Michael E. Gellert Professor of Sociology at The New School for Social Research

Democracy

Donald Trump’s Daily Briefings: Personal and Political Reflections

April 30, 2020 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

My friend and Democracy Seminar co-chair, Jeff Isaac, keeps on promising his friends that he won’t watch the briefings anymore, but he can’t help himself. Just about every day, I read his cursing of Trump and his enablers on Facebook. Jeff can’t take his eyes off Trump, even as he ...

Donald Trump’s Daily Briefings: Personal and Political Reflections

Democracy

The Expressive Antidote to the Trumpist Virus

How Erving Goffman helps us understand the hidden power of Biden, Sanders, and the Democratic governors

April 10, 2020 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

We can appreciate this by drawing upon the insights of the pioneering ethnographer of social interaction, Erving Goffman. There is irony in this. Goffman is not usually considered a political thinker, nor did he think of himself as such, but his creative examination of the details of social interaction, in my judgment, illuminates an ...

The Expressive Antidote to the Trumpist Virus

Democracy

Gray is Beautiful, Part 3

How do we balance the agendas of progressive and moderate voters?

March 27, 2020 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

What is to be done, in the face of the present crisis of democracy in America -- and far beyond -- in the midst of a pandemic? I think that we have a clear goal: all democrats -- small “d” -- have to work together against Trump and Trumpism. I agree ...

Democracy

Gray is Beautiful, Part 2

On the Social Condition and Fractured Society in Donald Trump’s America

March 24, 2020 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

Gray Beauty I came to appreciate the beauty of the gray listening to a lecture by Adam Michnik at The New School for Social Research in 1996. In his lecture, likewise entitled “Gray is Beautiful,” Michnik declared: “Radical movements -- whether under black or red banners -- gladly use democracy in order ...

Democracy

Gray is Beautiful, Part 1

On the Social Condition and Fractured Society in Donald Trump’s America

March 23, 2020 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

This is the first part of a three-part post, originally drafted as a lecture, drawn from my published and unpublished writings over the past decade, to be presented to Democracy Seminar participants in Gdansk, Warsaw, Budapest, and Berlin (to a group of Turkish exiles). Because of the coronavirus pandemic, the ...

North America

Why I Don’t Like the Leading Democratic Candidates to be President of the United States

And why I would support anyone of them

December 11, 2019 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

“I am devastated. All of my public commitments are under attack. I thought there was progress during my lifetime. Democracy and the positive developments of democratic culture, free speech and expression, social justice and the fight against racism, sexism, class exploitation, xenophobia, and much more, all seemed to advance, even ...

Why I Don’t Like the Leading Democratic Candidates to be President of the United States

Democracy

Democrats of the World, Unite!

A Report on the First International Meeting of Democracy Seminar 2.0

October 31, 2019 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

I proposed the seminar more than a year ago. Since then, we have been developing it here on Public Seminar, as I explained earlier this year. The organizers of this “worldwide network of democratic correspondence,” met for our first face-to-face meeting on October 4 and 5. We gathered in New York, at The New School, on the ...

Democracy

Open Letter: We Stand with the Kurdish People of Syria!

October 29, 2019 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

We are writing as scholars and citizens of the world to express our concern for the Kurdish people of Syria, whose fate has been dramatically altered by events that started with a phone call between President Donald Trump and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on October 6, 2019. Since then, the United ...

Feature

Welcome to the New Public Seminar

Marking the New School’s centennial year with a refreshed platform and a renewed commitment to conversation

September 30, 2019 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, James Miller and Claire Potter

Everything you have always found at Public Seminar is still here. But we’ve redesigned the site to let you let you slow down, if you want to. Public Seminar’s commitment to discussing the pressing issues of our contemporary world also now includes a commitment to contemplation, to doing more with less, and at the ...

Democracy

For Democracy / Against Cynicism

On Trump, McConnell, Pelosi and Company

July 31, 2019 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

“I believe the single most pressing challenge facing American society today is widespread public cynicism.” With these words, I opened my book The Cynical Society, published in 1991. I was deeply concerned by the interaction between the cynicism of politicians, on the one hand, and the cynicism of the media ...

Democracy

Defeating the Prince of the Darkness of Our Times

On the 2020 Election / Against Ideology

June 20, 2019 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

I hope Elizabeth Warren will be the next President of the United States, though I would be satisfied with Joe Biden, and pleased with Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker or Jay Inslee, or with any one of the other sixteen or so candidates, none of whom has ...