When Democracy Is on the Line: A Pre- and Post-Election Reading List
October 28, 2024
Here we are again with the nail-biting tension from four years ago. The neck-and-neck polls between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump alerted our attention to other issues at play in addition to the debate and rally talking points. Lies about voter fraud that distract us from how voter suppression at the systemic level threatens our voting rights. How those behind the scenes of the campaign industry shape the way we talk about politics. Why freedom and abolition mean different things to different communities.
Whatever the outcome of the election—no orange-tanned dictatorship, please!—these issues will still be with us after Inauguration Day as they have been before each election cycle. This batch of selected titles from Beacon’s catalog is for these times when the democratic US we want is on the line.
Understanding the Powers That Be
The Court v. the Voters: The Troubling Story of How the Supreme Court Has Undermined Voting Rights
“A close analysis of the Supreme Court’s rulings reveals that—in a project that has spanned decades—the Court has contributed to the rise of anti-democracy forces animating our elections. Its decisions unduly defer to state legislators to craft election rules that help politicians stay in power while failing to protect voters. The Declaration of Independence says that a government’s legitimacy derives from the consent of the governed, yet the Court’s decisions have allowed entrenched politicians to suppress the votes of people who might vote against them.”
—Joshua A. Douglas
Five Dollars and a Pork Chop Sandwich: Vote Buying and the Corruption of Democracy
“Paying people to vote for a specific candidate may not seem to fit the definition of “voter suppression,” but it is one of several ways that campaign operators manipulate the outcome of elections. Vote buying, misuse of absentee ballots, and other stratagems tend to defraud the very citizens who need government services the most: the poor, the elderly, and minority voters. These are also the people who may not have “proper” government-issued identification to vote. Whether their vote is bought, or not cast at all, their political power is suppressed. Buying votes is another form of suppression: paying eligible citizens to vote for candidates whom they might not otherwise support. And since a single ballot lists candidates for other offices at the local, state, and even federal level, the entire election can be corrupted.”
—Mary Frances Berry
“To understand campaigns, then, we need to understand the people whose work builds them: the political consultants and political operatives who make their living working for parties, campaigns, and allied partisan organizations. Just as the decision-makers at Netflix, HBO, and ABC determine what kinds of entertainment to provide, these campaign professionals curate our political options. The ways they shape the system and its offerings for voters come out of their perceptions of what is politically possible, which persuasion strategies are effective, how the electorate operates, and what will make sense to and be rewarded by the rest of the political world. Politicos’ beliefs about how politics ought to work and how regular people see politics shape the decisions, strategies, and public messaging of the party leaders, presidents, legislators, and governors they advise.”
—Daniel Laurison
Reconsidering Reagan: Racism, Republicans, and the Road to Trump
“[T]here are a number of important parallels between Reagan and Trump. The self-proclaimed ‘Errol Flynn of the B’s,’ and the reality-television host both began their public lives in the entertainment industry. Even if Reagan had served two terms as governor of California, he, like Trump, was not well-versed in the details of domestic or foreign policy and did not have much interest in becoming better versed. Both men ran for the presidency as ‘Washington outsiders.’ Furthermore, both the Reagan and Trump administrations were marred by rampant corruption. By the end of his presidency, the Reagan White House was mired in a miasma of corruption that enveloped a whopping 138 members of his administration, who faced investigation, indictment, or convictions for their roles in the numerous scandals that beset the administration. Perhaps it is no accident that Trump became a cultural icon during the Reagan era, the 1980s, ‘the decade of greed.’”
—Daniel S. Lucks
Hot-Topic Debate Issues
Christians Against Christianity: How Right-Wing Evangelicals Are Destroying Our Nation and Our Faith
“A travesty. That’s how I would characterize Christianity in America today. A travesty, a brutal sham, a tragic charade, a cynical deceit. Why? Because the loudest voices in American Christianity today—those of right-wing evangelicals—shamelessly spew a putrid stew of religious ignorance and political venom that is poisoning our society, making a mockery of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Their rhetoric in the name of their Lord and Savior is mean-spirited, divisive, appallingly devoid of love for their neighbors and outright demonizes those who do not accept their narrow views—even fellow Christians.”
—Obery M. Hendricks, Jr.
Don’t Look Left: A Diary of Genocide
“In the morning I read the news. The news is about us. But it’s designed for people reading it far, far away, who couldn’t possibly imagine they could ever know anyone involved. It’s for people who read the news to comfort themselves, to tell themselves: it’s still far, far away. I read the news for different reasons, I read it to know I’m not dead. Presumably the dead don’t read the news; I could be wrong.”
—Atef Abu Saif
Humanizing Immigration: How to Transform Our Racist and Unjust System
“I make the case for dismantling ICE. I call for continued disruption until transformation of the system is accomplished. Let me be absolutely clear about my starting point: immigration laws and enforcement policies are racist. In fact, those laws and policies are the quintessential examples of institutionalized racism. Think only of the foundational immigration laws that began with the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) and the national origins quota of the Immigration Act of 1924, which favored Western Europeans, and infamous immigration roundups, such as Operation Wetback (1954), which targeted Mexican braceros, who had been issued temporary US work permits to ease labor shortages.”
