The Left and the Crisis of Democracy: A Symposium Archives

The Left and the Crisis of Democracy: A Symposium

This symposium contains essays by Michael Walzer, Sheri Berman, Leo Casey, and Jeffrey C. Isaac that reflect on the principles and possibilities of social democracy and liberal democracy in our current political times. The pieces constitute extensions of the authors’ presentations in the “Crisis of Democracy” panel that took place at the American Political Science Association 2018 Annual Meeting, organized by Leo Casey and originally convened to respond to pieces published in a special issue of Dissent magazine.

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 ...