Democracy Archives - Page 36 of 56

Democracy

Elections 2020

An interview with Jacek Kucharczyk about the upcoming Polish vote

June 26, 2020 • by Jacek Kucharczyk, Elzbieta Matynia and Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

Professors Elzbieta Matynia and Jeffrey Goldfarb asked Dr. Jacek Kucharczyk, President of the Executive Board of the Institute of Public Affairs in Warsaw, to talk about the current situation, before the first round of voting. Jeffrey Goldfarb (JG): Jacek, it's great for the three of us to be getting together. I’ll ...

Democracy

Bernie’s Brooklyn

How growing up in a New Deal city shaped Bernie Sanders’s vision for America

June 24, 2020 • by Ted Hamm

One of the remarkable features of New York City in the middle three decades of the twentieth century was the plethora of political parties that wielded influence. There were the Democrats, still controlled by Tammany Hall in Manhattan along with similarly Irish-led machines in the Bronx and Brooklyn. The Republicans ...

Democracy

The U.S. Needs to Protect Free and Fair Elections

Here’s how

June 23, 2020 • by Katie Scofield

When eight states and Washington, D.C., all held elections facing the dual challenges of Covid-19 and demonstrations protesting anti-Black violence prompted -- this time -- by the killing of George Floyd, we learned that cumbersome voting systems have become more fragile than ever. Washington, D.C., Pennsylvania, and Maryland were unable to ...

The U.S. Needs to Protect Free and Fair Elections

North America

What Would Good National Leadership Look Like Now?

How best to address America’s current crises

June 11, 2020 • by Desmond King and Rogers M. Smith

The United States is in the midst of three national crises: a public health crisis, an economic crisis, and a civil rights crisis provoked by racist police brutality and structural racism. Each demands national responses and leadership. Designed to prevent centralized tyranny, the American federal system has always had trouble marshaling a ...

What Would Good National Leadership Look Like Now?

Activism

Enough Is Enough

The power of violence and the power of non-violence

June 4, 2020 • by Jeremy Varon

Now everywhere quoted, Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1966 declaration that “a riot is the language of the unheard” serves as a thoughtful shorthand for understanding the jagged edge of today’s unrest. But even in Dr. King’s time, it was not particularly radical wisdom. In 1967, the Kerner Commission was tasked by ...

North America

America’s Weimar Moment, Redux

A preface to our symposium on the left

May 28, 2020 • by James Miller

It seems like an eternity. But it was only a few months ago, before the pandemic and subsequent lockdown, that it seemed possible that the Democratic Party might have as its Presidential candidate an avowed socialist – Bernie Sanders. On February 6, 2020, Public Seminar ran a comment entitled “America’s Weimar ...

North America

The Story Behind DSA’s Non-Endorsement of Joe Biden

“Be it therefore resolved, the Democratic Socialists of America will not endorse another Democratic Party presidential candidate should Bernie Sanders not prevail”

May 28, 2020 • by Andrew Sernatinger

I joined the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in the fall of 2017. I’m a millennial, but by then, I’d been an activist for the better part of twenty years. I’d been in the anti-war movement as a high school student after 9/11. I grew up in the suburbs of ...

The Story Behind DSA’s Non-Endorsement of Joe Biden

Democracy

The Empire Strikes Back

Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement faces an uncertain future

May 28, 2020 • by Mark Frazier

On May 22, 2020, the National People’s Congress (NPC) in Beijing announced it would debate a new national policy for Hong Kong, a draft piece of legislation with an imposingly long and misleadingly soporific title: “Decision of the National People’s Congress on Establishing and Completing the Hong Kong Special Administrative ...

Democracy

Troilus and Cressida and a Diseased Body Politic

Reading Shakespeare in a time of plague

May 28, 2020 • by Emily Pitts Donahoe

We are perennially curious about what Shakespeare can teach us about our own world, hoping to find instruction and solace in his plays, poems, and exemplary turns of phrase. Recently, this curiosity has produced a score of tweets and articles speculating about Shakespeare’s productivity during periods when the plague ravaged London, ...

Troilus and Cressida and a Diseased Body Politic

North America

Lessons from the History of the Left

A network of SDS veterans reflects on the importance of elections

May 28, 2020 • by Robert J. S. Ross

On Monday, April 13, the Democratic nomination contest de facto over, I learned that Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), would refuse to endorse Biden, in accord with a contentious decision DSA made during the summer of 2019 not to endorse any other Democrat for president if Bernie Sanders was not ...

North America

An Open Letter to the New New Left From the Old New Left

Now it is time for all those who yearn for a more equal and just social order to face facts

May 28, 2020 • by Former leaders of the Students for a Democratic Society

“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country.…“…[L]ay your shoulders to the wheel; … Let it be told to the future world, that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope ...

An Open Letter to the New New Left From the Old New Left

North America

A Letter to the Bernie-or-Bust People

Why I’m voting for Biden

May 28, 2020 • by Sarah Newman

In 2000, I was a member of the Green Party and working for its presidential candidate, Ralph Nader. A twenty-something living in San Francisco, I took the bus every day to the Green Party’s campaign office in the city’s Mission District. It was a cavernous, dusty old store-front with political ...