Tag
Democracy
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Style and Politics: On “The National Security Strategy of the United States of America”
The National Security Strategy of the United States of America may have its longest life as a particularly vivid example of the ways in which bad faith will always manifest in terrible prose.
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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.
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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?
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Public Thinker: Astra Taylor on Democracy’s Long Crisis
“If we want democratic scrutiny, the demos must first have power.”
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Democracy’s Long Game: An Interview with Paul Starr
“You have to think … about how you’re going to make the changes stick.”
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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.
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Oedipus at the Border
The US has never been a democracy. Perhaps, for some, the most recent indefinite imprisonment of undocumented immigrants in concentration camps finally shattered confidence in this US fantasy. And yet, for others, no amount of …
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Trump Is a Liar. Tell Children the Truth.
Rich Rump is an ill-tempered “rich man” who accidentally receives Santa Claus’s pants from the dry cleaners and then refuses to return them. Featured in …
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Membership, Citizenship, and Democracy
President Trump’s pernicious attacks on nonwhite immigrants have thrust a particular theory of political membership—white nationalism—to the forefront …
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How Can Democracy and Criminal Justice Reform Coexist?
Ending mass incarceration in America isn’t just a matter of reforming a few aspects …
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B-Sides: Kazuo Ishiguro’s “The Unconsoled”
Ryder, the world-renowned pianist whose brief visit to an unnamed foreign city occupies the full 512 pages of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1995 The Unconsoled, finds …
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What the Constitution Means to Us
On June 22, 1999, Jessica Lenahan’s estranged husband, Simon Gonzales, abducted their three daughters from outside Jessica’s house, in Castle Rock …
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America Learns What Russia Knew
How to tell a story always matters enormously. This already urgent task takes on added dimensions and gravity when the story itself is about information …
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The Political Ascendancy of Creditworthiness
The widespread resurgence of authoritarian nationalism in recent years has been met by the left with fear and loathing—but also a bit of envy. For it is …
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Ignoble Savages
Writers created “Western” civilization out of a looming sense that it was in peril. This is as true today as it was a century ago, when Oswald Spengler published the first volume of The Decline of …
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Public Thinker: Siva Vaidhyanathan on Facebook and Other “Antisocial” Media
Siva Vaidhyanathan has built a career as a media studies and communications … [none-for-homepage]
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Public Thinker: Timothy Snyder on Russia and “Dark Globalization”
Timothy Snyder has taken a region that resists understanding and made it …
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Focus Groups and Voting Booths
What can we know of our fellow citizens? The question is at root philosophical or epistemological. In the peculiar climate fostered by the Trump regime, however …
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The Invention of the “White Working Class”
As liberals came to terms with what happened on Election Day 2016, early press reports focused on the so-called white working class. We’d seen these …
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The Big Picture: Trump’s Attack on Knowledge
On any particular policy, we can always hope President Trump will flip-flop. Expel the Dreamers; save the Dreamers. Maybe he’ll keep the US in the Paris climate accords after all. Threaten Kim Jong-un, but not really blow up the world. One thing we can know for sure: whatever Trump does, it won’t be on the…
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The Big Picture: Religion and the Republic
I still remember reading Tocqueville’s Democracy in America for the first time, as a freshman in college. I was astonished! How could this French aristocrat have understood us so well, I wondered …
