Professor of Politics and Liberal Studies, and Faculty Director of the MA in Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism at the New School for Social Research. Editor of Public Seminar. His latest book is Can Democracy Work? A Short History of a Radical Idea, from Ancient Athens to Our World New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018.
In his sweeping survey of ‘democides’, John Keane associates democracy with all that is deserving of respect, including nature itself. But ‘true democracy’, as Marx put it, is much less polite. Can we really invoke it to save the planet?
The discourse of white privilege is motivated by a genuinely anti-racist and democratic vision. But as a mode of confessional introspection aimed to provoke shame and guilt, its effects can be the opposite of transformational.
Trump wasn’t an aberration: he only renewed the US nation’s bitter, uncivil war over whether a clear majority of its people want to forge a republic of equals. The challenge for Biden will be to assert his ‘American ideal’ over the competing vision that Trump has left behind.
A defining debate of the political moment? Or liberal hairsplitting? Eurozine talks to James Miller, editor of Public Seminar, about what we mean when we talk of fascism – and whether it makes any difference anyway.
Does ‘counter-violence’ damage the antifascist cause? Or is it delusory to talk about non-violence in the face of an opponent with no such scruples? Natasha Lennard explains to James Miller why antifascism rejects debate as an effective response to the fascist threat.
‘Fascism’ has entered America’s political lexicon as way to understand and oppose the rise of the far-right. Trump’s polemics against the left have also propelled the label ‘antifascism’ into the mainstream. But are we really seeing a US fascism? What baggage does the concept of ‘antifascism’ carry? And what are we doing when we invoke Weimar?