How the Russian Public Sees Events in Ukraine Today

A conversation with Maria Matskevich: “People think it’s a peacekeeping operation”

People who give interviews and speak about a catastrophe in Russia project something into the future, and do not describe what is happening right now. The situation is very different in different cities and even different institutions. In Saint Petersburg and Moscow, you have more freedom than, for example, in ...
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How the Russian Public Sees Events in Ukraine Today

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?

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

Putin’s New Iron Curtain

Freedom and democracy are both impossible if we do not take responsibility for the other

Let us recognize that freedom and democracy are both impossible if we do not take responsibility for the other. This is the call of ethics. It is required to imagine another future, to free the world from arrogant barbarism, to break out of the world in which we now find ...
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Putin’s New Iron Curtain

The Implications of March 7, 1965

The history of Bloody Sunday and where we stand today

The story of March 7, 1965, in Selma is the story of Americans determined to bring to life the principle articulated in the Declaration of Independence that a government’s claim to authority comes from the consent of the governed....

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The Implications of March 7, 1965

The Future of the GOP

Has the Republic National Committee firmly dragged the Republican Party into Trump’s war on our democracy?

Coming as the statement did, just after former President Trump said that Pence had the power to “overturn the election” and, that if reelected, Trump would pardon those who attacked the Capitol, it has put the Republican Party openly on the side of overturning our democracy....

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The Future of the GOP

The Phantom of the “Greatest Generation”

“Citizen soldiers” of America, unite!

With the greatest generation serving as their antithesis, it has become de rigueur to mock and attack the baby boomers: spoiled children of fathers infinitely better than they. But whatever the errors and failings of the post-war generation, it rose up against war and racism and stifling rules, all of ...
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The Phantom of the “Greatest Generation”