Politics Archives - Page 68 of 143

Democracy

Can the Global Anticorruption Movement Survive Populism?

Where could this increased demand for new non-corrupt ruling elites on the part of voters, who care primarily for their self-interest rather than abstract principles, take us?

October 4, 2018 • by Alina Mungiu-Pippidi

On April 6, 2018, the former South Korean president Park Geun-hye was sentenced to 24 years in prison for abuse of power and corruption. The same day, South Africa's former President Jacob Zuma was charged with corruption, racketeering, fraud and money laundering linked to a 1990s arms deal, after he ...

Democracy

Why Do Authoritarian Leaders Appeal Today?

The age of the strongman

October 4, 2018 • by Ruth Ben-Ghiat

Ours is the age of the strongman. In Hungary, Russia, and many other places, authoritarian leaders attempt, with varying degrees of success, to undermine the rule of law, purge state bureaucracies of non-loyalists, make public office a vehicle for private profit, use propaganda to spread their versions of reality, and ...

Feature

Post-Kavanaugh Stress Disorder

Ending our political suffering will be a bigger project than winning the next election

October 3, 2018 • by Claire Potter

Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last Thursday, and Brett Kavanaugh’s unhinged response to her charges, was an epic installment of the Trump Show, now in season two. It’s probably safe to say that neither Kavanaugh or the GOP leadership care whether they alienate women voters by ...

Feature

2018 Brazilian Elections

The end of a crisis or the beginning of another?

October 3, 2018 • by Theo Almeida

The Brazilian presidential election of this year has the potential to scale back the political crisis that the country has been facing for the last 4 years. Alas, it seems that it will also increase the political division of the society even more. Lula’s representative, Fernando Haddad, affiliated with the ...

Feature

Populism in the Twenty-First Century

An Illiberal Democratic Response to Undemocratic Liberalism

October 2, 2018 • by Cas Mudde

Populism emerged in the mid-nineteenth century in Russia and the United States but remained almost irrelevant to European politics until the 1990s. Since then, populism has become a major political phenomenon throughout Europe. Today, we live in a “populist Zeitgeist” (Mudde 2004), in which populist parties and rhetoric dominate the ...

Feature

Has Brett Kavanaugh Lost His Mind?

A Lawyer’s Follow-Up to Jeffrey C. Isaac and Peter Dreier

October 2, 2018 • by Bill Barnes

As a trial lawyer of 33 years, watching Brett Kavanaugh’s astonishing opening statement at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on September 27, my immediate reaction was, “How could he be doing this? In public and on the record! Has he lost his mind?” Kavanaugh is a highly experienced, very smart jurist; ...

Feature

Lessons for Democrats from 1970’s Chile

The striking parallels between the Chilean media polarization leading up to Pinochet’s coup and our current journalistic and political schisms

October 2, 2018 • by Jay Blumler

On September 11th, 1973, Chile’s Popular Unity government led by President Salvador Allende was overthrown by a military coup staged by General Augusto Pinochet. One year earlier, in autumn 1972, I had conducted 25 interviews with media and political personnel in Santiago and Valparaiso. The Catholic University of Chile had ...

Blue Monday

Beyond the Three Faces of Power?

What we can learn from the recent Kavanaugh hearings

October 1, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

Politics is about power. And power is everywhere. To locate it is to locate the social agents who have the ability to shape our lives and the processes by which they can do so. Social and political theorists have debated about the concept of power, and the sources and locations ...

Feature

The Paradoxes of Identity Politics

A critique of recognition

October 1, 2018 • by Adam Louis Klein

1. Invention In 1975, Roy Wagner wrote a groundbreaking book called The Invention of Culture arguing, essentially, that the only cross-cultural universal was invention itself: creativity. Wagner’s book initiated a crucial sublation in anthropology -- arguably waiting to happen -- from cultural relativity to the relativity of Culture itself. “Culture,” and all those related notions ...

Feature

The Portable Phallus

An excerpt from Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings

September 28, 2018 • by Mari Ruti

In Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings: The Emotional Cost of Everyday Life Mari Ruti interweaves theoretical insight, cultural critique, feminist politics, and personal experience to lift the lid on the prevalence of bad feelings in contemporary everyday life. Emanating from a playful engagement with Freud’s idea of penis envy, Ruti’s autotheoretical ...

Feature

Kavanaugh Unhinged

Quick to anger, defensive, unable to control his temper, and intensely partisan

September 27, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

As I argued a few days ago: today’s hearings on the Ford allegations about Kavanaugh were not primarily about the “justice” or “veracity” of the allegations in a criminal or civil sense. Nor were they primarily about Ford or Kavanaugh. They were about political justice. They were about whether the Kavanaugh confirmation ...

Democracy

Censorship or Right Wing Infighting or Both?

Hungary in 2018

September 27, 2018 • by Ivan Szelenyi

The editor (Tamás Demeter, a distinguished and conservative philosopher) and his editorial group were fired. As far as I can tell the last time an issue of a journal was destroyed to prevent its circulation was in 1984. Do we see the return of the past; is this a case ...