The Republicans’ Trump Problem

The Republican Party has a problem. At the time I am writing (March 24, 2016), Donald Trump enjoys a clear lead in the race for the 2016 Republican Presidential nomination. With nearly 60% (739) of the 1,237 delegates required for the nomination, more than both of his remaining opponents, Ted ...

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The Republicans’ Trump Problem

Vision and Reality in Bernie’s Revolution

“And the children swarmed to him like settlers. He became a land.” (Edward Lear, 1945) A certain classic exposition on moral political thought holds that men acquire control and certainty about their world and their own existence through justice, and that humans’ knowledge of the world is inseparable from their own ...
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Vision and Reality in Bernie’s Revolution

A Working-Class Hero Is Something To Be

Bernie Sanders and the White Working Class

A good deal of ink has been spilled over the question of Bernie Sanders’s relationship to African American voters, and it still remains a real question whether he can attract enough black Democratic voters in the upcoming primaries to close the distance between himself and Hillary Clinton.  Even his historic ...

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A Working-Class Hero Is Something To Be

An American Tragedy

I hate anything that smells of “I told you so,” but the only way I can explain the overwhelming success of Hillary Clinton’s race baiting of Bernie Sanders, and the kind of tragedy that represents for America’s future, is autobiographically. My first inkling that Barack Obama’s 2008 talk about a ...
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An American Tragedy

A Response to Occupy the Party

I had read "Occupy the Party” in an earlier version, posted on Facebook. I am glad it is being circulated here on Public Seminar, and would like to offer a brief response. I have four thoughts about this piece. The first no doubt marks me as bourgeois: I don’t really know how ...
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A Response to Occupy the Party

Mothers, Daughters, and Democratic Primaries

In “Not Their Mother’s Candidate,” in last Sunday’s New York Times, Susan Faludi purports to situate the difference between women who support Hillary Clinton and women who support Bernie Sanders in terms of the history of American feminism. According to Faludi, this conflict, which first appeared among feminists in the ...
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Mothers, Daughters, and Democratic Primaries

The Sanders Campaign and ‘Political Revolution’

Support yes, credulity no

The Bernie Sanders campaign for President is one of the most exciting and hopeful developments in US politics in decades. Sanders is, and long has been, a man of principle -- democratic socialist principle. He articulates a clear message -- that a more genuine democratic politics in the United States needs to ...

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The Sanders Campaign and ‘Political Revolution’