by Sophia Barkoff | Nov 17, 2020 | University of Chicago
Last week, President Donald Trump was voted out of office by an American populace ready to replace him. This rightly seems like a signal that the majority of Americans are ready to move past Trump’s populist claims and fear mongering tactics. Yet Trump remains enabled...
by Preeya Patel | Nov 17, 2020 | University of Chicago
One of the specific criteria of populist leaders according to Jan-Werner Müller is antipluralism. He writes, “[Populists] claim that they and they alone represent the people.” [1] Instead of recognizing “the people” as a diverse set of groups with different identities...
by Stasya Rodionova | Nov 13, 2020 | University of Chicago
In the grand scheme of checks and balances on authoritarian tendencies, the media ideally plays an impartial role as a guardrail against democratic backsliding. 2016 posed a unique challenge to this system in the U.S. Then Republican-nominee Donald Trump’s claims and...
by Amber Germain | Oct 26, 2020 | Georgia State University
How can we classify the self-pitched-Playboy-Cover-model son of a wealthy, racist real estate developer as a populist when he is neither like the people he claims to represent nor does he enact policy to help his supportive minority in a meaningful way? Trump is not a...
by Monica Greig | Oct 24, 2020 | University of Chicago
Levitsky and Ziblatt write that ‘extreme polarization can kill democracies.’ [1] Polarization of politics in the US has left Americans not only at risk from a weakening of democracy, but it has also now threatened their ability to trust the governments handling of the...