Ronald Reagan Archives - Public Seminar

Podcast

When We Lose, We Win

Episode 60: Talking with historian Brenda Wineapple about civil rights, culture wars, the 1925 Scopes “Monkey” trial and her new book, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted A Nation

October 10, 2024 • by Claire Potter

In 2016, white evangelical Christians showed up at the polls in force for Donald J. Trump, part of a diverse movement that defied expectations to sweep him into the White House. In the past decade, scholars and journalists have spilled a lot of ink on what seemed initially like a ...

Podcast

Hit Them in the Pocketbook

May 8, 2023 • by Claire Potter

This book describes a part of the African American civil rights movement that many people don’t know—perhaps because it was run, and the battles were fought, by Black women who saw their activism as an extension of their commitment as mothers....

Our Next Guantánamo

Immigrants might become the next target for state-sponsored terrors

May 2, 2023 • by Joseph Margulies

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. ...

Higher Ed

Counting the Social Cost of What College Costs

The financial burden of higher education is not an unfortunate accident, nor is it a “fact of life” or a “natural consequence” of going to college

February 15, 2023 • by Lora Burnett

Now many of the students with the most motivation to work towards a more equitable and just society feel the least liberty to do so....

Counting the Social Cost of What College Costs

Europe & Central Asia

Robert Jay Lifton on Psychic Numbing and the Warning from Ukraine

The renewed threat of nuclear war—and the importance of distinguishing between fear and anxiety

October 25, 2022 • by James Carroll and Robert Jay Lifton

Nuclear complacency is multifaceted. A certain amount of nuclear fear is appropriate to our situation. When we give in to what you’re calling nuclear complacency, it’s because we have insufficient fear of what is actually dangerous....

Robert Jay Lifton on Psychic Numbing and the Warning from Ukraine

Europe & Central Asia

Might the U.S. Military Support Nuclear Disarmament?

Its senior leadership is uniquely positioned in the present moment to pursue a revolutionary possibility

October 24, 2022 • by Robert Edwards

It is often difficult in the moment to recognize when one is at a crossroads. In the 1991 Gulf War, I was a lowly tactical intelligence officer in a parachute infantry regiment of the 82nd Airborne, rolling through the Iraqi desert beneath an air campaign that left smoldering charcoal where ...

Might the U.S. Military Support Nuclear Disarmament?

Politics

The Elusive Latino Voter

History reconsidered

September 22, 2022 • by Claire Potter

One place to understand how Republicans have stumbled when it comes to Latino voters is the attempt by the Reagan administration to simultaneously declare an end to racism in 1980—mission accomplished!—and woo Latinos as a racial group because they presented as religious and more socially conservative. Yet, as White House ...

Economy

Cents and Non-Cents about Inflation

No, it isn’t Biden’s fault.

December 6, 2021 • by Steve Max

Yes, inflation is back—only 6 percent as of October, which is nothing like the 13.5 percent that brought down Jimmy Carter in the election of 1980. The exact numbers don’t really matter. Rising prices, especially gasoline prices, are always bad news for the party in power. We must remember, and keep ...

Politics

Never-Trumpers Keep Insisting that Reaganism Was Not Demagoguery—It Was

The “normal” GOP set the stage for the MAGA movement, and neoconservatives could help restore our democracy by telling the truth about what they did

September 29, 2021 • by Claire Potter

The conservative flavor of the week for liberals is Robert Kagan’s Washington Post opinion piece from September 21, 2021. It recounts, in apocalyptic terms, what everyone who cares about democracy in both parties worries about: that J6 was just the beginning; that the continuing lies and chaos that Trump and ...

Never-Trumpers Keep Insisting that Reaganism Was Not Demagoguery—It Was

Feminism

Why Does the Texas Legislature Believe That Embryos Have a Heartbeat?

Because fake science is part of the American conservative tradition

September 8, 2021 • by Claire Potter

____ The Texas statute that went into effect last week is one of many similar anti-abortion laws that have either recently cleared state legislatures or will clear them in the coming months. Using the weapon of a civil suit that can be filed by any private citizen, the law seeks to ...

Why Does the Texas Legislature Believe That Embryos Have a Heartbeat?

Politics

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

June 14, 2021 • by Adam Littlestone-Luria

_____ 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 ...

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

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 ...