Politics Archives - Page 65 of 109

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, ...

Politics

Harnessing Federal Power for Police Reform in America

What we can learn from Reconstruction and the Voting Rights Act of 1965

July 8, 2020 • by Richard Johnson and Desmond King

History suggests that the response to the current crisis of policing in the United States must be a stronger role for the federal government. Yet few activists within the Movement for Black Lives are demanding that the federal government flex its coercive muscle. Given the racism of the current occupant ...

Harnessing Federal Power for Police Reform in America

Democracy

Will We Still be American after Democracy Dies?

July 7, 2020 • by Johann Neem

There is a real possibility that American democracy will die come November. I hope not. I pray not. But I worry. Many scenarios that would have once appeared fantastic, now seem to be within the realm of the possible. One does not need a vivid imagination to wonder what would ...

Will We Still be American after Democracy Dies?

Politics

What is Behind the Ghislaine Maxwell Arrest?

Geoffrey Berman’s forced resignation from SDNY and Maxwell’s arrest may not be a coincidence

July 3, 2020 • by Heather Cox Richardson

Yesterday Jeffrey Epstein’s associate Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested. Epstein was a super-shady socialite and convicted sex offender who had lots and lots of cash and hobnobbed with elites in the political and financial world. Maxwell was his socialite companion and is alleged to have procured and groomed young girls for ...