When the writer Fred Dewey died unexpectedly in 2021, largely unsung at the time but increasingly recognized in Europe and the US as a startlingly original political thinker, this manuscript, five years in the writing, was fortunately saved and is finally publicly available.
Without the Consent of the People was written as a direct response to the post-2016 landscape of Bernie, Trump, Black Lives Matter, and January 6th. Dewey's amazingly fresh insights constitute a valuable primer for the way we all might begin to conduct ourselves as citizens, presaging the appearance of ICE on US streets and the decay of the international human rights order.
Dewey's new book is a heartfelt invitation to America, invoking Thomas Paine, Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin and others, an invaluable portrait of civic disintegration and re-building, with clear-eyed, incisive prescriptions of how we can come together and co-create a country all of us will want to live in.
