Eli Zaretsky, Author at Public Seminar

Activism

What Is to Be Done?

Three scholars of democracy respond to the protests

June 4, 2020 • by Eli Zaretsky, Jeffrey C. Goldfarb and Elzbieta Matynia

I believe this extraordinary nationwide mobilization is the best answer possible to the Democrats who engineered the destruction of the Sanders primary campaign -- I mean Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, James Carville, James Clyburn, Pete Buttigieg, and the innumerable reporters and media “experts” who from the beginning insisted ...

History

Culling the Herd

A modest proposal

May 18, 2020 • by Eli Zaretsky

The large-scale slaughter now unfolding in America was not set in motion overnight. The herd had to be prepared. One place to start is with the response to the uprisings of the 1960s. Any herd has to have its rebellious instincts curbed. Most urgent was suppressing the African-American population since ...

COVID-19

Be Strong

An Open Letter to My Students, Children, and Grandchildren

May 14, 2020 • by Eli Zaretsky

Be strong: The virus has laid bare the complete lack of leadership in both political parties and to a great extent in the media as well. Bernie Sanders is the only figure in recent times that one can call a visionary leader, proposing a future that you all will need ...

Sex & Gender

What Does the Idea of Misogyny Really Describe?

A response to Liza Featherstone

December 31, 2019 • by Eli Zaretsky

Often “misogyny” is used to refer to gender-based disrespect or misrecognition; in other w0rds, bad attitudes toward women publicly deployed. Here the term is a species of folk psychology, reflecting the word’s Greek root, hatred of women. Misogyny, in this usage, also signifies that this hatred, translated into action, is a moral wrong. In ...

What Does the Idea of Misogyny Really Describe?

North America

Obama’s Strategy for the Primaries and the Convention

Supporting Buttigieg ensures that Warren will win the nomination – and then lose it

December 7, 2019 • by Eli Zaretsky

What will – what can -- Obama do? As we learned recently he and his surrogates will support Buttigieg. This strategy launched today with endorsements from Reggie Love, Austin Goolsbee and Linda Douglass—three top Obama aides. The following is a speculation based on the best evidence we have. Obviously Buttigieg will not get the nomination. ...

Obama’s Strategy for the Primaries and the Convention

Feature

Populism and Freudian Mass Psychology

Three Paradoxes

January 26, 2017 • by Eli Zaretsky

Paradox one: Populism is generally described as irrational, emotional, intolerant of opposing viewpoints, and so forth, yet the main populist insight, namely that the system is rigged against the ordinary person, is correct. On the main question, in other words, populism is far more rational than the putatively rational dominant ...

Education

The Crisis of Dynamic Stabilization and the Sociology of Resonance

An Interview with Hartmut Rosa

January 18, 2017 • by Eli Zaretsky

Hartmut Rosa: Yeah, I actually started my academic career by working on Charles Taylor, the Canadian philosopher and I did that with Axel Honnett, who at that time was at the Free University in Berlin. And this is how I got socialized into the critical theory tradition. And after that ...

Feature

An American Tragedy

March 1, 2016 • by Eli Zaretsky

I hate anything that smells of “I told you so,” but the only way I can explain the overwhelming success of Hillary Clinton’s race baiting of Bernie Sanders, and the kind of tragedy that represents for America’s future, is autobiographically. My first inkling that Barack Obama’s 2008 talk about a ...

Uncategorized

Mothers, Daughters, and Democratic Primaries

February 17, 2016 • by Eli Zaretsky

In “Not Their Mother’s Candidate,” in last Sunday’s New York Times, Susan Faludi purports to situate the difference between women who support Hillary Clinton and women who support Bernie Sanders in terms of the history of American feminism. According to Faludi, this conflict, which first appeared among feminists in the ...

Mothers, Daughters, and Democratic Primaries

Uncategorized

Paul Krugman and the Grand Inquisitor

January 31, 2016 • by Eli Zaretsky

According to Krugman’s latest column, the difference between Sanders and Clinton is this: Sanders believes that all evil stems from big money; Clinton believes that big money is one evil, but there are also other evils like racism and sexism. How stupid does Krugman think his readers are to hand ...

Uncategorized

Krugman vs. Sanders

January 25, 2016 • by Eli Zaretsky

Scarcely a day goes by without Paul Krugman hammering away at Bernie Sanders. And the message is always clear. Change is difficult. It requires compromise. You can’t try to do too much. People like Sanders are ridiculous. They think all a President needs to do is snap her fingers and ...

Uncategorized

Islam and “the Sword”

December 13, 2015 • by Eli Zaretsky

Ross Douthat has an uncharacteristically ignorant post on Islam in yesterday’s New York Times. Douthat wants to contest the Trumpists in his own party that identify Islam with violence. He argues that there is a place for Islam in the modern world, as another religion, but -- he concludes -- “it has ...