Illustration by Daryl Seitchik One can hardly fail to notice the growing “cornflake-ification” of politics in the midst of the 2012 Republican primaries. Ideology has become irrelevant; the focus is now on personality. A candidate’s hairstyle counts as much as his views on immigration – or on, say, Libya. The voter is the consumer, the candidate the product. Behind this growing business lurk some of the most powerful men of the modern era: poli...
...it, he touches on certain events in American history that other historians would exclude, such as the suppression of free speech during the First World War, the extensive involvement of American corporations in Latin American politics, and the covert operations of the CIA in Iran and Guatemala. He devotes his entire epilogue to a discussion of the 9/11 attacks and American military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq. In a direct departure from C...
...ted, Obama eschews identifying exclusively as black, instead emphasizing his multi-racial and multi-cultural identity because by blood he is just as white as he is black. In doing this, Obama has become one of the most racial politics. Obama is exposing not only how simplistically Americans understand group identities, but also the extent to which the politics associated with those identities are overly touchy and intensely potent. Above all, he...
d and sustained diplomacy in the Americas,” but his administration has been unclear on its goals and inconsistent in its attention. This confusion reflects a debilitating general lack of information about the current state of politics in Latin America. The most attention-grabbing component of the current stalemate is the emergence of new political actors – the so-called “populist Left” governments in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua –wh...
for American gay rights activists working abroad and their often evangelical Christian anti-gay rights counterparts. Gay rights, a fundamentally nonpolitical human rights project, has become entangled in the web of American politics, and this has raised the stakes of a local Ugandan issue that was already heated in its own right. Conservative Christian groups have been very successful in acquiring authority and promoting anti-gay agendas abroad...
...hip, but it is not enough. Like joining an association of citizens who share your policy goals, volunteering lacks an important element of citizenship: deliberation with citizens with whom you might disagree. And deliberative politics requires citizens to discuss political issues—be they specific policy questions, or candidate choices—in a variety of settings: school meetings, neighborhood associations, town halls, and the rest. Alexis de Tocquev...
.... When they were last in this situation, during the first two years of the Eisenhower Administration, television was only beginning to establish itself as a tool for political communication. Since then, the personalization of politics in the press has grown to make the Democrats’ current problem as bad as possible. The media aren’t biased against liberals; rather, liberals need to learn how to use the media. The most clear-cut illustration of thi...
Illustration by Amalia Rinehart Ron Suskind, critically acclaimed author of narrative nonfiction, has been a leading voice in addressing and explaining critical issues impacting Americans on the national stage. A Pulitzer-Prize winner, Suskind was the senior national affairs writer for the Wall Street Journal from 1993 to 2000. Suskind’s past best-selling books include: A Hope in the Unseen, The Way of the World, The One Percent Doctrine, and T...
...eptions, came to be synonymous with Latin America in the twentieth century, are increasingly a thing of the past; peaceful power transfers have largely become the norm. I have written four of my predictions for Latin American politics in the year ahead. It looks to be action-packed, by any measure. Chávez Wins Reelection Amidst Fraud and International Disgust Venezuela holds presidential elections this year as well, pitting incumbent internationa...
...lue their assets in a way that accounts for the costs of climate change. Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, campaign finance laws must be reformed to limit the ability of corporations to determine the direction of American politics. In October, Chevron proudly made a $2.5 million donation to a Republican Super PAC, and the Center for Responsive Politics estimates that Mitt Romney received nearly $5 million in donations from the oil and gas ind...
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