Democracy Archives - Page 2 of 55

Democracy

A Republic, If We Can Afford It

Our Republic depends on both economic stability and civic participation

November 6, 2025 • by Larry Schwartz

When the Constitutional Convention of 1787 ended, Benjamin Franklin was asked what form of government the delegates had created. His reply—“A republic, if you can keep it”—was no mere quip from an aging sage. It was a warning that republics are fragile, rare, and never self-sustaining. What Franklin implied was that ...

Democracy

Is Social Media Destroying Democracy—Or Giving It to Us Good and Hard?

It’s easier to blame the algorithm than the bewildered herd

October 28, 2025 • by Dan Williams

One of our era’s most influential narratives is that social media is destroying democracy and perhaps civilization itself. For the liberal establishment, this story helps to explain the surging success of right-wing populism, as well as collapsing institutional trust, growing polarization, and an apparent explosion of misinformation and deranged conspiracy ...

Democracy

Can Poetry Re-Enchant the Modern World?

The philosopher Charles Taylor goes hunting for cosmic connections

October 27, 2025 • by Sarah V. Schweig

When the protagonist of Miranda July’s recent novel, All Fours, plummets into a crisis, she realizes, at age 45, that she “had entirely misunderstood the assignment, the scale of what life asked of us.” She had “only been living second to second—just coping—this whole time.” Being a writer, the character’s ...

Artificial Intelligence

Data Sovereignty vs. Digital Prospecting

AI’s reckoning in the Amazon

October 23, 2025 • by Annie K. Lamar and Sarah B. McClure

“Now, for the first time in history, anyone can conduct archaeological research,” or so promised artificial intelligence giant OpenAI in a recent promotion-via-public competition. Marketed as an Indiana Jones–style adventure, the “OpenAI to Z Challenge” invited users to digitally scour the Amazon rainforest for archaeological treasure. More than 2,500 teams ...

Data Sovereignty vs. Digital Prospecting

Activism

Should Universities Just Leave?

How can institutions fostering open inquiry survive authoritarian assaults?

October 23, 2025 • by Anastasija Mladenovska

Over the past year, I have tracked the journeys of five universities caught in the crosshairs of authoritarian pressure: Central European University (CEU) in Hungary; the Higher School of Economics (HSE) and the European University at St. Petersburg (EUSP) in Russia; Nazarbayev University (NU) in Kazakhstan; and the American University ...

Europe & Central Asia

The Gospel According to Queer Russians

Sergey Khazov-Cassia’s newly translated novel reimagines Christ’s story as a parable of queer suffering and resistance in Putin’s Russia

October 22, 2025 • by Katherine Kelaidis

For more than a decade, Russia—and its client states like Chechnya—have carried out the brutal persecution of sexual and gender minorities, particularly gay men, with tacit approval from the Russian Orthodox Church. This violence is framed as a defense of “traditional family values,” part of a nostalgic vision of Russia ...

Education

Intellectual Violence

The militarization of education in Russia

October 22, 2025 • by Andrei Kolesnikov

In the age of mature Putinism, violence and control, accompanied by a new morality based on so-called “traditional values,” have become crucial instruments for managing Russian society. The use of the education system and cultural institutions to indoctrinate the population—above all young people—is a form of violence, only intellectual rather ...

Economy

Panama Against Trump

A country’s fate hangs in the balance as protestors take to the streets

October 13, 2025 • by Nolan Young

As Donald Trump prepared to take office in late 2024, the American president-elect issued a stunning threat: to “take back” the Panama Canal, almost a quarter century after the United States had returned control of the canal and the zone around it to the sovereign state of Panama. Once in office, ...

History

Judah Magnes: Binationalism as Political Theology

A reminder of a sacred myth

October 7, 2025 • by Manousha Dhiwaghar

Judah Magnes, rabbi, orator, pacifist, and founding Chancellor of the Hebrew University, has long haunted the political margins of Israeli and Palestinian history. Too Zionist for the anti-statist left, too pacifist for the militarizing Yishuv, and too binational for a nation determined to consolidate, Magnes occupies a strange position in ...

Judah Magnes: Binationalism as Political Theology

Activism

A Lost Utopia

A review of Göran Rosenberg’s Israel: A Personal History

October 7, 2025 • by Coleson Smith

In a speech delivered to the United States Congress on July 25, 2024, Benjamin Netanyahu issued a sharp retort to protestors against Israel’s genocide in Gaza: They call Israel a colonialist state. Don’t they know that the Land of Israel is where Abraham, Isaac and Jacob prayed, where Isaiah and Jeremiah ...

Europe & Central Asia

Germany Holds Up a Mirror for America

The rise of the AfD, “Alternative for Germany,” now the nation’s most popular political party

October 6, 2025 • by Bruno Heidlberger

On May 2, 2025, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted on X that Germany was “not a democracy, but a tyranny in disguise.” True extremism, he said, lay not in the “popular AfD” but in the “deadly immigration policy of the establishment with open borders, which the AfD rejects.” Rubio's ...

North America

The New Political Theology

Disestablishing the Establishment Clause

September 24, 2025 • by Arthur Goldhammer

The First Amendment states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Strictly ...