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As New Zealand gears up to a general election this November, there’s a new party on the scene that I suggest outsiders keep an eye on. New Zealand is among the world’s healthiest democracies. In 2017, when the far right were gaining support globally and social democrats were in the doldrums, New Zealand bucked the…
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Suppose an island appears in the Pacific Ocean. An island that has never existed before. Many people of the world decide to settle it, until it has a similar population and settlement pattern to New Zealand. We can guess that the islanders would want their own government. They would want it to be democratic. And…
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What a fitting cover! The title Against Elections: The Case for Democracy (2013) may sound like a contradiction to most people. It shouldn’t be. In the Western world, we have an ingrained view that “democracy = elections”. But David Van Reybrouck, a Belgian historian and author, makes a provocative but strong case in this book…
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Conservatism is a philosophy of sex and death That’s an actual quote from Danny Kruger’s book Covenant: The New Politics of Home, Neighbourhood and Nation (2023) and it makes sense in context. I read this book because I think it’s healthy to sometimes read from different perspectives to your own. Kruger wrote it to argue…
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When confronted with the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, John F. Kennedy had on his mind a book that he had recently read. It was The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman’s newly-published and now-classic account of how the European powers blundered into the First World War. Kennedy was impressed by the book and encouraged many…
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Frome, a mid-sized town in the English county of Somerset A few of us have predicted that radical assembly-based parties could be The Next Big Thing in politics. But how would one actually work? Assemblies What do we mean by assembly-based? This would partly mean that the party would use the incredible potential of randomly-selected…
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Roger Hallam is not known for optimism. The co-founder of Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil is quite the fire-and-brimstone preacher when it comes to climate change. But when I heard him a few weeks ago on a call with Assemble and like-minded activists, he sounded genuinely hopeful about the assemblies that they were about…
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Many have wondered, as I have, why we study history. For a long time, I only really did it for fun, only in the last few years beginning to realise that it can do more. Seeing the past puts present-day problems in perspective. It can give clues as to what may happen next, but one…
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In the Western world and especially the United States, the political left has a problem. It is increasingly seen as a champion of the identity politics of discriminated groups to the exclusion of others, sometimes rightly and often wrongly. Yascha Mounk had previously written books such as The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is…
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There are two types of people – those who haven’t read John Rawls and those who are politics graduates. The Harvard professor revolutionised political philosophy with his book A Theory of Justice (1971), yet is rarely discussed in the world of politics. In his book Free and Equal (2023), Daniel Chandler, a political advisor turned…
