Democracy Archives - Page 6 of 54

Democracy

Trust in Political Leaders Plummets Worldwide

When it comes to political legitimacy, the more significant the expectations, the higher the disappointments

February 11, 2025 • by Camila Rodríguez Nardi

In early November 2024, PULSAR, the academic observatory of the University of Buenos Aires, and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (KAS), published a Spanish-language report that analyzed the social approval of national governments in 16 countries across Western Europe, North America, and Latin America. The document compiled approval ratings of presidents ...

Trust in Political Leaders Plummets Worldwide

Democracy

From Erdoğan’s Turkey to Trump’s America

What we can learn from a parallel history

February 7, 2025 • by Phyllis Jeffrey

In 2002, voters in Turkey—reeling from an economic crisis that halved the value of the Turkish lira and produced a 7.5 percent drop in GDP—elected a new party by a plurality: 34.3 percent of the vote. Though hardly a resounding mandate, the margin enabled the party, an Islamist offshoot led by ...

From Erdoğan’s Turkey to Trump’s America

Democracy

The Dictatorship of the Tech Bros—or, What Is to Be Done?

A conversation about DOGE and Trump and Musk’s attempt to smash the state

February 7, 2025 • by Forrest Deacon and James Miller

Editor’s note: In December 2024, Forrest Deacon, a Humanities lecturer at Villanova University who is also completing a dissertation in politics at the New School for Social Research, approached Public Seminar, offering to write a piece about the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). At the time, this seemed like a ...

The Dictatorship of the Tech Bros—or, What Is to Be Done?

Democracy

Trump Returns

Anyone who knows what will happen in 2028 probably doesn’t know much

February 6, 2025 • by David Plotke

The following remarks were first presented on November 13, 2024, in a public lecture at the New School for Social Research. Donald Trump’s substantial victory was a big deal, but not yet a full-scale political shift. Trump made a successful move in the trench warfare that now defines American politics, ...

History

Israel’s American History

On Israel’s ambivalent relationship with the United States and OZ Frankel’s latest book, Coca-Cola, Black Panthers, and Phantom Jets: Israel in the American Orbit, 1967–1973

January 29, 2025 • by Oz Frankel and Claire Potter

Historian Oz Frankel's new book, Coca-Cola, Black Panthers, and Phantom Jets: Israel in the American Orbit, 1967–1973 (Stanford University Press, 2024), examines the multifaceted and contradictory presence of the United States in Israel during a short but significant period of history. In a conversation with Claire Potter, Frankel shares the ...

Education

Schools Are for Children, Not Soldiers

Global scholasticide is getting worse

December 3, 2024 • by Charles Bradley

The fact that you can read this article makes it likely that you, like 7.2 billion people worldwide who completed primary education, remember spending much of your childhood at school. Learning is, by definition, challenging, and those of us reminiscing about childhood may also remember the stresses of grappling with math ...

Music

Election Anxiety Mixtape

What a Public Seminar editor is listening to in order to alleviate election dread

November 5, 2024 • by Alex Rossen

For the past year, commentators from all sectors of the American political spectrum have remarked on the impending enormity of the 2024 US presidential election. I am here not to join them but to offer a token of wellbeing. This week, Public Seminar’s editorial team is turning to music for escape, ...

North America

Trump’s Charm Offensive

“You guys are the same as me”

November 1, 2024 • by Adam Koehler Brown

A #1 with a large fry, made and served by the forty-fifth president of the United States: Donald Trump was working a drive-through at a McDonald’s last weekend in Pennsylvania. He salted fries and greeted customers, a stunt meant to mock Kamala Harris and her repeated claim to have worked ...

Activism

The “Prose of Counterinsurgency”

Policing, migration, militarization, and the liberal-democratic provocation of the fascist turn in the Republican Party

November 1, 2024 • by James Porter

What Ranajit Guha has called the “prose of counterinsurgency” surely comes closest to characterizing the current state of abolitionist struggles within the context of the US presidential election campaign. With this concept, the postcolonial historian describes the strategies by which uprisings against imperial forms of domination have been degraded as ...

Activism

Voting While Uncommitted

Sustained collective action is not incompatible with the singular act of voting

October 31, 2024 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

I have never subscribed to the idea that citizens who refuse to vote for a Democratic candidate in a tight race are somehow morally responsible for the election of a Republican, however bad that Republican might be. If we are serious about liberal democracy, then we must recognize that every citizen ...

Democracy

Leaving Honduras

The legacy of US military and economic interference that continues to drive migration

October 31, 2024 • by Jeremy Robson and Leah Zamore

As US border policy grows ever more restrictive, the Biden-Harris administration’s “Addressing the Root Causes of Migration in Central America” strategy is commendable for aiming to tackle the inhumane conditions in Central America that are causing so many people in the region to uproot in the first place. The strategy ...

Activism

What Democrats Lose in Ignoring the Uncommitted Movement

The party has learned the wrong lessons from 1968

October 24, 2024 • by Abby Lloyd

In anticipation of the Uncommitted National Movement’s arrival at this summer’s Democratic National Convention, press and political commentators made frequent reference to the anti-war protests turned police riots of the 1968 convention. It had been more than 50 years since internal discord among Democrats had been organized into an electoral ...