Three big lessons from Narendra Modi's shocking underperformance in the 2024 election. By Zack Beauchamp

This week we're talking about perhaps the most widely misused term in all of politics - authoritarianism. Why is it so misunderstood? Let's take a look.

“ I'd like to point out this entire controversy is intrinsically horrible. Personally, I don't think that something is good just because it's old, because I am not a conservative.”

Democracy is hackable. It is a complex set of economic, social and political systems that mimic the algorithms and protocols of computer code. When abused, democracy can be exploited by special interest hackers to find tax loopholes and ways to abuse obscure regulations and laws for their own self-interest.

Sorry, Dwayne Johnson fans! A presidential bid isn't in The Game Plan for The Rock. The movie superstar, 50, opened up to Tracy Smith in a preview for this weekend's CBS Sunday Morning sit down about a presidential run, which he toyed with in past interviews through the years. As he explained now: It's "off the table."

Hondurans headed to the polls on Sunday to pick a new president, with leftist candidate Xiomara Castro hoping to oust the right-wing National Party, whose 12-year rule has been beset by graft scandals, chronic unemployment and waves of fleeing migrants.

The gore is no more.

Access to the records, one expert said, could help squash the "wandering-officer phenomenon."

Just days after a French MP called for cannabis reforms, and even a referendum in France, the results of a government online survey on the subject are in.

The U.S. Constitution owes a huge debt to ancient Rome. The Founding Fathers were well-versed in Greek and Roman History. Leaders like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison read the historian Polybius, who laid out one of the clearest descriptions of the Roman Republic’s constitution, where representatives of various factions and social classes checked the power of the elites and the power of the mob. It’s not surprising that in the United States’ nascent years, comparisons to ancient Rome were common.

Richard D. Wolff is professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a visiting professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, in New York. Wolff’s weekly show, “Economic Update,” is syndicated by more than 100 radio stations and goes to 55 million TV receivers via Free Speech TV.

Donald Trump is an authoritarian and an autocrat. For him and others of such ilk, violence is political currency in the form of raw power. Autocrats and authoritarians such as Trump are de facto crime bosses who just happen to be leaders of their respective countries.

Presenting a keynote address at an ADL conference, comedian Sacha Baron Cohen wasn't kidding around when he painted a bleak picture of our emerging world: "Today ... demagogues appeal to our worst instincts. Conspiracy theories once confined to the fringe are going mainstream. It’s as if the Age of Reason—the era of evidential argument—is ending, and now knowledge is delegitimized and scientific consensus is dismissed.

The US House of Representatives has passed a resolution to formally proceed with the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump. The measure detailed how the inquiry will move into a more public phase and was not a vote on whether the president should be removed from office.

It could really boost voter turnout.

Excessive wealth and power commanded by a small group of multi-millionaires and billionaires—the richest one-tenth of 1 percent—poses an existential threat to America’s economic vitality, democracy, and civil society. It’s well-known by now that the richest 1 percent of American households have essentially doubled the share of national income they claim since the late 1970s. Less well-known is that inequality has even risen within the top 1 percent, with the top 10 percent of that overall group—or the top 0.1 percent—accounting for half of all income within the top 1 percent.1

In an unmissable talk, journalist Carole Cadwalladr digs into one of the most perplexing events in recent times: the UK's super-close 2016 vote to leave the European Union. Tracking the result to a barrage of misleading Facebook ads targeted at vulnerable Brexit swing voters -- and linking the same players and tactics to the 2016 US presidential election -- Cadwalladr calls out the "gods of Silicon Valley" for being on the wrong side of history and asks: Are free and fair elections a thing of the past?

For more than a year, the Observer writer has been probing a darkness at the heart of Silicon Valley. Last week, at a TED talk that became a global viral sensation, she told the tech billionaires they had broken democracy. What happened next? By Carole Cadwalladr.

In a previous post, I discussed the essential role that questions play in the political landscape of contemporary democracy. The ability to ask questions, and to ask good ones at that, facilitates participation in political discussion and debate, allows us to gather information that speaks to our concerns, and those of our communities, and enables informed decision-making, about, for example, which box to tick on one’s ballot paper. Here I want to make the case stronger by looking at...

Jaden Rams used to be on fire for Donald Trump. Shortly before the 2016 presidential election, when he was 13, he put on a red MAGA hat and matching tie and yelled his support at a rally in his hometown, Grand Junction, Colo. “I was getting politically charged around that time,” he said. “I was pretty passionate about a lot of the causes he was advocating for.”