Refashioning Patriotism

Selling Fear as Part of The War On Terror

Less than one week after the World Trade Center attacks, campaigns for the restoration of the American economy and the recovery of the former consumer confidence and spending habits proliferated across the country. By transforming the national tragedy into a commodity, these campaigns initiated a discourse of patriotic consumerism and ...
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Refashioning Patriotism

Renzi’s Right Way

Italy’s Constitutional Reform Vote

On Dec. 4th, Italian citizens will cast their ballot to approve or reject a vast Constitutional reform firmly put forward by the so-called "center-left" government headed by Mr. Matteo Renzi. If the votes in favor prevail, a third of the articles of the Italian main law will change. This would ...
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Renzi’s Right Way

Hungary 1956

Sixty Years After

In a 1958 article “Totalitarian Imperialism: Reflections on the Hungarian Revolution,” published in the Journal of Politics and intended as an update to her seminal Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt called the Hungarian uprising of 1956 a “spontaneous revolution”: a rare occurrence that erupted unexpectedly, without a preceding and destabilizing ...
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Hungary 1956

Tom Hayden And Unofficial Peace Diplomacy During The Vietnam War

Private Citizens and Conflict Resolution Efforts

To the memory of Tom Hayden On December 28, 1965, in light of the escalating war in Vietnam, three American private citizens landed in Hanoi, North Vietnam. They were Staughton Lynd, a Yale professor of American history and civil rights activist; Herbert Aptheker, an historian and communist activist; and Tom Hayden, ...
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Tom Hayden And Unofficial Peace Diplomacy During The Vietnam War

Is Abortion Candy?

Abortion is not a vice and every attempt to legislate it is a failure

Abortion worked its way into this past election, just like it did with every other election for the past few decades. Clinton said she believes in upholding Roe v Wade; Trump still wants to overturn it (but considers the question of marriage equality “settled”). In a series of debates that ...
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Is Abortion Candy?

From A Despised Elitist

So, I’m a despised elitist? This bemusing, tragicomic motif in the aftermath of the Trump victory is heard over and over among the white Rust-Belter diaspora. Living here in deep blue Massachusetts, I know people from all over Trump country: Iowa, Kansas, Wisconsin (my home state), Michigan… all over the Midwest. ...
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From A Despised Elitist

Moral and Political Competence, Redux

The View from the Rubble

Last spring, when the Democratic primary was still somewhat in doubt, and people worried about the “bruising” primary season damaging the likely standard bearer in the general election, I suggested that the center/center-left/left coalition needed to hear out the debate between Sanders and Clinton. I argued that this was sound ...
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Moral and Political Competence, Redux

Maximizing Risk and Uncertainty in a Changing World

Notes on Volatility in Cultures of Finance

One of the most remarkable contemporary developments has been the rise of what might be called a “politics of volatility” in which volatility is deliberately produced to take advantage of the uncertainty it creates. Its current embodiment is Donald Trump. Like the efficient market that he embraces, in the primaries, ...
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Maximizing Risk and Uncertainty in a Changing World

What Do You Do with a Massacre?

Grenadians Vote on Constitutional Reforms 33 years After the Assassination of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop

Nine years ago, I came across this article: “Remembering That Fateful Day” by Michael D. Roberts, published in Carib-News (October 23, 2007). It had been 24 years since the killing of Grenadian prime minister Maurice Bishop and his cabinet members on Fort Rupert, in the parish of St. George’s, on ...
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What Do You Do with a Massacre?

The Resistible Rise of Fascists Today

Trump, Erdoğan, Zizek, and All of Us?

This won’t be just four years; we are going to re-elect Trump. Perhaps it’s just a pessimism that has possessed me, but it seems that we -- the whole we, the global human race -- it seems to me, that we have turned servile. That we have become subservient and substandard ...
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The Resistible Rise of Fascists Today

Peace-ing Colombia Together

Colombia’s Aftermath in Rejecting the Peace Deal Referendum

But the Colombian tragedy is more convoluted still. Over the last month we have lived a political and moral rollercoaster. First was the joy of having the peace treaty signed, then the perplexity and frustration of the plebiscite result, followed by anxiety about the political limbo it created. Sadness grew ...
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Peace-ing Colombia Together