Matt Duss

[Welcome Malcolm Nance, and Host Matt Duss] [As a courtesy to our guests, please keep comments to the book.  Please take other conversations to a previous thread.  - bev] An End to Al-Qaeda: Destroying Bin Laden’s Jihad and Restoring America’s Honor Few Americans can claim the knowledge of radical terrorist ideologies that Malcolm Nance can. [...]

The problem of demagogues – political figures who fashion themselves as leaders of the masses and who will go to almost any extreme to hold and expand their power — is one that has stalked democracy from its very beginnings. It is one generated by the tension at the very heart of democracy – if political power is invested in, and derived from the will of the people, how to protect against leaders who stir up the people’s passions for their own destructive ends? In this book, an impressive work of philosophy and political science that is both rigorous and accessible, writer, analyst, and current candidate for Lt. Governor of Virginia Michael Signer explores the problem of the demagogue from the ancient Greeks down to the present day.

“I confess,” writes Stan Greenberg in the introduction to Dispatches from the War Room, “I’m a member of ‘the pollster industrial complex.’” Greenberg’s fascinating new book recounts his experiences working as a consultant to five leaders – Bill Clinton, Nelson Mandela, Britain’s Tony Blair, Israel’s Ehud Barak, and Bolivia’s Gonzalo Sanchez de Losada – all of whom knew or discovered that engaging with popular opinion was necessary to govern effectively in a democracy.

FDL Book Salon Welcomes Peter W. Galbraith, author of Unintended Consequences: How the War in Iraq Strengthened America’s Enemies

In his 2006 book, The End of Iraq, Ambassador Peter W. Galbraith drew upon his years of experience in the Middle East to analyze the multiple failures in judgment and decision-making that resulted in the fracturing of Iraq between Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites.