Politics Archives - Public Seminar

How to Incentivize Justice

The Price of Mercy makes clear the human toll when we employ a criminal legal system that priorities punishment over progress

August 31, 2026 • by Emma Robertson

Emily Galvin Almanza is a former public defender and the cofounder of advocacy group Partners for Justice. Her legal career boasts impressive accomplishments and accolades, and yet, as Almanza herself recognizes in the opening pages of her debut book, The Price of Mercy (Crown 2026), her life would likely be ...

Labor

Tariffs to Eliminate Forced Labor

Trump’s cynical, ineffective and misguided trade policy

August 27, 2026 • by Thomas Liess and William Milberg

President Trump’s latest effort to impose tariffs on 60 trading partners (collectively accounting for 99.4 percent of US imports) is the use of Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 to tax them for failing “to impose and effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with ...

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 ...