North America Archives - Page 3 of 22

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, ...

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

Democracy

What Is Illiberal Democracy?

Scholars discuss Trump, Modi, and Erdoğan

February 20, 2025 • by Senem Aydin-Düzgit, Mark Frazier, Jeffrey C. Isaac and Pratap Bhanu Mehta

In November 2024, the India China Institute at The New School hosted the online panel "Trajectories of Authoritarianism in Democratic Regimes," which featured scholars Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Senem Aydin-Düzgit, and Jeffrey C. Isaac in conversation with moderator Mark W. Frazier about patterns of takeover, decay, and distrust of political institutions ...

Democracy

The Dictatorship of the Tech Bros—or, What Is to Be Done?

A conversation about DOGE and Trump and Musk’s attempt to smash the state

February 7, 2025 • by Forrest Deacon and James Miller

Editor’s note: In December 2024, Forrest Deacon, a Humanities lecturer at Villanova University who is also completing a dissertation in politics at the New School for Social Research, approached Public Seminar, offering to write a piece about the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). At the time, this seemed like a ...

The Dictatorship of the Tech Bros—or, What Is to Be Done?

Democracy

Trump Returns

Anyone who knows what will happen in 2028 probably doesn’t know much

February 6, 2025 • by David Plotke

The following remarks were first presented on November 13, 2024, in a public lecture at the New School for Social Research. Donald Trump’s substantial victory was a big deal, but not yet a full-scale political shift. Trump made a successful move in the trench warfare that now defines American politics, ...

Music

Election Anxiety Mixtape

What a Public Seminar editor is listening to in order to alleviate election dread

November 5, 2024 • by Alex Rossen

For the past year, commentators from all sectors of the American political spectrum have remarked on the impending enormity of the 2024 US presidential election. I am here not to join them but to offer a token of wellbeing. This week, Public Seminar’s editorial team is turning to music for escape, ...

North America

Trump’s Charm Offensive

“You guys are the same as me”

November 1, 2024 • by Adam Koehler Brown

A #1 with a large fry, made and served by the forty-fifth president of the United States: Donald Trump was working a drive-through at a McDonald’s last weekend in Pennsylvania. He salted fries and greeted customers, a stunt meant to mock Kamala Harris and her repeated claim to have worked ...

Activism

The “Prose of Counterinsurgency”

Policing, migration, militarization, and the liberal-democratic provocation of the fascist turn in the Republican Party

November 1, 2024 • by James Porter

What Ranajit Guha has called the “prose of counterinsurgency” surely comes closest to characterizing the current state of abolitionist struggles within the context of the US presidential election campaign. With this concept, the postcolonial historian describes the strategies by which uprisings against imperial forms of domination have been degraded as ...

Democracy

Leaving Honduras

The legacy of US military and economic interference that continues to drive migration

October 31, 2024 • by Jeremy Robson and Leah Zamore

As US border policy grows ever more restrictive, the Biden-Harris administration’s “Addressing the Root Causes of Migration in Central America” strategy is commendable for aiming to tackle the inhumane conditions in Central America that are causing so many people in the region to uproot in the first place. The strategy ...

Capitalism

Behind the Balancing Act of Kamala Harris’s Industrial Policy

What should Kamala Harris learn from the complicated history of post-1970s New Liberals

October 21, 2024 • by Henry Tonks

Breaking with the strategic ambiguity of her presidential campaign’s early months, Vice President Kamala Harris served up a clearer distillation of her economic agenda in a speech to the Economic Club of Pittsburgh on September 25. The speech was fêted as Harris’s “pragmatic,” “moderate-friendly” pitch. Harris also, however, pointed to ...

Behind the Balancing Act of Kamala Harris’s Industrial Policy

Migration

“Blame It on the Immigrant”: The Housing Crisis Edition

Meet the infamously deep-pocketed, undocumented construction laborers building and then stealing American homes

October 18, 2024 • by Achilles Kallergis

Here’s a tip from the US political playbook: if your campaign is struggling, if you don’t have actual policies but “concepts of a plan,” if you secretly or openly wish for the “good ol’ days” when black people did “black jobs,” if you “forgot” to declare the lavish perks from ...

“Blame It on the Immigrant”: The Housing Crisis Edition

North America

How Moderate Republicans Went Extinct

Reconsidering Nelson Rockefeller and his legacy

September 18, 2024 • by Henry Tonks

At the Aspen Ideas Climate Summit in spring 2022—one of those gatherings of the well-informed and the well-to-do so beloved by American politicians—Nancy Pelosi, then Speaker of the House of Representatives, urged Republicans to “take back” their party from Donald Trump. “This country,” the veteran Democratic leader opined, “needs a ...