In the Long Run By Jonathan White ... Democracy is future-oriented and self-correcting: today's problems can be solved, we are told, in tomorrow's elections. But the biggest issues facing the modern world - from climate collapse and pandemics to recession and world war - each apparently bring us to the edge of the irreversible. What happens to democracy when the future seems no longer open? In this eye-opening history of ideas, Jonathan White investigates how politics has long been directed by shifting visions of the future, from the birth of ideologies in the nineteenth century to Cold War secrecy and the excesses of the neoliberal age. As an inescapable sense of disaster defines our politics, White argues that a political commitment to the long-term may be the best way to safeguard democracy. Wide in scope and sharply observed, In the Long Run is a history of the future that urges us to make tomorrow new again.
Author
![Jonathan White]()
Jonathan White
Historian Jonathan W. White is 2023 joint winner of the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize and the author of many books including, most recently, A House Built by Slaves: African American Visitors to the Lincoln White House (R&L, 2022). His numerous articles, essays, and reviews on Lincoln and the Civil War Era have appeared in Smithsonian, Time, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. He teaches American studies at Christopher Newport University and resides in Newport News, VA.