A New York Times article highlighted key takeaways from a recent lecture on campus discussing the future of American democracy from a comparative government standpoint.
Valerie Bunce, the Aaron Binenkorb Professor of International Studies and professor of government, specializes in the rise and fall of democractic systems in America and international countries. Bunce told her fellow social scientists that she is seeing something seemed reminiscent of the fall of Communism in the last century.
“We were looking at this in the 1980s — and if you said then the Soviet Union would break up, people didn’t believe you,” Bunce told two colleagues, who responded with an uneasy laugh. “I’m just trying to give you an idea of the kind of things that can happen here.”
The field of comparative politics compares and contrasts the formation and fall of political systems.
“The consensus among the scholars is that modern America has never produced a president like Mr. Trump, but that other countries have," Bunce writes. "Hugo Chávez in Venezuela pioneered using Twitter to attack his enemies and hosted a TV show called 'Alo, Presidente.' Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s current strongman, used the term 'deep state' decades before Mr. Trump did.”
Serge Petchenyi/Cornell University
From left, Xi Yang, PhD '10, senior lecturer of finance in the SC Johnson College of Business; Christine Ye; Christine Ye Award recipient Margaret E. Foster, doctoral candidate in communication; Cornelia Ye Award recipient Naman Agrawal, doctoral candidate in neurobiology and behavior; Cornelia Ye; and Derina Samuel, associate director of graduate student development at the Center for Teaching Innovation.
NASA, ESA, CSA, Ralf Crawford (STScI)
Artist concept of the gas giant planet WD 1856 b orbiting a white dwarf star. The planet is 7 times larger than the Earth-sized white dwarf it orbits. WD 1856 b has methane and hazes in its atmosphere, which would give it a similar color to Saturn's moon Titan. The white dwarf formed from a star that died 5 billion years ago, and has been cooling ever since, giving it an orange colour similar to the Sun.
Sreang Hok/Cornell University
Dressed in clean-room suits, the Warrior-Scholar Project’s STEM boot camp cohort toured the Cornell NanoScale Science and Technology Facility.
