From the Editors Archives - Page 130 of 171

Feature

Illiberal Democracy and Conceptual Clarity

Report from a Debate

August 4, 2017 • by Ewa Atanassow

This piece is part of the discussion generated by Jeffrey C. Isaac’s piece, Illiberal Democracy. This May 8 in Berlin -- a date and place whose symbolism cannot be mistaken -- the Hertie School of Governance launched the 2017 issue of the Governance Report. This year’s issue is devoted to the topic of ...

Illiberal Democracy and Conceptual Clarity

Feature

The Imaginal Politics of Empire

Thoughts on the images in the new Canadian passport

August 3, 2017 • by Serafina Appel

I. Imaginal Politics In 2013, the Canadian government redesigned Canada’s passports. The thirty-one pages that were until recently covered in faint maple leaves now boast images of two European explorer ships and one sailboat, five war memorials, two trains, one grand waterfall, two groups of policemen, hockey and football players with their ...

Education

Scandals in Higher Education

Race, Class and the Struggle Over Diminishing Resources

August 3, 2017 • by Claire Potter

As those of us who are college and university teachers gear up for the fall semester, our profession is briefly back in the news with a high focus on the heartbreak of college admissions. Let's start with genuine heartbreak. Last Saturday, we learned that UC Irvine had rescinded acceptances for almost 500 ...

Democracy

Illiberal Democracy Belongs to the Hybrid Regimes

Reflections on Jeffrey C. Isaac’s Illiberal Democracy

August 2, 2017 • by András Bozóki

Since the end of the “transition paradigm”[i] which displayed an optimistic belief in political progress, analysts had to accept that the development from dictatorship to democracy could be halted or reversed. General expectations notwithstanding, the democratic upheaval of 1989-1991 did not end in turning all dictatorships into liberal democracies. Not ...

Illiberal Democracy Belongs to the Hybrid Regimes

Feature

LIVE! Libraries, the Hamptons, and the Summer of Love

Past Present Episode 93

August 2, 2017 • by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Neil J. Young and Nicole Hemmer

In this week's special live episode, Niki, Neil, and Natalia debate funding cuts for libraries, the history of the Hamptons, and the legacy of the Summer of Love.

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LIVE! Libraries, the Hamptons, and the Summer of Love

Feature

Why Engage Public Anger

A reply to Chakravarti’s Introduction to ‘Sing the Rage’

August 1, 2017 • by Michael Weinman

“Sing the Rage” is a bold title for a bold book. It is no small provocation to thus entitle a book that argues for a more robust engagement with anger in public life in today’s democratic societies. The title is a further challenge for readers who recall the proem[1] to ...

Education

Media, the New Authoritarianism, and Its Alternatives Update

Teaching in Wroclaw, as liberal democracy is collapsing in Poland and beyond

August 1, 2017 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

I am exhausted. Conducting the seminar “Media, Publics and the New Authoritarianism” at this time, and in Poland, was intense, exciting, illuminating, and depressing. Coping with a combination of illumination and despair, I did not have the time or the constitution to properly digest what we were exploring together, and ...

Media, the New Authoritarianism, and Its Alternatives Update

Feature

When Women Fight for Health Care

Before Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, There Was Midge Costanza

July 31, 2017 • by Claire Potter

We are all still breathless from last week's near-repeal of Obamacare. As two Republican Senators, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, stood between the American public and a bill that would cut Medicare, defund Planned Parenthood, and throw the insurance industry into turmoil, keeping the consequences of ...

Feature

The Failure to Repeal and Replace Obamacare

Trumpism as Extremism’s Endgame

July 31, 2017 • by Sanford Schram

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has failed to get his chamber to join the House of Representatives in passing a repeal of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). He has handed President Donald Trump a major defeat that now tops the list of non-accomplishments of Trump’s failed presidency. In his daily ...

The Failure to Repeal and Replace Obamacare

Feature

Trump, Tweets, and the Dictatorial Mind

July 29, 2017 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

The Oxford English Dictionary defines dictation as “authoritative utterance or prescription . . . the making of a pronouncement. . . command.” It defines dictatorship as “A system of government by absolute rule of a single individual; a state ruled by a dictator.” Both words derive from the Latin word ...

Feature

The History of Sexuality has a Jewish Problem

The Difference Religion Makes to United States History

July 29, 2017 • by Gillian Frank

Recently I had the pleasure of being a respondent at a conference in honor of Heather White and Anthony Petro’s respective path breaking publications Reforming Sodom and After the Wrath of God. Both books make crucial interventions in the history of sexuality and LGBTQ history, two fields that are only ...

The History of Sexuality has a Jewish Problem

Feature

Black Bachelorette, White Mask

The Patterns of Subjugation and Oppression in Reality TV

July 28, 2017 • by Liz Scheer

There is no more popular culture, only ways of seeing populations as nothing. -- Nina Power, Thirty-one Theses on the Problem of the Public Like many faithful members of Bachelor Nation, I have long watched my favorite television show, The Bachelorette, with a healthy dose of irony. The sheer premise -- thirty-five ...