What Are We Defending When We Defend Democracy?

The unruly role of modern social movements in testing the limits of political freedom

I realized, as I wrote to Bill, “that it's quite unclear precisely what form of the American regime we are all ostensibly defending, at this juncture in history. Is it the current form as you describe it, which is so peculiarly open to popular pressure from the bottom up? What if ...
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What Are We Defending When We Defend Democracy?

Movements and Parties or Movement Parties?

Our contemporary conundrum

But how deeply have these recent developments disrupted the forms of the two main political parties? Are we still dealing—as the title of my book implies—with “movements and parties?” Or with movement-parties, hybrids that have added the passions of movements to the parties, while depriving the parties of one of ...
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Movements and Parties or Movement Parties?

Why We Should Rethink the Distinction Between “Institutional” and “Contentious” Politics

Movements and parties do not begin as separate kinds

It was not so long ago, perhaps a few decades, that inquiry into movements and political parties lived within separate disciplines. Aspiring political scientists who were interested in movements might have found themselves forced to make careers in sociology. Until recently, political sociologists were focused on protests and revolutions, paying ...
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Why We Should Rethink the Distinction Between “Institutional” and “Contentious” Politics

How Movements on the Right and Left Differ—and Why That Difference Matters

Defiant oppositional disorder threatens Republicans and the future of democracy in America

I believe that one can’t understand American politics today, and one certainly can’t properly understand the rise of Donald Trump, without keeping this aspiration/opposition distinction at the center of our analysis. Because just as the movements of Left and Right are different in this key respect, these differences inform and ...
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How Movements on the Right and Left Differ—and Why That Difference Matters

Europe 1948/2022

Uncontrolled migration is one of Russia’s weapons in its war with the West

Unlike in 2015, European citizens are unanimous in their solidarity with the refugees. Public opinion counts. In Poland especially, neighborliness is everywhere to be seen, despite all the historical baggage between the two countries. This time, there is a good chance that member state governments will rise to the challenge....

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Europe 1948/2022

The Measurement of Loss

What do I take with me? How much can I carry when on foot?

The flight of the refugee is not, as I understand it, migration. Although the boundary can be fluid, not all those who risk their lives to cross the Mediterranean, for example, are refugees. The two must be differentiated to protect the refugee against the threat of terminological arbitrariness....

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