Crises of Democracy: Thinking in Dark Times
Written by Samantha Hill, Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Studies, Assistant Director, Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities Office.
Last month the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College hosted its 10th annual conference on Crises of Democracy: Thinking in Dark Times. CCE sponsored the attendance of nearly 300 Bard early college and early college center students at the conference, including students from Baltimore, Hudson, Manhattan, Newark, New Orleans and Queens, as well as the Harlem Childrenās Zone.
The conference was opened by President Leon Botstein who heralded the virtues of having a physical, public sphere, and Roger Berkowitz, Academic Director and founder of the Arendt Center, who discussed four prejudices underlying our crises of liberal democracy. During the two days, conference speakers and participants engaged the question: Has liberal representative democracy failed?
Thursday began with Masha Gessen who discussed the trials and virtues of living in exile. AfD representative Marc Jongen emphasized the necessity of nationalism to the nation state, and importance of sharing a cultural heritage. (Jongenās speech attracted significant controversy following the conference. For a Bard faculty memberās insight, see Francine Proseās excellent article from the Guardian: My students heard a far-right politician on campus. Here's what they learned.) Occupy Wall St. co-founder Micah White explained why Occupy, Black Lives Matter, and the Womenās March are failed protest movements, as Melvin Rogers, Professor of Politics at Brown University pointed us back to the past to take refreshment in our shared history, and find a non-theological political faith. Yascha Mounk, lecturer at Harvard, offered the audience a more traditional, liberal view of democracy while arguing that the crisis of democracy is not retreating anytime soon. The expansive conversation included a heated discussed between Walter Russell Mead, who pushed us to wrestle with the causes of populism in America, and Linda Zerilli, who defended an Arendtian conception of freedom and what it means to act collectively in the public sphere. Jim Fishkin took the audience on a journey through his public research project Deliberative Democracy, which tries to connect voters to their elected officials and policy making by polling representative, random parts of the population. The conference was drawn to a close by acclaimed novelist Teju Cole. Weaving together bits of classical music and images from museum exhibitions, Cole argued that the crisis has already happened, and that we are living in the disaster. He left attendees with a question to consider: āIf we survive, who will be left after the disaster?ā
To hear more, click on the link below to watch the conference in full. http://bit.ly/crisesofdemvideo










