This is an excellent book that challenges so many sacred cows concerning our assumptions about democracy. Alexander Boot is a rare thinker for our times - a deeply learned man (also, by the looks of his brief biog, with a career in business), with an ability to synthesise a wide range of ideas and cultural influences from the cannon of political thought. Aristotle, Tocqueville, Dr Johnson, Irving Kristol are just some of the writers analysed within these pages.
His ideas that democracy is a neo-con trick, put about by thinkers in Washington and elsewhere to pursue their own self interest above all others, including the humbug of categorising violent terrorist Muslims as 'islamists' (thus implying that Islam is a religion of peace, corrupted only by extremists, when it isn't) are provocative, certainly, and highly incisive in places. Boot is especially informed and interesting when he writes about his native Russia. The revolution that brought to an end the Soviet Union was not a revolution at all, he claims, merely the continuation of power and wealth (now vast wealth) from one bullying corrupt elite to another, via the mechanism of KGB.
Read this book. You may not agree with it all, but it will challenge your preconceptions about democracy, and it deserves a wide audience.
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