Democracy Archives - Page 61 of 97

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Staring Harvey Down

A tribute to the people of Houston

September 19, 2017 • by Melanye Price

When the storm moved closer to the Texas coast, my large interconnected family wove a web of discussions about storm preparations. On text messages and FB threads two words -- pray and prepare -- became the family motto. We are lucky -- not because we share resources with each other, but because ...

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The My Mother / My Self: Presidential Election of 2016

Susan Bordo’s The Destruction of Hillary Clinton

September 17, 2017 • by Nell Painter

Bordo devotes three and a half early pages to Clinton’s appeal to women her age, and Bordo’s age, and mine -- we old women who still evoke wicked stepmothers, witches, shrill voices, and physical ugliness (18-22). In 2016, Democratic women divided by generation, with older women pro-Hillary and younger women ...

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The Political Landscape Post Charlottesville

Where Should Students and Academics Stand?

September 16, 2017 • by Elena Gagovska

I had thought that the scariest sight that weekend would be the images of the “Unite the Right” rally. Men can be scary enough on their own. Men with violent ideologies are simply terrifying. The white supremacist rally was toxically masculine, looked utterly fascist and sounded like a historical period ...

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The Life of the Mind Online

The Politics of Small Things, Civility and Subversion and Public Seminar

September 14, 2017 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

The future of scholarly and intellectual life will be decided on the web. The values of scholarship and the application of the fruits of scholarship to the problems of our times will thrive or wither online. It was out of a desire to test this judgment that I started dabbling ...

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How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics

An Excerpt from Laura Briggs’ latest book

September 12, 2017 • by Laura Briggs

The Subprime Trump’s presidency has sometimes been portrayed as a historical earthquake, radically discontinuous from what came before. Who could have predicted that at a time of rising employment rates, white U.S. Americans would vote in economic resentment of the Democratic Party? How could one foresee a hostile takeover of the ...

How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics

Feature

What Berkeley Needs is a Non-Violent Containment Squad

Reflections from a civil rights veteran

September 8, 2017 • by Jo Freeman

Those reports took me back to the 1960s when I was doing voter registration for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and marching against segregation in Birmingham and Mississippi. Then, we were the equivalent of the "fascists" that Antifa and the black bloc are beating up in Berkeley. They called us Communists, ...

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Remembering Romanian Fascism; Worrying About America

Losing Our Moral Compass between Past and Future

September 3, 2017 • by Maria Bucur

Living under Ceausescu was in some ways like living with Donald Trump as president. There was a lot of nationalist swagger, posturing, and boasting about independence from the Soviets. When Ceausescu refused to send troops into Czechoslovakia in 1968 as part of the Warsaw Pact crackdown on student protests, people ...

Politics

Near-Retirees at All Incomes Are Almost 1/3 Short of Target Retirement Savings

August Unemployment Report for Workers Over 55

September 2, 2017 • by Teresa Ghilarducci

Low-, middle-, and high-income near retirees are almost one-third short of the savings they need to maintain their standard of living in retirement. ReLab's new report using just-released government data documents that the median level of retirement savings in IRAs and 401(k)-type plans among workers ages 55-64 is $15,000. When workers who do not ...

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A Pre-History of Post-truth

East and West

September 1, 2017 • by Marci Shore

The end of “The End of History” arrived together with the end of belief in reality. The Cold War world was a world of warring ideologies; in the twenty-first century, both American capitalism and post-Soviet oligarchy employ the same public relations specialists catering to gangsters with political ambitions. As Peter ...

Feature

Why Nietzsche is Not Responsible for Donald Trump

The Post-Truth Perspective

August 31, 2017 • by Emmanuel Alloa

This is a true story. The acclaimed TV series Fargo starts off exactly in the same way as the movie of the same name in 1996. Just as the cult film by the Coen brothers, the TV drama whose first season was aired in 2014 displays the warning “This is a true story.” ...

Why Nietzsche is Not Responsible for Donald Trump

Feature

Once Upon a Time in 1989

How the West is now learning the hard lessons of the East

August 30, 2017 • by Slavenka Drakulić

In the first of a series of articles from the landmark 50th edition of Transit (to be published in September), author Slavenka Drakulić casts a rueful glance over the expectations -- some fulfilled, many frustrated -- of the generations that have lived through the changes since 1989. I imagine a cosy ...

Education

The New Authoritarianism and the Structural Transformation of the Mediated Public Sphere IV

Concluding Remarks

August 29, 2017 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

It has been an eventful summer. As my dear friend and colleague Robin Wagner-Pacifici would put it, a restless eventful summer: “The world seems out of whack, and everyday routines are, at the least, disrupted. People … experience a vertiginous sensation that a new reality or era may be in the ...