more and more difficult for a democracy to survive. While the book suggests the current breakdown of democratic politics means the breaking point has already happened in the US, it is ultimately hopeful that things may improve. One result of such major crises in the past has been the country finally taking a problem seriously and adjusting the institutions of American democracy to solve it. The problems this book looks at involve economics, war, and domestic and international politics. Annotation ©2015 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
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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. In The Confidence Trap, David Runciman 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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