Every so often, a satchel of books lands on my doorstep, providing several months worth of intriguing reading. This delivery brought a half-dozen books, dealing with fallout from 9/11 or subsequent developments; three dealt with government decision-making; a fourth with changes to gender roles in American society; and the last two offer personal observations stemming from regional travel. All of these, however, help to illustrate German sociologist Robert Michel's argument, made in his 1911 book Political Parties, that inevitably, all social structures tend towards oligarchies.

First among these offerings is The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (Viking Canada, 496 pp.), a controversial work by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, political science professors at the universities of Chicago and Harvard. A much shorter article-length version of The Israel Lobby had been published in the spring of 2007, causing much heated debate in American foreign policy circles, and its fall release also saw the publication of The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control (Palgrave, 256 pp.), a rebuttal by Abraham H. Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League. Mearsheimer, Walt and Foxman engage in a fairly predictable dance: Mearsheimer and Walt attempt to document instances where intervention by various pro-Israel lobbies have caused the government of the United States to pursue courses of action not in its best interest, while Foxman attempts to label the pair anti-Semites without exposing himself to libel. There are two main distinctions that Mearsheimer and Walt attempt to explain at the outset: first, that the various pro-Israel groups do not act differently from any of the other various lobby groups; and second, that pro-Israel does not necessarily mean Jewish. This last misconception, they argue, often inhibits a balanced discussion of the role of the pro-Israel lobby. With his shrill tone, Foxman, for his part, proves them right.

While Charlie Savage's Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy (Little, Brown and Company, 416 pp.) concerns several of the same people as The Israel Lobby, the main focus here is on attempts to take back presidential prerogatives lost to Congress after the fall of the Nixon administration. Two of the key players include John Ashcroft and Dick Cheney, both of whom started their White House careers under Nixon and Ford. These initiatives are backed by the so-called Unitary Executive Theory of government. The theory holds that the U.S. Constitution essentially frees the U.S. president from the laws and oversight of Congress, and, as Savage demonstrates, played a large role in the decision-making processes of the Bush-Cheney government — this despite the theory's 1988 dismissal at the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court.

A return of a different sort is viewed in Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (Metropolitan, 368 pp.), in which Faludi examines the efforts of mainstream American media to reconstruct traditional gender stereotypes in the wake of 9/11. Ignoring the role played by women in rescuing victims while also downplaying the suffering of men who lost wives and children, Faludi fails to offer an explanation as to why, and by whom, such stereotypes are desired. Eventually, Faludi focuses on media depictions of Pte. 1st Class Jessica Lynch and her dramatic military rescue from Iraqi forces, a feat whose peril and suffering were greatly exaggerated. Faludi contends that Lynch's story echoes the traditional U.S. historical captivity narrative that originated in the so-called Indian Wars. It’s familiar to modern audiences in movies like John Wayne's The Searchers. (Indeed, a quote from Alan Le May's novel of the same name provides Faludi with her title). As with Lynch and many of the women Faludi follows, the harrowing stories of women captured by Native American tribes and their triumphant rescue at the hands of virile American men rarely matched the reality described by these women themselves.

Taken together, these books form examples showing that various bureaucratic or corporate divisions (since the media plays such a large role in Faludi's work) have spent the last quarter of a century increasingly distancing themselves from the lives and realities of American citizens. Faludi’s account of the ghostwriting of Lynch’s story is especially poignant here. Even in the work of Mearsheimer and Fox, the discussion is not on the actions of particular individuals, Jewish or not, but rather on the behaviour and relationships between various corporate bodies. While Robert Michels argued that this distance was the result of the inevitable complexity of modern societies, social organizations and the demands of timely decision-making, Mearsheimer, Walt, Savage and Faludi would all equally stress the narrowing of viewpoints expressed among the conservative leaderships of these different groups. As Savage states throughout Takeover, the free and open discussion of ideas and information is vital to the functioning of a democracy. It’s threatened when the voices of the public are excluded, whether by journalists and editors, or White House politicians narrowly defined to the limited conservative circles of the Nixon-Ford-Reagan-Bush (I and II) administrations.

The more conversations and decisions are limited to select groups, wrote Michels, the more any organization or society will take on the appearance of an oligarchy. The remedy — personal travel and the deliberate inclusion of contrary points of view — may not do much for efficiency, but do more to help keep democratic societies open. Thus, books such as Kevin Sites’s In The Hot Zone: One Man, One Year, Twenty Wars (HarperCollins Canada, 368 pp.) and Jonathan Garfinkel's Ambivalence: Crossing the Israel/Palestine Divide (Viking Canada, 320 pp.), with their emphasis on direct personal contact with people and not bureaucratic structures, are important supplements to the views being discussed by more corporate writers. Sites, a documentary filmmaker, has chronicled his journeys throughout Africa, Southeast Asia and the Middle East in 2006, while Garfinkel, a Toronto-based poet, playwright and self-described Zionist, chronicles his own trip to Israel and into the occupied territories in search of deeper understanding.