Books like The Paradox of Democracy — picked by fans

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. 

I worked in local papers at the start of my career and was always amazed at why a network that had so many talented writers produced so few books about the hilarious things and the tragic things we experienced. I think it's partly because local newspapers are often seen as a stepping stone, we focus on the famous at the pinnacle of their career, editing a national newspaper for example, when in fact local news careers could and should be an end in themselves.

Roger Lytollis is not only a brilliant writer, but his book is remarkably personal in the way he faces his own demons and how journalism helped him cope with extreme shyness and depression. Coupled with hilarious stories, I couldn't put it down.

I had the privilege of talking with Angèle at an event and discussing our different book projects.

The wonderful thing about this book it is reveals that the interaction between technology and journalism is incredibly culturally specific. We tend to think that every newsroom engages with technology in the same way, but Angèle shows that long-standing national journalistic cultures influence how technologies are adopted and used.

The book is also an ethnography, which means that it offers a wonderful insight into the day-to-day practices of the newsroom.

The book Out on Assignment examines the careers of overlooked women who wrote for major metropolitan newspapers at the beginning of the twentieth century. Using archival materials, Alice Fahs describes a community of female journalists from numerous American cities. These newspaper women were part of a wave of women seeking a journalism career although their options were often limited. Although a few female journalists found hard-news reporting jobs in stunt work and undercover assignments, most found work in the women’s pages.

In these sections, they interviewed celebrities, advice columns, and suffrage news. Very little research has been done on women’s page journalism; this book provides an excellent foundation.

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.”

This cover completely drew me in because the typewriter, cityscape, and WWII airplanes all show an urgency and a story just waiting to be told. Cohen writes about prominent WWII foreign correspondents, including Dorothy Thompson and Frances Fineman, who travel the world in search of the latest war update. It was certainly not as easy to get from country to country back then—especially across vast oceans—so I really appreciated their determination to travel.