Feature Archives - Page 41 of 150

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Protesting Kavanaugh

Hundreds of women, plus a few men, arrested protesting Kavanaugh confirmation

October 5, 2018 • by Jo Freeman

The confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court stretched out for the month of September as the Hart Senate Office Building was repeatedly occupied by protesters. Led by the Center for Popular Democracy but mobilized by several different groups, the protesters were overwhelmingly female, ...

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Wearing It On Our Sleeves

A Millennial’s Response to Christine Blasey Ford

October 4, 2018 • by Hannah Leffingwell

Lately I’ve taken to wearing t-shirts, buttons, and pins that clearly identify me. “Dyke,” reads one, succinctly. “Black Lives Matter,” reads another, a gift from my girlfriend. “Fesbian Leminist” I include for an element of humor. It isn’t enough, I convince myself in the wake of the 2016 election, to merely ...

Democracy

Why Do Authoritarian Leaders Appeal Today?

The age of the strongman

October 4, 2018 • by Ruth Ben-Ghiat

Ours is the age of the strongman. In Hungary, Russia, and many other places, authoritarian leaders attempt, with varying degrees of success, to undermine the rule of law, purge state bureaucracies of non-loyalists, make public office a vehicle for private profit, use propaganda to spread their versions of reality, and ...

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Post-Kavanaugh Stress Disorder

Ending our political suffering will be a bigger project than winning the next election

October 3, 2018 • by Claire Potter

Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last Thursday, and Brett Kavanaugh’s unhinged response to her charges, was an epic installment of the Trump Show, now in season two. It’s probably safe to say that neither Kavanaugh or the GOP leadership care whether they alienate women voters by ...

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2018 Brazilian Elections

The end of a crisis or the beginning of another?

October 3, 2018 • by Theo Almeida

The Brazilian presidential election of this year has the potential to scale back the political crisis that the country has been facing for the last 4 years. Alas, it seems that it will also increase the political division of the society even more. Lula’s representative, Fernando Haddad, affiliated with the ...

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Populism in the Twenty-First Century

An Illiberal Democratic Response to Undemocratic Liberalism

October 2, 2018 • by Cas Mudde

Populism emerged in the mid-nineteenth century in Russia and the United States but remained almost irrelevant to European politics until the 1990s. Since then, populism has become a major political phenomenon throughout Europe. Today, we live in a “populist Zeitgeist” (Mudde 2004), in which populist parties and rhetoric dominate the ...

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Has Brett Kavanaugh Lost His Mind?

A Lawyer’s Follow-Up to Jeffrey C. Isaac and Peter Dreier

October 2, 2018 • by Bill Barnes

As a trial lawyer of 33 years, watching Brett Kavanaugh’s astonishing opening statement at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on September 27, my immediate reaction was, “How could he be doing this? In public and on the record! Has he lost his mind?” Kavanaugh is a highly experienced, very smart jurist; ...

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Lessons for Democrats from 1970’s Chile

The striking parallels between the Chilean media polarization leading up to Pinochet’s coup and our current journalistic and political schisms

October 2, 2018 • by Jay Blumler

On September 11th, 1973, Chile’s Popular Unity government led by President Salvador Allende was overthrown by a military coup staged by General Augusto Pinochet. One year earlier, in autumn 1972, I had conducted 25 interviews with media and political personnel in Santiago and Valparaiso. The Catholic University of Chile had ...

Blue Monday

Beyond the Three Faces of Power?

What we can learn from the recent Kavanaugh hearings

October 1, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

Politics is about power. And power is everywhere. To locate it is to locate the social agents who have the ability to shape our lives and the processes by which they can do so. Social and political theorists have debated about the concept of power, and the sources and locations ...

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The Paradoxes of Identity Politics

A critique of recognition

October 1, 2018 • by Adam Louis Klein

1. Invention In 1975, Roy Wagner wrote a groundbreaking book called The Invention of Culture arguing, essentially, that the only cross-cultural universal was invention itself: creativity. Wagner’s book initiated a crucial sublation in anthropology -- arguably waiting to happen -- from cultural relativity to the relativity of Culture itself. “Culture,” and all those related notions ...

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The Tragedy of Professor Christine Blasey Ford / The Folly of Judge Brett Kavanaugh

On the presentation of self and the pursuit of justice

September 30, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

I was not intending to watch the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings from beginning to end, but Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony on Thursday morning was so compelling that my writing had to wait. I was mesmerized by a truth-teller. Her testimony was an amazing combination of embodied reason and affect. Clearly very ...

The Tragedy of Professor Christine Blasey Ford / The Folly of Judge Brett Kavanaugh

Feature

Brett Kavanaugh Unhinged? Unlikely

Reflections on his testimony and on the need to resist his candidacy

September 29, 2018 • by Peter Dreier

Some reporters, bloggers, and pundits think that during his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, Judge Brett Kavanaugh just “lost it” and became "unhinged." I disagree. I have no doubt that he was angry and emotional, but his belligerent and partisan comments were also very strategic and calculated. He was not out ...