David Faris's Critical Reads

David Faris is the author of Dissent and Revolution in a Digital Age: Social Media, Blogging and Activism in Egypt, the co-editor of Social Media in Iran: Politics and Society After 2009, and a regular contributor to The Week. He holds a PhD in political science from the University of Pennsylvania and is associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University in Chicago. David will discuss It's Time To Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics on Wednesday, 4/11, 6pm at the Co-op.

How Democratic is the American Constitution?, by Robert Dahl - Dahl's eloquent critique of the U.S. Constitution is, to me, every bit as accessible, radical and urgent as Zinn's "A People's History of the United States." An eminent scholar who contributed important ideas about democracy to the study of politics, this book is a late-career gem, in which he calls into question the democratic legitimacy of the U.S. Senate, America's voting laws, and many other features of the Constitutional order that we take for granted.

Packing the Court: The Rise of Judicial Power and the Coming Crisis of the Supreme Court, by James MacGregor Burns - Curiously, this book is not really about court-packing as we understand the term today. It is, instead, a revisionist look at the history of the Supreme Court, and one that positions it throughout most of its history as a conservative, anti-democratic institution that has mostly served to protect the power of white property owners. The book concludes with a call to discard the power of judicial review, which as Burns points out, is found nowhere in the Constitution.

The Submerged State: How Invisible Government Policies Undermine American Democracy, by Susanne Mettler - During the 2016 presidential election, counties that expanded Medicaid most sharply saw the largest shifts in votes toward the Republican Party from 2012. If this strikes you as an unexplainable paradox, you need to read Mettler's book. It's key insight is simple: government increasingly distributes its public goods through market actors, thereby obscuring the role that the state plays in ensuring fairness and equality. Voters, not surprisingly, do not give credit to Democrats for new benefits, but instead believe the market is more important.

It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism, by Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein - As important for who wrote it as for what it said, It's Even Worse Than It Looks places the blame for America's partisan dysfunction squarely at the feet of the post-1994 Republican Party. Tracing the GOP's hostage-taking schemes back to the 80s-era rise of Newt Gingrich, Mann and Ornstein outline the escalating behavior of norm-violating Republicans over the past 30 years, and offer readers a set of policy prescriptions to fix the problem. Critically, both Mann and Ornstein are regarded as non-partisan observers and scholars, and their decision to dispense so publicly and forcefully with "both sides" rhetoric only made their work more convincing.

Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, by Arlie Russell Hothschild - This is the book everyone should have been reading instead of Hillbilly Elegy to understand what is really happening with the white working class. Hothschild did extensive field research in rural Louisiana, and apart from its poignant rendition of the plight of the forgotten, paints a disturbing portrait of people willing to ignore plain, unmistakable evidence of corporate malfeasance, inequality and greed-driven environmental ruin so that they can continue blaming too much government for their problems.

Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn't Count, by David Daley - One of the most important books written in the last 5 years, Daley's history of the Republican gerrymandering project after the 2010 census helps us understand so much of what is broken about how we elect the House of Representatives (and many state legislatures). It is not an accident that Daley's book has coincided with a renewed progressive judicial project to challenge the legitimacy of gerrymandering in court.

Electoral System Design: The New International IDEA Handbook, by Andrew Reynolds, Ben Reilly and Andrew Ellis, eds - One of the least understood aspects of American political dysfunction is how much of an outlier our electoral procedures are from those used in the rest of the world. Unfortunately, we lack a great page-turning best-seller about electoral systems, so this handbook will have to do. In accessible prose, the authors walk readers through the mechanics of systems like proportional representation, in addition to the many ways other societies have used electoral engineering to achieve progressive goals, like increasing the representation of women and minorities in office.

Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats, by Matt Grossman and David A. Hopkins - One of the more illuminating studies to come out of the field of political science in recent years, Asymmetric Politics argues that the modern Republican Party has evolved into a sharply ideological organization, more in line with European parliamentary parties. The Democrats, on the other hand, maintain a motley coalition of interest groups - teachers' unions, minorities, urban liberals. Less well known than the central thesis is the idea that Americans have broadly progressive views on individual issues (i.e. abortion, gun control, health care) but express support for individualistic, conservative frames about politics and society as a whole, such as the idea that we should rely on ourselves for success and support.

The Locals, by Jonathan Dee - A brilliant allegory about the retreat of the state and the politics of austerity. In Dee's novel, the residents of a troubled, upstate New York hamlet turn over control of their town and its finances to a mysterious billionaire, who cuts taxes and makes up the difference in services by paying for them himself. The parallels to contemporary policymaking are unmistakable, but not lit up so brightly as to be unsubtle.

The Politics of Resentment, by Katherine J. Cramer - You can think of this as the Wisconsin version of Strangers in Their Own Land. A political scientist, Cramer spent time in rural Wisconsin interviewing residents about their political attitudes and identity, finding that their is a "rural consciousness" that includes resentment of urban America and a belief that the rural way of life is under attack. The Politics of Resentment is essential reading for those seeking to understand the urban-rural divide in American politics and life.

About It's Time to Fight Dirty: In the lead-up to the crucial 2018 midterm elections, an accessible, actionable blueprint for how Democrats can build a lasting majority

The American electoral system is clearly falling apart — evidenced more horrifically in the 2016 presidential election than ever before. In It’s Time to Fight Dirty, David Faris offers accessible, actionable strategies for American institutional reform that don’t require a constitutional amendment, and would have a lasting impact on our future.

With equal amounts of playful irreverence and persuasive reasoning, Faris describes how the Constitution’s deep democratic flaws constantly put progressives at a disadvantage, and lays out strategies for “fighting dirty” though obstructionism and procedural warfare: establishing statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico; breaking California into several states; creating a larger House of Representatives; passing a new voting rights act; and expanding the Supreme Court.

The Constitution may be the world’s most difficult document to amend, but David Faris argues many of America’s democratic failures can be fixed within its rigid confines. The stakes have never been higher than they are today, and in It’s Time to Fight Dirty, Faris outlines a path for long-term, progressive change in the United States.