On October 24th, participants in the Democracy Seminar met for our monthly get together. These virtual meetings are informal gatherings, without an agenda. We usually catch up with each other and discuss developments in our different locations around the world, in recent months: the apparently never-ending dangers of Trump and Trumpism in the USA, the victory of Lula in Brazil, the twists and turns of authoritarian rule in …
Voices of sanity are in danger of being drowned out by the rhetoricians of all-out war When violence answers violence in a growing frenzy that makes the simple language of reason impossible, the role of the intellectual cannot be … to excuse from a distance one of the violences and condemn the other … that role is clarify definitions in order to disintoxicate minds and to calm fanaticisms, …
On May 30th, in Warsaw, the Polish Sejm deputy Grzegorz Braun interrupted a lecture by Professor Jan Grabowski, a historian reporting on the state of research about the World War II extinction of Polish Jews. Braun climbed onto the rostrum, threatening Grabowski, and trashed the microphone and speakers – as if not only physically, but also symbolically taking away the lecturer’s voice. Since there are no longer any …
The American University of Afghanistan and Me II Here is the second of a series of excerpts from the diary, recording my reflections on my online experiences with faculty and students in Afghanistan and exiled in Doha, Qatar, and around the globe. For the first entry see here. The Fall Semester, December 2022 My first semester is now winding down. I have been teaching one course, “Civic Engagement …
I have just signed a contract with the American University of Afghanistan as a University Professor. Last semester, I started working there as a visiting lecturer. Here’s the start of my ongoing reflections on this surprising turn of events, an introduction to a series of excerpts from my diary. Jeff November 2022 Until recently, Afghanistan has been a remote place on my mental map. Focused as I …
The dangers of a new tyranny of a minority in our time This talk was presented at the New School forum “American Democracy in Crisis: Perspectives from Tocqueville, Douglass, Wells, Dewey, and Arendt” on October 13, 2022. The other talks and the discussion at the conference can be found here. I first read Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America as a college freshman. I started reading it more closely and …
The first two weeks of January 2023 let us see the recto and verso of Brazil. On Sunday, January 1st, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was sworn in for his third presidential term. A week later, on the 8th, self-proclaimed patriots attacked the buildings of the three branches of government. How do these two events help us understand Brazil at this critical moment? For almost a decade now, …
My Response A conference in my honor, “Small Things, Deep Resonance: The Sociology of Jeffrey C. Goldfarb,” was convened at the New School for Social Research on April 30th. It was planned as a meeting of my colleagues, many former students, on the major themes of my life’s work. As it was being organized, I tried to convince myself and the organizers that it should not be envisioned …
By opposing Trump, she is opposing Trumpism, an authoritarian, xenophobic, and racist movement that has taken over the Republican party. It’s now official. Liz Cheney has been defeated by a Trumpist in this week’s Wyoming Republican primary. That Cheney lost in a landslide is a surprise to no one, including Cheney herself. For the moment that Cheney openly challenged Donald Trump, and by inference reproached every single Republican party …
Liberal commentators of Russian aggression against Ukraine rightly trace its source back to Russia’s imperialist politics. They are wrong, however, in assuming that the realness of this war renders insignificant all ‘unreal’ disputes, in particular those revolving around issues of culture and social mores, i.e. gender and sexuality. The same commentators are surprised at the scale of support for Putin in Russia and note with disbelief that the …
