Hong Kong on the Brink

The irony of the UK, one of the world's great democracies, belatedly handing over a colonized people from one distant ruler to another, in Beijing, was not lost on the people living nearly 2,000km south of China's capital. It is hard to say how genuine Margaret Thatcher's claimed optimism at the ...
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Hong Kong on the Brink

The Speech that Mike Bloomberg Should Have Given Last Week

How the former Mayor might redefine the importance of an outsider candidacy — by leaving the race, and supporting a candidate who can win

But at the moment, he is actually harming both. He is hurting Democrats by blunting the message of all the candidates other than Bernie Sanders. And he is hurting the country by making it less likely that the Democrats will nominate a person who will be able to defeat Donald Trump. Yet he ...
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The Speech that Mike Bloomberg Should Have Given Last Week

Are the Primaries – or the Voters –“Just Dumb”?

As the Sanders revolution surges ahead, efforts to block his candidacy increasingly look like rigging – not reform

When we look back on the 2020 election cycle, one clear theme will be the tension between reform and revolution that Democrats have wrestled with since the primary season began. A second may be the need to reform the rules regulating the party’s primaries and caucuses. Case in point: the lead editorial ...
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Are the Primaries – or the Voters –“Just Dumb”?

Must A Leader Not Be Above the Law?

Understanding the a-legal Foundations of Trumpism

Having spent some years studying and teaching about the structure and functioning of Nazi ideology, and having written books on the Christian-Jewish relationship in German culture, as well as German Orientalism, I would like to apply some of what I may have learned about extreme right-wing ideologies to the current ...
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Must A Leader Not Be Above the Law?

The Specter of George McGovern’s Defeat in 1972

Similarities — and Key Differences — with the Prospects for Sanders in 2020

Now that Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed democratic socialist, has emerged as the clear frontrunner for the Democratic nomination in 2020, the old warnings echo even louder. Veteran media commentator Chris Matthews is typical of alarmists in prophesying that Sanders as nominee would match McGovern in losing 49 states (presumably Vermont ...
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The Specter of George McGovern’s Defeat in 1972

Solidarity Means Sharing In Active Freedom

Democracy and The Public Square

“Democracies are not going to defend themselves. It is we the citizens who have to defend them. I believe it is not too late.” -- Adam Michnik, New School Centennial Lecture, October 2019 How can we resist the retreat from our beleaguered democracies and hold onto the embattled freedom we still have? I ...
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Solidarity Means Sharing In Active Freedom

Buttigieg’s Nevada Speech Was Terrific if the Goal is to Defeat Sanders Rather Than Trump

Slandering the party’s leading candidate is bad

This does not obviate the real limits of the Sanders campaign and the challenges it must address moving forward, if Sanders is to successfully claim the nomination much less the presidency. On Saturday night Jacobin, the organ of Sanders’s hard-core ideological supporters, declared that “After the Nevada Blowout, It’s Bernie’s Party Now” (indeed, ...
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Buttigieg’s Nevada Speech Was Terrific if the Goal is to Defeat Sanders Rather Than Trump

Revisiting the Netroots, 2020 Edition

Recent reports that Russia has been interfering with the election are no surprise — but this is what to do about it

But at Public Seminar, we have been paying attention to the corruption of what blogger Jerome Armstrong dubbed “the netroots” in 2002: grassroots political activism that occurs primarily online. In collaboration with our friends in the Eurozine network, we have a cluster of articles in this week’s issue about Disinformation. Adam Ramsay shows how disinformation, on its ...
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Revisiting the Netroots, 2020 Edition

The Cultural Counter Revolution in Brazil

Fascism’s advance in education

The government is not only restricting our freedom of expression, though. It is more than that. They are attacking our educational system, and thus attacking our common culture. Brazil is a very diverse country, in terms of culture, and unequal, in terms of wealth and opportunities. It is not at ...
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The Cultural Counter Revolution in Brazil

Democracy is Losing the Online Arms Race

How media monopolies have damaged the public sphere – and what we can do about it.

I started writing about the potential for computer-mediated communication in 1987, decades before online communication became widely known as “social media.” My inquiries about where the largely benign online culture of the 1980s might go terribly wrong led me to the concept of the “public sphere,” which had received a ...
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Democracy is Losing the Online Arms Race