The Most Important Election Ever!
The Nation magazine recently declared that the 2016 election “may be the most important election of our lives.” This really shouldn’t be surprising, since nearly every presidential election has been...
View ArticleTrump in the Age of Identity Politics
When I think of the liberal response to the election of Donald Trump I’m reminded of, as much as anything else, accounts of the shock and trauma that Germans experienced at the end of the First World...
View ArticleHow the US Lost Latin America
The end of the Cold War can be seen as both the best and worst thing to ever befall the United States. On one hand, the USSR’s precipitous collapse represented total victory for the US. In one dramatic...
View ArticleThe Subversive Conservatism of "True Grit"
The Coen Brothers occupy a Hollywood niche that implies subversion while reinforcing conservatism. “Blood Simple,” “Raising Arizona,” and “No Country for Old Men” are morality tales in which a flawed ?...
View ArticleAnother Professor Fired for Views on Middle East
Brooklyn College fired PhD student Kristofer Petersen-Overton yesterday, one day after New York state assemblyman Dov Hikind (D-Brooklyn) sent a letter to BC president Karen Gould accusing...
View ArticleThe Evils of Bad Criticism
In his misleadingly titled essay “The Evils of Unregulated Capitalism,” Joseph Stiglitz critiques ongoing austerity measures for an incriminating reason: austerity will deprive the U.S. and the E.U. of...
View ArticleObama and “The Help”
I haven’t seen The Help and, unless someone pays me $13.00 or I develop acute masochism, I don’t intend to. But watching the preview and reading the Association of Black Women Historians’ open...
View ArticleForm in Front of Content
In mere weeks Occupy Wall Street has challenged prevailing perceptions of the U.S. left, the status quo, and the relationship between the two. Overcoming the police suppression and media blackout of...
View ArticleThe Queasy Liberal
Once in a blue moon, which is still far too often, one encounters the lie that Nazism was a manifestation of the left. A quick way to refute this myth is to note that Nazism’s immediate tasks upon...
View ArticleSlaves to the Internet
Jean Baudrillard’s posthumous Agony of Power begins with a discussion of the ongoing transition from “domination” to “hegemony.” Domination had featured masters and slaves battling over control and...
View ArticleThe Banal Evil of Voting
A 2004 Pew poll showed that while 38 percent of Americans would be reluctant to vote for a Muslim presidential candidate, an even greater percentage (52) would be reluctant to vote for a candidate who...
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The Internet, Capitalism, and the State
Robert McChesney’s Digital Disconnect (New Press, 2013) is an informed and engaging account of the internet’s history and likely future within the context of corporate-dominated U.S. society. Yet while...
View ArticleKrugman’s Austerity Blinders
The liberal case against austerity has recently gained momentum with the exposure of Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff’s calculation errors in their influential pro-austerity paper,...
View ArticleThe Washington Redskins, Conservatives and Bob Costas
If someone makes a racist slur and no one is offended, can it really be racist? Arguing that there is no reason for team owner Daniel Snyder to change the name of the Washington Redskins,...
View ArticleIs BDS the Left’s "Save Darfur"?
In the mid-2000s the “Save Darfur Coalition,” backed by Christian and Jewish groups as well as the US House of Representatives, sought military intervention in southern Sudan in order to “save” African...
View ArticleDid Somebody Say Fascism?
Yale historian Timothy Snyder recently warned concerned readers and listeners to refrain from assuming that Ukraine’s ongoing tumult signals the growth of fascism. Notwithstanding the widespread...
View ArticleMidterm Notes
The Republicans won the Senate last night, and politics will resume in two years. But regardless of the ever-so expensive election or the outcome of the next round, rest assured that: *We’ll still be...
View ArticleThe Confusion of the West
It’s only when appearance is mistaken for reality that the “Clash of Civilizations” can become a plausible interpretation of the recent violence in France. Huntington’s concept was born moribund, its...
View ArticleThe Corruption of Football
The conspiracy theory surrounding Seattle Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll’s decision to pass, rather than run, on second and goal in the final minute of Sunday’s Superbowl is emblematic of the narrow...
View ArticleLibertarian Mythologies
One modest benefit of the current recession is that politicians are less likely to declare how fortunate we are to live under capitalism. This was a common refrain during the 1945-1973 “Golden Age of...
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