Benjamin Studebaker

My article in Contemporary Political Theory came out today. It directly challenges the prevalent idea that American democracy currently faces existential threats. I’ve been given a link that will allow you to read it even without institutional affiliation. Check it out:

https://rdcu.be/cViBD

I have spent years refining the argument, and I am hoping to spend many more years further developing my theory of chronic legitimacy crisis. It is central to my understanding of politics in countries like the United States and the United Kingdom. Anything that you’ve read on this blog for the past 5 years or so has been heavily influenced by the argument I make in the article above.

I have a new piece out for Current Affairs criticizing proportional representation and the tendency to fixate on reforming democratic procedures. You can read it here:

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/06/proportional-representation-is-a-terrible-idea-that-the-left-should-not-embrace

There’s an endemic debate over what people are saying when they refer to ‘the west’. Is the west defined by its whiteness, its wealth, its liberal democracy? Should we call it the ‘highly developed countries’, the ‘advanced economies’, the ‘first world’, or the ‘global north’? I think most of these terms misses what is distinctive about this set of places. The countries we think of as ‘western’ are all countries where Catholicism was once dominant but is now in varying levels of retreat. Western countries are ‘post-Catholic’.