Posts tagged "democracy"
The Danger of Winning
By Ann Neumann Is a revisionist history of abortion rights being used--by journalists, supporters, and lawyers--to curtail Supreme Court rulings on other rights like same sex marriage. Is "fear of the backlash" just a stubborn frame?
“Could People Be Good Without Foundations?”
From Andrew Hartman's recent post at U.S. Intellectual History, "The Politics of Epistemology," in which he excerpts the following (and more) from his book Education and the Cold War:
By the beginning of the Cold War, this crisis was seemingly resolved in what Purcell terms the “relativist theory of democracy,” a stripped-down version of Dewey’s...
Scenes From an Occupation
Nora Connor spent the wee hours of Friday morning in Zucotti Park, waiting for Bloomberg to evict the Occupy Wall Street protesters. Below she documents dawn in the park and the breaking news that the eviction had been called off. Some of the images are dark or hard to see; they all convey the unfolding...
Organizing Democracy
An excerpt from Blessed are the Organized: Grassroots Democracy in America, (Princeton University Press, 2010), edited slightly for this purpose.
by Jeffrey Stout
Beginning in the 1920s, Walter Lippmann argued that the main actors in a modern democratic republic are officeholders, political candidates, opinion makers, and other members of powerful elites. Ordinary citizens, he thought,...
Democracy and Faith
From Jan-Werner Müller's article in the November/December Boston Review titled, "Making Muslim Democracies":
In the case of Christian Democracy, believers needed to be convinced that the party had not sold out to secularism (of which liberal democracy seemed merely one symptom); nonbelievers needed assurance that religiously inspired parties would not abandon state neutrality in religious affairs...
The Strange Moves of The Economist
By Jeff Sharlet
The reverence with which so many upper-middle class Americans read The Economist has always puzzled me. There’s much to admire about the magazine, but it generally performs the same function as Newsweek, boiling down events into centrist conventional wisdom, facts be damned. A report in the July 3, 2010 issue, “The religious right...
Learning from Iraq’s Struggle for Religious Tolerance
Three months after elections in Iraq, a new Prime Minister has not yet been selected to form a new government. Accusations of fraud still surround the election and Ayad Allawi's secular (but Sunni-dominated) coalition is struggling against the Shiite opposition, led by Nouri al Maliki, to keep a grip on its narrow margin of...
Faith and Trust
The nomination of Elana Kagan to the Supreme Court has a few progressive commentators rightly chattering over the cartes blanches the Obama administration is receiving. Glenn Greenwald at Salon provides the most cogent summation of the illogic:
Just think about what that means. If the choice is Kagan, you'll have huge numbers...
Daily Links 19 November 2004
Crowds Irate at Seer’s Failure to Die A Hindu seer, chief cleric of the Sriguru Ashram in east India, was berated by a crowd of 15,000, for failing to die after having declared that his soul would leave his body between 6 am and noon on Wednesday, in a “‘death by will’” miracle. When asked...
