the Left Archives - Public Seminar

Activism

Occupy, Fifteen Years Later

What does today’s Left owe to those nights at Zuccotti Park?

September 17, 2026 • by Nara Roberta Silva

On September 17, 2011, a few hundred people spent the night at Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park and launched the movement known as Occupy Wall Street. Claiming to embody the “99%,” the movement showcased the idea of a great majority pitted against a tiny, immensely powerful minority. While ceaseless debates about Occupy’s ...

Interviews

Take Back the City

An interview with Samuel Stein on his new book, A Right to Housing?

September 16, 2026 • by Samuel Stein and Andreas Petrossiants

Samuel Stein’s A Right to Housing? asks more than just the titular question, but it does sit with a particularly troubling dilemma: are we crazy to keep fighting? As the book jacket describes, it offers both a “radical blueprint for universal housing” and an “unflinching assessment of why we haven’t won,” split ...

Politics

The Left Needs a Better Defense of Trans People

Stop emphasizing population size and start talking policy

April 24, 2025 • by Amelia Nonemacher

In the opening months of the Trump administration, the full power of the state has been deployed to suppress the rights of trans people to access healthcare, play sports, change their gender marker on official documents, and use public bathrooms, among other attacks. These policies have been critiqued by LGBTQ+ ...

The Left Needs a Better Defense of Trans People

Economy

Honduras Fights Back Against Global Oligarchy

How an unregulated techno-utopia came into existence and continues to sabotage a nation’s sovereignty

March 17, 2025 • by Nolan Young

Honduras money, financial business concept, banknotes and coins (2024) I Andrzej Rostek / Stutterstock ...

Honduras Fights Back Against Global Oligarchy

Philosophy

Ideology After Marxism

From Karl Mannheim and Daniel Bell to Vaclav Havel

June 10, 2024 • by Alex Rossen

Among the many reckonings of [the twentieth century] was a reckoning, not merely with Marxism—but with the process of ideology-making itself....

Politics

The Triumph of Just War Theory (and the Dangers of Success)

Considering the triumph, and questionable uses, of the theory since the Vietnam War

June 10, 2024 • by Michael Walzer

All of us in the antiwar camp suddenly began talking the language of just war—though we did not know that that was what we were doing....

The Triumph of Just War Theory (and the Dangers of Success)

Europe & Central Asia

People’s War and Nuclear Fear: The Anti-War Left and Ukraine

A response to James Carroll’s reckoning with peace activism

October 26, 2022 • by Jeremy Varon

America was duty-bound to save Ukrainian lives, if at the expense of Ukraine’s sovereignty. But there is an uncomfortable arrogance to this argument, framed as tough love. Perhaps the Ukrainians themselves should determine what’s worth fighting and dying for, not the U.S....

People’s War and Nuclear Fear: The Anti-War Left and Ukraine

Europe & Central Asia

Goodbye Merkel, Hello … Who?

The German election and what’s to come

September 29, 2021 • by Nicolas Allié

One thing is clear about the 2021 German election: it is going to be consequential. Long-time chancellor and ostensible champion of democratic values, Angela Merkel, is leaving after 16 years in office. The consequences of this action are still uncertain. Germany’s electoral system is unique. Voters elect representatives to the German parliament, or Bundestag, and they cast two votes. The first is for who will represent ...

History

Why Weimar is an Imperfect Mirror

Its polarized culture reinforced the destructive energy of an increasingly polarized politics

April 8, 2021 • by Helmut W. Smith

"It would be too much to say that the Weimar Republic fell to Nazism because of its bifurcated culture. But the high culture of Weimar was not a supporting pillar of democracy either. Instead, Weimar’s polarized culture reinforced the destructive energy of its increasingly polarized politics. " - Helmut W. ...

Columnists

Joe Biden’s Masculinity Is Anything But Toxic

How republican virtue is part of manliness

December 3, 2020 • by John Stoehr

“Virtue-signaling” is the idea that people say they believe something but don’t really believe it. They’re saying it to seem impressive to people they desire to impress. Everyone does this to some degree, and everyone deserves some degree of takedown. But if anyone has a corner on the market of ...

Joe Biden’s Masculinity Is Anything But Toxic

Politics

The Man Who Predicted Twitter Mobs

Gustave Le Bon and the mind of the crowd

July 10, 2020 • by Mitchell Abidor

In May, the New York Times published an opinion piece I wrote on the position taken by Democratic Socialists of America and Jacobin magazine on the presidential election. Both DSA and the magazine had expressed opposition to support for Joseph Biden, and the editor of Jacobin announced his intention to ...

Politics

The Rise of Liberal Support for Racial Justice

The critical factor connecting protest and electoral politics today

June 25, 2020 • by Sanford Schram and Richard Fording

There has been extensive commentary about the protests over the recent murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, with some suggesting parallels to the 1960s. But a number of observers have incisively pointed out differences as well, noting the racial diversity of today’s protesters compared to those who took to the streets ...