Daniel Little, University of Michigan-Dearborn
Course Description
Democracy has been understood as a setting where equal citizens collectively make decisions about law and public policy in an environment of equality, fairness, and mutual respect. Political theorists from JS Mill to John Rawls have attempted to define the conditions that make a democratic civil society possible. Today the world’s democracies are challenged by powerful political movements based on intolerance and division. The course considers current thinking about populism and the rise of racism and religious bigotry as political tools of mobilization. How should democratic theory respond to the challenge of hate-based political movements? The course reexamines classic ideas in democratic theory, current sociological research on hate-based populism, and current strategies open to citizens in the twenty-first century to reclaim the values of tolerance and respect in their democratic institutions. The course is intended to provide students with better intellectual resources for understanding the political developments currently transforming societies as diverse as the United States, Germany, the Netherlands, France, and India.
Required texts
John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement
Cas Mudde, The Far Right Today
Levitsky and Ziblatt, How Democracies Die
Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
Please download HONS 400 lecture master file.pdf on Canvas Files. This will serve as a digital textbook and resource for the course.
Course Outline
Session 1
Overview of course
VIDEO session 1
MASTER SLIDES Intellectual Foundations slides 1-8
Session 2
Setting the stage: Democracy and Hate
VIDEO Session 2
MASTER SLIDES Chapter 1 slides 9-22
READ US Constitution
READ Universal Declaration on Human Rights
READ: Propublica, After DeSantis’ Anti-CRT Law …”
Session 3
Classical liberalism: the minimal state
VIDEO lecture session 3
MASTER SLIDES Chapter 2 slides 23-35
READ Mill, On Liberty, Chapters 1, 2 (pp. 6-52)
Session 4
Modern liberal democracy: Rawls’s theory
VIDEO lecture session 4
MASTER SLIDES Chapter 3 slides 36-52
READ Rawls, Justice as Fairness sections 1-11
Session 5
Overlapping consensus and democratic stability
VIDEO lecture session 5
MASTER SLIDES Chapter 4 53-63
READ Rawls, Justice as Fairness sections 54-60
Session 6
A property-owning democracy; inequalities
VIDEO lecture session 6
MASTER SLIDES Chapter 5 64-81
READ Rawls, Justice as Fairness, sections 41-45
Session 7
Fundamental challenges to democracy
VIDEO lecture session 7
MASTER SLIDES Chapter 6 and 7 82-104
READ Levitsky and Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (ch. 1-5)
READ Levitsky and Ziblatt, Tyranny of the Minority (chap. 2)
Session 8
Populism, racism, and hate
VIDEO lecture session 8
MASTER SLIDES Chapter 8 and 9 146-163; 164-189
READ Mudde, The Far Right Today (intro, chaps. 2-4)
READ Mudde, “Populist Zeitgeist”, pp. 541-548
READ: McAdam and Kloos, Deeply Divided
Session 9
VIDEO lecture session 9
MASTER SLIDES Chapter 12 212-230
Justin Gest, The New White Minority
Session 10
Gest, working class resentment
VIDEO lecture session 10
MASTER SLIDES Chapter 13
Session 11
Populist mobilization
VIDEO lecture session 11
MASTER SLIDES Chapter 10 164-189
READ Mudde, The Far Right Today (ch. 5,6,8)
READ Blee, “Ethnographies of the Far Right”
READ Blee and Creasap, “Conservative and Right-Wing Movements”
Session 12
Authoritarian personality and social dominance
VIDEO lecture session 12
MASTER SLIDES Chapter 11 190-210
READ Little, Theories of authoritarian personality (e-book)
READ Saunders-Ngo, “The Right-Wing Authoritarianism Scale”
READ Pratto Sidanius and Stallworth Malle, “Social Dominance Orientation”
Session 14
Hindu Nationalism and anti-Muslim violence in India
VIDEO lecture session 14
MASTER SLIDES Chapter 14
READ New Yorker, “Blood and Soil in Narendra Modi’s India”
READ Gettleman, “Modi’s Policies” (NYT)
READ Brass, Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India (Part I Introduction)
VIDEO Delhi riots 2020 BBC
VIDEO Tulsa race riot 1921 (min 5:00 to end)
Session 15
Violent anti-government organizations in the US
VIDEO lecture session 15
MASTER SLIDES Chapter 15
READ Counter Extremism, “US White Supremacy Groups”
READ Far right violence and organizations (Stanford University Center for International Security and Cooperation, Mapping Militants Project)
Session 16
Addressing Tyranny
VIDEO lecture session 16
MASTER SLIDES Chapter 16
Inglehart and Norris, Cultural Backlash (selections)
Snyder, On Tyranny
Session 17
Liberal democracy in a multicultural society
VIDEO lecture session 17
MASTER SLIDES Chapter 17
READ Daedalus, American Democracy and the Common Good (Canvas)
READ AAAS 2020, Democratic Citizenship, Our Common Purpose (pp. 10-19)
Session 18
Concluding observations
VIDEO session 18
MASTER SLIDES Chapter 18, 19
Dan Little Research Page 