Archive

Class, Race and Poverty in the USA

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.

The Divided States of America

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.

Roger Berkowitz on Refiguring American Government

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.

President Trump: The End of American Democracy?

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

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.