Democracy Archives - Page 38 of 97

Feature

What is the Crisis a Crisis of?

To characterize our republic’s predicament as one of democracy is an authoritarian fantasy

October 25, 2018 • by Seyla Benhabib

Reading Hannah Arendt’s Crises of the Republic in the Age of Trump: A Symposium Hannah Arendt’s Crises of the Republic is not so much a book as a collection, published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1972, of three essays and an interview that first appeared, individually, in the years between 1969 and 1971. Three of ...

Democracy

Civil Disobedience in the Age of Trump

Hannah Arendt on why civil disobedience is not just justifiable but politically imperative

October 24, 2018 • by William E. Scheuerman

This symposium contains essays by Mary Dietz, William E. Scheuerman, Christian Volk, Seyla Benhabib, and Jeffrey C. Isaac that engage with the obvious and meaningful resonances between Crises of the Republic and the present. They were originally presented in August at the American Political Science Association’s annual meeting in Boston, in a ...

Feature

Lying as Politics in the Age of Trump

What Hannah Arendt does, and does not, anticipate under a deeply vicious presidency

October 23, 2018 • by Mary G. Dietz

Reading Hannah Arendt’s Crises of the Republic in the Age of Trump: A Symposium Hannah Arendt’s Crises of the Republic is not so much a book as a collection, published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1972, of three essays and an interview that first appeared, individually, in the years between 1969 and 1971. Three of ...

Blue Monday

Why I Play the Blues

A Very Brief Reflection on the Meaning of Politics and its Limits

October 22, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

The “Blue Monday” column began as a way of integrating the two passions of my life: politics and music and especially jazz. Readers will have noted that lately I have strayed from this purpose, and my columns have become political commentaries pure and simple. My obsession with politics is in part an ...

Blue Monday

Getting Millennials to the Polls

An Extra-Credit Assignment on Voting and Citizenship

October 15, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

As commentators across the political spectrum agree, the upcoming U.S. elections on Election Day, November 6, are very important in determining the future of American democracy. Readers of this column know that the only filter on my political opinions is the filter of language itself. I say what I think. I ...

Democracy

The Radical Center as a Utopian Project?

7 notes on the ideal of a free, intelligent and consequential public life

October 12, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

1. From a critical point of view, “the center” is the ground of the wishy washy: too attached to the ways things are to commit to the radical change of the left, not sufficiently informed by the wisdom of customs and traditional values to fully embrace the good of the ...

The Radical Center as a Utopian Project?

Feature

The Persons Among People in 1787

Why the U.S. Constitution contained within itself a promise that became a lie

October 12, 2018 • by Julie J. Miller

In the spring of 1787, a group of men met in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to revise the Articles of Confederation and ended up drafting the United States Constitution. That convention dissolved itself about four months later, on September 17, when work, some said, was finished, and the paper signed at that ...

Feature

Kavanaugh Protests Continue to the End

‘Sexual Predators on the Court, Hell no, We Don’t Support’

October 10, 2018 • by Jo Freeman

Protests against the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to become a Justice of the Supreme Court resumed on Thursday, October 4, and continued through Saturday, October 6 when he was officially sworn in. While the protesters were still mostly women, more younger women came than in September, dropping the average age of the protesters ...

Blue Monday

Courts, Kavanaugh, and Constitutional Hardball

October 8, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

On November 22, 1895 Eugene V. Debs stepped outside of the Woodstock Jail in Chicago, where he had been imprisoned for six months. Debs, the President of the American Railway Union, had been one of the leaders of the Pullman Strike of 1894, considered by many to be the first ...

Courts, Kavanaugh, and Constitutional Hardball

Democracy

The Legitimacy of the Supreme Court?

The system is working and that is the problem

October 8, 2018 • by Ajay Singh Chaudhary

We Americans are “constitutional fetishists” in the apt phrase of the lesser-known mid-20th century critical theorist of law and economy, Franz Neumann. We tend to think that a particular order of state institutions -- for example, our current incarnation of the separation-of-powers -- embodies the essence of democracy instead of looking ...

Feature

“1933,” or What Hitler’s Ascendency Teaches Us About Authoritarianism

10 Historic Lessons for the Age of Trump

October 8, 2018 • by Jürgen von Mahs

2018 marks the 85th anniversary of the birth of the perhaps the most strident authoritarian regime in Western history: Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler’s rise to power makes this year a good occasion to reflect on the lessons that can be learned from the fateful series of events that unfolded in Germany ...

“1933,” or What Hitler’s Ascendency Teaches Us About Authoritarianism

Feature

Picking Less Partisan Candidates

Boosting election participation is tricky, but there are easy ways to reform to produce candidates who reflect a broader swath of voter sentiment

October 6, 2018 • by John Lawrence

September is over, and with it summer, Labor Day, the celebration of National Potato Month… and the 2018 primary election season. Just two month before the November election that could decide the nation’s political course for the next two years, candidates have finally been selected in a process that began in some ...