Tag: Supreme Court decisions
How Hitler’s Enablers Undid Democracy in Germany
The short-lived Weimar Republic—which spanned the years after Germany’s defeat in World War I until 1933, when Hitler came to power—has become a paradigmatic example of democratic collapse. That has brought it renewed attention at this moment in America, when democracy is under threat from illiberal, would-be-authoritarian forces. We should rightly be suspicious of facile comparisons, especially the casual use of fascism as an imprecise epithet, yet Weimar’s fate provides us with some instructive parallels and important warning signals.
We Can Be Framers Too
The recent set of watershed Supreme Court opinions pulsates with the language of democratic accountability. Dobbs v. Jackson, overruling Roe v. Wade, makes its refrain the promise to “return” the abortion question “to the people and their elected representatives.” Concurring in West Virginia v. EPA, which restricts regulators’ ability to decarbonize the electricity grid, Justice Neil Gorsuch explained that the point of the decision was to keep power in the hands of “the people’s representatives” rather than
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 small group of activists, Podhorzer recently laid out a detailed case for thinking of the two blocs as fundamentally different nations uneasily sharing the same geographic space.
“When we