Democracy Archives - Page 48 of 97

Feature

The Fox News-Fake News-Trump Nexus

On the link between political orientation and the inclination to believe fake news

March 24, 2018 • by Sanford Schram and Richard Fording

In today’s overheated political climate, people are increasingly noting how difficult it is to convince others, who disagree, to alter their beliefs. Public discourse seems ever more compartmentalized in “silos,” where people express themselves in an “echo chamber” or “bubble” that reinforces their pre-existing biases. Contravening facts rarely get in ...

Feature

The Practical and Principled Gray Argument for Democratic Party Solidarity

Reflections of an Unreconstructed Deaniac

March 23, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

I am a committed partisan of “the democratic wing of the Democratic Party,” and have been so ever since Howard Dean ran for Democratic nomination to be President of the United States in 2004. I worked for his candidacy, wrote about it in The Politics of Small Things, and later wrote about ...

The Practical and Principled Gray Argument for Democratic Party Solidarity

Feature

Authenticity, American Style

The meaning of authenticity in the era of “reality show” politics

March 23, 2018 • by Jeremy Safran

In her 2012 book The Politics of Authenticity in American Presidential Campaigns, Erica Seifert documents the growing importance over a 25-year period of the voters’ perception of candidates’ authenticity in determining the outcome of presidential elections. In recent years Al Gore, John Kerry and Mitt Romney’s bids for the presidency were all ...

Blue Monday

Stormy Weather

Trump in trouble

March 19, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

"I merely took the energy it takes to pout, and I wrote some blues." -Duke Ellington Spring approaches. But for Donald Trump, the bane of our existence, Winter is coming still. Just this past week and a half, as another Noreaster made its way across the east coast, the tempest that is the Trump ...

Feature

Lamb’s Victory and the 1974 Precedent

What the past may predict for the 2018 mid-terms

March 18, 2018 • by John Lawrence

Conor Lamb’s improbable but likely victory in Tuesday’s congressional race in the 18th district of Pennsylvania raises comparisons to the 1974 victories of Democratic candidates running in traditionally Republican districts. The significance of those earlier upsets as precursors to a November wave victory, is recounted in my just-published book, The Class of ...

Feature

The Thick Line

On the impossibility of coming to terms with a dark past

March 16, 2018 • by Santiago Mandirola

"We split away the history of our recent past with a thick line. We will be responsible only for what we have done to help extract Poland from her current predicament from now on." – Tadeusz Masowiecki As Poland’s first post-Communist prime minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki sought to draw a thick line between the ...

Feature

Why Alexey Navalny is Important in Russia and the World

A look at how Navalny challenges Putin’s regime

March 15, 2018 • by Regina Smyth

The Kremlin’s political machine is shaping popular expectations about March 18th’s presidential election in Russia. For more than a year prior to the vote, the outcome of this election has been clear. In late 2016, First Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration Sergei Kiriyenko announced that President Putin would be ...

Why Alexey Navalny is Important in Russia and the World

Feature

Bannon at Booth

A conflict between principle and strategy?

March 15, 2018 • by Michael Weinman

Bannon, surely, needs no introduction, nor need we long belabor the reasons why the decision to invite him to speak at the University of Chicago proved controversial. Still, let’s note that in a letter of protest signed by over 100 members of the University of Chicago faculty, the rationale for objecting to ...

Feature

Putting Journalistic Ideals Back in the Service of Practice

Al Jazeera and the problems of media today

March 13, 2018 • by Barbie Zelizer

The following was presented as the Plenary Keynote for the International Federation of Journalists and the Human Rights Commission of Qatar, Doha, July 2017. When journalism comes to mind, the tendency is to think West, to think settled democracies, autonomous institutions, reasoned deliberation, transparent decision-making, and a unified and stable public. But ...

Putting Journalistic Ideals Back in the Service of Practice

Blue Monday

The Fables of Our Faubus

Jeff Sessions, man of justice

March 12, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

"I merely took the energy it takes to pout, and I wrote some blues." -Duke Ellington Jefferson Beauregard Sessions has fallen on hard times. A celebrated Alabamian and Man of the South, he came out for Donald Trump long before any other national Republican politician, and then gave up his very ...

Feature

Free Speech or Free Riding?

Janus v AFSCME before the Supreme Court

March 10, 2018 • by Jo Freeman

A thousand people rallied outside the Supreme Court the morning of January 26 while the Justices heard oral argument on Janus v. AFSCME Council 31 inside. The decision in this case will have profound effects on public service unions. Currently 22 states require employees who do not choose to join a union ...