Categoria: Culture Wars
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The US Culture War against Europe
“I hate to say that I told you so, but I told you so.” It may seem self-serving to appeal to one’s own foresight, but in the face of facts, it becomes inevitable. Since 2018, I have been focusing on the so-called “culture wars”, a phenomenon rooted in the clash between so-called “conservatives” and “progressives” around…
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Cultural Appropriation: Who Uses, Owns? Controversial Ideas on Cultural Ownership
Cultural appropriation is one of the central post-material battlegrounds of the contemporary world. It mobilizes questions of identity and culture, while often overlooking a foundational principle of culture itself: hybridity. At its core, the concept of cultural appropriation refers to the use of cultural elements—symbols, clothing, hairstyles, cuisine, religion—originating from a minority group by members…
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Are There Lessons for Democracy in Budapest’s Pride March?
The path Viktor Orbán took from liberal democracy to democratic illiberalism was neither abrupt nor improvised. It was a cold and calculated march—along the ground cleared by the political merits of populism and the rising tide of illiberal values that Orbán anticipated and, by embracing, helped consolidate. Broadly and clearly, democratic illiberalism rests on a…
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It’s time for Burka: radical right is creating a ‘political fact’ in Portugal
Law often lags behind reality. This is a well-known maxim in legal theory: laws emerge, for better or worse, as responses to new and evolving social challenges. Politics, too, is meant to offer such responses—through negotiation among competing forces in search of what has been called “common ground.” However, the rise of populist and demagogic…
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Portugal & Cultural Relativism
The reasons behind polarization are well known, and the literature has extensively documented them. They range from divergent social rhythms across regions of the West—even within countries, as seen in the contrast between urban America and the rural Midwest—with tensions between progressivism and a conservative cultural backlash around moral issues (the so-called culture wars), such…
