Democracy Archives - Page 2 of 97

Democracy

The Revolution Against Legitimacy

To the new revolutionary class, legitimacy itself is an unjust claim of power

August 26, 2025 • by Roger Berkowitz

“[Stalin] changed the old political and especially revolutionary belief expressed popularly in the proverb “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs” into a veritable dogma: “You can’t break eggs without making an omelette.”—Hannah Arendt We are living through a revolution, though not the kind we are used to. Most today ...

Latin America & Caribbean

Lula 3.0 and the Austerity Trap

The Left in power, the Right in control

July 17, 2025 • by Nara Roberta Silva

Campaigning for his third term as president in 2022, Lula da Silva ran on a straightforward message: making Brazil “happy again.” Now, halfway through his third term, macroeconomic indicators paint a fairly rosy picture of the country’s trajectory under his administration: GDP growth exceeded expectations, and the unemployment rate fell ...

Democracy

Trump, Thucydides, and the Corruption of Language

The breakdown of meaning can threaten the very foundations of a civil society

June 25, 2025 • by Benjamin Andrew Schupmann

On January 6, 2021, a violent mob stormed the US Capitol to overturn the results of the 2020 US presidential election. By any reasonable definition, this armed uprising was an insurrection. Yet President Trump recently described it as “a day of love.” In striking contrast, Trump called a mostly peaceful recent ...

Trump, Thucydides, and the Corruption of Language

Democracy

Naked Oligarchy

How billionaires captured power and hollowed out democracy

June 19, 2025 • by Salvador Santino Regilme

The choice is stark: rule by the many, or rule by the billionaires who already act as if they own the world. Across the globe, extreme wealth has overpowered democracy. The world’s billionaires no longer merely influence politics; they dominate it. Behind the rhetoric of innovation and market efficiency lies a ...

Capitalism

Ecology and Democracy in a World on Fire

Our first responsibility, always, is to preserve the world, and our second is to improve it

May 21, 2025 • by Jedediah Britton-Purdy

The following text was first presented on April 22, 2025, as a distinguished lecture presented by the Henry H. Arnhold Forum on Global Challenges and the New School for Social Research. I want to trace the outline of an era that has closed. It ran from roughly the end of the ...

Democracy

A Dystopian Novel for Our Times

What being tyrannized tastes like

May 15, 2025 • by Susan Yelavich

On one level, the premise of Prophet Song (Oneworld, 2023), the recent Booker-winning novel by the Irish writer Paul Lynch, is simple enough: It’s about the existential dilemmas a mother faces in an authoritarian state. But on every other level, Prophet Song exceeds the expectations of a dystopian tale. Instead ...

Activism

Leo Tolstoy Salutes the Student Movement in Russia

When Russian students decided to stop studying at the institutions where they get educated by the whip

May 15, 2025 • by Inessa Medzhibovskaya and Leo Tolstoy

Some lines written very long ago seem to have been written for the current moment. At the University of St. Petersburg in the spring of 1899, students protested the government’s policies and their pressure on university administration. Upon learning about student unrest and being urged by student delegates who were ...

Leo Tolstoy Salutes the Student Movement in Russia

Democracy

The Administrative State, Its Democratic Deficits, and How to Fix Them in Comparative Historical Perspective

Or, why should ordinary citizens trust unelected experts anymore?

May 8, 2025 • by Mark Frazier, James Miller, Kim Lane Scheppele and Julia Sonnevend

Good evening, my name is Jim Miller. I am a professor of politics and liberal studies at the New School for Social Research, and I have organized, and will be moderating tonight’s panel with the ungainly title, on bureaucracy and its discontents. To discuss the tensions created by professing democracy as ...

The Administrative State, Its Democratic Deficits, and How to Fix Them in Comparative Historical Perspective

Activism

Serbia’s Popular Protest Movement and Why It Matters

Students have adopted the dynamics of plenums and public assemblies where collective decisions are made without centralized leadership

April 25, 2025 • by Jorge González Arocha

In recent months, Serbia has witnessed one of the most significant social movements in its entire history—and one of the most important in contemporary Europe led mainly by students. What began as a response to a tragic accident in Novi Sad that left 16 people dead quickly grew into a ...

Serbia’s Popular Protest Movement and Why It Matters

Migration

Guantanamo, Again

No one is above the law, and no president should become a king

April 2, 2025 • by Joseph Margulies

Tracking the damage President Trump has done in his first two months in office sometimes seems like counting the homes flattened in a hurricane. Every house matters to someone—but it’s the cumulative devastation that most matters to society as a whole. Yet as long as people are still picking through ...

Democracy

“If You Wish to Know Who a Man Truly Is, Give Him Power”

By eroding the values of inclusivity and fairness, Trump’s rhetoric cultivates instead an exclusionary ethos, one deliberately designed to undermine the idea that all citizens possess equal moral worth and deserve equal opportunities to participate in public life

February 25, 2025 • by Melvin L. Rogers

Reflecting on Abraham Lincoln in 1894, the American orator and lawyer Robert Green Ingersoll observed that “nothing discloses real character like the use of power. It is easy for the weak to be gentle. Most people can bear adversity. But if you wish to know what a man really is, ...

“If You Wish to Know Who a Man Truly Is, Give Him Power”

Democracy

What Is Illiberal Democracy?

Scholars discuss Trump, Modi, and Erdoğan

February 20, 2025 • by Senem Aydin-Düzgit, Mark Frazier, Jeffrey C. Isaac and Pratap Bhanu Mehta

In November 2024, the India China Institute at The New School hosted the online panel "Trajectories of Authoritarianism in Democratic Regimes," which featured scholars Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Senem Aydin-Düzgit, and Jeffrey C. Isaac in conversation with moderator Mark W. Frazier about patterns of takeover, decay, and distrust of political institutions ...