Barack Obama Archives - Page 3 of 5

North America

The Two-Party System is Toast

What the socialist path to power looks like

May 28, 2020 • by Honda Wang

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, ...

Democracy

The GOP’s Anti-American Animus

Trump is the culmination of 40 years of sabotage.

May 7, 2020 • by John Stoehr

I suppose we should give the president a round of applause. Donald Trump has done something no Democrat (and no liberal) could have done -- demonstrate to a voting majority the anti-American animus of the “conservative” project of the last 40 years. “Anti-American” might sound strange. This is, after all, the same president who vowed in 2016 to ...

Activism

The History of American Progress is also Jewish History

On the final night of Hannukah, we put Jews at the center of the American narrative

December 30, 2019 • by Peter Dreier

Election results and public opinion polls reveal that among white Americans, Jews have consistently been the most liberal and progressive ethnic and religious group. In 1920, when only 3 percent of Americans voted for Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party candidate for president, Jews gave him 38 percent of their votes. In 1932, when Franklin Roosevelt ...

The History of American Progress is also Jewish History

Blue Monday

Bye Bye Biden

The weakness of his entire candidacy is that he is looking backward at a time when we need to move forward

April 8, 2019 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

“The more one suffers, the more, I believe, has one a sense for the comic.” – Søren Kierkegaard There is much suffering in the Age of Trump. The principal source of grief is Trump himself: what he does and doesn’t do, what he says and doesn’t say, and what and who is ...

Feature

1968 in the Time of the Plague

The morphing meaning of a remarkable year

December 19, 2018 • by Jeremy Varon

As a scholar of the 1960s, I had looked forward for several years to 2018 with both excitement and misgivings. 2018 would be, at last, the Big One: the 50th anniversary of 1968, widely anointed the most remarkable year in a remarkable era. The limelight beckoned for the spirited sub-field of ...

Blue Monday

Twisted

Thoughts on the insanity in the White House

September 10, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

"I merely took the energy it takes to pout, and I wrote some blues." -Duke Ellington This past week we have been vividly reminded of what we long have known: that the man currently occupying the office of President of the United States, the Chief Executive and Commander in Chief of ...

Feature

Black Insurgency, Anti-Racism, and the Student Mobilization Against Guns

The similarities and differences of these social movements

March 2, 2018 • by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

I have seen many comments on social media about the significant difference in how the emergence of the student mobilizations against gun violence has been greeted compared to the Black insurgency of Black Lives Matter. It is an important discussion to have because if these current mobilizations hope to grow into ...

Black Insurgency, Anti-Racism, and the Student Mobilization Against Guns

Feature

Presidential Portraits, Down Syndrome, and Sanitation Workers

Past Present Episode 119

February 25, 2018 • by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Nicole Hemmer and Neil J. Young

In this episode, Natalia, Niki, and Neil debate the release of the Obamas’ presidential portraits, the first Gerber Baby with Down syndrome, and the storied history of the sanitation worker.

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Presidential Portraits, Down Syndrome, and Sanitation Workers

Feature

Oprah for President?

Can a celebrity’s civic religion heal our divided nation?

January 10, 2018 • by Claire Potter

I turned off #GoldenGlobes2018 about 45 minutes into the show. I was impressed by what I was hearing from the awards stand. But I was also offended by Seth Meyers’ repeated jabs at Kevin Spacey, the only gay man other than the elderly George Takei to have been accused of ...

Feature

Gray is Beautiful Revisited

On the Politics of Sex and the Crisis of Democracy at Home and Abroad

December 23, 2017 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

This week I am returning to my appreciation of the color gray, a theme I promised to explore regularly here, which unfortunately I have only returned to occasionally, and not recently. I am returning to the theme on this the darkest of days -- I started writing this during the winter solstice ...

Education

Syllabus: From Goldwater to Trump

A Political History of Tea Party America

November 1, 2017 • by Claire Potter

In order to think this through with students, I re-did the course, and the syllabus below that I am teaching this fall is what I came up with. ___________________________________________________ This course is a survey of United States political history and domestic policy that puts the evolution of the American presidency at its ...

Feature

Jefferson’s Two Bodies

Memory, protest, and democracy at the University of Virginia and beyond

October 19, 2017 • by Isaac Ariail Reed

The students who shrouded Jefferson pulled the memory of the author of the Declaration of Independence — that document so useful to Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Jr., and so many others — into a larger series of conflicts over memorialization. These conflicts have tended focus on monuments to the ...