“Obama, the cerebral son of an anthropologist”—this is how the Associated Press touted soon to be ex-president Barack Obama on his visit to Laos this week. The AP went even further, declaring Obama’s approach “soft diplomacy”. One has to wonder where all of the “soft diplomacy” was in the seven brutal wars simultaneously fought by… Read More Cosmopolitan Imperialism: Obama Does Anthropology in Laos?
Immigration, rightly or wrongly, has been marched to the frontline of current political struggles in Europe and North America. Whether exaggerated or accurate, the role of immigration is situated as a central factor in the Brexit referendum in the UK, and the rise of the “America First” Trump movement in the US. It seems impossible… Read More Immigration and Capital
Against the Labouring Classes: Identity Politics in the New Victorian Age The New Victorianism serves to not only divert politics into issues of morality and identity, it works to obfuscate the bases of increasing inequality. Focusing on the Democratic Party, and its abandonment of the working class over the past forty years, Adolph Reed Jr.… Read More The Working Class, Identity Politics and New Victorian History
Social Imperialism? New Victorianism’s Domestic Moral Code and the Political Economy of Identity Politics “The nation-state in its imperialist guise was the inescapable context within which all political action necessarily took place: it determined the range of possibilities against which the left as much as the right were compelled to define their positions”. (Eley, 1976,… Read More Social Imperialism and New Victorian Identity Politics
