A Third Escape toward Freedom
Within the historical context of the New School’s Graduate Faculty, an institution founded in 1934, as a University in Exile for Jews fleeing fascism in Europe, and the current iteration of its existential crisis, the relaunching of the Democracy Seminar couldn’t come at a more fortuitus time.
In conjunction with Bard College Berlin’s inauguration of the European Democracy Institute, Democracy Seminar 3.0 is a public space for debate, discussion and reflection on issues of pressing concern. It is also testament to the vitality of the transatlantic alliance and our desire to learn from one another about the many facets of democracy – whether as an ideal, a complex set of institutions bound by national and international laws, or the moral conviction that each person has the right to have rights. As we are witnessing in real time, democracy is not a given. Rather, it is a form of governance and way of life that we wish to not only preserve, but to actively foster.
Given the dizzying pace of Trump 2.0 and his administration’s attack on Venezuela, blatant disregard for international law with the arrest of Nicolás Maduro, upending of the transatlantic alliance with his admiration for Vladimir Putin at the expense of his invasion of Ukraine, support for far-right parties in Europe, the promotion of Trump Gaza, threats to effectively end the NATO alliance by seizing Greenland from Denmark, and radicalization of paramilitary style ICE agents against individuals on American soil, one struggles to make sense of the dramatic shift to right-wing authoritarianism in democratic societies. Indeed, Trump’s rejection of the international rules-based order in favor of an updated Monroe Doctrine (a “Donroe Doctrine”) to proclaim American spheres of influence threatens to turn the clock back to a 19th century world of great powers unencumbered by international law or long-standing treaties. With the Trump administration, the tectonic plates of the post-war international order are rapidly shifting. While the international structures formed after World War II were imperfect, they nonetheless provided legal guidelines and the tacit agreement that individuals and governments should be held accountable for their actions.
As alumni of the Graduate Faculty at the New School for Social Research, we are influenced by Hannah Arendt’s (1906-1975) attention to political crises, subterranean currents of totalitarianism, banality of evil, collective responsibility, and amplification of lies by new media landscapes. Indeed, there is much to be learned from her emphasis on the importance of thinking about crises as breaks and ruptures in time. As she famously wrote in Between Past and Future:
‘A crisis forces us back to the questions themselves and requires from us either new or old answers, but in any case direct judgments. A crisis becomes a disaster only when we respond to it with preformed judgments, that is, with prejudices. Such an attitude not only sharpens the crisis but makes us forfeit the experience of reality and the opportunity for reflection it provides’ (1993: 175).
2026 thus presents readers with multiple crises and opportunities for reflection about democracy, the rule of law, and the fragility of democratic institutions when they are taken for granted. Just as Arendt warned against the comforting inertia of cynicism when facing the mendacity of politicians, so Fritz Stern (1926-2016) cautioned against the temptations of cultural pessimism and despair. Indeed, what he wrote in his 1961 book, The Politics of Cultural Despair might just as well have been written today: ‘I hope to show that ours is the age of the political organization of cultural hatred and personal resentments’ (1961: xvi). The Democracy Seminar is thus not only linked to the European Democracy Institute through Hannah Arendt’s writings and Bard College’s institutional cooperation between Berlin and New York, we are also linked by the seminal ideas of Fritz Stern. Indeed, Hana Cervinková, a long-standing member of the Democracy Seminar and alumna of the New School, gave the laudation in 2018 for Anne Applebaum’s receipt of the Fritz Stern Wroclaw Professorship.
While Stern wrote about 19th and 20th century German intellectuals, who were resentful of modernism and nostalgic for earlier times, Applebaum draws on his criticism of cultural despair to argue for the rise of right-wing authoritarianism in Europe and the United States since the end of the cold war. As she wrote in her 2020 book, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Allure of Authoritarianism: ‘the triumphant mood of the 1980s gave way to real anger’ (2020: 79). Indeed, her book is prefaced by a quotation from Stern’s The Politics of Cultural Despair:
‘We must accept the fact that this kind of rebellion against modernity lies
latent in Western society… its confused, fantastic program, its irrational and unpolitical rhetoric, embodies aspirations just as genuine … as the aspirations embodied in other and more familiar movements of reform’ (2020: vii).
Then and now, reactionary political movements are enacting a kind of ‘rebellion against modernity’. In his 1992-1993 Tanner Lectures at Yale University, Stern divided his talk into two parts –’Mendacity Reinforced: Europe 1914-1989’ and ‘Freedom and its Discontents: Postunification Germany’. Like The Politics of Cultural Despair, he focused on the roles of elites and the risk of Gleichschaltung as the dangerous and slippery slope of currying favour through accommodation, wishful thinking, and compromise.
After Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, Applebaum argued that comparisons between Sovietization and Russification do not go far enough in explaining how democratic governments accommodated Putin’s imperial annexation. Recalling Stern, in her acceptance speech for the Peace Prize for the German Book Trade in 2024, she pointed to the salience of Gleichschaltung as an ‘imposition of arbitrary autocratic rule’ that leads to the disregarding of international law, dismantling of rights, disappearance of accountability, and hollowing out of the system of checks and balances. As Applebaum underscored, authoritarianism exudes a ‘selective allure’ on those who admire autocrats as diverse as Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban and Donald Trump.
Allowing ourselves to cross the title of Erich Fromm’s great 1941 work on the social psychology by which with Ken Krimstein’s powerful graphic novel on the “three escapes” of Hannah Arendt, we can say that this rededication of the Democracy Seminar offers a third escape toward freedom. Jeff Goldfarb notes in his editorial note on this relaunch that in its original form, the Democracy Seminar was meant as an oasis of freedom in which the hope for a more genuinely democratic future could be nurtured in both the demoralized “West” and across Communist and later recently post-Communist. In its 2018 reboot, Democracy Seminar offered a space for a reckoning with democratic backsliding and a seemingly global rejection of and retreat by internationalist liberalism. Now, in stepping once more into the breach, we hope to offer an explicitly transatlantic cooperation that both draws on our network’s intellectual and cultural resources and contributes to them.
The juncture of this relaunch with the initial iteration of the Fritz Stern Prize, then, is no coincidence. In an interview with the History News Network in 2016, Stern warned that we are living in an ‘age of anxiety’, increasing religiosity, and illiberalism epitomized by the rise of Donald Trump. Given that Stern came of age during the end of the Weimar Republic and emigrated to the United States in 1938, his end-of-life reflections on the threat to democracy from within echo global concerns about the current health of American democracy. It is thus fitting that the European Democracy Institute, in conjunction with Bard College Berlin and the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities will present the inaugural Fritz Stern Award for Democratic Engagement to Małgorzata Maria Gersdorf, former First President of the Supreme Court of Poland on the 28th of January 2026. Her defense of the rule of law and independence of the judiciary in Poland, in accordance with the Treaty on European Union and Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union offers a beacon of hope for the other side of the Atlantic. More information about the event can be found here.
