Politics Archives - Page 80 of 143

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“Weaponized Babies”

Or, Damn, Why Didn’t I Think of Using That Term?

May 5, 2018 • by Janet Golden

News that Senator Tammy Duckworth brought her baby to the Senate floor for a vote thrilled some and infuriated others. Prior debate over whether babies belonged in the Senate sparked some great pro- and anti-baby remarks that pundits and scholars will enjoy parsing and quoting in coming days, weeks, months… or until ...

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The Democracy Seminar, Then and Now

An Invitation

May 4, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

We are imagining a forum for activists and thinkers who support democracy against the looming global threats of authoritarianism. The definitive feature would be openness. It would be a direct outgrowth of a small, international, at first clandestine, informal and improvised New School project, “The Democracy Seminar,” first proposed by ...

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From Velvet Revolution to Velvet Dictatorship

Reflections on Democratic Regression

May 3, 2018 • by Adam Michnik

Let me start by describing how communism died. The first thing to perish was the communist faith. And this faith had two dimensions. It was a faith in the project of a just world, a world of solidarity and freedom. And it was a conviction that people had finally deciphered ...

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A Historian Obsessed With the Present

Political memoir changes the questions I ask of the past

May 2, 2018 • by Claire Potter

If, at some point, a new diagnosis is announced that describes people who can't stop purchasing and reading books about the 2016 presidential campaign, I could be one of the first to sign up for treatment. I imagine that while wellness professionals will recommend some combination of meditation and exercise, ...

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Agent Sabina

On the abjection of Julia Kristeva

April 28, 2018 • by Albena Azmanova

Julia Kristeva’s recently released secret service files reveal a similar persona to that which comes through her writing: unruly, witty, courageous. And yet Kristeva is denying the allegations. Is it something other than the truth that she fears? ‘On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth showing through’ Milan Kundera, The Unbearable ...

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The Global Civil War

Gray Reflections on a Gray Friday Morning

April 27, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

It’s a cultural war that here and there sometimes includes guns. It is hard to see the end of it, short of victory or defeat, as it is important to realize it has long been with us. The war is being fought as a struggle between the good guys and ...

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Gender and the Politics of Secularism

A conversation between Joan Wallach Scott and Judith Butler on Scott’s latest book Sex and Secularism

April 26, 2018 • by Judith Butler and Joan Wallach Scott

An excerpt from Joan Wallach Scott’s latest book Sex and Secularism can be found here. Judith Butler: Shall we start the interview? I am wondering whether you could describe the decision to work on a book on sex and secularism. What led up to that decision? How does this book follow from your The Politics ...

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Sex and Secularism

An excerpt from Joan Wallach Scott’s latest book

April 26, 2018 • by Joan Wallach Scott

An interview between Judith Butler and Joan Wallach Scott can be found here. As I have studied it here, secularism is not an objective description of institutions and policies but rather a polemical term whose meanings change in the different contexts in which it is deployed. In this book I have ...

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For Conservatives, It’s Stormy Weather

Is the GOP dividing over Trump’s scandalous personal life?

April 25, 2018 • by Claire Potter

Why are so many Christian conservatives refusing to criticize Donald Trump's pay to play sex life? The news of a $130,000 settlement made to porn star Stephanie Clifford, a.k.a. Stormy Daniels, via alleged fixer Michael Cohen, is only the latest episode in which conservative religious leaders and the voters they ...

Migration

A Civics Lesson for Trump and Sessions

Sanctuary Cities and the Trump Administration

April 25, 2018 • by John Lawrence

As if we needed any further reminders of the reckless disregard for law and the Constitution rampant in the Trump Era, a panel of Republican federal judges has forcefully rejected efforts to punish so-called Sanctuary Cities by curtailing federal grant funds. It is a fair barometer to assume that when ...

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The Demonization of Ethel Rosenberg

An excerpt from Trans-generational Trauma and the Other

April 24, 2018 • by Adrienne Harris

The Demonization of Ethel Rosenberg, by Adrienne Harris, appears in Trans-generational Trauma and the Other, a volume of essays published in 2017 psychoanalytically meditating on the question of the transgenerational transmission of trauma, metastasizing and alienated historical ghosts, and the inter-subjectivity of Big History. Public Seminar spoke with Dr Harris – who is, among many ...

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Trump’s Bottling of Old Wine

Can we finally lose our bipartisan taste for workfare?

April 23, 2018 • by John Krinsky

It is tempting to see President Trump’s executive order directing his agencies to find ways to require work as a condition for receiving means-tested benefits as another example of his outsized callousness. By casting all means-tested aid programs as “welfare,” Trump’s executive order supersizes “workfare” by linking benefits to work. There are ...