America Is Growing Apart, Possibly for Good

It may be time to stop talking about “red” and “blue” America. That’s the provocative conclusion of Michael Podhorzer, a longtime political strategist for labor unions and the chair of the Analyst Institute, a collaborative of progressive groups that studies elections. In a private newsletter that he writes for a […] Read more »

Biden’s defense of democracy, strong abroad, is struggling on his home turf

Joe Biden has made vindicating democracy the central objective of his presidency. Improbably, he has found more success abroad than at home so far. The President’s signal achievement has been uniting Western democracies in defense of Ukraine against Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian aggression. With coordinated flows of military equipment, […] Read more »

Half of Americans now predict U.S. may ‘cease to be a democracy’ someday

A new Yahoo News/YouGov poll shows that most Democrats (55%) and Republicans (53%) now believe it is “likely” that America will “cease to be a democracy in the future” — a stunning expression of bipartisan despair about the direction of the country. … At the same time, however, a large […] Read more »

American Democracy is Under Threat — and Newsrooms Are Mobilizing to Cover It

Think about a “threat to democracy,” and it’s easy to conjure up an image of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — the nation’s very seat of government besieged by rioters convinced that the presidential election was rigged. … While the insurrection was a wake-up call for the nation […] Read more »

A 1955 book on right-wing extremists predicted the Jan. 6 attack

The year was 1954, and the Cold War was in full swing. Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) was seeing Soviet spies in every corner of the government. And a young sociologist at Columbia University, Daniel Bell, convened a seminar to come to grips with the menace of McCarthyism. Bell enlisted an […] Read more »

The Democratic Deficit in the West

Russia’s war on Ukraine has focused the world’s attention on the ideological battle between liberal democracy and totalitarianism—systems of government based on national sovereignty, freedom, the rule of law, and individual rights versus those based on military aggression, societal repression, one-party rule, and state control of people’s lives. … But […] Read more »