The dangers of a new tyranny of a minority in our time This talk was presented at the New School forum “American Democracy in Crisis: Perspectives from Tocqueville, Douglass, Wells, Dewey, and Arendt” on October 13, 2022. The other talks and the discussion at the conference can be found here. I first read Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America as a college freshman. I started reading it more closely and …
The first two weeks of January 2023 let us see the recto and verso of Brazil. On Sunday, January 1st, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was sworn in for his third presidential term. A week later, on the 8th, self-proclaimed patriots attacked the buildings of the three branches of government. How do these two events help us understand Brazil at this critical moment? For almost a decade now, …
My Response A conference in my honor, “Small Things, Deep Resonance: The Sociology of Jeffrey C. Goldfarb,” was convened at the New School for Social Research on April 30th. It was planned as a meeting of my colleagues, many former students, on the major themes of my life’s work. As it was being organized, I tried to convince myself and the organizers that it should not be envisioned …
By opposing Trump, she is opposing Trumpism, an authoritarian, xenophobic, and racist movement that has taken over the Republican party. It’s now official. Liz Cheney has been defeated by a Trumpist in this week’s Wyoming Republican primary. That Cheney lost in a landslide is a surprise to no one, including Cheney herself. For the moment that Cheney openly challenged Donald Trump, and by inference reproached every single Republican party …
Liberal commentators of Russian aggression against Ukraine rightly trace its source back to Russia’s imperialist politics. They are wrong, however, in assuming that the realness of this war renders insignificant all ‘unreal’ disputes, in particular those revolving around issues of culture and social mores, i.e. gender and sexuality. The same commentators are surprised at the scale of support for Putin in Russia and note with disbelief that the …
Reflections on the Mandate Recall On April 10, 2022, Mexico had its first “mandate recall”, an exercise of participatory democracy inaugurated by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the current Mexican president. Widely known by just his initials, AMLO won by a record 30 million votes in 2018, in a historic election with the highest turnout in Mexican history , with a victory margin of 32.44 points. After …
Before the war in Ukraine, the European Union was on course towards political decoupling from the common liberal democratic project. That decoupling was driven by increasing energy dependence on Russia and trade dependence on China. The war has put those energy and trade ties into question, along with the political and economic leadership of the EU. Germany, and to a lesser extent France, have been seen to have …
The triumph of Gustavo Petro and Francia Márquez has initiated a new political configuration. Their call for a Great Nacional Accord seeks not only governability but also advancement of peace in a broad sense. In addition, they will have to respond to the expectations that their triumph has generated in a large part of the Colombian population. * On June 21, two days after Election Day, Francia Márquez …
Roe v. Wade is now history, and with it the U.S. constitutional protection of a woman’s right to choose whether or not to carry a pregnancy to term. A half century of medical practice, normative evolution, and legal precedent has been overturned by a Supreme Court stacked with conservative, Trump-appointed judges who have long made clear their opposition to the idea that reproductive freedom is a fundamental right. …
John C. Eastman, the Trump lawyer behind the failed attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election, is again in the media spotlight. The New York Times now reports that Eastman not only worked behind the scenes with right-wing activist and SCOTUS spouse Ginni Thomas to roll back the election results, but also that on Christmas Eve 2020 he emailed another Trump lawyer, Kenneth Chesebro, with some explosive inside …
