Mourning and melancholy after the defeat: ‘We will now find out. The social experiment on which we are embarking is a treacherous one, from which it will not prove easy to recover. Trump promises a revolution. Trump promises a revolution … Still, even the rhetorical invocation of “revolution” is yet another in an overflowing field…
Category: governance
Liberals to Battle Trump with Federalism, a Page from the Conservative Playbook
On liberal federalism: “With Republicans in control of the White House, Congress, and (soon) the Supreme Court, progressive groups are considering ripping a page from the conservative playbook to advance and defend their priorities … over the next four years. That page? Federalism, the idea that state and local governments can and should pursue policies…
Daniela Cammack: “The dêmos in dêmokratia”
“What is exciting about democracy, even in its modern formulation, is that it includes all citizens, even the poor, the uneducated, the insignificant—not even the rich, the privileged, the powerful. Democracy still implies rule by the poorer majority—that can hardly be avoided. The question is how to instantiate this, assuming more people than not would…
The Constitutional debate at the 1788 Virginia Ratification Convention
In The Fate of the Revolution: Virginians Debate the Constitution (2016) Lorri Glover “raises the provocative, momentous constitutional questions that consumed Virginians, echoed across American history, and still resonate today. This engaging book harnesses the uncertainty and excitement of the Constitutional debates to show readers the clear departure the Constitution marked, the powerful reasons people…
A portrait of political historian and theorist Danielle Allen
Allen calls the social vision that incorporates her work on equality “egalitarian participatory democracy.” It evolved out of a belief that civic republicanism and liberalism, the most robust traditions of thought addressing democratic political equality, needed modification in order to work in a diverse modern society. Allen is trying to answer the same questions about…
Kevin Anderson: “Deep Contradictions Facing the Global Movement for Human Emancipation”
“We live in a time marked by the revolutionary upsurge that began in the Arab world in 2011, followed swiftly by Madison, Madrid, Occupy Wall Street, and then a bit later, by Gezi Park in Turkey, the defense of Kobane, Black Lives Matter, and the Sanders and Corbyn phenomena. During this whole period, tiny Greece…
Philippe Girard, _Toussaint Louverture: A Revolutionary Life_ (2016)
L’Ouverture’s “equivocation was representative of an age that had to reconcile Enlightenment principles and the labor requirements of plantations. Like three other great figures of the Age of Revolutions — Thomas Jefferson, Simón Bolívar and Napoleon — he had conflicted views on the delicate matter of human bondage.”
“America in Populist Times: An Interview With Chantal Mouffe”
“Movements cannot be left just to the streets. I am very critical of the idea of politics as fomenting a moment of total rupture with the existing status quo. This is not how revolutions work. At some point, mobilizations will lose steam. You cannot change things only on the horizontal level of social movements. ……
“America treats its bold revolution as a reliquary”
The Fable of Founder Certainty “is just that: a fable. In fact, the American founders were uncertain about many things. They were uncertain about politics, nature, society, economics, human beings and happiness. … The American revolutionaries wondered; they did not know. … The revolutionaries liked to ponder uncertainty, to live in the freeing moments it creates. They…