This Dispatch examines how religious symbolism and anti-migrant mobilization converged in Poland in mid-2025 to perform a sanctified politics of protection. Focusing on Catholic sermons, protests, and citizen border patrols, it shows how exclusion is recast as moral duty and care. Drawing on publicly circulated materials, the analysis develops the concept of affective legitimacy to capture moments when moral rightfulness is enacted through emotion, ritual, and ethical vocabularies as institutional trust wanes. The Polish case is treated as a diagnostic vignette of an emergent repertoire in which protection is felt rather than procedurally justified, highlighting how democratic authority can be reconfigured through affective publics rather than liberal-democratic accountability.

As climate crises intensify, youth inclusion in climate governance becomes increasingly important, for their presence could help mitigate the structural restraints of conventional democracies, which inherently incentivise short-term policies. This dispatch reflects what is happening on the ground and examines youth participation in climate governance, comparing three key youth inclusion models: quota-based (Rwanda), consultative (Finland), and donor-supported (Pakistan). The analysis employs a triangulated analytical framework combining Structural Injustice, Participation Ladders, and Intergenerational Justice Theories. Cross-case analysis demonstrates that all models provide partial but insufficient pathways toward intergenerational accountability and ecological sustainability. The research outlines a Youth Quotas Climate Democracy Framework combining youth quotas with safeguards for autonomy, intergenerational youth councils, and democratic innovations to systemically reconfigure democracy toward more inclusive climate governance for future generations.

The New Prometheans is divided into four sections. Section I, “The new political quadrilateral,” reviews the formation of a new quadrilateral in the United States: right-wing neoliberals, white evangelicals, Trumpian fascists, and rich tech bros. Each folds to some degree into the priorities and ethos of the others to form a larger resonance machine. It is also unstable. Section II, “Dreamscapes of the tech bros,” explores more closely the existential priorities, rage against death, crude understandings of intelligence, and economic patterns of insistence of the tech bros, focusing on quotations from figures such as Marc Andressen, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos. After advancing a preliminary critique, Section III, “Steps toward an alternative onto-cosmology,” presents alternative images of nonhuman modes of production, the porosity of knowledge, the element of creative responsiveness in thinking, the ubiquity of events, and the exploration of timescapes. These provide better ways to challenge and displace the shallow and cruel images of human mastery, smartness, computer brain uploads, time, and capitalist expansion. Critique is important but never enough. Finally, in Section IV, we look at how earthbound, entangled humanists can offer an alternative to the dreamscape of escape to Mars.

This article offers a Confucian conception of ownership and a different approach to equality based on a concept of relational person that could provide an alternative philosophical framework for economic democracy. The Confucian concept of nonexclusive and non-absolute co-ownership, conditional on owners fulfilling their social responsibilities and sustained in networks of relationships mitigates the drive to appropriation and resistance to redistribution even without formalizing legal rights of equal ownership. Confucian texts’ condemnation of wide disparities between rich and poor corresponds with distributive ideas that balance equal satisfaction of needs with merit-based incentives for productivity constrained by social harmony. Without advocating democracy directly, Confucian philosophy contains insights for contemporary inquiries into the crises of democratic polities and market societies.

Liberal electoral democracies face serious intrinsic as well as external problems that threaten their viability. Associative democracy (AD) holds the promise of alleviating them. I argue that a long but currently strangely ignored tradition of (neo-)corporatism has demonstrated the feasibility of associative governance arrangements. Nothing prevents governments to push corporatism into domains other than labor relations, such as education, health, housing, or climate change. I propose a two-tiered structure of AD in which extended classic corporatism forms Tier 1 and a layer of commons Tier 2. To maintain their creative, authentic organization, which collides with the organization of state bureaucracies, commons must not be integrated into state structures. Instead, they must be institutionally represented through confederate bodies which are mandatorily consulted by Tier 1 actors.

This paper develops an ethics of compromise inspired by Paul Ricœur’s philosophy. Although Ricœur explicitly addressed compromise only once (1991), his broader work provides conceptual resources for rethinking it beyond moral failure or political opportunism. Rather than offering a textual exegesis, the paper mobilizes Ricœurian concepts to establish compromise as a fundamental dimension of intersubjectivity and democracy. It advances three arguments: first, ethics and politics should be understood through their intersection rather than separation or hierarchy; second, compromise is redefined as the “voluntary and innovative intersection of conflicting domains,” rather than a mere exchange of concessions; third, compromise rests on the ethical disposition of the capable yet fallible subject, committed to deliberation and the common good despite enduring disagreement.

Working with a national U.S. sample and data collected from our work with the nonprofit bridging organization Living Room Conversations, we counter the assertions of conflict profiteers. People in the U.S. are far less polarized than imagined, there is a great deal of trust in the election system, and a subsequent “reveal” strategy of this common ground thus becomes as, if not more, important than the need to “bridge” imagined chasms between citizens. With this strategy in place, those interested in or involved with bridging can further set the conditions for democratic dialogue by designing interventions that involve more and different kinds of people in their work, focusing on long-term impacts, and stretching definitions of participation from dialogue to civic action.

This research note critically examines the structural failures of Mexico’s post-2000 democratic transition, arguing that the rise of illiberal populism under the National Regeneration Movement (Morena) is not the cause but the consequence of a stalled and superficial democratization process. While formal electoral procedures were strengthened, underlying issues such as state capture, elite dominance, widespread corruption, and socioeconomic exclusion remained unaddressed. By reducing democracy to procedural minimalism, political elites failed to deliver substantive democratic outcomes, eroding institutional legitimacy, and fueling public disillusionment.