“This is a book about the ways a healthy democracy should connect people to each other and to the place they call home. It is about the toxic politics that reverse and disrupt that process. It is about the failures at the heart of democracy…” So says Rafael Behr. His project was conceived and written in the aftermath of a heart attack that very nearly did for him at the age of 45.
He writes during a period of turbulence. Across Europe and in the US, populists of right and left, often under the cloak of nationalism, are on the rise. UK politics during the past decade has been a rollercoaster, both main parties having succumbed to takeovers by cults. Meanwhile the world beyond fortress Europe appears to be disintegrating, and looming ever larger over our comfortable little lives are the potentially existential threats of global heating and mass migration.
