Politics Archives - Page 95 of 105

Feature

Bannon at Booth

A conflict between principle and strategy?

March 15, 2018 • by Michael Weinman

Bannon, surely, needs no introduction, nor need we long belabor the reasons why the decision to invite him to speak at the University of Chicago proved controversial. Still, let’s note that in a letter of protest signed by over 100 members of the University of Chicago faculty, the rationale for objecting to ...

Blue Monday

The Fables of Our Faubus

Jeff Sessions, man of justice

March 12, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

"I merely took the energy it takes to pout, and I wrote some blues." -Duke Ellington Jefferson Beauregard Sessions has fallen on hard times. A celebrated Alabamian and Man of the South, he came out for Donald Trump long before any other national Republican politician, and then gave up his very ...

Feature

Is Women’s Solidarity Possible?

To be a successful movement, feminism has had to ignore its failure with conservative women

March 7, 2018 • by Claire Potter

Tomorrow is International Women's Day. Don't do housework—let men do it (that is, should you own a man: we don't at my house, so we would have to rent or borrow one.) Don't do paid work. Don't shop—except at female and minority-owned small business (should you be able to locate ...

Europe & Central Asia

From Casting Director to Failed Coup

Unseating the Turkish military

March 6, 2018 • by Phyllis Jeffrey

The most recent period of competitive democratic politics in Turkey was bookended by two coups: those of 1980 and 2016. If the first heralded the re-organization of politics under the supervision of the military, the second instigated the transition to a civilian autocracy. The significance of the failed coup of ...

Blue Monday

Strange Fruit

An improvisation on race, hybrid identities, and the blues

March 5, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

"I merely took the energy it takes to pout, and I wrote some blues." -Duke Ellington February was Black History Month. The Republican Party apparently decided to commemorate this by organizing a reception on February 26 to honor Black Republicans. Not invited was Michael Steele, the first African-American to chair the Republican National Committee ...

Europe & Central Asia

A Revolution in the Polling Booths?

The new constitutional order in Orbán’s “illiberal” Hungary

March 5, 2018 • by Mátyás György Endrey

In line with these ambitions, Orbán was also quick to announce that he considered the new parliament to be “a constitutional assembly,” tasked with setting the solid foundations for the new system in the form of a new constitution, The Fundamental Law, coming into force on January 1, 2012. This ...

Democracy

The Current Situation in Catalonia

Part two on Catalonia’s constitutional crisis

March 4, 2018 • by Lucia Pradel

This piece is part of a two-part series. Part One is meant to contextualize Pradel’s essay. The Election on December 21st, 2017 The Catalonian independence movement won what appears like a clear victory on December 21. All the same, Ciudadanos (Citizens Party), a liberal pro-unity party that calls themselves “post-nationalist” won the majority ...

Democracy

America’s Hunger Games

The normalization of mass shootings will only stop when a majority of citizens start acting

March 4, 2018 • by Siobhan Kattago

In the dystopian novels of Suzanne Collins, the Capitol organizes annual Hunger Games, in which twenty-four youth – one boy and one girl from each peripheral district, which resemble colonies – are forced to fight to the death. The children, who are selected by lottery and mostly poor, are trained, ...

Democracy

Contextualizing Catalonia

Part One on Catalonia’s constitutional crisis

March 1, 2018 • by Skyler Maassen, Lucia Pradel and Leng Wah Sing

In the early- to mid-twentieth century, repeated regime changes instigated the devolution of power from a centralized government to localized authorities. The desire for a stabilized, democratic form of government prevailed in the late 1970s with the fall of General Franco. Spain is comprised of seventeen autonomous regions. The Spanish Constitution of 1978, states ...

Democracy

Democracy Dies in Darkness

A keynote address from the Dramaturgies of Resistance conference

February 28, 2018 • by Elzbieta Matynia

I have been fascinated by a dimension of political life that occurred in the latter part of the twentieth century in both non-democratic and democratic contexts. I think of this dimension -- something I experienced myself -- as closely related to the politics of hope, and I call it performative. Just ...

Power and Crisis

The City Does Not Belong to its Inhabitants

A letter from Jerusalem

February 27, 2018 • by Ido Nahari

The holy is that which people have no control over: it is found only in the sovereignty of God and is unobtainable in the physical realm, which is what is described as “mortal” and is limited to people. Jerusalem is holy. That is why it was not the sovereign city ...

The City Does Not Belong to its Inhabitants

Blue Monday

Brown and Blue

Further thoughts on gun violence, fascism, and resistance

February 26, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

"I merely took the energy it takes to pout, and I wrote some blues." -Duke Ellington I’m still moanin’ about the high school massacre in Parkdale, Florida. Moaning, and thinking. About guns, and politics, and history. The massacre was horrendous, but also distinctively compelling, insofar as the extraordinary response of the Marjory Stoneman ...