Americans have always accepted a degree of inequality, inequality of outcomes. What seems to have changed in recent years, or at least in people’s perception of it, is…that there seems to be growing inequality of starting place.
Nexus Symposium 2016: Democracy Today in the USA
Political Culture, Donald Trump and Education
presented by Anne Applebaum, Derek Shearer, Jeb Bush, Roger Berkowitz, Sean Wilentz
Donald Trump is not an American phenomenon, solely an American phenomenon. We see Trumps emerging all across the West, all across Europe—Western Europe and Eastern Europe. And they are repeating themselves in very similar ways.
The Divided States of America
presented by Jeb Bush, Randall Kennedy, Rob Riemen, Roger Berkowitz, Sean Wilentz
I think there’s a great deal of naiveté about how politics actually works. And this is where either wing—the Trump wing or the Sanders wing—don’t understand how politics actually works in Washington.
I don’t think we’ve had anybody quite like Donald Trump before, in terms of the politics of celebrity, which is what I think he’s really about. It’s not simply that he’s rich. We’ve had rich people in politics before. He’s not simply a businessman. We’ve had businessmen in politics before.
Three Advices for Clinton
presented by Derek Shearer
I think the interesting and most difficult challenge for Mrs. Clinton if she becomes President is how to bring America together.
The great danger and fear that I have is that in the last fifty to seventy years, power has increasingly concentrated not only in the federal government but in the presidency.
One thing I can say is that I don’t think we know very much about Donald Trump, which is one of the things that’s scary about him but also one of the things that’s exciting about him.
Roger Berkowitz on Hannah Arendt
presented by Roger Berkowitz
Hannah Arendt loved it when unexpected things happened in politics. She thinks and thought that spontaneity, newness… She used the word “natality,” which is often misused and abused in her work by others, but it means birth, birthliness. And she thought that what made human beings different from other animals is not that we were rational, but that we could start things new.