Search Results for: authoritarianism

Historian Richard Hofstadter, in his classic 1964 work offered an eerily accurate description of today’s politics. Hofstadter conducted a thorough review of American politics from before the founding of the nation through McCarthyism. He noticed a pattern among a small impassioned minority on the fringes of the political spectrum. He called their behavior the “paranoid […]

There’s a thing called Do Something Twitter. These are people on Twitter who loudly demand that those in power DO SOMETHING to save democracy. I’ll give a few examples. After Hayden Brown reported that Biden talks energetially about the importance of democracy, Sarah Kenzdior (who has appeared on news programs and presents herself as an

First, the definition of cynicism from my Oxford American Dictionary: Cynic: A person who believes that people are motivated purely by self-interest rather than acting for honorable or unselfish reasons. A person who questions whether something will happen or whether it is worthwhile. Right-Wing cynicism Cynicism is a characteristic of fascism. The best way to

This blog post started as a YouTube video. You can see it here. I think the way the current fascist threat will be beaten back is most likely through thousand small cuts, each seemingly undramatic. After all, over the past several decades, Trump’s brand of fascism has gained as much power as it has by

This blog post started out as a short (14-minute) youtube video. What follows is an edited transcription. The video is here. What follows is an [edited] transcription. The historical background, and ideas for how to weaken the strongman cult, comes from this book by New York University professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat: The question of the hour

As with my post last Sunday, this blog post started out as a video. You can see it here. What follows is an [edited] transcript. This week I want to talk about totalitarianism—which is something we don’t talk about enough. There is an aspect to totalitarianism that helps explain a lot of what we are

One of my followers on Twitter suggested that Trump supporters don’t understand that he poses a danger to democracy. I disagree. There may be a few Trump supporters who don’t understand the danger posed by a president who openly says that the way for him to stay in power is to “get rid of the

To read this page on the Harris School of Public Policy website, click here   Why are challenges to democracy so important to effectively address? Democracies can, and do, die.  “If it happens here,” says Prof. David Strauss, “it won’t happen all at once. A large, diverse society with democratic traditions and a strong civil