Some wager that the end is not inevitable: that universities can reassert their centrality to the American liberal democratic project.
Tag: Democracy
Democracy’s Horizons: Talking with Michael Hanchard
“The question becomes, What can we do to make democracy more economically, socially, and politically just?”
Freedom Education
An educated public grew out of freedom, W. E. B. Du Bois claimed. And education was also freedom’s surest protector.
Freedom for Whom?
What right does a society have to extoll freedom as its highest virtue if that same society is dependent on the unfreedom of others?
Laboratory of Conversations: The 15M Movement
Ten years ago today, Spain’s “15M” movement burst on the scene. In short order, everything changed. Or has it?
Politics—Not Psychology—Drives Politics
Social psychologists know conservative media politicizes its viewers. But by focusing on individuals, they miss how to enact political change.
Pay Attention When They Tell You to Forget
Remember that anti-Black violence has been the central dynamic of US history—and how Black women have struggled with this violence for centuries.
Can Free Assembly Survive the Internet?
When the internet is in everything, its problems are everywhere.
How Versailles Still Haunts the World
Middle Eastern borders, democratic defeats, the US War on Terror: all this flows from the Treaty of Versailles, now just over a century old.
Can the Crowd Speak?
Occupy Wall Street’s great achievement was to briefly create a community that prefigured a robust democratic culture.
“We Don’t Want the Program”: Jill Lepore on How Tech Can’t Fix Democracy
“Start-ups: they need philosophers, political theorists, historians, poets. Critics.”
Let’s Polarize Together
Humans can adapt to almost anything. So if social media forces us into permanently hostile camps, we will learn to stop seeing any other way.
Public Thinker: Thomas Frank on How Populism Can Save America
“A relentless assault on received orthodoxies has the effect of making you unpopular with the people for whom those received orthodoxies are orthodox.”
The Oligarchs’ Charter
Today we know that, just as Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson predicted, economic elites will never relinquish supreme power easily.
Was Impeachment Designed to Fail?
Six months ago, the impeachment of President Trump failed. The fault doesn’t lie with Congress, but, instead, with the Constitution.
Tele-visionary Blackness
Black folks can call into being an alternative relationship to TV, one that prompts a shift in consciousness and just possibly alters the future.
Democracy, More or Less
What future does democracy have? What future should it have? And, moreover, can the problems of democracy be solved within the framework of democratic politics?
Public Thinker: Astra Taylor on Democracy’s Long Crisis
“If we want democratic scrutiny, the demos must first have power.”
Democracy’s Long Game: An Interview with Paul Starr
“You have to think … about how you’re going to make the changes stick.”
Silicon Valley Is Not a Place
Silicon Valley has no mystical powers. It gets away with being thought of as apolitical simply because few have called its bluff.