Our Next Guantánamo

Immigrants might become the next target for state-sponsored terrors

We create Guantánamos in those fevered moments when imagined needs enflame ancient hatreds and modern fears, telling ourselves they will keep us safe and forgetting that they never have before. ...

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Our Next Guantánamo

Part 2: My Convictions

Revelations of the War in Ukraine: An anti-war activist’s personal and political reckoning

Having faulted American policies myself—emphatically so from Clinton forward, when I took on that role of Boston Globe op-ed pundit—I nevertheless refused now to place blame for Putin’s war on America’s drive to protect, in the left-wing argot, its “global hegemony.”...

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Part 2: My Convictions

Navigating the World of Grand Strategy with Christopher McKnight Nichols and Andrew Preston

The two historians talk to Public Seminar about Rethinking American Grand Strategy

Award-winning historians Christopher McKnight Nichols and Andrew Preston spoke (virtually) with Public Seminar editorial intern Gregory Coleman to discuss their new book Rethinking American Grand Strategy (Oxford University Press, 2021). Edited by Nichols and Preston with fellow historian Elizabeth Borgwardt, the collection of curated essays discusses what American grand strategy ...
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Navigating the World of Grand Strategy with Christopher McKnight Nichols and Andrew Preston

Democrats and the Conservative Supreme Court

Is there incentive to attack the court’s legitimacy?

Last week, opinion columnist Jennifer Rubin wrote about the sinking reputation of the United States Supreme Court. With respect to a new abortion law in Texas, which invalidates Roe v. Wade, the Post columnist said that, “The nub of the problem is not that (or not only that) voters are angry that the court allowed ...
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Democrats and the Conservative Supreme Court

9/10,11, and 12

The world was bigger then. Our two oceans provided us with the same illusion of protection our grandparents enjoyed

It's not just that I am a man who was born and raised in New York City. It's not just that my family goes back generations here: my dad and his two brothers were cops who patrolled its streets, and my mom worked on the 97th floor of Tower One. ...
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9/10,11, and 12

Democrats and Anti-Trump Conservatives Must Join Forces to Defend Democracy

But the wounds of the Reagan and Bush years have created a stark barrier to cooperation across ideological lines

_____ When Mitt Romney voted to convict then-President Trump in his 2020 impeachment trial, he stepped forward as an icon of truth in a party increasingly committed to lies. Many liberals felt a keen and unexpected thrill, watching Romney, the face of the 2012 Republican Party hold back tears as he ...
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Democrats and Anti-Trump Conservatives Must Join Forces to Defend Democracy

The Rotten Alliance of Liberals and Neocons Will Likely Shape U.S. Foreign Policy for Years to Come

Trump’s rise led to unity in the interventionist ranks opposing his foreign policy

The mobilization appears to be having an impact. More recently, "more than 100 former staff of [recently deceased Senator John] McCain's congressional offices and campaigns also endorsed Biden for president," according to NBC News and dozens of former staffers from Senator Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign. That GOP support comes in addition to the more ...
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The Rotten Alliance of Liberals and Neocons Will Likely Shape U.S. Foreign Policy for Years to Come

The Hidden Structural Racism in the American Response to Public Health Emergencies

Facing a disproportionate death rate among Black people from COVID-19, President Trump shrugs: “What, me, worry?”

When faced with emerging epidemics related to HIV/AIDS in the 1970s, to crack cocaine in the 1980s, to Ebola in 2014 and 2018, the U.S. government was slow to intervene on behalf of homosexual populations, or urban poor populations, or African populations, who respectively were most-affected by those public health ...
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The Hidden Structural Racism in the American Response to Public Health Emergencies

Is This Regime Change?

The old order has entered a period of decay and illegitimacy

Thanks to Donald Trump, white Americans are starting to see the United States through the eyes of black Americans, who experience, every day, police departments deploying an array of Gestapo tactics. Black Americans, in other words, understand fascism intimately. White Americans are finally seeing that the point of Black Lives Matter ...
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Is This Regime Change?

The Two-Party System is Toast

What the socialist path to power looks like

During the early stages of the 2019–20 Democratic primary, Bernie Sanders was a persistent progressive thorn in the side of the Democratic establishment. He regularly maintained a solid second place in the horse race, polling between 15–18 percent once Joe Biden officially announced his candidacy in April 2019. In June, ...
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The Two-Party System is Toast