Can We Save Democracy?

Over the course of the past decade, few people in the world of democratic theory have worked harder to challenge those intuitions than Yale University’s Hélène Landemore. Her latest work, Politics Without Politicians, is a précis of the arguments she has developed in a series of texts for academic presses and a variety of more public engagements. Her solution is simple and bold: The bums in Washington should be thrown out of office—not just those from one party, but all of them. And not just in the next election, but forever and in its place a system of sortition should be used. But will this be more democratic than the representative system that we have? Read Osita Nwanevu’s “Can We Save Democracy?”

Love and Literature in Leslie Fiedler’s America

“We are living not only in the age of america but also in the Age of the Novel, at a moment when the literature of a country without a first-rate verse epic or a memorable verse tragedy has become the model of half the world.” So begins Love and Death in the American Novel, Leslie Fiedler’s 1960 work of literary criticism—now being republished by New York Review Books—in which he sets out to explain a few home truths about American culture through his Freudian analysis of the American novel. From that perspective, Fiedler begins, “our novels seem not primitive, perhaps, but innocent…almost juvenile.” “Why?” the reader might ask, and the answer is not long in coming: because “our great novelists, though experts on indignity and assault, on loneliness and terror, tend to avoid treating the passionate encounter of a man and woman, which we expect at the center of a novel. Indeed, they rather shy away from permitting in their fictions the presence of any full-fledged, mature women, giving us instead monsters of virtue or bitchery, symbols of the rejection or fear of sexuality.” Read Vivian Gornick’s “Home Truths”