Politics Archives - Page 83 of 105

The Façade of Justice in Poland

Undermining the rule of law, hiding social inequality

October 15, 2019 • by Paweł Marczewski

Although social transfers do consolidate support for Law and Justice, especially among the new voters of the party, they are not a simple economic transaction, in which political support is exchanged for money. The welfare transactions are perceived as a symbol of a new beginning after three decades of austerity ...

Blue Monday

Anti-Semitism at the Bard Conference?

When early reports don’t tell the whole story about a protest

October 14, 2019 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

This is why I re-posted a powerful piece by Batya Ungar-Sargon entitled “I Was Protested at Bard College for Being a Jew” (Forward, October 12 2019) on Facebook. In the piece Ungar-Sargon reported that she was protested “for being a Jew” because a panel discussion on anti-Semitism featuring her and ...

North America

The Moral Clarity of Children

What Climate Strikers Have to Teach Elizabeth Warren

October 9, 2019 • by Hannah Leffingwell

The quick answer was: yes, Warren’s speech did feel monumental. And yes, the Climate Strike was an event of global significance. The two rallies inspire the assembled crowds, and me. Most importantly, their positioning as bookends to the week’s political news brought into focus how these two agendas might intersect. Warren highlighted the innovations and ...

Democracy

Hate Inc.

Why Today’s Media Makes us Despise One Another

October 2, 2019 • by Matt Taibbi

I know this because I was hired to do this work, over and over. My commercial niche, in fact, was the vitriolic essay that got people spitting mad, or poked fun at someone audiences hated. I was the Triumph the Insult Comic Dog of journalism. I actually won the National Magazine ...

Blue Monday

The Trump “Whistleblower” Situation Is Very Dangerous for Democracy and for the Democrats

Biden’s disingenuousness is no match for Trump

September 23, 2019 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

Do the recent revelations by investigative journalists at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and most notably the Wall Street Journal represent an “inflection point,” exposing a level of malfeasance and criminality that can no longer be ignored? Perhaps. It is too early to tell. But the record of the past seems pretty ...

Feature

Elizabeth Warren Stays Off the Pollercoaster and with the People

Reflections from the crowd at the Washington Square Park rally

September 18, 2019 • by Claire Potter

So that’s what I set out to do when I attended Elizabeth Warren’s rally in New York City on Monday, an event that seems to have jolted the mainstream media into noticing her "slow but steady wins the race" campaigning style. As one young staffer said to me cheerfully -- ...

Europe & Central Asia

Varieties of Gendered Populism

The case of Poland

September 17, 2019 • by Elżbieta Korolczuk

These developments suggest there is a tight connection between right-wing populism and opposition to gender equality and sexual democracy. Just like there is a clear pattern of gendered nationalism, there appears to be also a trend towards gendered populism. As Ruth Wodak pointed out in her seminal book Politics of fear, ...

Blue Monday

Warren is Not Too Late

Of course Jacobin prefers Sanders, but this does not make him the obvious candidate of the broad democratic left

September 16, 2019 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

Kilpatrick and Sunkara’s argument is complicated, and somewhat convoluted (they say “paradoxical”), and boils down to this: while Warren is passe because her vision is grounded in the failed promises of financial regulation under the administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama that can be traced back to the politics ...

Democracy

Lies, Fakes, and Deep Fakes

Deceptions and Scams in the Age of Trump

September 11, 2019 • by Sidney Tarrow

Following the speech three things happened: first, a video was almost immediately made and posted online; a video in which Pelosi’s delivery was slowed down and her tone changed to give the impression that she was either drunk or affected by a health disorder. Second, the next day President Trump tweeted a ...

Blue Monday

Is “Motherfucker” The Concept Political Science Now Needs?

An Immodest Proposal

September 9, 2019 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

Is “Motherfucker” the concept that political science now needs? The question is a serious one. And the answer, I suggest in all seriousness, is “yes.” Kind of. We live in troubled times. The June 16, 2018 cover of The Economist stated the trouble clearly: “How strongmen subvert democracy.” The September/October cover of Foreign Affairs also puts it well: “Autocracy Now.” But ...

Feature

My Butch Career: An Interview With Esther Newton

Resisting gender conformity, coming out in the nineteen-seventies, and fighting for world liberation.

September 9, 2019 • by Theresa Smalec and Esther Newton

I interviewed Esther Newton about her new memoir, My Butch Career on June 20, 2019. Newton earned her PhD in 1968 and published Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America (1972), the first major anthropological study of a gay-identified community in America. Though she researched drag queen culture and desired women sexually, Newton resisted the norms of ...

Democracy

The Story of Indian Democracy Written in Blood and Betrayal

BJP thinks it is going to Indianize Kashmir. Instead, we will see, potentially, the Kashmirization of India.

September 5, 2019 • by Pratap Bhanu Mehta

The narrative supporting a radical move on Kashmir is familiar. Article 35(a) was a discriminatory provision and had to go. Article 370 was not a mechanism for integration but a legal tool for separatism. The Indian state, despite the horrendous violence it has used in the past, has never had ...