Democracy Archives - Page 22 of 55

North America

The Case for Creating a National Lustration Commission for the United States

It’s a way to stabilize fragile democratic institutions

April 1, 2021 • by Monika Nalepa and Colleen Murphy

_____ The storming of the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob on January 6 has made it clear that a surprising number of police and military veterans are currently affiliated with armed right wing militias. But suspending and firing a few police officers and soldiers in response likely won’t suffice. And any mass ...

The Case for Creating a National Lustration Commission for the United States

East Asia & Pacific

China’s Return to Global Dominance

What it means for America — and for the future of democracy around the world

April 1, 2021 • by John Keane

_____ When future historians look back on our discordant times, they will surely report an epochal shift of global importance: a transition from failed attempts to restore America’s greatness to China’s return, after two centuries of subjugation, to world pre-eminence. The writing is already on the wall, but strange prejudices, bitter ...

Democracy

Winston Churchill’s North American Tour

In the summer of 1929, the future prime minister almost quit politics

March 30, 2021 • by Josh Ireland

_____ One night in the summer of 1929, Winston Churchill, who was staying in a bungalow owned by William Randolph Hearst, was horrified to see a bulky figure clambering through his window. The intruder, Winston realized, was his son Randolph, who seemed equally startled. Randolph had expected to find Hearst’s daughter-in-law, who ...

Democracy

Citizens Defending Democracy Are Being Shot on the Streets of Myanmar.

We should support them

March 29, 2021 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

By all accounts the situation in Myanmar is grave, as citizens struggle non-violently to defend democracy, and as the military massacres them. As always, behind this violent military coup is a complicated political situation. Here is an extensive account published in today’s New York Times. Here is a recent Times piece on the ...

Citizens Defending Democracy Are Being Shot on the Streets of Myanmar.

East Asia & Pacific

What America Teaches White Men About Asian American Women

The Atlanta killings have all the hallmarks of a hate crime

March 25, 2021 • by Nadia Y. Kim

_____ On March 16, 2021, Robert Aaron Long – a twenty-one-year-old white male evangelical Christian – massacred six Asian American women while they were working at three Asian-owned Atlanta-area spas: Daoyou Feng (44), Hyunjung Grant (51), Suncha Kim (69), Soon Chung Park (74), Xiaojie Tan (49), and Yong Ae Yue (63). Police ...

What America Teaches White Men About Asian American Women

Columnists

Our Nation Is a Shooting Gallery

But anyone who pretends there’s nothing we can do is lying

March 25, 2021 • by Claire Potter

_____ Yesterday I began to see the tweets, again: people who had left their houses that day to do something unremarkable were dying. Friends at the University of Colorado-Boulder expressed fear, horror, and confusion as another mass shooting unfolded at a supermarket near their campus. Later, I learned that ten people, ...

Democracy

As Biden Reverses GOP Policies, SCOTUS May Stand In the Way

An all-out legal attack by Republican attorneys general will be warmly welcomed by Trump appointees

March 25, 2021 • by Heather Cox Richardson

_____ As the Biden administration sets out to restore a government that can regulate business to level the playing field in the United States between workers and employers, address inequality, and combat climate change, Republicans are turning to the courts to stop him. Republican attorneys general have already launched a number of lawsuits ...

As Biden Reverses GOP Policies, SCOTUS May Stand In the Way

Democracy

Can The Republican Party Successfully Orbanify the U.S.?

Some comparative reflections on the exceptional vulnerability of American democracy

March 23, 2021 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

This past year the U.S. experienced a transfer of presidential power from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. It was not a peaceful transfer of power. On January 6, a large and angry mob descended on the U.S. Capitol to “Stop the Steal” by obstructing the constitutionally mandated certification by Congress of the ...

Democracy

America’s Political Parties

The order shattering and the order affirming

March 17, 2021 • by Thomas Cobb

The oppositional leadership styles of Trump and Biden have proved the timelessness of the political scientist Stephen Skowronek’s position, outlined in the second chapter of his 1993 masterwork The Politics Presidents Make, that the American presidency displays competing instincts. Skowronek posited that the presidency contained the potential for “order shattering,” ...

Economy

Can Cooperatives Build Worker Power?

Give platform co-ops a seat at the policy table

March 11, 2021 • by Trebor Scholz, Doug O'Brien and Jason Spicer

If the American movement supporting Democratic Socialism gets traction, centrist Democrats are likely to push for cooperatives as a way to temper the severity of American capitalism. To that end, efforts like The Clean Slate for Worker Power project would do well to consider the potential of platform cooperatives ...

Democracy

Democracy and Social Justice

On the significance of C.T. Vivian and Adam Michnik

March 11, 2021 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

The New York Times, April 26, 1984: “A Polish Nobel laureate in exile stood in a church on lower Fifth Avenue yesterday and read an open letter of moral outrage from a jailed dissident in Poland to his jailer. The letter, as another speaker put it, fell like ''a tornado'' on the ...

Democracy

The United States Is Picking Up Where The Great Society Left Off

The conventional wisdom that endured for decades is making way for something new

March 11, 2021 • by John Stoehr

_____ You might be tired of me talking about the American Rescue Act, which passed the House of Representatives on March 10 and is headed to the President’s desk. But while the rest of the country is talking about Joe Biden’s dog, and while the press corps is asking about the ...