Practical Politics

This wise and sensible guide to practicing democracy will be invaluable to members of community and neighborhood organizations, parent-teacher associations, local government, citizens groups, and other grass-roots organizations.

Practical politics should be part of every school and college curriculum, with this handbook a basic text for the subject. It affords insights into how power and democracy work everywhere - in family, office and state - and shows how education in practical politics can enable people to recognize and deal with political problems

This wise and sensible guide to practicing democracy will be invaluable to members of community and neighborhood organizations, parent-teacher associations, local government, citizens groups, and other grass-roots organizations. It will also be of interest to anyone wanting a deeper understanding of how democracy should work--and why it often fails to do just that.

Political theorist Michael Walzer's classic guide is a perfect introduction to social activism, including what-to-do advice for deciding which issues to take on, organizing, fundraising, and providing effective leadership Political Action is a how-to book for activists that was written at one of the darkest moments of the Nixon administration and remains no less timely and intelligent and useful today. Michael Walzer draws on his extensive engagement in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s to lay out the practical steps necessary to keep movement politics alive both in victory and in defeat. What do people need to do when out of outrage or fear of looming disaster they come together to demand change? Should they focus on one or several issues? Should they form coalitions? What can and can’t be accomplished through electoral politics? How can movements operate democratically? What is effective leadership? Walzer addresses such questions with clarity, concision, wisdom, and wit in a book that everywhere insists not only on the centrality of movement politics to the health of democratic societies but on the deep satisfaction that is to be found there. Political Action is both an indispensable resource for activists and a lasting and inspiring summons to arms.

Are you one of the growing number of women who feels betrayed by political parties and mainstream feminist organizations who can no longer define what a woman is, let alone represent women's interests? Practical Politics for Bold Women is for women's rights campaigners who want to be heard, but may not be sure where to start. If you've ever gotten anyone else to agree to work with you towards a common goal, this book lays out steps you can take to build towards political achievement and influence.

"There are many persons, who, though possessing the suffrage, often put the question, "What is the use of a vote?" Giving small heed to political affairs, the issue of elections has as little interest for them as the debates in Parliament; and they imagine that the process of governing the country is mainly a self-acting one, upon which their individual effort could have the least possible effect. This idea is wrong at the root, and the cause of much mischief in politics. We are governed by majorities, and every vote counts." This book is a treatise on the political process by British journalist and political biographer Sir Alfred Farthings Robbins. It is comprised of a series of articles originally written for the publication, 'the Halfpenny Weekly'.

Underneath today's elections is a fierce battle for power driven not by the country's elected officials, but by organizations and people you have never heard of. Since the 1964 Goldwater defeat, conservative philanthropists have built a set of ideologically-aligned institutions -- think tanks, legal advocacy organizations, watchdog groups, and media vehicles -- to change the country's intellectual and political climate and to assure conservative political dominance. Progressives finally woke up to this structural disparity and have embarked on one of the most invigorating periods of renewal and growth in political history. This book tells the story of the brightest and best institutions leading this revival.

Henry A. Giroux challenges the contemporary politics of cynicism by addressing a number of issues including the various attacks on cultural politics, the multicultural discourses of academia, the corporate attack on higher education, and the cultural politics of the Disney empire.