Political theory 
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SOURCE: Harvard Gazette
10/27/2022
Melvin Rogers: How Black Thinkers Remade America's Political Traditions
From Douglass to DuBois, African American intellectuals have pushed for the theory of American republicanism to wrestle with the conflict between racial domination and political equality.
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SOURCE: Boston Review
10/12/2022
Democracy v. The People: Jan-Werner Muller on Populism
by Alberto Polimeni
A leading historian and theorist of populism looks beyond psychology or brainwashing as explanations for the appeal of such movements, but still focuses on the ways elites can better lead the people instead of what people may want.
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SOURCE: The Baffler
10/12/2022
Angelo Codevilla: An Unknown Intellectual Leader of Today's Far Right
by Daniel Luban
The recently deceased political theorist's life helps to explain how a cast of conservative power brokers could move from the War on Terror neoconservatism to the Tea Party to Trumpism.
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SOURCE: The Bulwark
9/16/2022
Walter Lippmann's "Public Opinion" at 100
Concern about what happens to democracy when a society buried in information gives up on the truth and embraces alternate realities is nothing new. What does the work of Walter Lippmann tell us today?
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SOURCE: Boston Review
9/15/2022
Barbara Ehrenreich's Legacy is More than "Nickel and Dimed"
by Lynne Segal
The late writer's contributions to keeping a current of socialist radicalism in the feminist movement deserve recognition, too.
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SOURCE: The New Yorker
9/5/2022
Can We Do Better than Liberal Democracy?
by Adam Gopnik
Critic Adam Gopnik examines two recent books on alternatives to representative democracy that respond to the recent use of institutions by power-seeking authoritarians.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
7/20/2022
Fanaticism May be Alarming, but It's Not New
by Zachary R. Goldsmith
The term "fanatic" evolved from a value-neutral name for participants in Roman religious cults to describe someone with dangerous and erroneous beliefs in religion and then in modern politics. Philosophers from Kant to Burke show the need to pull back from such absolute judgments of our adversaries.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
7/5/2022
Explaining the Complexities of the Great Vibe Shift
by Tom F. Wright
As pundits invoke the nebulous concept of "vibes" to try to explain and predict incoherent and emotionally volatile politics, it's worth considering how the outdated (but not very old!) concept of charisma has served the same role.
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SOURCE: The Baffler
6/27/2022
"Last Man Standing" – Michael Brenes on Francis Fukuyama and the Return of History
Presented with the manifest failure of a peaceful global liberal order after the end of the Cold War, Fukuyama now simply argues that people have failed classical liberalism.
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SOURCE: New Statesman
6/9/2022
What's Really New about the "New" American Right?
by John Ganz
There's something familiar about a secular nationalist movement that mobilizes property owners through a narrative of national decline and the promise of controlling or purging enemies of a unified people through force, recently described in a Times op-ed. If only there were a word for it....
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SOURCE: The New Republic
4/11/2022
Authoritarianism Isn't Just About Personality Cults
Recent books on "strongmen" reduce the problem of authoritarianism to the phenomenon of charismatic leadership and ignore many of the structural factors contributing to democratic collapse.
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SOURCE: Boston Review
4/4/2022
Gramsci's Gift
by Alan Wald
As the political thought of the Italian marxist is increasingly used and misused in popular discourse, including in right-wing attacks on "cultural Marxism," has the time come for this generation's biography of Antonio Gramsci?
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SOURCE: The Week
3/21/2022
The Thrill of Teaching Mill
by Samuel Goldman
Mill was prescient in focusing attention not only on the restriction of speech by the state, but on the cultural and social obstacles to dissenting opinion.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
3/17/2022
Now is the Time to Revisit Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism
by Anne Applebaum
The political and economic supports for stability and prosperity in the developed world are more precarious than ever; the revival of authoritarianism that Arendt predicted may be at hand, making her work more vital than ever.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
3/14/2022
Francis Fukuyama Revisits the "End of History" and Liberalism's Prospects After War
"People really like being in liberal societies after they’ve gone through either horrible nationalist conflict (as in the two world wars of the 20th century) or they’ve had to live under authoritarian dictatorship (as people in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union did under communism)."
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SOURCE: Boston Review
1/6/2022
The Deep Structure of Political Crisis
by Ruth Berins Collier and Jake Grumbach
The economic model of post-industrial America has produced the kinds of organization and disorganization, and mobilization and demobilization, that have led to profoundly antidemocratic politics.
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SOURCE: National Interest
1/2/2022
How Willmoore Kendall Invented Trumpism
by Jacob Heilbrunn
Christopher Owens's biography places Willmoore Kendall in the first rank of postwar conservative intellectuals and identifies him with the fusion of populism and traditionalism associated with the Trumpist right and the burgeoning "national conservative" movements.
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SOURCE: New York Review of Books
12/16/2021
Review: Digging For Utopia
by Kwame Anthony Appiah
"There was a stepwise connection, we think, between sowing cereals in our primeval past and waiting in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles." Do David Graeber and David Wengrow effectively demolish this assumption in a new book with implications for how we understand freedom and civilization?
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SOURCE: New York Times
12/9/2021
Why does Biden's Term Register as a Disappointment? We've Misread the Political Regime Cycle
by Corey Robin
The author was among those who thought Joe Biden might seize a "reconstructive moment" to push aside the social austerity politics of the Reagan Revolution. The problem hasn't been Biden's will, but the disproportionate obstructive power conservatives still hold.
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SOURCE: The Nation
9/20/2021
Beyond the State: An Anarchist History of Humanity
by Daniel Immerwahr
The late radical anthropologist David Graeber, with his posthumous collaborator David Wengrow, looks to the long sweep of history to assess the prospect of human self-governance without a powerful state.
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