Daniel Little
rising tide of radical populism; defense of liberal democracy; social democracy
It is hard to remember that American politics has experienced times of profound reflection upon and criticism of the premises of modern urban, capitalist, democratic life. Engagement in progressive issues and progressive political movements has a strong history in the U.S. The period of Civil Rights and the Vietnam War was one such time, when …
Continue reading "What are the prospects for a progressive movement in the United States?"
What does sociology have to offer when it comes to understanding the political phenomenon of Donald Trump as president? It seems that there are a number of different kinds of questions that sociologists ought to consider (link). Ideology and culture A political movement needs to mobilize a significant population of followers around a set of …
Ivan Ermakoff's 2008 book Ruling Oneself Out: A Theory of Collective Abdications is dense, rigorous, and important. It treats two historical episodes in close detail -- the passing of Hitler’s enabling bill by the German Reichstag in the Kroll Opera House in March 1933 (“Law for the Relief of the People and of the Reich”) and the …
Steve Bannon may have lost his perch in the White House and Breitbart; but the themes of white supremacy, intolerance, bigotry, and anti-government extremism that drive radical nationalist populism survive his fall. In The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality Justin Gest attempts to explain how this movement …
We know what is meant by saying that a physical system is resilient: for a given range of shocks, the system has the ability to recover its structural integrity. This does not mean that a resilient system is impervious to shocks, but rather that it is capable of recovery from a given range of shocks …
The Southern Poverty Law Center documents that hate groups and hate-based mobilization are on the rise in the United States (link, link). Here is a current map of hate-based groups monitored by SPLC: Through provocative epithets, slogans, and extremist demonstrations a variety of hate groups -- white supremacists, neo-Nazis, anti-muslim bigots, anti-immigrant activists, anti-LGBTQ extremists, …
Paul Brass provides a wealth of ethnographic and historical evidence on the causes of Hindu-Muslim violence in India in The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India. His analysis here centers on the city of Aligarh in Uttar Pradesh, and he believes that his findings have broad relevance in many parts of India. His key conclusion …
A democracy allows government to reflect the will of the people. Or does it? Here I would like to understand a bit better the dynamics through which radical right populism has come to have influence, even dominance, in a number of western democracies -- even when the percentage of citizens with radical right populist attitudes …
Continue reading "Democracy and the politics of intolerance"
Social Europe is a vibrant publisher of current progressive thought in Europe. Readers can find data, opinion, and policy analysis on the site, highly relevant to the core priorities of progressives across the continent and Britain -- social opportunity, inequalities, work, the threat of right-wing populism, the refugee crisis, and the future of the European Union. …
Continue reading "Strategies for resisting right-wing populism"
It is apparent, on this first round of the presidential elections in France, that we urgently need to understand better the dynamics and causes of radical populism in democratic polities. What is populism? Why does it have such virulence in the current moment as a political movement? What roles do racism, xenophobia, resentment, and economic …
Understanding Society 