Plus ça change. When the Democracy Seminar was last re-launched, in 2018, its curators at that time envisioned a “worldwide committee of democratic correspondence” in the hope that “democrats of the world can learn from each other as we oppose the dark forces of our times.” Undoubtedly and unfortunately, there is still much to learn. Moreover, there is much work to do in response to the attacks on democracy. As we once more relaunch the Democracy Seminar, in version 3.0 as it were, we invite our truly global and interdisciplinary band of colleagues to rise to the challenge of the moment so we can both understand and address the challenges that democracy and democracies face today.
In this first opening salvo, focused on the theme of the truth of the New Right, we present pieces by scholars of cultural sociology, international studies, and political science to help us examine trends in the knowledge production and manipulation that are part and parcel of the newly emboldened and electorally successfully illiberal right and threats they pose both to democracy and to truth. In these cases, we discuss Argentina, Brazil, and the United States. There is no shortage of other national, regional, and international cases to examine.
Democracy Seminar Editorial Team: Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, Siobhan Kattago, and Michael Weinman
Milei’s Right-Libertarian Populism
Javier Milei is one of the most eccentric figures in what Cas Mudde (2020) describes as the ‘fourth wave’ of far-right politics. This wave, characterized by the rise of radical ideas and their mainstream acceptance, is a global trend that is reshaping democracies. It is marked by the normalization of previously fringe ideas and agendas, creating new challenges for established political systems. Argentina, with its long history of …
Reaction to Backsliding in Brazil and the United States
Brazil and the United States have convergent and divergent trajectories regarding the relationship between democracy and the rise and contention of autocratic populist leaders. In both countries, leaders with this profile came to power—Donald Trump, in the United States, in 2017 (and again in 2025), and Jair Bolsonaro, in Brazil, between 2018 and 2022. This convergence, however, contrasts with the divergence in the response of political institutions, especially …
Memory, Slavery, and the Struggle for Truth in American Museums
In March 2025, President Trump issued an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” aimed at rooting out “corrosive ideology” in the Smithsonian institutions and other federal sites of memory and history. The order accuses sites like the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), which has extensive exhibits on slavery and segregation, of making a “concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our …