Leo Casey, Author at Public Seminar

Democracy

Feel Better, Defeat Trump!

Some practical tips for putting your election emotions to good work

November 2, 2020 • by Leo Casey

Many of us are finding ourselves quite apprehensive, even fearful, because of what is happening with the 2020 elections and in American political life. There is value, I want to argue, in taking a moment to analyze those feelings, the role they play in the elections and what we can ...

North America

Will Sanders Democrats Support a Politics of Coalition — or Isolation?

Some Thoughts on Where the Left Goes From Here

March 10, 2020 • by Leo Casey

Asked why he continues to do poorly with African-American voters, Sanders responded with a dodge that his campaign was actually “winning among people of color in a very significant degree.” While it is certainly true that Sanders has won impressive levels of support from Latino voters, the same is clearly ...

Politics

Health Care & the Dangers of Demanding the Impossible

What Bernie Sanders Might Learn from Elizabeth Warren

February 28, 2020 • by Leo Casey

I have been struck today by how much of the argument I saw in the last few days before the Nevada caucuses, much of which was swirling around disagreements between the Bernie campaign and the Culinary Workers Union in Nevada, was based on a common misunderstanding of the dynamics of ...

Health Care & the Dangers of Demanding the Impossible

Feature

Against the “Diversity of Tactics”

Why Antifa Street Fighting Is Not a Strategy to Defeat Fascism

August 29, 2019 • by Leo Casey

As democratic socialists we have always been anti-fascists, because the essence of fascism -- its authoritarianism, its racism, its misogyny, its homophobia and its suppression of independent unions, political freedom and civil liberties -- runs completely counter to the principles and moral values that are most important to us. The ...

It Was Never About The Buses

Personal And Political Reflections On “Forced Busing”

July 27, 2019 • by Leo Casey

One of my earliest recollections dates back to the fall of 1964, in my 6th grade class at St. Matthias Elementary School. The nun who taught the class had us research that year’s presidential election, and each of us had to decide which of the major party candidates – Johnson ...

Education

Teacher Insurgency

What Are The Strategic Challenges?

February 23, 2019 • by Leo Casey

The following post was the basis for a talk by Leo Casey, the Executive Director of the Albert Shanker Institute, which was delivered at “The Future of American Labor” conference held February 8th and 9th in Washington, D.C. There is every reason to celebrate the “Teacher Spring” strikes of 2018 and the more ...

Democracy

Not Knowing What We’ve Got Til It’s Gone

We need to both defend liberal democratic norms and institutions and address their fault lines

November 14, 2018 • by Leo Casey

In my contribution to the Dissent Magazine discussion of the “Crisis of Democracy” which provided the inspiration for our reflections in this symposium, I put forward the argument that attacks on the citizenship rights of racialized ‘others’ are central to Trumpism and other variants of the populist authoritarianism of the far right that have taken ...