A Book Guide To Protecting Our Democracy

For the past several years, on her chart-topping Substack, “Civil Discourse,” Joyce Vance has guided readers through a continued erosion of democratic norms, the unprecedented felony conviction of an ex-president, and the constitutionally calamitous beginning to the second Trump administration. Giving Up Is Unforgivable is a clarion call to action, putting our current crisis in historical context and sketching out a vision for where we go next. Vance’s message is hopeful at its heart, even as it acknowledges the daunting challenges that lie ahead. She is the constitutional law professor you never knew you needed, explaining the legal context and the political history — and why the rule of the law still matters. At the same time, she empowers the reader to do something, both as individuals and collectively.

Attacks on schools and teachers have long been a hallmark of fascist regimes: Throughout history, as many dictators rose to power, they began banning books and controlling curriculum.  As the head of one of the largest teachers’ unions in America, Randi Weingarten is among the last lines of defense for American public education. For decades, she has sounded the alarm that attacks on teachers are part of a larger, darker agenda — to undermine democracy, opportunity, and public education as we know it. After the Trump administration declared its intention to dismantle the Department of Education, that alarm became undeniable. This book explains why all Americans should care about attacks on schools and teachers. In the past, as today, the fate of the United States is inexorably intertwined with the fate of public education.

In Democracy Awakening, acclaimed historian Heather Cox Richardson delves into the tumultuous journey of American democracy, tracing the roots of Donald Trump’s “authoritarian experiment” to the earliest days of the republic. She examines the historical forces that have led to the current political climate, showing how modern conservatism has preyed upon a disaffected population, weaponizing language and promoting false history to consolidate power. An essential read for anyone concerned about the state of America, Democracy Awakening is more than a history book; it’s a call to action. Richardson reminds us that democracy requires constant vigilance and participation from all of us, showing how we, as a nation, can take the lessons of the past to secure a more just and equitable future.

As Benjamin Franklin famously put it, Americans have a republic, if we can keep it. Preserving the Constitution and the democratic system it supports is the public’s responsibility. One route the Constitution provides for discharging that duty, a route rarely traveled, is impeachment. Expanding beyond violations of the law, impeachment was meant to defend against any action that would undermine the foundations of our republic. Harvard Law professor Cass R. Sunstein provides a succinct citizen’s guide to this essential tool of self-government. He illuminates the constitutional design behind impeachment and emphasizes the people’s role in holding presidents accountable.

Throughout his first administration, Trump did more than any other president to politicize the nation’s top law enforcement agency. With a plethora of sources deeply embedded in the ranks of three presidencies, Leonnig and Davis reveal the daily war secretly waged for the soul of the department and how — if the United States hopes to live on with its same form of government — Trump’s war with the Justice Department will mark a turning point from which it will be hard to recover. Injustice is the jaw-dropping account of partisans and enablers undoing democracy, heroes still battling to preserve a nation governed by laws, and a call to action for those who believe in liberty and justice for all.

The term “the great replacement theory” was coined in 2011 by a French novelist who argued that Black and Brown immigrants were “invading” Europe, brought by shadowy elites to “replace” the White population. Over time, it has expanded those under threat to include citizens, men, Jews, Christians, heterosexuals, and ethnic majorities in countries as distinct as Russia, El Salvador, Brazil, Italy, and India, all targeted with the message that they are facing an existential attack that only a strongman can prevent. In Chain of Ideas, Ibram X. Kendi offers an unsettling but indispensable global history of how great replacement theory brought humanity into this authoritarian age — and how we can free ourselves from it.

In this illuminating work, immigrant rights activist Aviva Chomsky shows how “illegality” and “undocumentedness” are concepts that were created to exclude and exploit. With a focus on US policy, she probes how people, especially Mexican and Central Americans, have been assigned this status — and to what ends. Blending history with human drama, Chomsky explores what it means to be undocumented in a legal, social, economic, and historical context. The result is a powerful testament of the complex, contradictory, and ever-shifting nature of status in America.

In the first of the book’s three intertwining essays, Ta-Nehisi Coates, on his first trip to Africa, finds himself in two places at once: in Dakar, a modern city in Senegal, and in a mythic kingdom in his mind. Then he takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he reports on his own book’s banning, but also explores the larger backlash to the nation’s recent reckoning with history and the deeply rooted American mythology so visible in that city, a capital of the Confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares. Finally, in the book’s longest section, Coates travels to Palestine, where he sees with devastating clarity how easily we are misled by nationalist narratives, and the tragedy that lies in the clash between the stories we tell and the reality of life on the ground.

