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    cass sunstein

    "Civility" Should Not Be a Priority for a Democracy Under Threat

    "Civility" Should Not Be a Priority for a Democracy Under Threat

    Biden is simply hiding behind "civility" to conceal the fact that, all too often, he shared portions of the same anti-democratic agendas embraced by vile segregationists, by his "Republican friends," and by his Wall Street donors

    Ernest A. Canning
    Jul 07, 2019

    As an abstract principle, civil discourse is regarded as a virtue. However, one should neither mistake a facade of respectability for civility nor be prepared to sacrifice core democratic principles to achieve civility.

    It is extremely dangerous, either in the name of "civility" or "bipartisanship," to yield to those who seek nothing less than the destruction of democracy.

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    Opinion
    Warren and Sanders Understand the Power of 'The Bad Guy'

    Warren and Sanders Understand the Power of 'The Bad Guy'

    For Sanders and Warren, it’s simple: The Bad Guy is the rich, the one percent, the oligarchy

    Adam Johnson
    May 23, 2019
    Progressive activist Norman Solomon offers a succinct description of neoliberalism: an ideology that sees victims but never victimizers. Bad things just happen.They're the product of mysterious, unaccountable and ill-defined "market forces." Factories just close, endless wars just "erupt," the Nasdaq just crashes and our 401K and home equity just evaporate. No one specifically is responsible. And when someone is, around the margins, it's a handful of faceless Arabs off in a cave somewhere or, increasingly, anonymous "Russians." Our military and intelligence services are off fighting those Bad Guys. Trust us.

    But intuitively we know this is inadequate. It's clear neither Islamic State group nor the Russians caused the opium crisis, the housing bubble, racist policing, the predatory gig economy, massive college loans, endless wars or a host of other social ills. It's human nature to seek out the causes of a crisis, name names and get a sense that, even if one accepts that terrorism and Putin are real and urgent threats, they're small-time compared to those making us poor, overworked, drug-addicted, indebted and war-fatigued. We have victims--this much is obvious. But where are the victimizers?

    Two 2020 presidential candidates, Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, have gone to great lengths to lay out who these victimizers are and to establish The Bad Guy--the former, first in 2016; the latter with more specificity in 2020. It goes without saying that both Sanders and Warren have major flaws (namely on matters of foreign policy and imperialism) and this article will not litigate those. It will, instead, argue only that their biggest asset--and the thing most necessary for the Democrats in 2020--is that they clearly establish who The Bad Guy is and how the Democratic presidential nominee is going to work to take that opponent down.

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    Opinion
    Neither Debs Nor Brandeis, Or Why It Is a Mistake Now to Exaggerate Differences on the Left

    Neither Debs Nor Brandeis, Or Why It Is a Mistake Now to Exaggerate Differences on the Left

    There is no reason to figure Sanders as Debs, in a century-long contest with Warren as Brandeis. Debs and Brandeis are long gone, and the parties they supported are long gone too.

    Jeffrey C. Isaac
    Mar 18, 2019

    Note: The piece below is a critical response to a recent piece published in Jacobin, the widely-read publication that bills itselfas "a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture. The print magazine is released quarterly and reaches over 30,000 subscribers, in addition to a web audience of 1,00,000 a month." I hoped to publish it in Jacobin , but its editors were not interested in the piece, which runs counter to their editorial perspective. So I sent it to Dissent, which bills itselfas " one of America's leading intellectual journals and a mainstay of the democratic left." Its editors were not interested in running a critique of a piece published in Jacobin. As a long-time editor myself, I have total respect and admiration for the above-mentioned editors, who do a fine job of piloting their journals and advancing the missions of those journals. At the same time, as someone who believes that real dialogue on the broad left is important, it is of some concern that each of these fine journals seems satisfied to proceed in relative disregard of the other. Fortunately, Public Seminar exists as a space for such dialogue across the broad liberal and democratic left. Such spaces are as important now as they have ever been.

    In his recent Jacobin piece, "You Can Have Brandeis or You Can Have Debs," Shawn Gude insists that it is important to be clear about who is a socialist and who is not. He maintains that Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders "draw their lineage from distinct political traditions," and that "Warren's political tradition is the left edge of middle-class liberalism; Sanders hails from America's socialist tradition. Or, to put the distinction in more personal terms: Warren is Louis Brandeis, Sanders is Eugene Debs." His essay's subtitle accurately underscores the point: "Don't confuse the two."

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    Opinion

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