100 Books Like The Paradox of Democracy

This book gave me a deeper appreciation of how moral intuitions shape political divisions—not as accidents of ideology but as features of human psychology. Haidt’s metaphor of the elephant and the rider helped me see why rational argument so often fails to persuade across political lines: because reason follows intuition, not the other way around.

His mapping of multiple “moral taste buds”—including authority, loyalty, and sanctity—also challenged the narrow moral frameworks that dominate secular discourse. While I don’t agree with everything—particularly his optimistic lean toward moral equilibrium or his underemphasis on structural power—I admire his effort to move us beyond outrage toward curiosity. It’s a valuable guide for understanding why we talk past one another—and how we might start listening instead.

This book has become a touchstone in conversations about democratic erosion. What I found most compelling was how it uses global and historical patterns to explain how democracies can slide into authoritarianism—slowly, and often legally. It helped me connect institutional changes in the U.S. to larger global trends in democratic backsliding.

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argue that today’s democracies rarely collapse through sudden coups. Instead, they are gradually weakened from within by elected leaders who stretch or disregard institutional norms to expand their own power. These changes frequently occur under the appearance of legality, making democratic decay harder to detect.

Drawing on historical and global examples, the authors show how democracies slide into authoritarianism when two foundational norms begin to erode: mutual toleration (the recognition that political rivals are legitimate) and institutional forbearance (the practice of exercising restraint even when one holds legal authority). When those norms break down,… show more.

Nichols doesn’t just critique anti-intellectualism—he lays bare the cultural shift that made it acceptable to dismiss expertise altogether. What resonated with me is his central claim: that the erosion of trust in specialists is not merely ignorance, but a form of civic arrogance, reinforced by misinformation and a collapsing public discourse.

I don’t agree with all of his diagnoses—particularly when it comes to the role of the academy—but I share his concern that the rejection of expertise isn’t just bad for science or public health. It’s corrosive to democracy itself. This book made me reflect on how we, as citizens, must rebuild the norms of epistemic humility and shared knowledge that democratic life depends on.

Most Americans think authoritarian ideologies are imported; Churchwell’s book shows they have deep native roots. What I found striking here was how phrases like “America First” and “The American Dream” have never had fixed meanings—they’ve always been battlegrounds, shaped by race, capitalism, nationalism, and myth. Churchwell builds her argument almost entirely from forgotten voices: local editors, preachers, fairground speakers—ordinary people whose words show us how national values are constructed from the ground up.

It’s a sobering read, not just because it reclaims the past, but because it exposes how easily language can be repurposed by demagogues in moments of political drift. This book reminded me that vigilance isn’t just about institutions—it’s about history, memory, and the rhetoric we take for granted.

Covers some of the same ground as Joanne Freeman, regarding dueling, reputation, politics, and the press in the antebellum U.S.A. But what I really like about this book is how it makes those historical issues relatable to our contemporary era by drawing parallels and connections between the politicized press of the 19th century and present-day debates about free speech in social media. If modern Twitter warriors had lived in the 1800s, they would have needed to know how to handle a sword. 

One of the things I like about this type of book is that the main characters often have a secret identity.

To their classmates or teachers or parents, they’re just an ordinary kid—but when they’re not being watched, they’re doing something important and impactful. I love the tension of worrying that their secret identity might get found out. In this series, the main character’s secret identity is that she’s an accomplished and influential restaurant critic and no one knows, not even her parents. 

Before Life there was the Saturday Evening Post, a roaring success capturing the spirit of Middle America at a time when Middle America defined the cultural ethos of the nation. But by the late 1950s the potent reach of television advertising undermined the general-interest magazine business model, and the Post slipped into an inexorable spiral of decline that its top executives could never quite handle or even understand. There’s plenty of pathos and human drama as they struggle with forces beyond their control. 

Journalism takes many forms, and this readable study by a journalist-turned-academic examines some of the more alternative styles and outlets that operate beyond the corporate mainstream media industries. Alternative they may be, but the projects studied by Forde produce proper journalism rather than the uninformed commentary or aggressive shouting adopted by some who like to style themselves as ‘alternative media.’ None of the journalists she interviews would see themselves as heroes but, by defying the odds to produce independent reporting in the cause of social justice around the world, they engage in countless small acts of heroism every day. 

As a former professor of sociology and media studies at the University of Virginia, I was (and, of course, remain!) interested in the history of communication. In this book, I discovered the backstory to the creation of well-known documents that fueled the American Revolution and fostered lively debate in the ensuing decades.

I also enjoyed reading about writers, publishers, and printers (often, one and the same) whose literary works raised mudslinging to an art form and deepened divisions that threatened to upend the grand experiment of democracy in its infancy. But somehow, the incendiary press of the late eighteenth century became “the basis of a humane and enduring society.”

A highly perceptive if rather depressing examination of how the British media works, how expensive investigative journalism has largely given way to opinion columns and trivia about so-called celebrities, how stories are often not stories, how papers dress up partisan opinion as fact. In short, an exposure of the falsehoods, distortion, and propaganda that have corrupted the media. Nick Davies was a journalist at the Guardian.