Syllabus writing for my upcoming @brooklyninstitute.bsky.social course on the theory and practice of dictatorship. A few spots are still available—we start on March 3! (Link below)
Rafael Khachaturian
@rafkhach.bsky.social
Political theorist, educator, translator. Teaching at Penn and BISR. www.rafaelkhachaturian.com
Feel pretty hopeful that Gen A countercultural and underground forms of life are going to be organized around analog tech, small scale farming, and the primacy of face to face interaction.
My toddler has picked up all the gesticulations of an intensely speaking adult without almost any of the vocabulary, leading to some hilarious gibberish monologues when upset. This is what happens when both of your parents come from hand talker cultures.
Toddlers are innately anti-capitalist because they have no conception of abstract time or private property.
This may be the best interview I've done about my book. Many thanks to @rafkhach.bsky.social for sharp, insightful questions pressing me to relate normative theory to our big-picture historical situation. (Recorded in February, but no less relevant today.) mitchellcenter.libsyn.com/episode-710-...
The Andrea Mitchell Center Podcast: Episode 7.10: Democracy as Dispersion of Power: A Conversation with Samuel Bagg
Interviewer: RAFAEL KHACHATURIAN. Over the past decade we have witnessed an unfolding global crisis of democracy, in its liberal-democratic, representative, capitalist form. As elite power has continu...
mitchellcenter.libsyn.com
Curtis Sliwa looks like he is ready to negotiate the transition to democracy in a southern European country after the generalissimo has died.
Barack hitting the phones between now and November
I had the pleasure of joining @rafkhach.bsky.social for a convo on 20 years of Brazilian politics -- from the Workers’ Party and the Pink Tide, through the 2013 protests and Bolsonaro’s rise, to Lula’s current term and the Left’s contradictions in power. mitchellcenter.libsyn.com/episode-72-b...
The Andrea Mitchell Center Podcast: Episode 7.2: Brazil's Pink Tide and the Politics of Redistribution
In this episode, host RAFAEL KHACHATURIAN speaks with sociologist and political theorist NARA ROBERTA SILVA about the trajectory of Brazil’s left over the past two decades. Together, they unpack the r...
mitchellcenter.libsyn.com
A New Deal for Higher Ed where you and all your academic friends go to work at community colleges.
A year ago, I'd have guessed that widespread AI adoption into white collar work is going to bifurcate the labor force, with only the most prestigious layers still getting meaningful training in reading and writing. Now, looking at the Ivies, I was probably way too optimistic.
It's weird when adults say hi to your baby but not to you. What are you supposed to do? Say hi for them? Say hi for yourself? Smile and keep walking??
One of the lasting insights from postwar scholarship on authoritarian regimes where the rule of law no longer holds up is that they encourage internal radicalization, as mid-tier operatives scramble to outdo each other to impress the leader.
The New York Times@nytimes.com · last yr.Breaking News: Trump officials blame a mistake for setting off the tectonic confrontation with Harvard. nyti.ms/4ioHtIT
Basically everyone who talks about 🇮🇱/🇵🇸 regularly ends up going insane because it is considered completely unacceptable to acknowledge things like "A country where some people are denied the right to vote based on their ethnicity is not a democracy" that are objectively true statements.
If interwar fascism was a modernist phenomenon, turning to myth as a response to the uprooting of metaphysical foundations, its American cousin is thoroughly postmodernist, playfully and consciously embracing the lack of any meaning apart from that measured by capital.
Pulling up to the Capital reading group with this
my hope is that AI can empower the Dumbest, Least talented slobs i know to replace everything i ever loved with One Million Years of Content
Can you please think for a second how this data is about to be used by people without great intentions? You’re playing with fire.
John Holbein@johnholbein1.bsky.social · last yr.Here are the party leanings of various universities. Look at how right-leaning BYU (my alma-mater) employees are! {BYU employees are significantly more to the right than even Liberty U. employees--wow!}
I never knew Michelle Trachtenberg, but she went to junior high in my neighborhood (Bay Academy) and we literally had common acquaintances/friends of friends. This, plus growing up a Nickelodeon kid, really does feel like hearing a former classmate died.
750 political scientists in support of democracy* *unless there’s a networking event and you “have to” cross a picket line
Philly, come out to 2000 Market right now and say it loud: hands off our healthcare, hands off our research, hands off our jobs!
another Thing I Will Keep Saying: there is of course an important moral case for internationalism. but the practical case for it can start by simply noticing how internationalist the people robbing you are (however nationalist their rhetoric might be)
Peter Elkind@peterelkind.bsky.social · last yr.“The lawsuit appeared to represent an astonishing effort by Mr. Trump to pressure a foreign judge as he weighed the fate of a fellow right-wing leader who, like him, was indicted on charges that he tried to overturn his election loss.” www.nytimes.com/2025/02/19/w...
Maybe it was a bad idea to combine presidentialism with a FPTP duopoly in which one party, against conventional wisdom, has been colonized by its extreme wing.
Brainstorming poli sci course proposals at a university under the right wing microscope 🫠
At last RFK Jr can reboot the real family business: rum running from Canada
It is 2027. "The cruelty is the point!!" I sob, as I am herded into an AI-run Kyle Rittenhouse Reeducation Center at Hillsdale College-Philadelphia.