From the United States and Britain to continental Europe and beyond, liberal democracy is under siege, while authoritarianism is on the rise. In Twilight of Democracy, Anne Applebaum, an award-winning historian of Soviet atrocities who was one of the first American journalists to raise an alarm about antidemocratic trends in the West, explains the lure of nationalism and autocracy. In this captivating essay, she contends that political systems with radically simple beliefs are inherently appealing, especially when they benefit the loyal to the exclusion of everyone else. Elegantly written and urgently argued, Twilight of Democracy is a brilliant dissection of a world-shaking shift and a stirring glimpse of the road back to democratic values.

In a series of short, pointed chapters, Sanders explains how the United States today is an oligarchic society in which a small handful of multibillionaires exercise enormous economic and political power. Sanders discusses how, under Trump, we are rapidly moving toward authoritarianism — with a president who is undermining our democracy as he attacks Congress, the courts, the media, and law firms and universities in search of more and more power for himself. With relentless optimism and focused energy, Sanders reminds readers that true power rests with the people — and he presents a path forward to a reinvigorated democracy.

Journalist Osita Nwanevu has spent the Trump era examining the very meaning of democracy in search of answers to questions many have asked in the wake of the 2024 election: Are our institutions fundamentally broken? How can a country so divided govern itself? Does democracy even work as well as we believe? The Right of the People offers us challenging answers: while democracy remains vital, American democracy is an illusion we must make real by transforming not only our political institutions but the American economy. In a text that spans democratic theory, the American Founding, our aging political system, and the dizzying inequalities of our new Gilded Age, Nwanevu makes a visionary case for a political and economic agenda to fulfill the promise of American democracy and revive faith in the American project.

Hundreds of thousands of people who arrive every year at the US-Mexico border travel far from their homes. For years, the majority came from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, but many more have begun their journey much farther away. As Jonathan Blitzer dramatizes with forensic, unprecedented reporting, this crisis is the result of decades of misguided policy and sweeping corruption. Brilliantly weaving the stories of Central Americans whose lives have been devastated by chronic political conflict and violence with those of American activists, government officials, and the politicians responsible for the country’s tragically tangled immigration policy, Blitzer reveals the full, layered picture of this vast and unremitting conflict.

America’s great promise of equality has always rung hollow in the ears of African Americans. But today the situation has grown even more dire. Part manifesto, part history, part memoir, Democracy in Black argues that we live in a country founded on a “value gap” — with white lives valued more than others — that still distorts our politics today. Whether discussing why all Americans have racial habits that reinforce inequality, why Black politics based on the civil-rights era have reached a dead end, or why only remaking democracy from the ground up can bring real change, Glaude crystallizes the untenable position of black America — and offers thoughts on a better way forward.

Donald Trump’s presidency has raised a question that many of us never thought we’d be asking: Is our democracy in danger? Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have spent more than 20 years studying the breakdown of democracies in Europe and Latin America, and they believe the answer is yes. Democracy no longer ends with a bang — in a revolution or military coup — but with a whimper: the slow, steady weakening of critical institutions, such as the judiciary and the press, and the gradual erosion of long-standing political norms. Drawing on decades of research and a wide range of historical and global examples, Levitsky and Ziblatt show how democracies die. Now the question is, can our democracy be saved?

The lifeblood of any free society is persuasion: changing other people’s minds in order to change things. But America is suffering a crisis of faith in persuasion that is putting its democracy and the planet itself at risk. In The Persuaders, Anand Giridharadas takes us inside these movements and battles, seeking out the dissenters who continue to champion persuasion in an age of polarization. As the book’s subjects grapple with how to call out threats and injustices while calling in those who don’t agree with them but just might one day, they point a way to healing and changing a fracturing country.

Professor Gloria Browne-Marshall delves into the history of protest movements and rebellion in the United States. Beginning with Indigenous peoples’ resistance to European colonization and continuing through to today’s climate change demonstrations, Browne-Marshall expands how to think about protest through sharing select historical moments and revealing the role of key players involved in those efforts. Regardless of whether these protests accomplished their end goals, Browne-Marshall reminds us that not only is dissent meaningful and impactful, but it is also an essential tool for eliciting long-lasting change.

Here for the first time in a convenient pocket edition are all of Walt Whitman’s essential prose writings on democracy, including his unforgettable reflections on the roots of American division, the fearful legacy of the Civil War, and the shining example of Abraham Lincoln. Few writers have been as harsh in their condemnation of America’s sins and spiritual shortcomings or as abiding in their faith in democratic ideals as Whitman. His clarion voice speaks to us with renewed urgency today.