We all are obviously intensely interested in politics but just have different views on things. So why not a book club? We could vote on the book or other written work to read, set a time frame and then start a thread to discuss the implications of what we read. Obviously those who read the entirety of the chosen work will have an advantage over those who can only get a few chapters in, but I think even that would allow those who simply don't have the time to sit down and read something in full to still participate. I suggest works that are in the public domain and therefore free or cheaply available to all and we could discuss a variety of books and works such as the US Constitution, the Magna Carta or other primary legal documents. Naturally some are quite a bit more complex than others so they can be broken down into sections which would aid in encouraging discussions without having to go through the entire work which would likely take a fairly long time.
Nice idea, but things like the Magna Carta and the US or any Constitution are documents more than books. It might be hard to discuss them in this non-intellectual or anti-intellectual environment. As a political science student, I read a lot of books on politics. As much as I'd love a discussion of Elinor Ostrom's Governing the Commons, I don't think it will fly. Maybe you could start with Aristotle's Politics. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6762 It's free and an important work. Maybe then, Plato's Republic, some of the works of St. Augustine, Machiavelli's The Prince, Hobbes' Leviathan, Locke's Second Treatise on Government, Mill's On Liberty and writings of Rousseau, Kant, Nietzsche, Hume, and Smith.
I would be interested. The problem, though, is to get people to participate, as the lack of responses to this thread attests to the fact that it is hard getting people to discuss books.