Five Essential Texts on Democracy
We asked a leading political theorist for help understanding the meaning of democracy and the elite reaction to it.
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Corey Robin is the author of The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump and a contributing editor at Jacobin.
We asked a leading political theorist for help understanding the meaning of democracy and the elite reaction to it.
Impeachment could, in theory, turn Donald Trump into an even bigger symbol of a rotten political and social order. It could help bury the Reagan order once and for all. But establishment Democrats would never be interested in the type of impeachment that fundamentally challenged the status quo.
All successful movements need leaders, elected officials, and, yes, even bureaucrats. The key is to remember the radical roots of those bureaucracies and leaderships — so they can sustain instead of squelch socialist politics.
After months of frenzied speculation and breathless commentary, Robert Mueller has turned in his report. But the political landscape some said it would upend is basically unchanged.
Trump’s pending declaration of a state of emergency isn’t a show of power — it’s a show of desperation.
With the Right firmly in control of the Supreme Court, elite liberals’ veneration of the undemocratic body might finally be coming to an end.
It’s not just the Supreme Court — we have to take on the undemocratic scandal of the Court, the Senate, and the Electoral College. Only the Left can do it, because Democrats won’t.
Set in contemporary Russia, Keith Gessen’s new novel captures the cost of modern life.
Liberalism, they said back in the 1930s, was freedom plus groceries. In the Obama era, it was faulty websites plus hip celebrities.
At a time when Democrats and Republicans flout even basic democratic standards, it’s socialists who have become democracy’s greatest champions.
Making political hay from attacking Donald Trump as Vladimir Putin’s puppet is both wrong and dangerous.
Ocasio-Cortez missed an opportunity to push a left position on Israel. But it’s not too late to change that.
It’s often a sign of progress when people change their minds. But it can also be unsettling, even eerie.
The wave of teacher strikes is a challenge not just to GOP austerity, but to Democratic Party neoliberalism.
If the US is in the throes of a constitutional crisis, it’s one oddly devoid of social substance.
Sometimes you have to break the rules to create a more democratic system.
Libertarians have a distorted sense of what counts as free speech.
Burke, Hayek… Trump? Yes, The Donald fits well within the right-wing tradition.
The discourse of “norm erosion” has nothing to say about the very text that helped produce Donald Trump.
Trump’s entire mode of politics is drawn from his business background. And that’s why he’s floundering.