From the Editors Archives - Page 152 of 171

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Why Vote for Clinton If You Don’t Believe in Her?

A pragmatic defense of the Democratic Party in 2016

November 6, 2016 • by Zachary Sunderman

The following was a message I wrote to my friends on the morning of November 6, 2016. Jeffrey Goldfarb recommended that it be published at Public Seminar. I have revised it slightly for this version, but it remains an informal piece. ZVS With a few days left before the end of this election, ...

Why Vote for Clinton If You Don’t Believe in Her?

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New Catastrophe in Turkey

An open letter from Zeynep Gambetti

November 6, 2016 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

Nancy Fraser just sent me this important open letter from Zeynep Gambetti on the escalating crisis in Turkey. J.G Dear friends and colleagues, We are going through very, very hard times all over the world. The rate of catastrophe is perhaps higher in Turkey, due to the State of Emergency that accelerates ...

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Why I am Not a Libertarian

November 4, 2016 • by Cam Clayton

I used to call myself a libertarian. I still believe that market forces are the best way to allocate non-essential resources. And I still believe that government should stay out of people’s personal business. But I now realize that libertarianism is based on a number of conceptual confusions. Libertarianism holds out ...

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The Pursuit of Happiness… and Cruelty

American Politics and its Commitment to Oppression

November 3, 2016 • by Kye Barker

The most disturbing trend of 2016 has been the progressive revelation of cruelty in American political life. As someone who has always believed in the kindness and generosity of Americans, I have found this extremely difficult to acknowledge. I'm not only thinking of the Trump campaign, which seems to have, ...

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Prophets of Irony: a Discussion with Richard J. Bernstein

November 2, 2016 • by Laura Nelson

Richard J. Bernstein, Ironic Life (Cambridge UK: Polity Press, 2016), pp. 184, $64.95 hardcover, $22.95 paperback. There is a certain irony about contemporary attitudes toward irony. According to the late novelist David Foster Wallace, our culture is steeped in the ironic reluctance to commit to ideals and thus embrace moral seriousness. ...

Prophets of Irony: a Discussion with Richard J. Bernstein

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Punk Preempts the Post-Popstar Age

Prosumption and Celebrity within Neoliberal Economics

November 1, 2016 • by Jared Davis

“maybe they’re born with it. maybe they watched loads of YouTube tutorials.” So reads the SoundCloud page description of Internet-native photographer, artist, and musician Arvida Byström. In the 1977 issue of the UK fanzine Sideburns, the punk movement was once instructed, “this is a chord, this is another, this is a ...

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Adulterous Patriarchs and Nasty Women

Sex, Marriage and the Recent History of Political Scandals

October 31, 2016 • by Claire Potter

It is T minus 8 to election day, and once again I am asking: why are we talking about former Democratic Congressman and celebrity sexting champ Anthony Weiner? And why did Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s top advisor, not separate from her cheating husband before embarking on a major political campaign? On ...

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The Invisible Constitutional Crisis

Options for the US Supreme Court’s Pending Vacancy

October 28, 2016 • by Matthew Filner

The United States is in the midst of a constitutional crisis. Yes, that’s right: one of the most important crises of our constitutional republic and it is going virtually unnoticed as a crisis. No, I am not talking about the Trump candidacy -- though reprehensible in multiple ways, it is ...

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Saint Simone

Simone Weil and Revolutionary Politics

October 27, 2016 • by Lisabeth During

In the November 1933 issue of the dissident communist journal La Critique Sociale, two nonconformists of the French left took sharply opposed positions on the “catastrophic” character of revolutionary struggle. Both connected to the Communist Democratic Circle, both friends of its founder Boris Souvarine, they disagreed about action. And they ...

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Trump and the End of America’s Dreaming

October 26, 2016 • by Christopher Lebron

The other day as my son and I walked to his school, he began riffing -- as 5 year-olds are wont to do -- on the wonder of the police. As most kids do at some point, he has developed an interest in uniformed public servants. The police interest him ...

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Organized Women at the Democratic Convention

October 25, 2016 • by Jo Freeman

While women faded into the background at the Republican Convention, they were front and center at the Democrats’. Women were everywhere, and not just sitting in the seats. Women were roughly half of the delegates because Democratic Party rules require equal division by sex. The Republicans do not have such a ...

Organized Women at the Democratic Convention

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Italian Constitutional Reform

The “Urgent” Solution to a Non-Existent Problem

October 24, 2016 • by Luca Baccelli

“The reform of the second part of the Constitution cannot wait any longer.” This sentence from the introductory report to the “Renzi-Boschi” Constitutional Bill (A.C. 2613 -- D) could sound quite odd to an American reader. In fact, the Italian Constitution, entered into force on January 1, 1948, has been ...