Democracy Archives - Page 52 of 56

Democracy

Further Thoughts on Putting Liberal Democracy First

Why we need consensus on the democratic left to defend liberal institutions

November 16, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

I’ve been obsessively writing about the dangers of Trump and Trumpism for the past two years. This obsession has taken over my Facebook feed, originally intended as a way to showcase my band; has completely hijacked my first sabbatical leave in 20 years; has transformed me into a very active ...

Democracy

Politics, Pessimism, and Populism

We have lost the sense of the possible that social democracy injected into postwar liberal democracy

November 15, 2018 • by Sheri Berman

The rise of right-wing populism is probably the most pressing problem facing Europe today. Many analysts, including myself, have linked the rise of populism to the decline of the social democratic or center-left. Many traditional social democratic voters now vote populist; social democracy’s embrace of a “kinder, gentler” neoliberalism opened a policy “space” ...

Democracy

Not Knowing What We’ve Got Til It’s Gone

We need to both defend liberal democratic norms and institutions and address their fault lines

November 14, 2018 • by Leo Casey

In my contribution to the Dissent Magazine discussion of the “Crisis of Democracy” which provided the inspiration for our reflections in this symposium, I put forward the argument that attacks on the citizenship rights of racialized ‘others’ are central to Trumpism and other variants of the populist authoritarianism of the far right that have taken ...

Not Knowing What We’ve Got Til It’s Gone

Democracy

The Crisis of Democracy is a Crisis of the Left

A capitalism transformed by a strong version of social democracy should be our political goal

November 13, 2018 • by Michael Walzer

It is a crisis for democracy when the left is weak and unable to mobilize its natural constituency. All I want to do today is to unpack that sentence. Why is this a crisis? Democracy requires some degree of equality, but capitalism and neo-liberal economic policies produce inequality: a steady pressure ...

Democracy

Arrows into the Heart of Democracy

Attacks on Gender Studies and the conquest of democracy

November 12, 2018 • by Sabine Hark

The history of women’s suffrage taught us that democratic rights and institutions must be fought for and can never be taken for granted. They are fragile. Today, in the face of worldwide attacks on democratic rights and the neo-reactionary conquest of democracy, we desperately need to remember this. In countries such ...

North America

All Votes Must Be Counted, or Why Concessions of Electoral Defeat Are Irrelevant

November 10, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

Republicans are now very angry that some races they thought they had won are still too close to call. Being egged on by aspirational fascist demagogues like Donald Trump and Rick Scott, they are now condemning Democrats for disturbing the electoral process. “Enemies of the people” and “unethical liberals” we ...

All Votes Must Be Counted, or Why Concessions of Electoral Defeat Are Irrelevant

Feature

A Few Quick Take-Aways

Reflecting on the 2018 midterm election

November 9, 2018 • by John Lawrence

A short blog on the election; it will take a little while to fully digest the results. But some results seem clear and important to note. Obviously, the major news of the day is the Democratic resurgence in the House, with Democrats winning back the majority they lost so spectacularly in ...

Democracy

Civil Disobedience in the Age of Trump

Hannah Arendt on why civil disobedience is not just justifiable but politically imperative

October 24, 2018 • by William E. Scheuerman

This symposium contains essays by Mary Dietz, William E. Scheuerman, Christian Volk, Seyla Benhabib, and Jeffrey C. Isaac that engage with the obvious and meaningful resonances between Crises of the Republic and the present. They were originally presented in August at the American Political Science Association’s annual meeting in Boston, in a ...

Democracy

The Radical Center as a Utopian Project?

7 notes on the ideal of a free, intelligent and consequential public life

October 12, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

1. From a critical point of view, “the center” is the ground of the wishy washy: too attached to the ways things are to commit to the radical change of the left, not sufficiently informed by the wisdom of customs and traditional values to fully embrace the good of the ...

The Radical Center as a Utopian Project?

Democracy

The Legitimacy of the Supreme Court?

The system is working and that is the problem

October 8, 2018 • by Ajay Singh Chaudhary

We Americans are “constitutional fetishists” in the apt phrase of the lesser-known mid-20th century critical theorist of law and economy, Franz Neumann. We tend to think that a particular order of state institutions -- for example, our current incarnation of the separation-of-powers -- embodies the essence of democracy instead of looking ...

Democracy

Defending “Open” Democracy

What would an open democracy based on different forms of non-electoral yet democratic representation look like?

October 5, 2018 • by Hélène Landemore

Democracy is in trouble, or so we are told. In this essay I argue that the crisis of democracy as we know it -- which has come to be symbolized by Trump or Brexit -- is a sign of its vitality as a normative ideal. People the Western world over ...

Democracy

Let’s Keep Democracy

But let’s look for better alternatives

October 5, 2018 • by Jason Brennan

The BMW 3-series is wonderful, often the best in its class, but it nevertheless has significant flaws. BMW’s engineers acknowledge its shortcomings and continually attempt to improve it. Consumers love the car, but also recognize in a given year that competitors may be better, and often buy the competitors instead. ...