North America Archives - Page 12 of 22

North America

Public Seminar Books Presents: A Conversation with Eric Alterman

Hosted by co-executive editor Claire Potter, the topic is politics and Alterman’s new book, “Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie -And Why Trump is Worse” (Basic Books, 2020)

August 13, 2020 • by Claire Potter

If there’s one thing we know about Donald Trump, it’s that he lies. But he’s by no means the first president to do so. In Lying in State, Eric Alterman asks how we ended up with such a pathologically dishonest commander in chief, showing that, from early on, the United States ...

Public Seminar Books Presents: A Conversation with Eric Alterman

North America

Mike Pompeo’s Originalist Foreign Policy

The Commission’s report gives ammunition to partisans who aim to weaken core constitutional protections within the United States

July 23, 2020 • by Duncan Hosie

This justification is a pretext. While pretending to strengthen protection for human rights abroad, the Commission’s report gives ammunition to partisans who aim to weaken core constitutional protections within the United States. Pompeo and the Commission’s report embrace an “originalist” vision of America’s founding. Originalism is a doctrine in constitutional law ...

Mike Pompeo’s Originalist Foreign Policy

Democracy

Biden Versus Trump: Whose Story of America Will Americans Choose?

“That’s not who we are” — or is it?

July 10, 2020 • by Rogers M. Smith

As Plato suggested in The Republic, politics is driven more by stories than facts. As different as they are in all other regards, America’s last two presidents both won wildly improbable electoral victories while telling completely contradictory stories about their country. Barack Obama made his own hopeful story a symbol of ...

Biden Versus Trump: Whose Story of America Will Americans Choose?

Climate & Ecology

Let’s Make Sure We Get the Green New Deal Right

Covid-19 will force us to rethink many of the assumptions underlying existing GND proposals

July 2, 2020 • by Marshall Auerback

Advocates of the Green New Deal (GND) are looking to change the way we handle a range of problems facing society, especially in the wake of environmental challenges occasioned by climate change. In response, policymakers have suggested a variety of programs designed to deal with these challenges. Should any of ...

Let’s Make Sure We Get the Green New Deal Right

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, ...

Troilus and Cressida 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 ...