—Bill Ong Hing
Trust Women: A Progressive Christian Argument for Reproductive Justice
“The reproductive justice movement offers a more robust and demanding ethical theory for approaching women’s reproductive health. By starting with the concrete realities of women’s lives, a reproductive justice ethic can rightly focus on healthy sexuality, empowered motherhood, selfcare, and robust families. The movement was born in the United States out of the efforts of women of color seeking to broaden the traditional abortion-rights movement by responding to a fuller understanding of the issues associated with women’s reproduction.”
—Rebecca Todd Peters
Building and Sustaining Democracy
Daring Democracy: Igniting Power, Meaning, and Connection for the America We Want
“When we assert that democracy is essential we mean that it’s not just a ‘good’ thing. It is the only approach to governance that brings forth the best of who we are. To really thrive, to live our possibility, we hold that beyond the physical, humans must meet at least three essential needs: for connection, meaning, and a sense of agency—that is, a sense of personal power. When these needs are met we can often accomplish what virtually no one before believed possible.”
—Frances Moore Lappé and Adam Eichen
Dirt Road Revival: How to Rebuild Rural Politics and Why Our Future Depends on It
“We’ve watched since 2009 as the Democratic Party abandoned rural Americans—our communities—allowing the rural vote to trend red, with little effort to stop the bleeding. The 2016 presidential election made clear that the consequences of these choices have produced an existential threat to American democracy, plainly illustrated in Donald Trump’s ascendancy and the 2021 US Capitol attack. Rural red districts like the ones that we grew up in have become a decisive force swinging national politics toward an extreme right-wing agenda. Reuniting our country depends on forging a new political paradigm for Democrats in rural America.”
—Chloe Maxmin and Canyon Woodward
We Need to Build: Field Notes for Diverse Democracy
“[A] potluck supper is about the best symbol there is for a diverse democracy. Potlucks are civic spaces that both embody and celebrate pluralism. They rely on the contributions of a diverse community. If people don’t bring an offering, the potluck doesn’t exist. If everyone brings the same thing, the potluck is boring. And what a nightmare it would be if you brought your best dish to a potluck and you were met at the door with a giant machine that melted it into the same bland goo as everybody else’s best dish. The whole point of a potluck is the diversity of dishes.”
—Eboo Patel
Change Starts with Us at the Ground Level
Let My People Vote: My Battle to Restore the Civil Rights of Returning Citizens
“All rights are important to returning citizens: to be able to surpass occupational license restrictions or housing restrictions or education restrictions; to serve on a jury; to run for office; and to own a firearm. All of these make up an individual’s civil rights. But when I looked at all of those rights, the one that stuck out more than any other was the right to vote. I had learned over the course of the years since returning from prison that nothing speaks more to citizenship than being able to have your voice heard. If we were limited to just dealing with one issue at a time, that seemed like the single most important civil right. Nothing restores dignity more effectively than the right to vote, which in turn can lead to all kinds of other positive momentum for an individual.”
—Desmond Meade
School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics, and the Battle for Public Education
“It is hard to consider current school board battles without revisiting the 1970s, when the Christian right movement began to crystallize. This crystallization was also marked by the founding of new think-tanks such as the Heritage Foundation (formed in 1973); the Libertarian Cato Institute, in 1977; and the Leadership Institute in 1979. Yet at the time, its growth was largely overlooked, according to Matthew C. Moen, a well-regarded scholar of the Christian right. Politicians and journalists were caught off guard, and scholars, he wrote, ‘ignored the Christian Right’s infiltration of state Republican party organizations until the Reagan era was over.’”
—Laura Pappano
When Freedom Is the Question, Abolition Is the Answer: Reflections on Collective Liberation
“Freedom as a living thing and a vital aspiration is partially revealed when we look unblinkingly into the face of unfreedom: if unfreedom includes being prevented from voting, then freedom must involve the act of voting; if unfreedom is in part being forced to attend underfunded, segregated, miseducating schools, freedom embraces integrating into the privileged schools and fighting for an honest curriculum; if unfreedom is having no roof over your family’s head, freedom includes having access to adequate housing; if unfreedom is policies and politics of caging and cruelty, exclusion and dehumanization, then freedom must unlock the cages and abolish those heartless practices. Freedom in fact is always freedom in opposition.”
—Bill Ayers
About the Author
Christian Coleman is the digital marketing manager at Beacon Press and editor of Beacon Broadside. Before joining Beacon, he worked in writing, copy editing, and marketing positions at Sustainable Silicon Valley and Trikone. He graduated from Boston College and the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. Follow him on Twitter at @coleman_II and on Bluesky at @colemanthe2nd.bsky.social.