Politics Archives - Page 78 of 113

North America

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

February 29, 2020 • by Claire Potter

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 ...

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

Politics

Health Care & the Dangers of Demanding the Impossible

What Bernie Sanders Might Learn from Elizabeth Warren

February 28, 2020 • by Leo Casey

I have been struck today by how much of the argument I saw in the last few days before the Nevada caucuses, much of which was swirling around disagreements between the Bernie campaign and the Culinary Workers Union in Nevada, was based on a common misunderstanding of the dynamics of ...

Health Care & the Dangers of Demanding the Impossible

Politics

COVID-19 and the End of a Political Era

New stages of history are inevitably ushered in by chaos

February 28, 2020 • by Heather Cox Richardson

The coronavirus is grabbing the headlines, and it is a huge story in its own right, but it also lays bare the rot in the Republican Party that has put Trump in the White House. The coronavirus is a pandemic now, meaning it is a disease that has appeared on ...

Democracy

Must A Leader Not Be Above the Law?

Understanding the a-legal Foundations of Trumpism

February 27, 2020 • by Jeffrey S. Librett

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 ...

North America

The Four Hurdles and The Four Temptations of Bernie Sanders

February 25, 2020 • by Andrew Arato

The final hurdle is the Constitution. This involves the separation of powers, a powerful Supreme Court, and federal decentralization. Each hurdle also suggests a temptation inherent in populist politics, which Sanders represents on the left, as Trump does on the right. Securing the Democratic nomination in 2020 is a tall order for ...

The Four Hurdles and The Four Temptations of Bernie Sanders

North America

The Specter of George McGovern’s Defeat in 1972

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

February 25, 2020 • by Bruce Miroff

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 ...

The Specter of George McGovern’s Defeat in 1972

Politics

Is Democratic Socialism in America’s Future?

The success of every radical movement in American history has occurred when it is co-opted by the forces of reform.

February 25, 2020 • by Peter Dreier

More than at any time since World War I, Americans are talking about socialism. Conservatives fear it. Liberals question it. Many progressives and radicals embrace it. Why is that word, and its egalitarian vision, enjoying a resurgence in the United States? And does it mean that socialism is on the ...

Is Democratic Socialism in America’s Future?

Democracy

Solidarity Means Sharing In Active Freedom

Democracy and The Public Square

February 24, 2020 • by Elzbieta Matynia

“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 ...

Solidarity Means Sharing In Active Freedom

North America

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

Slandering the party’s leading candidate is bad

February 24, 2020 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

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, ...

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

North America

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

February 22, 2020 • by Claire Potter

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 ...

North America

No Candidate Who Cannot Win a Majority of Delegates Deserves the Democratic Presidential Nomination

February 21, 2020 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

I know that DSA is not a party (though it surely wishes it could be), but I wonder if the organizational rules would allow its leadership and platform to be decided by a simple plurality of the votes in open primaries throughout the country in which in most places anyone ...

No Candidate Who Cannot Win a Majority of Delegates Deserves the Democratic Presidential Nomination

Democracy

The Cultural Counter Revolution in Brazil

Fascism’s advance in education

February 20, 2020 • by Daniel Peres

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 ...