debating progressive politics in Europe and beyond
Conservative populism is flourishing in America as rapid change and media hysteria cultivate the politics of fear. As must now be blindingly obvious to anyone following the international news, American politics is not like Western European politics. In the United States, popular outrage does not turn rapidly into responsive public policy. Governments do not move [...]
Two previous recent postings explored the parameters and the prerequisites for a progressive second presidential term for Barack Obama. Each of those postings triggered three broad responses from a largely skeptical audience. One broad response, from conservative or libertarian bloggers, was that since progressive answers to America’s contemporary ills could only make those ills worse, the hope [...]
Amid the scampering up and down the fiscal cliff that has recently dominated political life in Washington, some more important and basic questions are in danger of vanishing from view, questions about the general character and progressive potential of Barack Obama’s second term. Questions such as these. Will this administration in the end prove to [...]
Watch Professor David Coates (Wake Forest University) discuss the upcoming US Presidential election with Dr Henning Meyer, Editor of Social Europe Journal. You might also be interested in David’s recent appearance on an interesting panel on MSNBC.
Unless the Republican convention in Tampa is swept away by hurricane force winds — itself a fascinating prospect for a party, so many of whose activists claim to be in regular and direct contact with the Almighty — the media will make next week an entirely R week. Monday through Thursday, it will be a [...]
This is the lull before the storm, the final moments within which to settle the character of the presidential campaign of 2012. Even in the lull, however, the likely lines-of-march are already clear – lines that, if unaltered, should give far more comfort to conservatives than they do right now to progressives. The Romney camp [...]
In Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the world discovered by Alice was one in which every aspect of reality was inverted. Big things were small. Small things grew big. The Cheshire cat faded into a grin. One side of a mushroom made you grow. The other made you shrink. It was also a world [...]
Thus far 2011 has not been a good year for progressives. The daily sight of the White House seeking elusive accommodations with Tea Party-inspired Congressional Republicans has not been an edifying one. Prior to and during the debt ceiling crisis, all the drive, all the issue framing, all the assertiveness in the pursuit of solutions, [...]
With Congress in recess and our lawmakers now back in their districts, there is presumably a slight chance of meeting one of them in the street. If, like me, your representative in the House is not of your political persuasion – mine, Virginia Foxx, most definitely is not – it might just be worth letting [...]
[vsw id="Woj8FQGvfvE" source="youtube" width="425" height="344" autoplay="no"] The signers of The Declaration of Independence combined political courage with intellectual honesty. Indeed for them, the first was entirely rooted in the second. As they said, since “prudence…will dictate that Government long established should not be changed for light and transient causes,” “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind [...]
Nearly one American in two is currently “financially fragile” – unable, that is, to come up with $2000 dollars in 30 days to deal with an unexpected emergency.[1] That fragility presumably does not stretch out to the fortunate few employed by Goldman Sachs, collectively the recipients of the reportedly $15.4 billion set aside by the [...]
The Center for American Progress issued a fascinating and important PolicyLink paper early in April 2011: Prosperity 2050: Is Equity the Superior Growth Model?[1] Written by Sarah Treuhaft and David Madland, both its content and its title raised a central question of our time: whether it is “possible that the traditional assumption that there is [...]
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