The Education of H Ctor Villa

Literature & Fiction

Williamson, Jr. Chilton

Contemporary

Chronicles Press/The Rockford Institute

Héctor Villa, a direct descendant of Pancho Villa, and his family have lived in the town of Belen, New Mexico, on the Rio Grande since they were guided across the inter- national border 20 years ago by coyotes. He has his own business as a computer repairman and con- siders himself a patriotic American and a proud supporter of President George W. Bush. Héctor believes in American values and the Republi- can Party, and he can't understand why everyone doesn't, including his best friend, Jesus "Eddie" Juarez. He still thinks of America as the Promised Land, but things begin to go wrong in his life, especially after he is drafted to run as the GOP can- didate for the U.S. House of Repre- sentatives from his district, begin- ning a series of misadventures that perplex and trouble him and his wife, AveMaría. The result is a kind of crisis of faith from which Héctor emerges as a sadder but wiser man. The Education of Héctor Villa is a novel on a highly contemporary subject, a work that combines satire and comedy with deep sympathy and pathos.

The End of Democracy?
The fall of the Berlin Wall. The collapse of the Iron Curtain. The Orange Revolution. The Arab Spring.
The rush of events in recent decades seems to confirm that Alexis de Tocqueville was right: the future belongs to democracy. But take a closer look. The history of democracy since the 1830s, when Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America, reveals a far more complicated picture. And the future, author Chilton Williamson Jr. demonstrates, appears rather unpromising for democratic institutions around the world.
The fall of communism sparked the popular notion that the spread of democracy was inevitable. After Tocqueville challenges this sunny notion. Various aspects of twenty-first-century life that Tocqueville could scarcely have imagined—political, economic, social, religious, intellectual, technological, environmental—militate against democracy, both in developing societies and in the supposedly democratic West.
This piercing, elegantly written book raises crucial questions about the future of democracy, including: •Just what is democracy? As Williamson shows, definitions and concepts have become so varied that the term is effectively meaningless. •How does a system whose institutions and habits arose in small-scale societies adapt to a postmodern, globalized world? •After two centuries of democratization, are Western countries really more free? •How can democracy endure when people care more about procuring what they want than about securing liberty? •How does a political system survive when it is beset by problems that cannot be solved by political means? Two decades ago, Francis Fukuyama famously pronounced the “end of history.” History, it turns out, is still very much with us. Democracy (whatever it is) may not be in the decades and centuries to come.

After Tocqueville: The Promise and Failure of Democracy

Politics & Social Sciences

Politics & Government

Intercollegiate Studies Institute

Jerusalem, Jerusalem!

Jerusalem, Jerusalem! is the final volume of the Fontenelle Trilogy. It is intended to stand together or independently with two previous novels, Desert Light and The Homestead. The story in this book is set in the early 1990's.

Genre Fiction

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Books by Williamson, Jr. Chilton