xenophobia

Eschewing Electability: What Democrats Can Draw from the Far-Right Playbook

Talking heads, opinion columnists, and mainstream pundits continually stressed that a Democratic victory in the 2020 presidential election was predicated on a nominee who could appeal to centrist swing voters. Political commentator Thomas Friedman, in a New York Times op-ed, pitched Michael Bloomberg as that candidate—one who could send a message of “national unity, personal […]

Conservatism as Narcissism

In Greek mythology, a hunter, famed for his beauty, was so captivated by his reflection in a pool of water that he literally drowned in his own self-image. The hunter’s name was Narcissus, and from it derives narcissism, the excessive love for one’s self. The story of Narcissus reveals the deadly temptation of excessive self-love, […]

Immigration Policy: How Protectionism Becomes Racism

The human predisposition is to fear what we do not know, which helps us to identify potential threats and protect ourselves from them. It is precisely this psychological impulse that both leads a child not to eat a strange new food and has led to President Donald Trump’s protectionist immigration policies, particularly the travel ban […]

Never Again and Other Lies

I don’t remember when I became aware of the reality of the Holocaust. At some point, between heavily censored history books with veiled allusions to the fact, an unprecedented access to the Internet, and Zlata’s Diary, my presumably too-young mind was forced to grapple with the systematic murder of millions of people. Millions. Numbers are […]