Thirteen Cracks
Repairing American Democracy after Trump
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- 19,99 €
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- 19,99 €
Publisher Description
America’s founders feared a president like Donald Trump. Through the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, they erected a fortified but constrained government to secure the benchmarks of our democracy and established the guardrails designed to protect it. But Trump pushed almost every one of the Framers’ safeguards to its limit—most held, but some broke under the weight of presidential abuses even the Framers did not foresee.
Thirteen Cracks will be the first book to expose the most vulnerable areas in our democracy, explain in historical context how President Trump uniquely and outrageously exploited these weak spots, and propose a fix for each challenge. Historian Allen J. Lichtman argues that Trump has put us at a pivot point in our history, where the survival of American democracy is at stake. But this is also an historic opportunity to shore up the vulnerabilities and to strengthen our democracy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
American University history professor Lichtman (The Case for Impeachment) identifies in this well-informed if somewhat slapdash account 13 "loopholes" in American democracy that President Trump "ruthlessly" exploited, and offers ideas on how to close them. Noting that major structural reforms, including the establishment of due process rights and the direct election of U.S. senators, have occurred after previous "times of crisis," Lichtman prescribes new laws, organizational changes, and private-sector programs to better protect the "principles of democracy" from a president's "will to power." But the proposed fixes, including the jailing of administration officials who defy Congress's subpoena power, the creation of a special court to hear legal challenges to executive orders, and a constitutional amendment to make Senate representation population-based, don't take the considerable obstacles such reforms would face into consideration. More enlightening are Lichtman's discussions of the ways in which previous presidents laid the groundwork for Trump's more flagrant violations of democratic norms. He notes, for instance, that Abraham Lincoln defied a ruling by Supreme Court chief justice Roger Taney in suspending habeas corpus during the Civil War, and that Federalist Party senators threatened to overturn the results of the 1800 election if John Adams lost. Readers will learn more about the historic fault lines of American democracy than how to repair them.
