Category: Repression

Oedipus in Berlin: How a German television series about the Cold War re-tells an ancient myth

If you’re looking for an excellent television series to watch, I highly recommend The Same Sky, a German production about Berlin in 1974, which you can now stream on Netflix. I had been complaining on Facebook about how amid all the new detective shows from abroad—especially the noirish/Anglo/Nordic TV series —it was hard to find a series that didn’t rely for its suspense and thrills on either the sexual abuse and rape of women or harm to children. The series Fortitude is one of the worst offenders on this score.  At one point I thought I was going to literally throw up and had to run out of the room to the bathroom. I didn’t throw up, but I didn’t go back […]

On liberals, the left, and free speech: Something has changed, and it’s not what you think it is

When I was in college and in graduate school (so the 1980s and 1990s), the dividing line on free speech debates was, for the most part, a pretty conventional liberal/left divide. (I’m excluding the right.) That is, self-defined liberals tended to be absolutists on free speech. Self-defined leftists—from radical feminists to radical democrats to critical race theorists to Marxists—tended to be more critical of the idea of free speech. What’s interesting about the contemporary moment, which I don’t think anyone’s really remarked upon, is that that clean divide has gotten blurry. There were always exceptions to that divide, I know: back in the 1980s and 1990s, some radical feminists were critical of the anti-free speech position within feminism; some liberals, like Cass […]

3 Ways Forward For Trump

Looking beyond Flynn, it seems like there are three ways forward. First, status quo: we have four years of this stand-still, in which a dysfunctional presidency keeps the entire nation in a permanent state of high drama and anxious alert, punctuated by the occasional act of brutality without a lot getting done. Second, someone takes charge: either a James Baker-type fixer is brought in to stabilize the White House and regularize its operations so that Trump has the semblance if not reality of a functional presidency OR the Republican leadership steps in and figures out a way to sideline Trump either through resignation or impeachment. Third, war. I don’t see any other options. Am I missing anything?

Welfare Reform from Locke to the Clintons

In a draft of his “Essay on the Poor Law,” Locke writes: Now no part of any poor body’s labour should be lost. Things should be so ordered that everyone should work as much as they can. That passage, which Locke ultimately deleted, came right after his complaint that women were staying home with their kids and not working. As a result, he wrote, “their labour is wholly lost.” Locke follows this observation up with a complaint about the existing poor laws in England: the problem with them is that “they are turned only to the maintenance of people in idleness, without at all examining into the lives, abilities, or industry, of those who seek for relief.” That is what […]

The American Terrible

Someone recently asked me: if you don’t think Trump is a fascist, what do you think is going to happen? I answered her as truthfully as I could: I don’t know. The fact is: none of us knows. Not even, I suspect, Trump or Steve Bannon. In the course of several argumens and conversations over the last few days—about Trump, what he’s up to, and so on—I’ve sometimes found myself, against my better judgment, drifting into predictions. I start out trying to think about what this current moment means, and I wind up making claims about where we’re going. That’s not a place I want to be. Not simply because my prediction about the election was so completely wrong, not simply because I’m […]

Trump and Tomasky: Where Liberalism and Conservatism Meet

Donald Trump in last night’s debate: And we have to be sure that Muslims come in and report when they see something going on. When they see hatred going on, they have to report it. As an example, in San Bernardino, many people saw the bombs all over the apartment of the two people that killed 14 and wounded many, many people. Horribly wounded. They’ll never be the same. Muslims have to report the problems when they see them. Michael Tomasky, liberal columnist for The Daily Beast and editor of the liberal journal Democracy, in December, after the San Bernadino killings: …the rights you [Muslims] have as Americans have to be earned, fought for….If anything Obama should have been more emphatic about this. […]

8 Quick Thoughts on the Emmett Rensin Suspension

Some quick thoughts on Emmett Rensin, who was just suspended from Vox because of his tweets. This is the second case in two weeks of a leftist being fired or punished by a liberal outfit because of the content of his tweets. Political publications have the right to impose a line in order to maintain the political line of the publication. The American Conservative gets to conserve, Jacobin gets to Jacobin, and Dissent gets to dissent (or assent, as old joke goes). Vox, however, claims not to be that kind of publication. As Ezra Klein says in his statement on Rensin’s suspension: “We at Vox do not take institutional positions on most questions, and we encourage our writers to debate and disagree.” In disavowing the sort of political line that avowedly political magazines take, Vox […]

Michael Ratner, 1943-2016

This a terrible loss. Michael Ratner, the president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights, died today in New York City. For the past four decades he has been a leading champion of human and civil rights, from leading the fight to close Guantánamo to representing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to holding torturers accountable, at home and abroad. Michael was a prince. Whenever we had a civil liberties crisis at Brooklyn College—which is to say, all the time: a former student held on material support for terrorism charges; an adjunct fired for his views on the Middle East; a panel discussion that almost got canceled because of threats from politicians—I’d email Michael. No matter where he was (one time, I remember, […]

