North America Archives - Page 2 of 22

Democracy

Trump, Thucydides, and the Corruption of Language

The breakdown of meaning can threaten the very foundations of a civil society

June 25, 2025 • by Benjamin Andrew Schupmann

On January 6, 2021, a violent mob stormed the US Capitol to overturn the results of the 2020 US presidential election. By any reasonable definition, this armed uprising was an insurrection. Yet President Trump recently described it as “a day of love.” In striking contrast, Trump called a mostly peaceful recent ...

Trump, Thucydides, and the Corruption of Language

Migration

Trump Versus Los Angeles, Immigrants, and the Rule of Law

The ICE raids in Los Angeles were the first step in Trump’s plan to impose martial law

June 12, 2025 • by Peter Dreier

Ten observations on the ongoing anti-ICE protests and Trump's misuse of our military to thwart legal protest: The ICE raids in Los Angeles were the first step in Trump’s goal to impose martial law and consolidate his power. This is hardly far-fetched. Even Congresswoman Laura Friedman said that the other day. ...

Trump Versus Los Angeles, Immigrants, and the Rule of Law

Disability

Greg Abbott’s Wheelchair

Cripnormativity rewards crips like Abbott for distancing themselves from other disabled people

June 10, 2025 • by Andrew Joseph Pegoda

On July 14, 1984, an 8,000-pound oak tree fell down in the River Oaks suburb of Houston, Texas. The tree stuck a young man out doing one of his favorite pastimes—running—leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. But the young man, who had just received a law degree from Vanderbilt ...

North America

United States Makes Weapons—Then Sells Them to Mexican Cartels

A review of Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence Across the Border

May 22, 2025 • by Jeremy Robson

In her work along the US–Mexico border, Ieva Jusionyte, an anthropologist and associate professor at Brown University, kept coming across similar stories: people fleeing from gun violence. The fruit of years spent in the field with journalists, federal agents, and members of organized criminal groups, her latest book, Exit Wounds: ...

United States Makes Weapons—Then Sells Them to Mexican Cartels

East Asia & Pacific

US Tariffs and Trump’s Neopatrimonial Mercantilism

Implications for the United States, China, and the global order

May 21, 2025 • by William Milberg

I have spent decades giving boring lectures on tariffs to graduate students. Suddenly, every other newspaper article is on tariffs. We have to credit President Trump with tapping into the popular disgruntlement with globalization beginning in 2016, leading to a rethinking of the structure of global economic governance and a ...

US Tariffs and Trump’s Neopatrimonial Mercantilism

Literature

Whitman, Spiritual Decay, and the Last Light of American Faith

In dark times, the sacred work is not to flee but to testify

May 14, 2025 • by Yahia Lababidi

I say we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us. The underlying principles of the ...

Whitman, Spiritual Decay, and the Last Light of American Faith

Higher Ed

Paying for College Was Already Stressful. Then Came Trump and DOGE.

A Q and A on today’s higher ed money worries

April 16, 2025 • by Center for New York City Affairs and Kim Nauer

Urban Matters: Kim, there’s certainly a lot of confusion about the future of the US Department of Education right now. I know you were in Washington earlier this month looking for some answers. But first: For those who haven’t gone through the process—or who have blissfully forgotten what it can be ...

Paying for College Was Already Stressful. Then Came Trump and DOGE.

Health care

Standing Up for the Health of Black Americans

Trump’s proposed budget cuts are definitely cuts to Medicaid—and will be felt hardest by Black Americans

April 4, 2025 • by Eric T. Jones

On March 4, Rep. Al Green (D-TX) was censured by his Congressional peers for interrupting President Trump’s joint address to Congress. What was lost in the media coverage of Green’s censure is the content of his comments—he was condemning Trump for projected cuts to Medicaid, which are certain to exacerbate ...

Standing Up for the Health of Black Americans

North America

Elon Musk’s Cruel Moral Sentiments

What the world’s richest man has yet to learn from his study of the Bible

April 3, 2025 • by David Lay Williams

Elon Musk may or may not be “the world’s richest man” these days, depending on the wildly fluctuating value of his Tesla car company, a target for those protesting Musk’s “move fast, break stuff” approach to downsizing the federal bureaucracy through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Musk’s savage cuts ...

Migration

Guantanamo, Again

No one is above the law, and no president should become a king

April 2, 2025 • by Joseph Margulies

Tracking the damage President Trump has done in his first two months in office sometimes seems like counting the homes flattened in a hurricane. Every house matters to someone—but it’s the cumulative devastation that most matters to society as a whole. Yet as long as people are still picking through ...

Migration

Asylum and the Hierarchy of Suffering

Limitations of the US migration framework

February 27, 2025 • by Charlotte Soehner and Olivia Woldemikael

Even before Trump barred asylum seekers from the US-Mexico border by declaring all unauthorized border crossings to be “invasions,” American asylum was a system with no winners. Now, while migrants at the border are stripped of the meager options they previously had recourse to, it’s crucial to understand what it meant, until very ...

Democracy

“If You Wish to Know Who a Man Truly Is, Give Him Power”

By eroding the values of inclusivity and fairness, Trump’s rhetoric cultivates instead an exclusionary ethos, one deliberately designed to undermine the idea that all citizens possess equal moral worth and deserve equal opportunities to participate in public life

February 25, 2025 • by Melvin L. Rogers

Reflecting on Abraham Lincoln in 1894, the American orator and lawyer Robert Green Ingersoll observed that “nothing discloses real character like the use of power. It is easy for the weak to be gentle. Most people can bear adversity. But if you wish to know what a man really is, ...