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The Gardens Of Democracy: A New American Story Of Citizenship, The Economy, And The Role Of Government (2011)

by Eric Liu(Favorite Author)

3.91 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

1570618232 (ISBN13: 9781570618239)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Sasquatch Books

review 1: Gardens of Democracy provides a digestible overview of topics often too hard to even chew on. The clarity of writing i s matched in the small pages, large font, and approachable look and feel of the cover and layout. I never thought such heavy content could be such an easy read, but these guys achieved it!As an author myself writing about emotional healing as an aspect of societal healing, this book provides a great basic framework to illustrate where our society is stuck and where we need to go to get thriving again.
review 2: It's hard to give this book a single rating... my reaction to it is kind of all over the map. With some parts I agreed, with some parts I (strongly) disagreed, and some parts I just couldn't tell where the authors were coming from or wh... moreat they were saying. However, this book is interesting and thought-provoking, and the authors acknowledge differing opinions and even encourage the reader to come up with their own ideas about American citizenship, economy, and government. The authors' argument is that we need to throw away our existing ideas and metaphors about how people and our government should behave and start fresh with things that we know work today and a new metaphor for American government: as a garden instead of a machine.What the difference is between those, I'm still not entirely clear and don't agree with their definitions. Nor am I convinced the authors are clear in their own minds exactly what the difference is. In their push to transcend the machine metaphor, they drastically over-simplify some current ideas and set up straw men to knock down. They also use the new metaphor to argue for some current liberal issues that strike me as doing exactly the opposite of transcending to the new metaphor. However, as someone who has tried to think of drastic changes we could make to have government work better, I have come to agree with the authors that a new way of thinking is necessary and a new metaphor would be helpful.It should be noted that the authors are very liberal and even staunchly Democrat in their ideology. Although they claim to have transcended the conflict between Democrat and Republican, they significantly distort Republican ideals and ascribe greed and idiocy as the reasons for holding them. They say that Democrat ideals are also wrong, but excuse many of them because the holders of those ideas had good motives and the ideals are just outdated as opposed to antithetical to human existence.The reason I bring this up is that, in many cases, the authors actually agree with conservatives about some ideals and how certain things should be done. They've pushed conservatives further to the right in order to claim some of that ground, and in one case they actually apologize to liberals for agreeing with a common conservative criticism of liberal ideas. In other cases they describe their opinion in a roundabout way, obfuscating the fact that they are long-held conservative values. Clearly they have not managed to transcend the conflict themselves, and to someone in the middle it gets in the way of clearly communicating their ideas.The end result of this is a three-star rating: it's worth reading, particularly because it's short, but if you're anything like me you will strongly agree with some of the authors' ideas, virulently disagree with others, and marvel at their floundering and inconsistency in others. How can they state that power should be disseminated to local levels as much as possible, claim that too much national control hurts citizenship, and simultaneously bash libertarian ideals of limited government? Or explain that liberals are not socialists while accusing conservatives of being anarchists? And I'm not buying that campaign finance reform is a general principle instead of one of the issues we need to think beyond to address the real problem. And why, if you're saying that government should be revising/shutting down old programs as much as it's creating new ones, do you have some darling exceptions? As someone who is currently projected to receive 75% or less of the Social Security benefits I'm paying for, I don't think there's a single government program that can't be redesigned. less

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