The governance, or lack thereof, of the great republic.
Look. Politics isn’t easy. It’s terribly difficult, enormously frustrating, full of compromise and defeat. And even though it’s subtle and complex, suffused with gray areas and uncertainty, we still have to define it by its ability to conform to four sections of a lazily drawn grid. We understand. We are …
Brothers! From the Levant I send you greetings, and convey to you the blessings of Allah against the infidel, the invader, and the apostate. I also bring you stamps, as requested, and some of that berry-flavored sparkling water Riad really likes. Riad, this was not easy to find, and you …
This year, I made the decision that all the non-fiction I would read would be about two events, separated by a century but bonded in the blood: the Paris Commune of 1871 and the revolts that spread across France in May of 1968. Both are events that have had a …
Death, we are reminded every time someone dies*, comes in threes. A good truism; a strong truism; and most importantly, a truism that can be stated in less than five words, making sure it will lodge in our consciousness before we get bored and go off to play video games …
In my last entry, about the massive betrayal of the American people to a handful of plutocrats via the passage of a license to loot posing as a tax reform bill, I caught a small amount of hell from Democrats, who wondered why I had harsh words for their party. …
The possibility of having to restate the profound and likely irreversible damage the new tax bill will inflict on this country exhausts me. There are only so many times you can say that America is involved in a one-sided class war and that the rich (all of the rich) are …
It may be too soon to talk about forgiveness. The sins of the world are still so great, after all; and we are only now developing the language and the means to articulate our objections to some of its greatest crimes. Why should we now talk about forgiveness, when even …
Harvey Weinstein is the latest. But he isn’t the last. The news that Weinstein, a prominent movie producer and one of Hollywood’s biggest power players, is at the very least a serial sexual harasser of women and at worst a multiple rapist has been met with varied reactions. It’s not …
Today in downtown Chicago, I heard the Reverend William Barber speak. Barber, the founder of Moral Mondays, follows in a long tradition of black preachers who stand for social, racial, and economic justice; he is an inheritor of the great lineage of Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson, who stood …
Because of the somewhat reserved nature of leadership in the Democratic Socialists of America, and because it is a brewing scandal that recent events have shown no sign of calming, I wanted to make clear my personal thoughts on the issue of Danny Fetonte’s continued presence on the DSA’s national political …
Cards on the table time: I am not a pacifist. I don’t believe that violence is never an option. I’m opposed to violence and cruelty on general principles, but I don’t think general principles really mean that much, especially when shit is starting to go down. I always reject aggressive …
Michael Shermer, in his book Why People Believe Weird Things, wrote about his workmanlike history of appearing on television chat shows to debate neo-Nazis and Holocaust revisionists. Some of his colleagues, he wrote — even ones with impeccable antifascist credentials — told him he was not just wasting his time, but …
“If you are neutral in situations of injustice,” Bishop Desmond Tutu told us in 1984, the year I first manifested what might be called a political consciousness, “you have chosen the side of injustice.” Injustice, cruelty, oppression, and inequality refuse the position of neutrality; they will not recognize a central …
Today was the first day of the Democratic Socialists of America’s national convention. It’s taking place in my own city of Chicago, and it’s the first convention since the DSA experienced unprecedented growth in the wake of the Bernie Sanders campaign and the election of Donald Trump. In addition, it’s …
Criticizing the Republican Party is always a tricky proposition. With the election of Donald Trump in particular, it’s practically impossible; calling out a moronic huckster who won the election by making jerk-off gestures at the very notion of being a respectable politician is like arguing against a fart. Part of …
