How Democracies Transform, Fast and Slow

A response to John Keane

For all its acuity, John Keane’s theory of democide risks confusing democratic degradation with a transformation of the political debate. Not only that, it fails to account for the radicalization of authoritarian systems once democracy has been killed. ...

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How Democracies Transform, Fast and Slow

Toward a Postliberal Future? 

Patrick J. Deneen’s Regime Change and the Meletus option

Deneen invokes Machiavelli, but at a deeper level his model is Meletus: the whole class of “ordinary people,” all of them, have the right political instincts, and only the liberal “ruling elite,” like the deplorable Socrates, is corrupting the American polity....

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Toward a Postliberal Future? 

Putin’s Atom

An excerpt from Paul Josephson’s Nuclear Russia

The concept of preempting an enemy’s nuclear weapons that was a central point of Soviet military thought has been reiterated by President Vladimir Putin....

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Putin’s Atom

Are Universities Bad for Democracy?

We need a revolution, not only against how we train students to think but also, “more importantly, against what we, as humans, ultimately are.”

Business schools obviously train students to see the world in terms of commodities. But what about the rest of the university? ...

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Are Universities Bad for Democracy?