Politics Archives - Page 30 of 143

North America

A Letter to the Bernie-or-Bust People

Why I’m voting for Biden

May 28, 2020 • by Sarah Newman

In 2000, I was a member of the Green Party and working for its presidential candidate, Ralph Nader. A twenty-something living in San Francisco, I took the bus every day to the Green Party’s campaign office in the city’s Mission District. It was a cavernous, dusty old store-front with political ...

North America

The Two-Party System is Toast

What the socialist path to power looks like

May 28, 2020 • by Honda Wang

During the early stages of the 2019–20 Democratic primary, Bernie Sanders was a persistent progressive thorn in the side of the Democratic establishment. He regularly maintained a solid second place in the horse race, polling between 15–18 percent once Joe Biden officially announced his candidacy in April 2019. In June, ...

North America

The DSA, Left-Bashing, and Joe Biden

We are about as interested in endorsing Biden as Biden’s campaign is interested in our endorsement

May 28, 2020 • by Annie Levin

The decision by Democratic Socialists of America to not endorse Joe Biden in the general election has been met with cries of alarm by some of our progressive friends. We are told that we are living through a second Weimar era and electing a Democrat to the presidency is our ...

North America

Why Socialists Should Support the Democratic Ticket in November…

… Even if it is led by Joe Biden

May 28, 2020 • by Max B. Sawicky

Enthused by the wave of support for the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016, I joined DSA shortly after leaving the federal government the following year. The group seemed well-positioned to take that wave of support and turn it into something enduring. My optimism has been elevated by the emergence of ...

Why Socialists Should Support the Democratic Ticket in November…

Europe & Central Asia

Letter from Glasgow

Labour renewed in a Britain unchanged

May 14, 2020 • by Simon Jones

But then in late April, the blossom trees awaken in the resurgent sun, their brilliant petals a thrilling antidote to the months of grey. Within days of their fading arrives the full vibrancy of the parks and countryside around Glasgow, a reminder that the trade-off for living somewhere so apparently ...

Exiles on 12th Street

Nevertheless, She Persisted

Exiles on 12th Street, Episode Eight

May 10, 2020 • by Claire Potter

This is the eighth episode of Public Seminar’s podcast, Exiles on 12th Street. If you like it, go to iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe. Thanks to the bravery of several generations of activist women, the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified on August 18, 1920, finally granting women in the ...

Democracy

The Power and Limits of Partisanship in the Struggle to Defeat Trumpism

A Critical Response to Osita Nwanevu’s “Bipartisanship Won’t Save Us”

May 7, 2020 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

As Nwanevu nicely outlines, the “emergency” legislation recently passed by Congress through bipartisan compromise, and signed into law by President Trump, is manifestly inadequate to the current crisis. It is also the necessary and predictable result of compromises with a Republican party that opposes remedial public policy as a matter ...

The Power and Limits of Partisanship in the Struggle to Defeat Trumpism

Democracy

The GOP’s Anti-American Animus

Trump is the culmination of 40 years of sabotage.

May 7, 2020 • by John Stoehr

I suppose we should give the president a round of applause. Donald Trump has done something no Democrat (and no liberal) could have done -- demonstrate to a voting majority the anti-American animus of the “conservative” project of the last 40 years. “Anti-American” might sound strange. This is, after all, the same president who vowed in 2016 to ...

Democracy

Mitch McConnell’s Betrayal of Democracy

McConnell is happy to let a pandemic weaken and impoverish his political rivals

April 28, 2020 • by John Stoehr

Nearly 50,000 Americans have died in the last five weeks from COVID-19, the disease caused by a new strain of the coronavirus. The death toll would almost certainly be higher had not good-faith governors (both Democrats and Republicans) taken aggressive measures to force people to isolate or distance themselves from ...

North America

Sustaining Democratic Opposition to Trumpism

Why the Democratic Party Must Support Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

April 22, 2020 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

Since Super Tuesday, it has been clear that the Democratic nominee will be Joe Biden. And in the past week, there has been an extraordinary public display of political unity behind the Biden campaign, with Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, and then Elizabeth Warren issuing full-throated endorsements. The appeal to party unity in the face ...

Sustaining Democratic Opposition to Trumpism

North America

“There Go the People….”

By endorsing protesters who demand that states reopen, Donald Trump reveals himself as a leader of a movement, not a party or a nation

April 21, 2020 • by Sidney Tarrow

There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader. No one could be further from Donald Trump in either ideology or personal biography than Ledru-Rollin, who was the grandson of Nicolas Philippe Ledru, a well-known quack doctor under the Old Regime. But the celebrated quote attributed to the radical French ...

Past Present

Vote-by-Mail and USPS

Past Present Podcast, Episode 225

April 21, 2020 • by Nicole Hemmer, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela and Neil J. Young

Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: Earlier this month in Wisconsin, voters had to choose between civic participation and public health. Questions over mail-in voting have reignited a debate over federal funding for the post office, as discussed in this Vox piece. Niki explained ...