The Progressive Magazine writes about their "favorite books of 2017." John Nichols writes about Gar Alperovitz’s Principles of a Pluralist Commonwealth released by the Democracy Collaborative:
Of the several 2017 books that might best be described as “roadmaps” for a future that renews America’s promise and extends it to all, the finest is Gar Alperovitz’s Principles of a Pluralist Commonwealth (Democracy Collaborative).
A veteran Congressional aide and special assistant with the U.S. Department of State, Alperovitz is a political economist and historian who taught at the University of Maryland, College Park. He reports from the frontlines of the struggle to forge a new economy that meets individual, community, and ecological needs by breaking the bonds of corporate capitalism. And he is optimistic.
Alperovitz’s book projects a politics that will go well beyond the Trump presidency. Drawing on his work with the visionary New Economics Institute and Democracy Collaborative projects, Alperovitz concludes that “a broad range of new institutions is quietly developing just below the surface of most political reporting.” Those institutions form the outlines of a next America that has nothing to do with the narrow calculations that gave us Trumpism and everything to do with the real democracy that will forge “a system robust, rigorous, and resilient enough to tackle all the hard questions.”