Liberalism Archives - Public Seminar

Democracy

Liberalism Against Itself and the Return of the Cold War

An interview with Samuel Moyn

April 24, 2024 • by Julian Nicolai Hofmann and Samuel Moyn

Samuel Moyn annd Julian Nicolai Hofmann explore the resurgence of Cold War liberalism amid global crises. Through historical analysis, Moyn examines liberalism's evolution, highlighting its transformation and proposing a revival of its progressive elements for the future....

Liberalism Against Itself and the Return of the Cold War

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?

Toward a Postliberal Future?

Patrick J. Deneen’s Regime Change and the Meletus option

May 16, 2023 • by Geoffrey Kurtz

Deneen invokes Machiavelli, but at a deeper level his model is Meletus: the whole class of “ordinary people,” all of them, have the right political instincts, and only the liberal “ruling elite,” like the deplorable Socrates, is corrupting the American polity....

Columnists

The stink of treason clings to the Republican Party

Big profit-seeking corporations can smell it, same as everyone else.

May 5, 2021 • by John Stoehr

_____ My friend and fellow New Havener Tom Krattenmaker has a new piece in USA Today worth amplifying, in my own modest way, but also worth setting in the larger context of ideological shifting taking place in the country. Tom argues that big profit-seeking corporations aren’t “woke.” They just believe the ...

The stink of treason clings to the Republican Party

Democracy

“Carl Schmitt’s Comeback?”

Understanding Trump and global authoritarianism

February 17, 2021 • by William E. Scheuerman

As the saying goes: “that was then, but this is now.” I had little inkling that Schmitt would soon become pertinent to present-day political developments. With the dramatic worldwide emergence of authoritarian populism, Schmitt’s thinking seems disturbingly relevant. As the Cambridge jurist Lars Vinx has correctly noted, Schmitt’s significance today ...

Education

What You Learn When You Talk to Conservative Students

College professors and college administrations have to do better–we are losing these kids to extremism

February 3, 2021 • by Claire Potter

"We have a tough job in the next four years as we try to rebuild a more inclusive and truly democratic national conversation." - Claire Potter...

What You Learn When You Talk to Conservative Students

Higher Ed

The Tenured Radical

A brief character study

October 22, 2020 • by Aurora Borealis

------ The tenured radical is a mean creature. No blunder is too small to point out and magnify, no conversation too anodyne to incite accusations of “violence” and “colonization.” To them, there is no difference between The Jakarta Method and a white colleague speaking too much at a faculty meeting. Violence ...

Politics

Fox News Accidentally Reveals the Horrible Truth About Republicans

An attempt to advance the Republican party line goes awry

July 9, 2020 • by John Stoehr

Brian Kilmeade is co-host of Fox & Friends, the president’s favorite weekday morning show. Kilmeade is, well -- he’s not that bright. To be sure, he’s very good at advancing the party line. Sometimes, though, he gets mixed up. Wednesday morning, he tried saying something bad about the Democrats but ...

Fox News Accidentally Reveals the Horrible Truth About Republicans

Politics

If Everyone Else Is the Problem, You Probably Aren’t Seeing Things Clearly

Why effective anti-racism demands reflexivity

June 8, 2020 • by Musa al-Gharbi

In general, whites and socioeconomic elites in America feel a greater sense of entitlement and belonging, and a stronger conviction that social institutions exist to serve them and promote their interests. Within these groups, progressives are much more likely than conservatives to view various forms of state intervention as the ...

If Everyone Else Is the Problem, You Probably Aren’t Seeing Things Clearly

Race

Amy Cooper: The Paradox of the Shameless White Liberal

How pious white anti-racism can contribute to racist behavior

May 29, 2020 • by Musa al-Gharbi

It is unclear what the appropriate consequences for something like this should be, given how dire the consequences of her actions could have been (as recent events in Minneapolis sadly confirm). However, Ms. Cooper has already paid a high price for her transgression: She has been publicly shamed and terminated ...

Amy Cooper: The Paradox of the Shameless White Liberal

Democracy

Testament of our Revolution

What we can learn today from the Czechoslovak Experience of 1977

March 12, 2020 • by Martin Palouš

-James Dodd On February 21, 1990, Václav Havel -- still under arrest less than four months previous as a “subversive element” -- addressed a joint session of the U.S. Congress in his new capacity as Czechoslovak President. He was welcomed as a leader of the Velvet Revolution, which brought to an ...

Literature

On The Hatred of Literature

Liberalism is about life and everything it contains

March 10, 2020 • by Jon Baskin

When I was in college, at the end of the last century, the prevailing school of literary interpretation was called “New Historicism.” The foundational assumption of this approach was that artworks were primarily of value insofar as they could offer us insight into the context and conditions of their historical ...