Politics Archives - Page 3 of 143

Germany Holds Up a Mirror for America

The rise of the AfD, “Alternative for Germany,” now the nation’s most popular political party

October 6, 2025 • by Bruno Heidlberger

On May 2, 2025, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted on X that Germany was “not a democracy, but a tyranny in disguise.” True extremism, he said, lay not in the “popular AfD” but in the “deadly immigration policy of the establishment with open borders, which the AfD rejects.” Rubio's ...

Art & Design

Imperfect Images

Sohrab Hura on slowing down time in a survey show at MoMA PS1

October 2, 2025 • by Alexandra Chaves and Sohrab Hura

Sohrab Hura began his career in film and photography documenting social issues across India and has been a full-time member of Magnum Photos since 2020. Over the years, his practice has expanded to include publishing, drawing, and writing in an ongoing investigation into the relationship between the personal and the ...

Activism

The Revolutionary Street Art of Bangladesh’s 2024 Uprising

In Dhaka, layers of graffiti offer a timeline of hope

September 29, 2025 • by Rayna Salam

Inspired by a popular insurrection against Sheikh Hasina’s increasingly autocratic 15-year tenure as prime minister of Bangladesh, in July 2024, US-based Bangladeshi artist Debashish Chakrabarty produced and circulated online more than 100 posters illustrating the symbols, martyrs, and demands of the movement. He urged protesters around the world to copy ...

The Revolutionary Street Art of Bangladesh’s 2024 Uprising

North America

The New Political Theology

Disestablishing the Establishment Clause

September 24, 2025 • by Arthur Goldhammer

The First Amendment states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Strictly ...

North America

A Martyr and a Meme

After the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Walter Benjamin’s politics of spectacle should serve as a warning to Trump’s America

September 17, 2025 • by Benjamin Andrew Schupmann

Within minutes of the deadly shot, millions of viewers across the digital public sphere saw right-wing activist Charlie Kirk’s last moments in full graphic horror, from multiple angles. Each clip was pared down to shareable content. His death made him at once a martyr and meme. German philosopher Walter Benjamin, writing ...

Higher Ed

The Burned-Over District: The Horses of Instruction and the Tygers of Wrath

Must the university resign itself to the fact that the liberal ethos at the heart of intellectual inquiry rarely informs our political convictions?

September 11, 2025 • by Jonathan Veitch

Genocide; Zionism; antisemitism; settler colonialism; structural racism; apartheid. "Divest now!"; "Hamas, we love you! We support your rockets too!"; "Anyone who sympathizes with Hamas is an antisemite"; "Red, black, green, and white, we support Hamas's fight"; "Globalize the intifada"; "Using Gazans as a human shield is a war crime"; "From the ...

The Burned-Over District: The Horses of Instruction and the Tygers of Wrath

Education

The Evangelical Capture of the Republican Party and Its Implications for Academia

On evangelical anti-intellectualism in the Republican Party

August 28, 2025 • by David A. Hollinger

For the first time in American history, a major political party has a vested interest in a low-education electorate. This astonishing fact has inspired remarkably little discussion. Religion has a lot do with it. The Republican Party courted evangelical Protestants for decades, but the client eventually captured the patron. The party ...

The Evangelical Capture of the Republican Party and Its Implications for Academia

Economy

Trump vs. the Fed

Or how history is forcing the question of a democratic politics of central banking

August 27, 2025 • by Adam Tooze

Donald Trump’s move to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook “for cause,” escalates his long-running battle with America’s central bank. The news has triggered outrage. In the pages of the FT, David Wessel, director of the Hutchins Center for Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution, warned: “President Trump seems determined to ...

Democracy

The Revolution Against Legitimacy

To the new revolutionary class, legitimacy itself is an unjust claim of power

August 26, 2025 • by Roger Berkowitz

“[Stalin] changed the old political and especially revolutionary belief expressed popularly in the proverb “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs” into a veritable dogma: “You can’t break eggs without making an omelette.”—Hannah Arendt We are living through a revolution, though not the kind we are used to. Most today ...

Latin America & Caribbean

Lula 3.0 and the Austerity Trap

The Left in power, the Right in control

July 17, 2025 • by Nara Roberta Silva

Campaigning for his third term as president in 2022, Lula da Silva ran on a straightforward message: making Brazil “happy again.” Now, halfway through his third term, macroeconomic indicators paint a fairly rosy picture of the country’s trajectory under his administration: GDP growth exceeded expectations, and the unemployment rate fell ...

Gender

The Politics of Music and Motorcycles in Indonesia

Elections have empowered a strongman government—and police and military are back to banning music

June 25, 2025 • by Rachmi Diyah Larasati

Sukatani, a punk band from Central Java, are known for critiquing the interconnected violence of police, military, and religious institutions. I like to play their music in my Minneapolis house—and share it on my Instagram—to protest the return of fascism in Indonesia and globally. So early this year, I was ...

The Politics of Music and Motorcycles in Indonesia

Democracy

Trump, Thucydides, and the Corruption of Language

The breakdown of meaning can threaten the very foundations of a civil society

June 25, 2025 • by Benjamin Andrew Schupmann

On January 6, 2021, a violent mob stormed the US Capitol to overturn the results of the 2020 US presidential election. By any reasonable definition, this armed uprising was an insurrection. Yet President Trump recently described it as “a day of love.” In striking contrast, Trump called a mostly peaceful recent ...