Politics Archives - Page 54 of 143

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Permanent Mystifications

The Story of Post-Conceptual Art in Slovakia

April 30, 2019 • by Max L. Feldman

Prague City Gallery’s “Probe 1: The Story of Slovak (Post)Conceptual Art” (12th December 2018 - 24th March 2019) came and went unnoticed. This is hardly surprising, despite the prime location of the museum’s 13th-century Stone Bell House site: a corner of the Old Town Square beneath the piercing spires of the Church ...

Blue Monday

On Trump’s Dangerous Words

Why We Need to Use the Word “Impeachment” Now

April 29, 2019 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

We humans are many things. One is that we are beings who understand, construct, and change our world in and through language. In the beginning there were words. The late great writer and dissident-citizen-president, Vaclav Havel, said it well in his powerful 1989 acceptance speech to the German Booksellers Association, “Words ...

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Trump and the San Diego Synagogue Shooting

The President Plays with Fire, and The Rest of Us Get Burned

April 28, 2019 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

My mind was reeling. I was writing a column about Trump’s speech to the National Rifle Association in Indianapolis when I learned of yesterday’s (Saturday) synagogue shooting in California by a white supremacist. The connection between these two events was immediate and obvious to me, as I will briefly explain in ...

Trump and the San Diego Synagogue Shooting

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Richard Rorty: The Dark Years

The philosopher’s vision of what is dangerous and yet possible

April 26, 2019 • by Richard J. Bernstein

The passages below are selections from “Richard Rorty: The Dark Years.” Introduction No one was more acute than American philosopher Richard Rorty in echoing and epitomizing the accusations and taunts of his critics. In “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids” he tells us that conservative culture warriors characterize him “one of the relativistic, ...

North America

Toxic Language Alert for Campaign 2020

Confusing populism with demagoguery isn’t good for democracy

April 26, 2019 • by Robert Ivie

This essay was originally published on April 26 2016. In early April 2019, The Washington Post’s adversarial columnist Dana Milibank dubbed Bernie Sanders “the Donald Trump of the left,” noting perfunctorily at the end of his column that his wife, Anna Greenberg, “works for John Hickenlooper, a Democratic presidential candidate.” One can assume ...

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Further Thoughts on Impeachment as Political Strategy

Do it to expose and weaken Trump and the Republicans for 2020

April 25, 2019 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

The argument about impeachment continues, as it should. Yesterday I laid out the general case for impeachment. My argument was not ethical or legal, it was political: impeachment is a legitimate constitutional process that ought to be pursued not because it will remove Trump from office -- Senate Republicans will surely ...

Further Thoughts on Impeachment as Political Strategy

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For the Green New Deal / Against Ideology

Ideology looms as a threat to human decency, justice and survival

April 24, 2019 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

Ideology doesn’t only undermine democracy, as I tried to demonstrate in my last post. It looms as a threat to human decency, justice and survival. I thought about this reading Jake Davis’s “Why I Want Nothing to do with the Green New Deal. Davis’s essay attracted a great deal of attention, with ...

For the Green New Deal / Against Ideology

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Mass Psychology of Crisis

For a structural analysis of financialization and against the use of “fascism” as a scare tactic

April 23, 2019 • by Nancy Fraser

Mass psychology, new fascism, financialization. The conjunction of these three terms is startling. Its meaning is not immediately transparent. To grasp it requires an imaginative leap. What connects them, for me, is a fourth term, crisis. Not just financial crisis, nor indeed any crisis that is merely sectoral -- whether ecological, economic, social or ...

Blue Monday

Two Cheers for Impeachment

The political “risks” are not that great, and they are worth taking

April 22, 2019 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

In an ideal world, the thought of impeaching Donald Trump would warrant at least three cheers, along with some somersaults and a marching band (my preference would be for a New Orleans Second Line led by Trombone Shorty). Yet in an ideal world Donald Trump would be nothing but a ...

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Reading the Mueller Report

You can’t always get what you want. But if you try sometime you just might find — you know how to read.

April 21, 2019 • by Claire Potter

I understand why you wouldn’t want to read the whole thing through: it’s really long, repetitive and dull. But most of all, you will want to react before reading because you just wanted the Trump presidency to be over, right? You wanted Robert Mueller to make the case for why ...

Democracy

Who Wants to Live in a Comedy State?

A tough choice to make in the Ukrainian elections

April 19, 2019 • by Mariia Shynkarenko

It would be fair to say that notwithstanding the protracted war in Donbass and endemic corruption, Ukraine has managed to prove itself a prudent player in the region. Over the course of five years, Ukraine weaned itself off Russian gas, strengthened its army, signed an association agreement with the European ...

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Merleau-Ponty’s Doubt

On Rethinking Our Thoughts

April 19, 2019 • by David Stromberg

As political camps grow increasingly extreme in their messaging – with Democrat and Republican views both turning less nuanced, with the Right and Left seeming to need each other in order to justify their political survival -- it may be helpful to recall a person who tried to make a ...