Extremism Archives - Public Seminar

Podcast

Terrorism Begins at Home

Why Now? With Claire Potter, Episode 28

June 26, 2023 • by Claire Potter

A conversation with legal journalist Jeffrey Toobin about his new book, "Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism" ...

Podcast

Extremism in Defense of Liberty Is No Vice

April 19, 2023 • by Claire Potter

A conversation with historian Matthew Dallek about his new book, "Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right"...

Politics

The Riot on New Zealand’s Front Lawn

Reckoning with an antivax occupation, homegrown racism, and global white nationalism

April 11, 2022 • by Lydia Nobbs

Ardern’s words might have comforted those New Zealanders taken aback by the protest, but it fails to seriously engage with the complexity of the occupation, which intermingled transnational far-right tactics with homegrown white supremacy, wellness misinformation, and indigenous disenfranchisement. The protest, and Ardern’s response, has wide implications for parsing both ...

Politics

Moonwalking in Brasilia

How Jair Bolsonaro creates the illusion of moving forward while sliding back

October 26, 2021 • by Felippe Ramos

In Brazil's ongoing experiment with a far-right populist President, there is a gap between Jair Bolsonaro's performance in face-to-face rallies and on social networks and his minimal accomplishments as a politician constrained by a complex constitutional network of institutions and norms. Bolsonaro’s oral and written communication is filled with the hallmarks ...

Europe & Central Asia

France’s Tale of Two Secularisms

After terrorist attacks rattle France, where will the Republic go from here?

November 18, 2020 • by Hannah Leffingwell

In October, France experienced another spate of terrorist attacks over a span of two weeks. First was the gruesome beheading of an Évreux public-school teacher, Samuel Paty, after he showed a caricature of the prophet Muhammad in his class. The slaying received national attention and the French government responded swiftly, ...

Feature

On Religion and Backlash

Theda Skocpol on Popular and Elite Roots of Republican Extremism in the U.S.

February 9, 2018 • by Public Seminar

The Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life presents the Populism and Religion lecture series from Theda Skocpol (Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University). Note from Jean Cohen, project organizer: Everyone seems to be writing on populism these days, which is unsurprising given the global rise of populist movements, parties, ...

Uncategorized

How to Deal with Extremists? Post European Election Reflections

Considering the dilemmas of dealing with parties suspected of wanting to undermine core elements of liberal democracy

September 9, 2014 • by Jan-Werner Mueller

In the wake of this past spring’s European elections, in which far-right parties did very well, an old conundrum for liberal democrats is posed with renewed urgency: how to deal with extremists? Should one talk with them? Or should one only talk about them? Or not even that -- in ...