Compromising with Trump

Democracy Lessons from Havel and Michnik

Some critics of Trump have called for intransigent resistance; others have counseled openness to compromise in the hopes of taming or co-opting the administration. Even those who doubt that President Trump will prove to be the pragmatic problem-solver he and some supporters have promised must recognize the hunger to believe such promises. President ...
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Fortress America

The state of exception and Trump’s politics of forgetting

As Timothy Snyder reminds us, Trump’s policy to "Make America Great Again" harkens back not only to the protectionism of the 1930s, but also to America First, the conservative group in the 1940s who opposed US intervention into World War II. Trump’s promise to make America great again is one of ...
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“Hamilton” and the Women’s March

A response to David Brooks

He concludes his piece by offering the musical Hamilton as an example of what a more useful politics might look like. As Brooks writes, the march didn’t come close to offering a vision that can “rebind” the polity. “The musical ‘Hamilton’ is a lot closer.” His praise of Hamilton reflects that ...
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Trump’s Executive Order

Banning Immigration and Refugee Admissions

Now Mr. Trump declares that no more Syrian refugees will be brought to the United States. And he has, by the stroke of a pen, cut President Obama’s commitment of 110,000 refugee admissions this year to just 50,000 -- the lowest number in a decade. All this at a time ...
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The Trump Executive Orders on Immigration Enforcement

How a wilfull disregard for facts has produced disastrous policy

The problem, of course, is how to move from premises to policies, and the particular problem for Mr. Trump is a fundamental misunderstanding of the current facts on the ground. Let’s start with the facts. Since the beginning of his campaign for President, Mr. Trump has painted a picture of a ...
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What Makes Something a Robot?

An Interview with John M. Jordan

Zed Adams: In your book, you point out that although it’s easy to identify instances of robots, it’s hard to give a general definition of what makes something a robot. This is intriguing, because it seems like we know what differentiates robots and, say, humans -- at least until we’re ...
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Thoughts on Putin and Trump

Democratic “Interference,” and the Transnational Contest for “Democracy”

This second response has obvious merit. The US government historically has very deliberately interfered with elections elsewhere on numerous occasions, many of which involved efforts to undermine perceived “enemies” and to promote “friends” even if they were “our sons-of-a-bitch,” as President Franklin Roosevelt famously said of Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somozo ...
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Populism and Freudian Mass Psychology

Three Paradoxes

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 ...
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Giulio Regeni

Toward a Radical Use of Memory

“A highly promising young scholar of social and economic development in the Middle East,” as his obituary reads, Giulio Regeni was a PhD candidate at Cambridge, who moved to Cairo for his fieldwork, researching independent trade unions, especially that of street vendors, in post-Mubarak and post-Morsi Egypt. After disappearing on ...
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The Politics of Innocence

Miriam Ticktin

GIDEST is a Mellon-funded research institute based at The New School that incubates transdisciplinary research at the intersection of social theory, art, and design. As well as our faculty, artist-in-residence, and doctoral fellows’ programs, we run a series of biweekly public seminars that feature both prominent and emerging scholars and ...
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New Yorkers, We Get the Job Done

Marching up Fifth Avenue in Manhattan

As the crowd around me streamed up to the main march, a Lexington Avenue MTA bus pulled across 43rd street and got stuck in traffic. Protesters, many wearing  "pussy hats" that look oddly like pink wool versions of the liberty cap formerly sported by eighteenth century French revolutionary sans culottes,  ...
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