Two of my favorite historians, Steve Fraser and Josh Freeman, are teaching a course, starting in mid-September, at the New York City DSA Academy—yes, an actual socialist school for the left!—that I think will be of interest to a wide range of readers of this blog. It’s called “Red New York: A History of the Left in America’s Most Radical City.” Seems pretty timely and relevant, no? There are just five classes, and having listened to both Josh and Steve for years, I can tell you that there are not two people who know more about the NYC and the left and are better pedagogues than these two! Seems like a real treat. You can sign up here.
As we move into the last days before Iowa, it’s useful to review some of the very best things that have been written on Donald Trump. Much of it is recent. 1. Hands down, I’d say Jodi Dean has penned the central text for understanding Trump. Donald Trump cuts through the ideological haze of American politics and exposes its underlying truth, the truth of enjoyment. Where other candidates appeal to a fictitious unity or pretense of moral integrity, he displays the power of inequality. Money buys access — why deny it? Money creates opportunity — for those who have it. Money lets those with a lot of it express their basest impulses and desires — there is no need to […]
My column in Salon this morning is about left v. right and why time—history, tradition, past, present, and future—is not what divides left from right. With the help of two new books by Steve Fraser and Kristin Ross, I discuss the bloody civil wars of the Gilded Age, the Paris Commune, Marx’s archaism, and how the memory of pre-capitalist society can fire the anticipation of a post-capitalist society. Ever since Edmund Burke, founder of the conservative tradition, declared, “The very idea of the fabrication of a new government, is enough to fill us with disgust and horror,” pundits and scholars have divided the political world along the axis of time. The left is the party of the future; the right, the […]
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Categories
Labor/Workplace, Political Theory, The Left, The Right
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Tags Burke, Gilded Age, history, Kristin Ross, Kropotkin, Marx, Paris Commune, Steve Fraser