Bill Clinton Archives - Public Seminar

Reviews

Can American Liberalism Reinvent Itself?

How obscuring the public side of public-private partnerships from FDR to Clinton rendered the liberal state politically precarious

June 27, 2023 • by Henry Tonks

The DLC, soon to anoint Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas as their chairman and presidential standard-bearer, were leaving the legacy of New Deal and postwar liberalism behind. They were, after all, “New Democrats.” Or were they? ...

Can American Liberalism Reinvent Itself?

Activism

Statewide Democratic Candidates Rally in Brooklyn

A photo essay

November 8, 2022 • by Jo Freeman

The Democratic candidates for all five of New York’s statewide offices on the 2022 ballot rallied the troops in downtown Brooklyn on Saturday afternoon before election day. They were all incumbents seeking re-election. ...

Statewide Democratic Candidates Rally in Brooklyn

Politics

The Perfect Dictatorship

The perfect dictatorship is not one in which there are no elections. The perfect dictatorship is one in which the government does not lose elections

June 2, 2021 • by Francisco Rodríguez

_____ It was during the presidency of Carlos Salinas de Gortari, whom many saw as one of the champions of economic reforms (even today, some people remember him that way), that Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa decided to break one of the unwritten rules of Mexican politics. In a televised discussion ...

Politics

Harnessing Federal Power for Police Reform in America

What we can learn from Reconstruction and the Voting Rights Act of 1965

July 8, 2020 • by Richard Johnson and Desmond King

History suggests that the response to the current crisis of policing in the United States must be a stronger role for the federal government. Yet few activists within the Movement for Black Lives are demanding that the federal government flex its coercive muscle. Given the racism of the current occupant ...

Harnessing Federal Power for Police Reform in America

History

Taking Children

An excerpt from Taking Children: A History of American Terror by Laura Briggs

June 8, 2020 • by Laura Briggs

The past stalks the present, the ghost in the machine of memory. This is why history writing matters; it gives us ways to understand the specters already among us and to assemble tools to transform our situation. Things change; the epidemic of child taking in the context of mass incarceration ...

Feature

Bill Clinton’s Symphony of Hypocrisy and Rage

Remembering Monica Lewinsky

June 6, 2018 • by Claire Potter

I used to love Bill Clinton (known in our household for years as The Big Dog) and now I just want someone to get him off the stage. Two days ago, in an interview with The Today Show's Craig Melvin about a new thriller co-written with James Patterson, former president William Jefferson ...

Bill Clinton’s Symphony of Hypocrisy and Rage

Feature

Trump’s Bottling of Old Wine

Can we finally lose our bipartisan taste for workfare?

April 23, 2018 • by John Krinsky

It is tempting to see President Trump’s executive order directing his agencies to find ways to require work as a condition for receiving means-tested benefits as another example of his outsized callousness. By casting all means-tested aid programs as “welfare,” Trump’s executive order supersizes “workfare” by linking benefits to work. There are ...

Feature

Tonya Harding, Prison Book Bans, and the Clinton-Lewinsky Scandal

Past Present Episode 115

January 28, 2018 • by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Nicole Hemmer and Neil J. Young

In this episode, Neil, Natalia, and Niki debate Tonya Harding’s comeback, book bans in prison, and the 20th anniversary of the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal.

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Tonya Harding, Prison Book Bans, and the Clinton-Lewinsky Scandal

Feature

NAFTA’s Long Shadow

Where immigration and economic policy meet

January 9, 2018 • by Sarah McNamara

Congressional Democrats and Republicans regularly play the blame game about why there’s no immigration reform. But each party fails to point the finger at one of the major culprits behind the contemporary immigration waves and this political morass: NAFTA. The signing of NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) in the 1990s ...

Feature

Bill Clinton, the NYC Subway, and GOP’s Tax Plan

Past Present Episode 109

December 3, 2017 • by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Nicole Hemmer and Neil J. Young

In this episode, Niki, Neil, and Natalia debate the recent reckoning with Bill Clinton’s legacy, the state of the New York City subway, and the new tax reform measure.

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Bill Clinton, the NYC Subway, and GOP’s Tax Plan

Feature

Triangulation is the Not-So-New Black

Party Coalitions, Racial Scapegoating and the Carceral State

October 10, 2017 • by Daniel Kato

Bill Clinton vilified African-Americans with his draconian crime bill while pushing for economic deregulation policies that he hoped would woo Republicans while also not upsetting the labor base of the Democratic Party too much. By the time Obama came around, African-Americans went from being vilified by the Democratic Party to ...

Feature

Three Futures for the Democratic Party

The Party Beyond Hillary and Bernie

April 13, 2017 • by Macabe Keliher

The electoral defeat of the Democratic Party last November, coupled with a lackluster resistance to Trump and the Republican agenda, has exposed a political party long in decay. Having lost nearly one thousand seats in local and national elections over the past eight years, and then the presidency, the Democratic ...