Politics Archives - Page 72 of 112

Democracy

Who Is Trump Really Protecting During the Coronavirus Crisis?

May 12, 2020 • by Rogers M. Smith and Desmond King

Will Trump’s response to the Covid-19 crisis at last damage his claim to be his constituents’ Great Protector? The answer is not obvious. While Trump’s approval ratings first surged, then dropped, as the crisis grew, he has not fallen below where he has been through most of his term. Most ...

Who Is Trump Really Protecting During the Coronavirus Crisis?

Activism

How Do You Protest in a Pandemic?

The challenges of creating a social movement while social distancing

May 12, 2020 • by Jane Desmond

On Thursday, April 15, the traditional day for paying federal taxes, several thousand cars rolled to a stop on the streets in Lansing, Michigan. They surrounded the State Capitol, commencing “Operation Gridlock” to protest Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s extension of the state’s “stay-at-home” order. Blaring horns, waving flags, and sprouting signs ...

Politics

How Fast Can a President Tweet? Once Every 7.5 Minutes

In a morning tweetstorm, the President seems consumed with his own safety

May 11, 2020 • by Heather Cox Richardson

Trump appears to be upset about the recent prominence of former President Barack Obama in the news. On Friday, a tape of Obama talking to about 3000 former staffers leaked. In it, the former President expressed dismay over the Justice Department's decision to drop the case against former National Security ...

How Fast Can a President Tweet? Once Every 7.5 Minutes

Democracy

The Power and Limits of Partisanship in the Struggle to Defeat Trumpism

A Critical Response to Osita Nwanevu’s “Bipartisanship Won’t Save Us”

May 7, 2020 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

As Nwanevu nicely outlines, the “emergency” legislation recently passed by Congress through bipartisan compromise, and signed into law by President Trump, is manifestly inadequate to the current crisis. It is also the necessary and predictable result of compromises with a Republican party that opposes remedial public policy as a matter ...

The Power and Limits of Partisanship in the Struggle to Defeat Trumpism

Democracy

The GOP’s Anti-American Animus

Trump is the culmination of 40 years of sabotage.

May 7, 2020 • by John Stoehr

I suppose we should give the president a round of applause. Donald Trump has done something no Democrat (and no liberal) could have done -- demonstrate to a voting majority the anti-American animus of the “conservative” project of the last 40 years. “Anti-American” might sound strange. This is, after all, the same president who vowed in 2016 to ...

Democracy

The Business of Disinformation

In Central and eastern Europe, political disinformation is highly profitable

May 7, 2020 • by Judit Szakács

Since February 2019, the Center for Media, Data and Society at Central European University has been mapping individuals and companies running or owning disinformation websites in five central and eastern European countries: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Hungary, Moldova, Romania and Slovakia. The goal is to collect data on independent (i.e. not ...

Prisons and Police

Out of Jail and Homeless

City struggles to stop COVID-19’s spread among New York’s recently released prisoners

May 6, 2020 • by Abigail Kramer

Stefan Outlaw had just recovered from the worst of his COVID-19 symptoms when he learned that a charitable fund had paid to bail him out of the Rikers Island jail. It was mid-March, and much of the jail population was quarantined in cells for 24 hours a day. Outlaw, age ...

Democracy

The Age of Infection

Is life turning against itself?

May 5, 2020 • by Eric Anthamatten

In the age of infection, the goal of human existence is to become a virus -- to have a Tweet or TikTok infect the cells of the cultural body, cutting through the cacophony, so that others might finally see me, and acknowledge that my existence matters (even if that “existence” ...

Activism

How Long Is a Football Field? The Kent State Shootings Reconsidered

It was a story told in photographs, but what we saw wasn’t what happened. It was worse.

May 4, 2020 • by Carol Wilder

The author would like to extend deep thanks to Thomas Grace, Alan Canfora, and Dean Kahler; and to NYU history Professor Robert Cohen for his clarifying remarks. Fifty years is a big part of a human life. How unsettling that the meticulously planned 50th commemoration of the tragic May 4th, 1970 killings at ...

How Long Is a Football Field? The Kent State Shootings Reconsidered

Democracy

Donald Trump’s Daily Briefings: Personal and Political Reflections

April 30, 2020 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

My friend and Democracy Seminar co-chair, Jeff Isaac, keeps on promising his friends that he won’t watch the briefings anymore, but he can’t help himself. Just about every day, I read his cursing of Trump and his enablers on Facebook. Jeff can’t take his eyes off Trump, even as he ...

Donald Trump’s Daily Briefings: Personal and Political Reflections

Democracy

Mitch McConnell’s Betrayal of Democracy

McConnell is happy to let a pandemic weaken and impoverish his political rivals

April 28, 2020 • by John Stoehr

Nearly 50,000 Americans have died in the last five weeks from COVID-19, the disease caused by a new strain of the coronavirus. The death toll would almost certainly be higher had not good-faith governors (both Democrats and Republicans) taken aggressive measures to force people to isolate or distance themselves from ...

Activism

Hong Kong Under Lockdown

From the masks of protesters to the mask of public health

April 28, 2020 • by Mark Frazier

The mask ban, based on a century-old colonial emergency ordinance, was largely upheld earlier this month in a controversial ruling by Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal. By then, the Covid-19 crisis had stopped the mass protests, accomplishing what Carrie Lam and her officers could not during much of 2019. ...