Share the post "Revue de Presse: August 11"

Welcome to Tocqueville 21’s weekly revue de presse, where we recap some of the most thought-provoking articles we’ve seen on democracy and politics in France, the US, and beyond. As always, the articles we relay here do not necessarily reflect the views of the editors and interns that put this list together, just what we think is worth reading.

Americans have been seeing the fall of Rome as a mirror for their own anxieties for about as long as the country’s been around. In the NYR Daily, Tom Holland maps the common comparison points between contemporary US politics and Rome’s final era, while making clear that this sort of prophesying is nothing new. Meanwhile, in Mediapart, Fabien Escalona investigates fears about the

Share the post "Revue de Presse: August 4"

Welcome to Tocqueville 21’s weekly revue de presse—now appearing on Sundays—where we recap some of the most thought-provoking articles we’ve seen on democracy and politics in France, the US, and beyond. As always, the articles we relay here do not necessarily reflect the views of the editors and interns that put this list together, just what we think is worth reading.

In Dissent’s latest issue, devoted to the question, “What is the nation for?”, Quinn Slobodian and William Callison offer a biting critique of the left-wing populism of Germany’s Aufstehen movement, led by Sahra Wagenknecht (see some of our discussion of Wagenknecht’s “left nationalism” here). Though the movement claims to represent the voice of working-class

Share the post "Revue de Presse: July 27"

Welcome to Tocqueville 21’s weekly revue de presse, where we recap some of the most thought-provoking articles we’ve seen on democracy and politics in France, the US, and beyond. As always, the articles we relay here do not necessarily reflect the views of the editors and interns who put this list together, just what we think is worth reading.

With the second round of Democratic Party debates just around the corner, Michael Tomasky’s New York Review of Books essay examines how the rules of the primary process have changed since 2016 and how those changes might affect the current presidential hopefuls. Tomasky considers the Democratic voters who are not necessarily represented on Twitter and explores what the so-called

Share the post "Revue de Presse: July 20"

Welcome to Tocqueville 21’s weekly revue de presse, where we recap some of the most thought-provoking articles we’ve seen on democracy and politics in France, the US, and beyond. As always, the articles we relay here do not necessarily reflect the views of the editors and interns that put this list together, just what we think is worth reading.

Three months after the astonishing Notre Dame fire, the New York Times published a comprehensive and interactive report on what went wrong at the cathedral. Maps and videos give an up-to-the-minute account of the the blaze and the response by firefighters, church officials, and everyday Parisians.

In a historically-focused and policy-oriented article for the London Review of Books,

Share the post "Revue de Presse: July 13"

Welcome to Tocqueville 21’s weekly revue de presse, where we re-cap some of the most thought-provoking articles we’ve seen on democracy and politics in France, the US, and beyond. As always, the articles we relay here do not necessarily reflect the views of the editors and interns that put this list together, just what we think is worth reading.

In The Nation, Rosemarie Ho notes that the Democratic Party has been reticent to intervene in the recent pro-democratic protests in Hong Kong, and argues that this silence has had unintended consequences. Ho acknowledges that progressives are perhaps justified in their concerns over interfering in another country’s self-determination, but ultimately concludes that this is a fleeting

Share the post "Revue de Presse: July 6"

Welcome to Tocqueville 21’s weekly revue de presse, where we re-cap some of the most thought-provoking articles we’ve seen on democracy and politics in France, the US, and beyond. As always, the articles we relay here do not necessarily reflect the views of the editors and interns that put this list together, just what we think is worth reading. 

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Libération‘s EU correspondent Jean Quatremer examines the ongoing frustrations of the efforts to choose a new president of the European Commission. In his take, Merkel’s choice to throw her weight behind the Dutch social democrat Frans Timmermans was a strategic sacrifice of the interests of the right-wing PPE bloc in order to save the Spitzenkandidat system. This is a compromise

Share the post "Revue de Presse: June 29"

Welcome to Tocqueville 21’s second weekly revue de presse, where we re-cap some of the most thought-provoking articles we’ve seen on democracy and politics in France, the US, and beyond. As always, the articles we relay here do not necessarily reflect the views of the editors and interns that put this list together, just what we think is worth reading. This week, we take a look at the migration debate on both continents, France’s “anti-liberal” left, and more.
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Is Macron a centrist or merely a centralizer? In this article for the London Review of Books, Didier Fassin highlights the ways in which the French president has used a polemicized narrative of “progressives vs. nationalists” to claim pretenses to populist governance

Share the post "Introducing Tocqueville 21’s Revue de Presse"

Starting this weekend, we’re going to be trying something new on this blog: putting together a weekly collection of some of the most interesting articles, in English and French, that touch on some of the core themes of this blog. The articles we’ll be posting do not necessarily represent the opinions of Tocqueville 21’s writers, but get to the heart of contemporary democratic issues as seen in the politics of France, the United States, and beyond. These collections will be curated by Jacob and Danielle as well as Tocqueville 21’s interns Matt Jackson, Felix Chaoulideer, and Claire Holland. This week, we’ve been reading about right-wing politics in France, democracy and authoritarianism in Egypt, and