Politics Archives - Public Seminar

Interviews

The Cultural Marxism Bogeyman

An interview with author A. J. A. Woods on their new book about the Right’s favorite conspiracy theory

July 27, 2026 • by Austin Tannenbaum and A. J. A. Woods

A specter is haunting the West—the specter of Cultural Marxism. Or at least that’s what many conservative operatives would like us to think. From military theorist William S. Lind to Texas Senator Ted Cruz, prominent right-wingers deploy “Cultural Marxism” as a catch-all for the forces behind our reputed decline: feminism, ...

The Right

William S. Lind and His Single-Factor Explanation of History

How William S. Lind—a former director of the Free Congress Foundation’s Center for Cultural Conservatism—used the phrase “Cultural Marxism” as a delegitimizing tool

July 27, 2026 • by A. J. A. Woods

In July 1998, Lind was invited to speak at an Accuracy in Academia (AIA) conference. Founded in 1985, AIA was set up to expose instances of political bias on American campuses. Its founder, Reed Irvine, believed that universities were indoctrinating students with progressive ideologies rather than teaching them facts and ...

William S. Lind and His Single-Factor Explanation of History

Politics

Against “Peace and Love”

A review of Hate: The Uses of a Powerful Emotion

July 6, 2026 • by L. Zhang

Following the assassination of Charlie Kirk, New York Times columnist Ezra Klein rushed to praise the far-right activist for, he wrote, “practicing politics in exactly the right way.” Klein lauded the Turning Points USA founder’s approach to civil political debate on college campuses. The column brushed over the fact that ...

Interviews

Practical Prison Abolition

An interview with Anna Terwiel on how thinking about justice in terms of personal experience can disrupt the belief that safety requires violent state intervention

June 23, 2026 • by Anna Terwiel and Madeline Trice

There are nearly two million people incarcerated in the United States. The idea of an end to the mass incarceration of those deemed criminal is perceived as far-fetched, naive, or unrealistic. But political scholar Anna Terwiel disagrees. In her new book, Prison Abolition for Realists (University of Minnesota Press, 2025), ...

Genocide

Learning Trust and Reconciliation in Rwanda

On weaving communities back together

June 22, 2026 • by Tamir Bell, Paul Draus and Anna Müller

We arrived in Rwanda at 2:30 a.m, jet-lagged and not knowing what to expect. Our hosts greeted us as we staggered out of the airport, offering a few words in English, then promptly hustled us to a nearby hotel. We had come to the land of a thousand hills, the ...

Learning Trust and Reconciliation in Rwanda

North America

Judging Presidents

The hidden logic of C-SPAN’s expert survey

June 18, 2026 • by Larry Schwartz

C-SPAN’s Presidential Historians Survey has become one of the most widely cited efforts to evaluate presidential performance—shaping how figures such as Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush are understood alongside their predecessors. Its rankings circulate in classrooms, media coverage, and public debate, offering what appears to be a ...

Democracy

Simulacra of Democracy

Between erasure and reactivation

June 16, 2026 • by Elzbieta Matynia

The following lecture was first presented as part of the Memory Study Network conference “Routes and Roots: Migration, Memory, Transnationality” at the New School for Social Research Festival of Ideas, on April 16, 2026. Let me begin with a proposition that may sound unsettling. Democracy does not disappear only when it is ...

Capitalism

Has Conservatism Outlived Its Usefulness?

A short note on a hoary concept

June 9, 2026 • by James Miller

Matt Walsh: The definition of conservatism … It has no definition, I think. We talk about the words that don’t mean anything anymore, words that used to be useful and maybe used to mean something and they just don’t anymore because of how they’ve been used and abused and overused. ...

Has Conservatism Outlived Its Usefulness?

Labor

The Artist Status as Managed Retreat

On the Artist Status in Belgium and the underlying issues caused by defunding cultural labor

June 8, 2026 • by Dominick DeJoy

In March last year, several hundred cultural workers gathered at the Place de la Monnaie in Brussels as part of a national strike. They were there because the Belgian federal government was considering whether to limit the Artist Status, a social protection system that provides unemployment benefits to freelance cultural ...

Migration

Three Years After Roxham, Canada Still Scapegoats US Immigration Law

The irregular border crossing is a metonym for the complications of Canada’s changing immigration policies

June 4, 2026 • by Rachel Charney McKenzie

On September 25, 2023, about 30 miles southeast of Montreal, a lime-green excavator advanced like a centipede over concrete and gravel. Its claw-like appendage tore at the gable roof of a long white rectangular building. The structure’s walls folded inward under the pressure, and the ghost of a dark blue ...

Three Years After Roxham, Canada Still Scapegoats US Immigration Law

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 L. 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 ...

Politics

The Cultural Marxism Bogeyman

An interview with author A. J. A. Woods on their new book about the Right’s favorite conspiracy theory

William S. Lind and His Single-Factor Explanation of History

How William S. Lind—a former director of the Free Congress Foundation’s Center for Cultural Conservatism—used the phrase “Cultural Marxism” as a delegitimizing tool

Against “Peace and Love”

A review of Hate: The Uses of a Powerful Emotion

Practical Prison Abolition

An interview with Anna Terwiel on how thinking about justice in terms of personal experience can disrupt the belief that safety requires violent state intervention

Learning Trust and Reconciliation in Rwanda

On weaving communities back together

Judging Presidents

The hidden logic of C-SPAN’s expert survey

Simulacra of Democracy

Between erasure and reactivation

Has Conservatism Outlived Its Usefulness?

A short note on a hoary concept

The Artist Status as Managed Retreat

On the Artist Status in Belgium and the underlying issues caused by defunding cultural labor

Three Years After Roxham, Canada Still Scapegoats US Immigration Law

The irregular border crossing is a metonym for the complications of Canada’s changing immigration policies

Capital’s Long War on Civic Society

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

Sovereignty Through Technology

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

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