A collaboration with The New School & the European Democracy Institute
 
Category: <span>Dispatches</span>

Dispatches

Category: Dispatches

Populism in the Twenty-First Century

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An Illiberal Democratic Response to Undemocratic Liberalism The following essay were presented as part of the day-long conference “Democracy in Trouble?” at the University of Pennsylvania’s Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy. As the post-Cold War democratic order is straining under the dual threat of authoritarian and exclusionary movements on the national level and transnational oligarchic networks, the goal of the conference was to take account of …

Censorship or Right Wing Infighting or Both?

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Hungary in 2018 Issue #88 of the conservative journal Századvég (End of Century) was already been posted on the website of the journal, but at the order of the government-friendly foundation which finances the journal, it was removed from the website of the journal, and if hard copies were already printed they were ordered destroyed. The editor (Tamás Demeter, a distinguished and conservative philosopher) and his editorial group were fired. …

The Powerlessness of the Powerful

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Living in post – truth, seeking alternatives, examining Nicolae Ceausescu and Donald Trump At critical moments, the powerful become powerless. It becomes clear that the emperor does indeed have no cloths. The crowd hesitates, and turns against the leader. One moment they are exclaiming support, and the next, they turn on him. The combination of fear and interest that supports dictatorship melts away. Supporters join “the resistance,” in …

Revolution, Democracy, and Restoration Revisited

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In Poland and beyond In opposition to the threat to democracy in Poland today, Lech Walesa is calling for a united front against the ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS), reviving a citizens committee he led 30 years ago in the democratic struggle against Communist dictatorship. Here the second of two pieces considers the broader significance of the formation of the new committee – Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, Public …

Democracy and the Uterus

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Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Bodily Autonomy What does it mean to live in a democracy if part of your body is out of your control and subject to surveillance and policies that run against everything you believe in? This is the question every single person born with a uterus must ask themselves between now and July 9th, when Donald Trump plans to announce his nominee for …

From Velvet Revolution to Velvet Dictatorship

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Reflections on Democratic Regression This essay was originally published on May 3 2015.  Let me start by describing how communism died. The first thing to perish was the communist faith. And this faith had two dimensions. It was a faith in the project of a just world, a world of solidarity and freedom. And it was a conviction that people had finally deciphered the secret of world history …

Democracy Dies in Darkness

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A keynote address from the Dramaturgies of Resistance conference This is a shortened version of the keynote address delivered at the conference Dramaturgies of Resistance — International Artistic Positions on Freedom and Repression, Greifswald, January 26, 2018 Democracy Dies in Darkness It was a year ago, in late February 2017, when the Washington Post appeared in the newsstands displaying a disturbingly unfamiliar motto: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Though it had been …

Solidarity, and the Rise and Fall of the Public Sphere

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A Review of Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz’s Media Events Twenty-five years after its publication, Dayan and Katz’s classic study of ceremonial television, Media Events, has continued relevance for understanding the politics of media. With the proliferation of cable television and digital media explosion, television is no longer the hegemonic media form it once was, and the media events they studied exist no more in the form that they studied …

Reflections on a Revolutionary Imaginary and Round Tables

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The new always appears in the guise of a miracle This is the prepared text answering the question “What do we really know about transitions to democracy?” for  the General Seminar of The New School for Social Research, March 19, 2014. It was a quarter of a century ago, in 1989, that a new kind of revolutionary imaginary emerged, one that promises a new beginning, and demonstrates the …

Searching for Hope? Look for Bridges with Kapias

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For some time already, I have been thinking about the stimulating image of a world of civility that I found in a novel written in the middle of the twentieth century by the Yugoslav writer Ivo Andric entitled The Bridge on the Drina. The bridge as envisioned by a 14th-century builder is not just a river overpass between Bosnia and Serbia, as it suddenly doubles in width in  …