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You know what? Kudos to this book for actually saying something with its full chest. I frequently come across political books that read like, "everything sucks and here's why," but this goes a step further with tangible and direct suggestions for what to do about it; it really is a guide of sorts.

Of course there's the standard solutions like ranked-choice voting and campaign finance reform, but this also discussed a concept of "citizen deliberation" (think of a souped-up round of jury duty except the results get pushed to a public election as a referendum question) that I'd never even heard of before. It even laid out real-world examples of how these have operated in the (then) recent past. There's also discussions on how to tweak recall election rules to better hold politicians accountable in between elections, and just an overall grab bag of specific things that foreign countries do.

The book reads as a little dated now because it was published in 2014 when the Greek austerity programs and the Eurozone crisis was the big news of the day. I did find it curious that even in a pre-Brexit/pre-Trump society the general attitude was described as "literally everyone from the far left to the far right hates establishment politicians". I guess the more things change the more they stay the same. But this is still definitely a book worth checking out if you come across it though.

Well it's a day that ends in 'Y', which means it's a beautiful day to despise the Russian government with every fiber of my being!

This is a powerful argument for asking Western governments to stop treating powerful heads of state as one-off, case-by-case studies; the Francos and Mugabes of the 20th century no longer provide the model of authoritarianism. Seemingly diverse countries with little in common beyond a desire to stay in power in the face of Western pressure (Venezuela, Iran, Zimbabwe to name a few) are all interconnected now in an effort to provide an air of legitimacy to each other. The overwhelming message they convey to their populaces is, "yes we're bad, but it could be worse, so don't fight to change things."

Rather than acting as a bridge to bring these oppressive regimes into the Western fold, post-Cold War economic overtures have instead acted as a rope that can be pulled against democracies for leverage (Germany being so dependent upon Russian gas pipelines and high-tech industries relying on Chinese rare earth suppliers come to mind). And on a smaller scale, cities like Vancouver and London allow powerful foreign nationals from hostile countries to park wealth in the form of real estate without repercussion, and at detriment to their own citizens.

I appreciate that the book tries to end on a more positive note, laying out a potential blueprint for how liberal democracies can combat deliberate misinformation, cyberwarfare aimed at infrastructure that we're pretending isn't already happening, and cultural defeatism in general, but it felt a touch too ambitious to me. Or maybe I'm already bought in to the idea that our enemies have too much of a head-start in the information age.