Trump and the Trumpettes: In Stereo

Everyone’s worried about Donald Trump. As they should be. They should also worry about his friends across the aisle. Division of Labor Monday, which saw Trump reveal his plan to stop all Muslims from coming into the United States, also announced this convergence between right and left. Newt Gingrich: Nine percent of Pakistanis agree with ISIS, according to one poll. That’s a huge number. We need to put all the burden of proof on people coming from those countries to show that they are not a danger to us. Michael Tomasky: It [Obama’s statement] says to Muslim Americans that the rights you have as Americans have to be earned, fought for. And you know, that’s OK…But I do know that if other Americans had some […]

Security Politics, Anti-Capitalism, Student Activists, and the Left

I gave a lengthy interview to Margins, a progressive student magazine at Yale. We talked a lot about a lot of things. We talked about the increasing securitization—terrible word, I know—of politics. But, as I said, what I think is most significant about that trend is the growing opposition to it. Compared to what was going on in the 90s, or the aughts, the movements on the ground against the security state are tremendous. The only question is: can they build and last? We’ve seen lots of blips of movements in the last 15 years: against the WTO, the Iraq War, Wall Street, debt, and now the police. Their half-lives seem to be getting shorter and shorter. In part because we’ve yet to […]

No more fire, the water next time: Ta-Nehisi Coates on Global Warming and White Supremacy

In the very last pages of Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates registers his full and final distance from the world of James Baldwin. Where Baldwin had said, “We, with love, shall force our [white] brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it,” and where that assault by African America on white supremacy was the promissory note to a more fundamental transformation of the United States (“we can make America what America must become”), Coates makes explicit what has been implicit throughout his text: he does not believe black America can transform white America. I do not believe that we can stop them, Samori, because they must ultimately stop themselves. And still I […]

The Lives They Touched

The year after I graduated college, I lived out in the East Bay area. I was interning at a magazine, for free, and temping (among various other jobs) to support myself. At one of my temping gigs I befriended a woman from Carbondale, Pennsylvania. Her name was Gloria. She had long black hair, wore lots of leather and makeup, and listened to hard rock and heavy metal. I think she had a son, though I can’t remember for sure. A working-class Italian-American from back East, we didn’t have much in common except a shared love for complaining about our job and trash-talking our boss. Even so, she wound up telling me a lot about her personal life (I have vague memories of  a problematic […]

Kristin Ross on The Paris Commune

In 2002, I was slogging through a fellowship at NYU and feeling depressed. It was the aftermath of 9/11, and all the world was Paul Wolfowitz and Paul Berman. At our fellowship seminar, we were asked to read a book called May ’68 and Its Afterlives. I think we read it in proofs. I had never heard of it or its author, Kristin Ross. I fell in love with both after the second or third page. Kristin is one of those writers who seizes on an image and never lets you forget it. Now she’s got a book coming out on the Paris Commune; it’s called Communal Luxury. Here’s just a taste: In the decade following the massacre [of the Communards]…traces of […]

James Madison and Elia Kazan: Theory and Practice

James Madison, Federalist 51: The constant aim is…that the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights. Elia Kazan, on why he named names: Reason 1: “I’ve got to think of my kids.” Reason 2: “All right, I earned over $400,000 last year from theater. But Skouras [head of Twentieth-Century Fox] says I’ll never make another movie. You’ve spent your money, haven’t you? It’s easy for you. But I’ve got a stake.”

The Moderate and the McCarthyite: The Case of Robert Taft

In the New York Times today, John G. Taft, who is the grandson of Robert Taft, makes his contribution to the growing “Oh, conservatives used to be so moderate, now they’re just radicals and crazies” literature that The Reactionary Mind was supposed to consign to the dustbin of history. (You can see how successful I’ve been.) Having written about and against this thesis of conservatism’s Golden Age so many times, I don’t think it’s useful for me to rehearse my critique here. Instead, I’ll focus on one important tidbit of Taft’s argument, in the hope that a little micro-history about his grandfather might serve to correct our macro-history of conservatism. Here’s what Taft says: This recent display of bomb-throwing obstructionism by […]

Robert Bellah, McCarthyism, and Harvard

Robert Bellah, one of the leading sociologists of the last half-century and author of the path-breaking Habits of the Heart, has died. There haven’t been many obituaries yet. Even so, I haven’t seen any mention in the write-ups so far of a little known episode in Bellah’s past: his encounter with McCarthyism at Harvard. (All of the following information comes from Ellen Schrecker’s No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in the topic. You’ll never look at your favorite mid-century scholar the same way again.) As an undergraduate at Harvard in the late 1940s, Bellah had been a leader of the university’s undergraduate Communist Party unit. He left the party in 1949 because […]

Think you have nothing to hide from surveillance? Think again.

People often say that they don’t think government surveillance is such a big deal because they have nothing to hide. They post on Facebook or Twitter, their life is an open book. What they don’t realize, as this excellent article points out (h/t Chase Madar), is that they might very well have something to hide. And the reason they don’t realize that is that they—like all of us—have no clue as to just how extensive the federal criminal code is. The US criminal code is scattered across 27,000 pages. And that doesn’t include the roughly 10,000 additional administration regulations the government has promulgated. So extensive and sprawling are these laws and regulations that the Congressional Research Service cannot even count […]