Is Tyranny Around the Corner? | New York Times | May 2016 A Washington Post piece claimed that a sizable number of Americans are supposedly wary about democracy, and Andrew Sullivan has written that Trump’s rise shows that we’re ripe for tyranny. Others have spoken of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders as dual demagogues. But are Americans looking for an
Democracies end when they are too democratic | New York Magazine | April 2016 As this dystopian election campaign has unfolded, my mind keeps being tugged by a passage in Plato’s Republic. It has unsettled — even surprised — me from the moment I first read it in graduate school. The passage is from the part of the dialogue where
Democracy and the Demagogue | New York Times | October 2015 In Book VIII of “The Republic,” Plato is clear-eyed about these perils for democracy. He worries that a “towering despot” will inevitably rise in any democracy to exploit its freedoms and seize power by fomenting fear of some group and representing himself as the protector of the people against
Princeton Study: U.S. No Longer An Actual Democracy | TPM | April 2014 A new study from Princeton spells bad news for American democracy—namely, that it no longer exists. Asking “[w]ho really rules?” researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page argue that over the past few decades America’s political system has slowly transformed from a democracy into an oligarchy, where
Scholar Behind Viral ‘Oligarchy’ Study Tells You What It Means | TPM | April 2014 A new political science study that’s gone viral finds that majority-rule democracy exists only in theory in the United States – not so much in practice. The government caters to the affluent few and organized interest groups, the researchers find, while the average citizen’s influence