The Struggle for Democracy By Christopher Meckstroth

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The Struggle for Democracy By Christopher Meckstroth. It is difficult to read through the global news today without running across struggles for democratic change. Most spectacular are revolutions and counterrevolutions, such as the ambivalent events of the Arab Spring or recently, as I write in 2014, in Ukraine. But even where democracy has long been established, struggles over social and political reform often fill the headlines. The Struggle for Democracy By Christopher Meckstroth In the United States, for instance, the first decades of the twenty-first century saw an equal rights movement mobilize for same-sex marriage and Occupy protestors challenge the legitimacy of economic inequality, at the very time a Tea Party organized to roll back Keynesian economic stimulus and Obama’s health insurance reforms. In France, new challenges were raised to long dominant secular principles, both by proponents of multicultural inclusion and by resurgent traditionalists who rallied en masse against legalizing “marriage for all.”1 In Europe more broadly, responses to the economic crisis and subsequent austerity led in countries including Spain and Greece to an explosion of extra-parliamentary politics on the left, repeatedly pitting elected governments against massive street protests and general strikes.

The Struggle for Democracy By Christopher MeckstrothIn other countries (and again in Greece), new and old antisystem parties surged on the right, claiming to speak for people unrepresented by unaccountable elites and redefining more narrowly the boundaries of the people that ought to rule. In Latin America, the rise of populist and indigenous movements since the 1990s produced profound constitutional changes in a number of states, many of which remain highly divisive and unstable. And in Egypt, mass protests toppled one former general and paved the way for the country’s first ever freely elected president, before another round of protests accused the same presidency of sliding into dictatorship and helped another general come to power. The Struggle for Democracy By Christopher Meckstroth.