North America Archives - Page 12 of 21

Democracy

Bernie’s Brooklyn

How growing up in a New Deal city shaped Bernie Sanders’s vision for America

June 24, 2020 • by Ted Hamm

One of the remarkable features of New York City in the middle three decades of the twentieth century was the plethora of political parties that wielded influence. There were the Democrats, still controlled by Tammany Hall in Manhattan along with similarly Irish-led machines in the Bronx and Brooklyn. The Republicans ...

North America

What Would Good National Leadership Look Like Now?

How best to address America’s current crises

June 11, 2020 • by Desmond King and Rogers M. Smith

The United States is in the midst of three national crises: a public health crisis, an economic crisis, and a civil rights crisis provoked by racist police brutality and structural racism. Each demands national responses and leadership. Designed to prevent centralized tyranny, the American federal system has always had trouble marshaling a ...

What Would Good National Leadership Look Like Now?

North America

America’s Weimar Moment, Redux

A preface to our symposium on the left

May 28, 2020 • by James Miller

It seems like an eternity. But it was only a few months ago, before the pandemic and subsequent lockdown, that it seemed possible that the Democratic Party might have as its Presidential candidate an avowed socialist – Bernie Sanders. On February 6, 2020, Public Seminar ran a comment entitled “America’s Weimar ...

North America

The Story Behind DSA’s Non-Endorsement of Joe Biden

“Be it therefore resolved, the Democratic Socialists of America will not endorse another Democratic Party presidential candidate should Bernie Sanders not prevail”

May 28, 2020 • by Andrew Sernatinger

I joined the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in the fall of 2017. I’m a millennial, but by then, I’d been an activist for the better part of twenty years. I’d been in the anti-war movement as a high school student after 9/11. I grew up in the suburbs of ...

The Story Behind DSA’s Non-Endorsement of Joe Biden

Democracy

Troilus and Cressida and a Diseased Body Politic

Reading Shakespeare in a time of plague

May 28, 2020 • by Emily Pitts Donahoe

We are perennially curious about what Shakespeare can teach us about our own world, hoping to find instruction and solace in his plays, poems, and exemplary turns of phrase. Recently, this curiosity has produced a score of tweets and articles speculating about Shakespeare’s productivity during periods when the plague ravaged London, ...

<em>Troilus and Cressida</em> and a Diseased Body Politic

North America

Lessons from the History of the Left

A network of SDS veterans reflects on the importance of elections

May 28, 2020 • by Robert J. S. Ross

On Monday, April 13, the Democratic nomination contest de facto over, I learned that Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), would refuse to endorse Biden, in accord with a contentious decision DSA made during the summer of 2019 not to endorse any other Democrat for president if Bernie Sanders was not ...

North America

An Open Letter to the New New Left From the Old New Left

Now it is time for all those who yearn for a more equal and just social order to face facts

May 28, 2020 • by Former leaders of the Students for a Democratic Society

“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country.…“…[L]ay your shoulders to the wheel; … Let it be told to the future world, that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope ...

An Open Letter to the New New Left From the Old New Left

North America

A Letter to the Bernie-or-Bust People

Why I’m voting for Biden

May 28, 2020 • by Sarah Newman

In 2000, I was a member of the Green Party and working for its presidential candidate, Ralph Nader. A twenty-something living in San Francisco, I took the bus every day to the Green Party’s campaign office in the city’s Mission District. It was a cavernous, dusty old store-front with political ...

North America

The Two-Party System is Toast

What the socialist path to power looks like

May 28, 2020 • by Honda Wang

During the early stages of the 2019–20 Democratic primary, Bernie Sanders was a persistent progressive thorn in the side of the Democratic establishment. He regularly maintained a solid second place in the horse race, polling between 15–18 percent once Joe Biden officially announced his candidacy in April 2019. In June, ...

North America

The DSA, Left-Bashing, and Joe Biden

We are about as interested in endorsing Biden as Biden’s campaign is interested in our endorsement

May 28, 2020 • by Annie Levin

The decision by Democratic Socialists of America to not endorse Joe Biden in the general election has been met with cries of alarm by some of our progressive friends. We are told that we are living through a second Weimar era and electing a Democrat to the presidency is our ...

North America

Why Socialists Should Support the Democratic Ticket in November…

… Even if it is led by Joe Biden

May 28, 2020 • by Max B. Sawicky

Enthused by the wave of support for the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016, I joined DSA shortly after leaving the federal government the following year. The group seemed well-positioned to take that wave of support and turn it into something enduring. My optimism has been elevated by the emergence of ...

Why Socialists Should Support the Democratic Ticket in November…

Democracy

Misinformation in a Moment of Crisis is Incredibly Dangerous

May 26, 2020 • by Jonathan Beale

It’s madness. But it’s not difficult to imagine people resorting to similar actions now, influenced by misinformation about how to stave off the novel coronavirus. Most of us would also take desperate measures to evade death. And indeed, unreasonable desperate measures are multiplying during the Covid-19 pandemic. Gary and Wanda Lenius, ...