“Movements cannot be left just to the streets. I am very critical of the idea of politics as fomenting a moment of total rupture with the existing status quo. This is not how revolutions work. At some point, mobilizations will lose steam. You cannot change things only on the horizontal level of social movements. ……
Category: power
Eric Foner on teaching a course on “The American Radical Tradition”
“And it’s also important to remember that all revolutions are unfinished, all triumphs incomplete, and every success or failure simply sets up the next series of struggles.”
Joshua Foa Dienstag: “Pessimism contra Trump”
“We don’t need to renew our optimism with ever more elaborate fantasies about the future. We need to deepen our pessimism and draw our strength from there.”
“Saturn devours his young: President Trump”
“Popular dreaming about Donald Trump reveals him to be a father figure who evokes half-buried fears and longings about peoples’ own fathers. … He is the embodiment of the law, and its gruelling obverse: the law is enforced precisely through its bloody transgressions. He is the cannibalistic ogre of fairy tales, the Pale Man of Pan’s Labyrinth, Saturn eating…