Co-Executive Editor, Public Seminar and Professor of History, The New School for Social Research

Feature

Post-Kavanaugh Stress Disorder

Ending our political suffering will be a bigger project than winning the next election

October 3, 2018 • by Claire Potter

Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last Thursday, and Brett Kavanaugh’s unhinged response to her charges, was an epic installment of the Trump Show, now in season two. It’s probably safe to say that neither Kavanaugh or the GOP leadership care whether they alienate women voters by ...

Feature

I Believe Christine Blasey Ford

Republicans have no plausible argument about why Brett Kavanaugh is innocent

September 19, 2018 • by Claire Potter

What will come of the allegation by Christine Blasey Ford, a clinical psychologist and professor at Palo Alto University, that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when he was seventeen and she was fifteen? As of today, it is not clear that Ford will testify before the Senate ...

Feature

Don’t Run Against Trump

As the general election looms, what is the best way for Democrats to win?

August 29, 2018 • by Claire Potter

When Democrats go to sleep at night, they dream of sticking it to Donald Trump in November. But that's not how you win elections -- or at least, not how you should win elections. While the media outrage machine often feeds the idea of impeachment as the ultimate endgame, there ...

History

So You Are Finishing Your United States History Syllabus

Public Seminar is here to give you a hand

August 20, 2018 • by Claire Potter

The United States historians at Public Seminar know what our high school and university colleagues are doing right now: finishing syllabi for the fall. We know the feeling of needing just the right piece – something that will spark discussion, show students what good historical writing looks like, and give ...

So You Are Finishing Your United States History Syllabus

Feature

The Watergate Babies

What the Congressional Class of 1974 can teach us about political change

August 15, 2018 • by Claire Potter and John Lawrence

It is less than ninety days until election day in the United States, when Democrats hope to achieve one of the biggest sweeps of Congressional seats in recent American history. Many of these Democratic hopefuls are veterans. As longtime political strategist Joe Trippi put it back in March, these are ...

Education

On Beyond the Academy

When university profs don’t discuss retirement, we don’t discuss our hopes and dreams either

August 1, 2018 • by Claire Potter

Like many people, I aspire to using these decades well. Accomplishing this has something to do with how much work any of us has left in us, and if so, what that work will be and to whom, other than the students to whom many of us have devoted ourselves, ...

Feature

What Does “For the People” Mean?

Anodyne slogans tell us nothing about the Democrats’ agenda

July 25, 2018 • by Claire Potter

Would someone please reconsider the prominent role of marketing in politics? Or perhaps I should rephrase that question -- could we take a close look at the substitution of marketing and branding strategies for politics? I ask this question only days after the Democratic leadership, well-embarked on flipping the House of Representatives ...

Feature

So You Want To Be POTUS?

Avoid the disasters that long presidential campaigns produce

July 18, 2018 • by Claire Potter

Checking my Instagram a few evenings ago, I saw that Senator Elizabeth Warren was live. I clicked. In a grainy video, I saw her striding out onto a marble plaza talking to an aide, her blunt cut blond hair swinging slightly as she strode into the darkness. The sound of ...

Feature

Ask Brett Kavanaugh About Facebook

Digital media shapes democratic citizenship and we have a right to know whether SCOTUS candidates understand why

July 11, 2018 • by Claire Potter

What is Facebook? I ask this question as I am well embarked on a two-week intensive seminar, “Democratic Crisis and the Politics of Social Media,” part of the 27th annual Democracy and Diversity Institute sponsored by The New School’s Transregional Center for Democratic Studies in Wrocław, Poland. Facebook and Twitter, and the ...

Feature

We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident

A Letter to President Trump

July 4, 2018 • by Claire Potter

On this July 4 I am in Poland, where President Andrzej Duda has just decapitated the judiciary, and Poles are, as I write, in the streets to protest the continuing theft of their democracy. Perhaps because of this, a stirring performance of Krzysztof Penderecki's "Polish Requiem" I attended at St. Mary's Cathedral ...

Education

Remembering a Campus Free Speech Fight

In the 1990s, the culture wars did not always drive us apart: sometimes we learned to respect each other more

June 27, 2018 • by Claire Potter and Zachary Schonfeld

On June 10, 2018, Doug Bennet, a historian, political aide, assistant secretary in the State Department, former president of National Public Radio and—most importantly to me—president of Wesleyan University, died at the age of 79. It's rare that you see someone bring such a rich background to the executive office ...

Feature

The U.S. Border Crisis is Not the Holocaust

But comparing these two events tells a deeper truth about what the Trump administration is trying to accomplish

June 20, 2018 • by Claire Potter

Although I love to travel, I've never liked crossing borders. It makes me nervous, perhaps because, on one side of my family, I am the child of immigrants who were always fussing about their paperwork. Border guards, I learned at an early age, are anonymous functionaries who have outsized power ...