Democracy

Democracy

Can The Republican Party Successfully Orbanify the U.S.?

Some comparative reflections on the exceptional vulnerability of American democracy

March 23, 2021 • by
This past year the U.S. experienced a transfer of presidential power from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. It was not a peaceful transfer of power. On January 6, a large and angry mob descended on the U.S. Capitol to “Stop the Steal” by obstructing the constitutionally mandated certification by Congress of the ...
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Can The Republican Party Successfully Orbanify the U.S.?
Democracy

America’s Political Parties

The order shattering and the order affirming

March 17, 2021 • by
The oppositional leadership styles of Trump and Biden have proved the timelessness of the political scientist Stephen Skowronek’s position, outlined in the second chapter of his 1993 masterwork The Politics Presidents Make, that the American presidency displays competing instincts. Skowronek posited that the presidency contained the potential for “order shattering,” ...
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America’s Political Parties
Democracy

Democracy and Social Justice

On the significance of C.T. Vivian and Adam Michnik

March 11, 2021 • by
The New York Times, April 26, 1984: “A Polish Nobel laureate in exile stood in a church on lower Fifth Avenue yesterday and read an open letter of moral outrage from a jailed dissident in Poland to his jailer. The letter, as another speaker put it, fell like ''a tornado'' on the ...
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Democracy and Social Justice
Politics

Our Janus-Faced Political Culture

As the Biden administration moves into the future, conservatives are stuck in the past

March 4, 2021 • by
_____ We’re in this weird eddy where Republicans are trying to cling to past politics to gain advantage and the Biden administration is trying to move forward into the future. On top of this struggle are stories about how the previous administration pushed the boundaries of our laws or, worse, broke ...
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Our Janus-Faced Political Culture
Democracy

Guo Wengui

Trump and the war on truth

March 4, 2021 • by
1. On the morning of December 1, 2020, I was at home teaching an online class for Hunter College students. The subject was how the Chinese government extended its suppression of freedom abroad. Suddenly, outside on the sidewalk in front of my house, a dozen or so masked people appeared, each ...
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Guo Wengui
Democracy

On Treason: A Citizen’s Guide to the Law

An excerpt exploring the meaning of treason and the present-day prevalence of alleging treason

February 25, 2021 • by
As a professor of American constitutional law and legal history, I regularly answer questions for the media about legal issues. But for the most part, those calls tended to focus on constitutional law more generally and on other subjects I have written about, such as the Second Amendment or the ...
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On Treason: A Citizen’s Guide to the Law
Democracy

The United States Is in Recovery

What Texas, white supremacy and coronavirus can teach us about American history

February 18, 2021 • by
"In the exchange, Americans saw a president who cared, and a government that finally, after its previous leaders had told them to get out of a terrible catastrophe on their own, responded to their needs."...

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The United States Is in Recovery
Democracy

“Carl Schmitt’s Comeback?”

Understanding Trump and global authoritarianism

February 17, 2021 • by
As the saying goes: “that was then, but this is now.” I had little inkling that Schmitt would soon become pertinent to present-day political developments. With the dramatic worldwide emergence of authoritarian populism, Schmitt’s thinking seems disturbingly relevant. As the Cambridge jurist Lars Vinx has correctly noted, Schmitt’s significance today ...
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“Carl Schmitt’s Comeback?”
Democracy

Confronting the World Wide Threat of Right Wing Authoritarianism

If we don’t hang together, we will surely hang separately

February 3, 2021 • by
Our effort to create and nourish a “world-wide committee of democratic correspondence” began long before the coronavirus laid waste to our world. And as a world-wide network, our efforts have always involved a strong online component. For the web affords our far-flung group many opportunities for the sharing of ideas ...
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Confronting the World Wide Threat of Right Wing Authoritarianism
Politics

Break Up the Tech Monopoly

No corporation should be so big or systemically important that it can credibly threaten to cut an entire nation off from the news

February 3, 2021 • by
Australian leaders want Google to pay news outlets for articles the tech giant serves up to users. In response, Google threatened to pull its search engine from the entire country. Not just news, but democracy is at stake. Google’s threat sounds absurd. But it actually happened. And Google wasn’t alone: Facebook also ...
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Break Up the Tech Monopoly
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