From the Editors Archives - Page 142 of 171

Feature

White European Women’s Rights

France’s Paradoxical Women’s Liberation

March 1, 2017 • by Hannah Leffingwell

While Clinton ran on the notion that “women’s rights are human rights,” Le Pen’s slogan might best be summed up as “women’s rights are white European women’s rights.” Employing xenophobic rhetoric all too familiar to Americans under the Trump administration, Le Pen has become the face of contemporary French nationalism, ...

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Totalitarianism

Historical Regime or Bio-Power Intimate Vocation?

February 28, 2017 • by Simona Forti

Coined in 1923 by Giovanni Amendola -- a strong opponent of Mussolini’s fascism -- the term has had a very interesting history. I retraced the genealogy of the concept, from Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinki[1] in the first half of the 1950s, to Norman Davies[2] at the end of the ...

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Trumpism

How Should the Left Respond?

February 27, 2017 • by David Maddy

The Democratic Party has lost the Presidency, majority control of Congress, and an alarming number of state governorships and legislatures. In contrast, the Republican Party seems poised to ideologically control the remaining branch of federal government through the appointment of a Supreme Court judge. With the Democratic Party flat on ...

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What Brazilian Democracy Needs

The country cannot advance until it has accountable political leadership

February 27, 2017 • by Sebastião Ventura Pereira da Paixão

If we look at Brazilian politics, we see that the few destroy the lives of the many, condemning our country to backwardness, poverty and thievery. Indeed, they are very few. The problem is that these few are organized and empowered in their usurpation of republican institutions. From time to time, ...

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“Focus on the Issues, Not on Trump?” NOT!

How the Trump Administration is waging war against the Media

February 25, 2017 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

The right-wing version of this, expressed by conservative MSNBC talk-show host Joe Scarborough but also by his MSNBC colleague Chuck Todd, goes something like this (I paraphrase): “Trump’s antics are distracting him from attending to the substantive policy issues of his campaign. He is needlessly making enemies of the press, ...

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McCarthyism

An American Analog to Trumpism

February 23, 2017 • by Barbara Falk

Without denying the relevance of the European experience, however, I want to suggest there is plenty in U.S. history powerfully instructive to the present moment. When the Alien and Sedition Acts were passed in 1798, and again following World Wars I and II during the first and second “Red Scares,” ...

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Trump and his Recent Denunciation of Anti-semitism

11 Theses

February 21, 2017 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

2. This is a very bad thing for Jewish-Americans, for minorities of all kinds, for all citizens who care about the rights of individuals and the importance of constitutional democracy, and for all human beings who care about human dignity and respect. 3. It is imperative that this anti-semitism is denounced ...

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Responding to Neo-Fascism (Part 2)

Full-bodied Democratic Power Six Theses for a Robust Resistance to Trumpian Fascism

February 21, 2017 • by Romand Coles and Lia Haro

Whereas much grassroots democratic politics often resembles Nietzsche’s sarcastic image of a huge mouth on a feeble stick of a body with atrophied senses, we need to cultivate a robust, full-bodied politics. Radical politics is often represented today by a bullhorn in the hands of a protester speaking truth ...

Education

The False Premises of Alt-Right Ideology

Academics must understand how the Alt-Right sees the world if we are to resist it

February 20, 2017 • by Rachel McKinney

Adequately understanding the alt-right ideology requires us to see how it is different from other strains of racism, how it is different from political frameworks that it might seem superficially similar to (e.g. Marxist critique) and how it understands and responds to the left’s own narratives, frameworks, and discourse. Once ...

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Peddling Acquiescence as Unity

Exploring the complexity of empathic communication in the face of Trump

February 19, 2017 • by Laura Hooberman

Alongside the article’s publication, the Times’s political podcast The Run Up announced a three-episode series called “Dialogues” in which pairs of family and friends -- one Trump voter and one Clinton voter per episode -- would pose these questions to one another. Perhaps not unsurprisingly the dialogues, resting on necessarily ...

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Understanding Neo-Fascism (Part 1)

Trump-shock and Resonant Violence Five theses for Comprehending Trumpian Fascism

February 17, 2017 • by Romand Coles and Lia Haro

The new regime bears important similarities to classic fascism, meaning that it buzzes with rapid intensifications of white supremacist nationalism, dismissive attacks on reason, autocratic leadership, deepening entwinements of state and capital, disenfranchisement, the attack on liberal and representative democratic institutions and, increasingly, right-wing populist violence. However, this new fascism ...