Politics Archives - Public Seminar

Politics

Capital’s Long War on Civic Society

In Hyperpolitics, Anton Jäger documents neoliberalism’s erosion of the public sphere

June 2, 2026 • by Austin Tannenbaum

I have a friend, let’s call him SJ, who is passionate about social justice. He majored in political science and keeps apace with all the latest goings on domestically and abroad. He parlays this knowledge into a dozen or so savvy Instagram stories per day on topics ranging from, to ...

Economy

Sovereignty Through Technology

A conversation with Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff on Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed

June 1, 2026 • by Ben Tarnoff, Quinn Slobodian and Lydia Zhang

If Fordism named the operating system of the twentieth-century economy, what governs the twenty-first? Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff—a historian of global capitalism and a technology writer respectively—suggest that the answer lies in Muskism. Their new book, Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed (Harper, 2026) is not so much an ...

Democracy

Resisting Cynicism and Neototalitarianism

The ideological dogmatism of left and right might dissipate within a radical center that is open and inclusive

May 28, 2026 • by Siobhan Kattago

As part of an ongoing symposium on Jeffrey Goldfarb’s latest book on the retreat of democracy, Gray Is Beautiful: Confronting the Retreat of Democracy from the Radical Center, Siobhan Kattago opens up another window on the concept of the radical center, noting that while the term “radical center” may sound like a ...

Resisting Cynicism and Neototalitarianism

Democracy

Thoughts on “the Radical Center” and the Defense of Democracy

On the limits of the limits of either/or thinking

May 28, 2026 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

As part of an ongoing symposium on Jeffrey Goldfarb’s latest book on the retreat of democracy, Gray Is Beautiful: Confronting the Retreat of Democracy from the Radical Center, Jeffrey C. Isaac suggests that this “paradoxical idea” (paradoxical, for how can “radicalism” be “centrist?”) is best defended by Goldfarb himself but that ...

Democracy

Understanding the Retreat of Democracy With Jeff Goldfarb’s Gray Is Beautiful

On creating a free space of exploration

May 27, 2026 • by Irit Dekel

As part of an ongoing symposium on Jeffrey Goldfarb’s latest book on the retreat of democracy, series editor Irit Dekel reflects on how the book’s subtitle, Confronting the Retreat of Democracy From the Radical Center, poses the potent tensions that are crucial for attempting to solve the problems at hand, suggesting that ...

Understanding the Retreat of Democracy With Jeff Goldfarb’s Gray Is Beautiful

North America

Trump’s Way With Words

The metapragmatic presidency

May 20, 2026 • by Sanford Schram

Donald Trump has a kingly approach to his presidency—and to language. Yes, it is well-recognized that Trump does not command mastery of the basics of syntax and grammar of any language, including the one his supporters want to be declared the US national language, i.e., American English. No bother: Trump ...

History

The Waning of the American Illusion

And the virtues of democratic idealism

May 19, 2026 • by Sylvia Taschka

Was Ronald Reagan’s famous image of America as a “shining city on a hill” truly just an illusion, a Fata Morgana of the United States as a beacon of democracy, freedom, and moral leadership, a trick played on the world’s collective mind? In a podcast aired on January 14, 2026, Tucker ...

Climate & Ecology

A Staggering Reversal of Assumptions

Adam Tooze and Natasha Lennard discuss our current moment of bizarre juxtapositions in global politics

May 18, 2026 • by Natasha Lennard and Adam Tooze

Renowned historian Adam Tooze returned to The New School last month to reflect on this moment of dramatic geopolitical rupture. President Donald Trump’s unjustified and unjustifiable war against Iran has shown the fragility of the fossil fuel-based energetic order. At the very same moment, China’s meteoric rise as the world’s ...

Politics

Marco Rubio in Dante’s Inferno

His orazion picciola at Munich, and the fate of Republican oratory post-Trump

May 18, 2026 • by Daniel DiMassa

It hasn’t escaped the commentariat that, among other things, the appeal of Trumpism is rhetorical. “I love the way he talks,” a supporter told Vanity Fair in 2020. “I understand him more than any other president.” Iterations of the same remark have become a refrain over the last decade. There ...

Film & Performing Arts

The Defiant Spirit of Palestinian Parkour

A conversation with filmmaker Areeb Zuaiter on her documentary Yalla Parkour and making art amid genocide

May 12, 2026 • by Rida Chaudhry and Areeb Zuaiter

A decade ago, filmmaker Areeb Zuaiter was glued to her screen watching the 2014 Israeli offensive on Gaza when a different kind of video interrupted her feed: smiling young men laughing between backflips as bombs darkened the sky behind them. The Nablus-born documentarian was partly curious and partly enamored with ...

The Defiant Spirit of Palestinian Parkour

Film & Performing Arts

Think Happy Thoughts

An excerpt from The Extended Universe: How Disney Killed the Movies and Took Over the World

May 11, 2026 • by Vicky Osterweil

In the wake of the animator’s strike, Walt’s reflexive conservatism turned into a frothing anti-communism. But while his politics grew more unhinged and hateful, his creative output turned definitively toward the production of nostalgia. Song of the South’s reenvisioning of plantation childhood was one particularly egregious example, as was Peter ...

Philosophy

Teaching Skepticism in Kyiv and Nablus

Close attention can foster compassion and spur action

April 16, 2026 • by Peter Levine

In 2025, I gave lectures and classes in Kyiv, Ukraine, and at two Palestinian universities in the occupied West Bank. I have lived a tame life, and these were relatively intense experiences for me. As I had anticipated, Kyiv was heavily bombed while I visited, and I taught in a bomb shelter. ...