Mexico’s First Woman President Inherits a Crisis of Femicide

How do we reconcile these coexisting realities?

This July, two of the three party-backed candidates in the Mexican presidential elections were women. Claudia Sheinbaum, the candidate of the ruling left-wing party, MORENA (an acronym for “Movement for National Regeneration”) won with between 58.3 and 60.7 percent of the vote, the highest percentage in Mexico's democratic history. As ...
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Mexico’s First Woman President Inherits a Crisis of Femicide

Election Anxiety Mixtape

What a Public Seminar editor is listening to in order to alleviate election dread

For the past year, commentators from all sectors of the American political spectrum have remarked on the impending enormity of the 2024 US presidential election. I am here not to join them but to offer a token of wellbeing.  This week, Public Seminar’s editorial team is turning to music for escape, ...
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Election Anxiety Mixtape

Trump’s Charm Offensive

“You guys are the same as me”

A #1 with a large fry, made and served by the forty-fifth president of the United States: Donald Trump was working a drive-through at a McDonald’s last weekend in Pennsylvania. He salted fries and greeted customers, a stunt meant to mock Kamala Harris and her repeated claim to have worked ...
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Trump’s Charm Offensive

The “Prose of Counterinsurgency” 

Policing, migration, militarization, and the liberal-democratic provocation of the fascist turn in the Republican Party

What Ranajit Guha has called the “prose of counterinsurgency” surely comes closest to characterizing the current state of abolitionist struggles within the context of the US presidential election campaign. With this concept, the postcolonial historian describes the strategies by which uprisings against imperial forms of domination have been degraded as ...
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The “Prose of Counterinsurgency” 

Voting While Uncommitted

Sustained collective action is not incompatible with the singular act of voting

I have never subscribed to the idea that citizens who refuse to vote for a Democratic candidate in a tight race are somehow morally responsible for the election of a Republican, however bad that Republican might be. If we are serious about liberal democracy, then we must recognize that every citizen ...
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Voting While Uncommitted

Leaving Honduras

The legacy of US military and economic interference that continues to drive migration

As US border policy grows ever more restrictive, the Biden-Harris administration’s “Addressing the Root Causes of Migration in Central America” strategy is commendable for aiming to tackle the inhumane conditions in Central America that are causing so many people in the region to uproot in the first place. The strategy ...
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Leaving Honduras

Immigration and the US Presidential Election

A conversation on the US-Mexico border, inflammatory rhetoric, and policies that can serve migrants and citizens alike

Both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have emphasized US-Mexico border security as one of the top concerns of their 2024 presidential campaigns. Why? In a conversation hosted by the New School for Social Research, Eugene Lang College, and the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility, politics and global studies professor ...
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Immigration and the US Presidential Election

Noncitizen Voting and the Politics of Common Sense in New York City

Can proposals to expand local voting to noncitizens survive in the era of Stop the Steal?

Even as Republican politicians continue to undermine faith in the U.S. electoral system by erroneously claiming the 2024 election will be “stolen” by undocumented immigrants, the New York Court of Appeals is quietly considering a law that would expand the right to vote in local elections to certain residents of ...
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Noncitizen Voting and the Politics of Common Sense in New York City

A Brief History of Travel Bans

What could follow a Trump victory in November?

On the campaign trail in 2016, Donald Trump promised retribution for the San Bernardino Isis attack in December 2015: he would enact a ban prohibiting the entry of Muslims into the country. It was, unfortunately, one of the campaign promises he made good on. In late January 2017, President Trump signed ...
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A Brief History of Travel Bans

What Democrats Lose in Ignoring the Uncommitted Movement

The party has learned the wrong lessons from 1968

In anticipation of the Uncommitted National Movement’s arrival at this summer’s Democratic National Convention, press and political commentators made frequent reference to the anti-war protests turned police riots of the 1968 convention. It had been more than 50 years since internal discord among Democrats had been organized into an electoral ...
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What Democrats Lose in Ignoring the Uncommitted Movement

Behind the Balancing Act of Kamala Harris’s Industrial Policy

What should Kamala Harris learn from the complicated history of post-1970s New Liberals

Breaking with the strategic ambiguity of her presidential campaign’s early months, Vice President Kamala Harris served up a clearer distillation of her economic agenda in a speech to the Economic Club of Pittsburgh on September 25. The speech was fêted as Harris’s “pragmatic,” “moderate-friendly” pitch. Harris also, however, pointed to ...
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Behind the Balancing Act of Kamala Harris’s Industrial Policy

When We Lose, We Win

Episode 60: Talking with historian Brenda Wineapple about civil rights, culture wars, the 1925 Scopes “Monkey” trial and her new book, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted A Nation

In 2016, white evangelical Christians showed up at the polls in force for Donald J. Trump, part of a diverse movement that defied expectations to sweep him into the White House. In the past decade, scholars and journalists have spilled a lot of ink on what seemed initially like a ...
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When We Lose, We Win