The Barbie Curse
Can a girl’s first icon of can-do power ever be good enough?
Barbie is the most popular doll in the world, and the most hated....
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Identity Politics and Culture Wars
Judith Butler, Cornel West, and Glenn Greenwald join moderator Simon Critchley in the 2021 Holberg Debate
To some, identity-based politics has been embraced as an effective strategy to combat discrimination and marginalization. To others, it may seem that identity politics has resulted in culture wars involving violent conflicts and a destructive exchange of labels. ...
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The Power of Empty Terms
The increasingly militant culture wars divide the public into two irreconcilable camps
Unlike a historical dispute or ideological debate, the “politics of morality” is primarily about power, a concept with American origins, now playing out in Europe. But what lies even further behind central Europe’s growing disagreement over same-sex marriage, abortion rights, and immigration?
The Czech Republic has recently caught up with the ...
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It Matters That Warren is a Woman
But It’s Not All That Matters
Here is Cooper’s takeaway: "Wanting a woman to rise to the top of an almost all-male pack is not a position that needs defending. What should be defended is the uncritical desire to elect yet another man to a position that 45 men and zero women have held."
I agree that ...
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What’s Wrong with the ‘Great Awokening’?
White Liberals’ Racial Attitudes Aren’t Too Far Left, They’re Stuck within a Crude Identity Politics
According to center-left commentators, this Awokening is simply too extreme and, thus, threatening to the success of a broader progressive agenda -- whether in the 2020 presidential election or in local organizing efforts. To support this assertion, they claim that white liberals’ racial attitudes have moved so far left that ...
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“Will Modi Return?”
The Inevitable Question from the Indian Elections 2019
For at least a few months now, most Indians in their workplaces, homes and within their communities have been unwittingly discussing the inescapable context of the 2019 General Elections. At the time I write this article, the 17th General Elections are underway in India and six out of the seven ...
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Not Knowing What We’ve Got Til It’s Gone
We need to both defend liberal democratic norms and institutions and address their fault lines
In my contribution to the Dissent Magazine discussion of the “Crisis of Democracy” which provided the inspiration for our reflections in this symposium, I put forward the argument that attacks on the citizenship rights of racialized ‘others’ are central to Trumpism and other variants of the populist authoritarianism of the far right that have taken ...
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The Crisis of Democracy is a Crisis of the Left
A capitalism transformed by a strong version of social democracy should be our political goal
It is a crisis for democracy when the left is weak and unable to mobilize its natural constituency. All I want to do today is to unpack that sentence.
Why is this a crisis? Democracy requires some degree of equality, but capitalism and neo-liberal economic policies produce inequality: a steady pressure ...
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