North America Archives - Page 13 of 21

North America

Do Not Presume a Fair Election

“Obamagate” reveals the skulduggery still to come.

May 15, 2020 • by John Stoehr

The president and his confederates in the United States Congress have spent the last several days manufacturing a controversy for the press corps to report and debate. Donald Trump has dubbed it “Obamagate.” It seems to have something to do with the previous administration’s lawful handling of the case of former ...

Democracy

Who Is Trump Really Protecting During the Coronavirus Crisis?

May 12, 2020 • by Rogers M. Smith and Desmond King

Will Trump’s response to the Covid-19 crisis at last damage his claim to be his constituents’ Great Protector? The answer is not obvious. While Trump’s approval ratings first surged, then dropped, as the crisis grew, he has not fallen below where he has been through most of his term. Most ...

Who Is Trump Really Protecting During the Coronavirus Crisis?

Democracy

The GOP’s Anti-American Animus

Trump is the culmination of 40 years of sabotage.

May 7, 2020 • by John Stoehr

I suppose we should give the president a round of applause. Donald Trump has done something no Democrat (and no liberal) could have done -- demonstrate to a voting majority the anti-American animus of the “conservative” project of the last 40 years. “Anti-American” might sound strange. This is, after all, the same president who vowed in 2016 to ...

Democracy

Donald Trump’s Daily Briefings: Personal and Political Reflections

April 30, 2020 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

My friend and Democracy Seminar co-chair, Jeff Isaac, keeps on promising his friends that he won’t watch the briefings anymore, but he can’t help himself. Just about every day, I read his cursing of Trump and his enablers on Facebook. Jeff can’t take his eyes off Trump, even as he ...

Donald Trump’s Daily Briefings: Personal and Political Reflections

Democracy

Mitch McConnell’s Betrayal of Democracy

McConnell is happy to let a pandemic weaken and impoverish his political rivals

April 28, 2020 • by John Stoehr

Nearly 50,000 Americans have died in the last five weeks from COVID-19, the disease caused by a new strain of the coronavirus. The death toll would almost certainly be higher had not good-faith governors (both Democrats and Republicans) taken aggressive measures to force people to isolate or distance themselves from ...

Democracy

Don’t Personalize Donald Trump’s Response to Covid-19

It’s classic neoliberalism — with a Schmittian face

April 24, 2020 • by William E. Scheuerman

“When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total. And that’s the way it’s gotta be. It’s total.” President Donald Trump, April 13, 2020 Carl Schmitt, Germany’s most influential authoritarian jurist, has long played a major role in political and legal debates around the world. Because of ...

Don’t Personalize Donald Trump’s Response to Covid-19

North America

Sustaining Democratic Opposition to Trumpism

Why the Democratic Party Must Support Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

April 22, 2020 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

Since Super Tuesday, it has been clear that the Democratic nominee will be Joe Biden. And in the past week, there has been an extraordinary public display of political unity behind the Biden campaign, with Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, and then Elizabeth Warren issuing full-throated endorsements. The appeal to party unity in the face ...

Sustaining Democratic Opposition to Trumpism

North America

“There Go the People….”

By endorsing protesters who demand that states reopen, Donald Trump reveals himself as a leader of a movement, not a party or a nation

April 21, 2020 • by Sidney Tarrow

There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader. No one could be further from Donald Trump in either ideology or personal biography than Ledru-Rollin, who was the grandson of Nicolas Philippe Ledru, a well-known quack doctor under the Old Regime. But the celebrated quote attributed to the radical French ...

Democracy

Donald Trump Advocates the Overthrow of (State) Governments

Is Republican populism approaching its Thermidor moment?

April 20, 2020 • by Heather Cox Richardson

“LIBERATE MINNESOTA!” “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” “LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!” The media has been on fire ever since. A president advocating a violent overthrow of three states with Democratic governors is unprecedented and quite possibly illegal—Mary McCord, acting US assistant attorney general for national security from 2016-2017 ...

Donald Trump Advocates the Overthrow of (State) Governments

Democracy

Donald Trump Has Been in Politics for Decades

As a new book by Andrea Bernstein details, creating a 20th-century real estate empire demanded it

April 19, 2020 • by Claire Potter

As early as 1987, rumor had it that Donald Trump was considering a presidential bid. In October 1987, as both parties began to assemble the 1988 field, Trump took a trip to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where a crowd bearing “Trump for President” signs greeted him. He decided not to run ...

Donald Trump Has Been in Politics for Decades

Democracy

Steve Bannon and the Struggle for America’s Post-Pandemic Soul

Why populist-nationalist movements detest international cooperation

April 16, 2020 • by Robert Wright

But however grave Bannon’s crimes, to write him off back then—to assume he would never again be a significant force within Trumpism—would have been to underestimate his resourcefulness and determination. A pandemic is a time of opportunity as well as tragedy, and Bannon is seizing the moment. And the way ...

Steve Bannon and the Struggle for America’s Post-Pandemic Soul

Democracy

The Expressive Antidote to the Trumpist Virus

How Erving Goffman helps us understand the hidden power of Biden, Sanders, and the Democratic governors

April 10, 2020 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

We can appreciate this by drawing upon the insights of the pioneering ethnographer of social interaction, Erving Goffman. There is irony in this. Goffman is not usually considered a political thinker, nor did he think of himself as such, but his creative examination of the details of social interaction, in my judgment, illuminates an ...