Politics Archives - Page 63 of 105

Democracy

Fascists in Slovak Politics

Waiting for a new chance in times of the COVID-19 crisis?

July 12, 2020 • by Alexandra Bitušíková

Marian Kotleba, a former IT teacher, is infamous for his open hatred of the Roma minority, Jews, immigrants and the LGBTIQ+ community. He denies the Holocaust and admires the World War Two fascist Slovak State and its president Jozef Tiso, who was hanged in 1947 as a war criminal. Kotleba ...

Democracy

This is Not a Temporary Crisis

Jeffrey C. Isaac in conversation with Tomasz Sawczuk

July 11, 2020 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac and Tomasz Sawczuk

Tomasz Sawczuk: The United States faces now a dangerous pandemic, a deep economic crisis, and massive social protests, after a policeman killed George Floyd. On top of that, Donald Trump fuels further division and conflict into the American politics. To begin on a general note, how do you make political ...

Democracy

Authoritarian Appetites versus Local Solidarity

July 10, 2020 • by Helena Chmielewska-Szlajfer

This piece was originally published in Polish in Res Publica Nowa. The English translation is provided by the author. Commenting on the Covid-19 Pandemic, Ursula Von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, recently said that Europe is the “world’s beating heart of solidarity.” Indeed, for two months now news ...

Authoritarian Appetites versus Local Solidarity

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?

Politics

The Man Who Predicted Twitter Mobs

Gustave Le Bon and the mind of the crowd

July 10, 2020 • by Mitchell Abidor

In May, the New York Times published an opinion piece I wrote on the position taken by Democratic Socialists of America and Jacobin magazine on the presidential election. Both DSA and the magazine had expressed opposition to support for Joseph Biden, and the editor of Jacobin announced his intention to ...

Activism

Saying Goodbye to Aunt Jemima Is Not Enough

What we really need to do to address the economic impact of systemic racism in the United States

July 9, 2020 • by Elwood Watson

When Dinah Washington recorded “What a Diff’rence a Day Makes” in 1959, the blues diva managed to imbue the Tin Pan Alley lyrics with a kind of haunted hopefulness, the same kind of soulful yearning that would reappear a few years later in Sam Cooke’s monumental ode to the civil ...

Saying Goodbye to Aunt Jemima Is Not Enough

Prisons and Police

Police Abolition — or Electronic Surveillance?

RoboCop returns

July 9, 2020 • by Micol Seigel

These moves may yield genuine improvements in public life in the United States, something other than the same old tired reforms -- civilian review boards, community policing, recruitment of Black and brown cadets, training and so on -- all of which have proven to be ineffective. But even as the nation ...

Police Abolition — or Electronic Surveillance?

Politics

Trump’s Story of America

Whistling “Dixie” through the graveyards

July 9, 2020 • by Rogers M. Smith

By the time of Trump’s Mount Rushmore speech on July 3 of this year, his targets had shifted, slightly but significantly. Now America faced threats from “angry mobs” trying to “tear down statues of our Founders” and “unleash a wave of violent crime” in the service of a “new far-left ...

Politics

Fox News Accidentally Reveals the Horrible Truth About Republicans

An attempt to advance the Republican party line goes awry

July 9, 2020 • by John Stoehr

Brian Kilmeade is co-host of Fox & Friends, the president’s favorite weekday morning show. Kilmeade is, well -- he’s not that bright. To be sure, he’s very good at advancing the party line. Sometimes, though, he gets mixed up. Wednesday morning, he tried saying something bad about the Democrats but ...

Fox News Accidentally Reveals the Horrible Truth About Republicans

Democracy

Turkey’s Forged Success Story

Re-opening without closing down?

July 9, 2020 • by Nazan Bedirhanoglu

Erdoğan of Turkey was already equipped with extensive powers to exhibit his one-man-show. Even though the two years long post-putsch state of emergency formally ended in July 2018, most of the emergency regulations were codified in a way that essentially kept the country in a perpetual state of emergency well ...

Activism

What Will It Take for Black Lives to Matter?

Nonviolent, cross-racial coalitions are the way back to a decent America

July 9, 2020 • by Todd Gitlin

I wrote the article that follows three years ago. Since it first appeared in the American Prospect, Black Lives Matter (BLM) has generated the largest protest movement in American history. What has changed? And what hasn’t? It remains true that the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) is ill-defined. It has rough edges ...

What Will It Take for Black Lives to Matter?

Democracy

Gender Ideology as Pandemic

Anti-gender campaigns in a time of crisis

July 8, 2020 • by Elżbieta Korolczuk

We may have expected that a major health crisis would result in an easing of ultraconservatives efforts to limit the rights of women and minorities. The reality proved to be different. In March 2020 Polish Archbishop Wacław Depo claimed in an interview that “coronavirus is just one of many threats, ...