Politics Archives - Page 8 of 105

Israel’s Grotesque Violation of Jewish Values

A new book by Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza

March 3, 2025 • by Mitchell Abidor

Peter Beinart’s Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (Knopf, 2025) is a book that will cause much outrage among some of its intended audience: fellow Jews. If there is one thing to which many Jews cleave, it is to our history of victimhood, and the purity that ...

Israel’s Grotesque Violation of Jewish Values

Migration

Asylum and the Hierarchy of Suffering

Limitations of the US migration framework

February 27, 2025 • by Charlotte Soehner and Olivia Woldemikael

Even before Trump barred asylum seekers from the US-Mexico border by declaring all unauthorized border crossings to be “invasions,” American asylum was a system with no winners. Now, while migrants at the border are stripped of the meager options they previously had recourse to, it’s crucial to understand what it meant, until very ...

Democracy

“If You Wish to Know Who a Man Truly Is, Give Him Power”

By eroding the values of inclusivity and fairness, Trump’s rhetoric cultivates instead an exclusionary ethos, one deliberately designed to undermine the idea that all citizens possess equal moral worth and deserve equal opportunities to participate in public life

February 25, 2025 • by Melvin L. Rogers

Reflecting on Abraham Lincoln in 1894, the American orator and lawyer Robert Green Ingersoll observed that “nothing discloses real character like the use of power. It is easy for the weak to be gentle. Most people can bear adversity. But if you wish to know what a man really is, ...

“If You Wish to Know Who a Man Truly Is, Give Him Power”

Migration

Border Time

Policing movement in the Rio Grande Valley

February 24, 2025 • by Victoria Hattam

The southern border of the United States has been policed intensively for over half a century. Donald Trump and many other global political leaders have narrowed their policy focuses from bordering more generally to building walls. Even short trips to the US-Mexico border make clear that the wall is not ...

Democracy

What Is Illiberal Democracy?

Scholars discuss Trump, Modi, and Erdoğan

February 20, 2025 • by Senem Aydin-Düzgit, Mark Frazier, Jeffrey C. Isaac and Pratap Bhanu Mehta

In November 2024, the India China Institute at The New School hosted the online panel "Trajectories of Authoritarianism in Democratic Regimes," which featured scholars Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Senem Aydin-Düzgit, and Jeffrey C. Isaac in conversation with moderator Mark W. Frazier about patterns of takeover, decay, and distrust of political institutions ...

Europe & Central Asia

Vladimir Putin, Man of Yesterday

While the global community dreams of the future, the Kremlin fixates on a retrotopia

February 19, 2025 • by Alex Rossen

In September 2024, the United Nations convened for the Summit of the Future. In it, diverse global communities came together to dream of the utopia tomorrow might offer. Yet as the Russian state declares its desire to restore the territorial holdings of the old Russian empire, these same global communities ...

Genocide

The Self-Orientalization of Israeli Politics

Why “the only democracy in the Middle East” is cozying up to authoritarian regimes

February 19, 2025 • by Assaf David and Arie Dubnov

Israel has often been described as the only democracy in the Middle East. This perception—flawed and problematic as it is—has been central not only for Israel’s defenders abroad but also for many Jewish Israelis’ self-perception. The power consolidation of an extreme coalition of right-wing political parties in recent years, coupled ...

Democracy

An Open Letter to Kamala Harris

When silence is not an option

February 13, 2025 • by Melvin L. Rogers

On the final night of the Democratic National Convention in August 2024, Vice President Harris delivered what was meant to be a defining speech of her career. Accepting her party’s nomination, she did more than make the case for her presidency—she sounded the alarm. “With this election, our nation has a precious, fleeting ...

Democracy

Trust in Political Leaders Plummets Worldwide

When it comes to political legitimacy, the more significant the expectations, the higher the disappointments

February 11, 2025 • by Camila Rodríguez Nardi

In early November 2024, PULSAR, the academic observatory of the University of Buenos Aires, and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (KAS), published a Spanish-language report that analyzed the social approval of national governments in 16 countries across Western Europe, North America, and Latin America. The document compiled approval ratings of presidents ...

Trust in Political Leaders Plummets Worldwide

Democracy

From Erdoğan’s Turkey to Trump’s America

What we can learn from a parallel history

February 7, 2025 • by Phyllis Jeffrey

In 2002, voters in Turkey—reeling from an economic crisis that halved the value of the Turkish lira and produced a 7.5 percent drop in GDP—elected a new party by a plurality: 34.3 percent of the vote. Though hardly a resounding mandate, the margin enabled the party, an Islamist offshoot led by ...

From Erdoğan’s Turkey to Trump’s America

Democracy

The Dictatorship of the Tech Bros—or, What Is to Be Done?

A conversation about DOGE and Trump and Musk’s attempt to smash the state

February 7, 2025 • by Forrest Deacon and James Miller

Editor’s note: In December 2024, Forrest Deacon, a Humanities lecturer at Villanova University who is also completing a dissertation in politics at the New School for Social Research, approached Public Seminar, offering to write a piece about the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). At the time, this seemed like a ...

The Dictatorship of the Tech Bros—or, What Is to Be Done?

Democracy

Trump Returns

Anyone who knows what will happen in 2028 probably doesn’t know much

February 6, 2025 • by David Plotke

The following remarks were first presented on November 13, 2024, in a public lecture at the New School for Social Research. Donald Trump’s substantial victory was a big deal, but not yet a full-scale political shift. Trump made a successful move in the trench warfare that now defines American politics, ...