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Articles by Ronald Aronson
Peg Brand Weiser, "Camus’s The Plague: Philosophical Perspectives." & Alice Kaplan and Laura Marris, "States of Plague: Reading Albert Camus in a Pandemic."
Copyright (c) 2024 Ronald Aronson This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Submission of an original manuscript to Philosophy in Review (PiR) will be taken to mean that it represents original work not previously published and that it is not being considered elsewhere for publication.
A Deliberate Political Madness?
There must be a path back from the derangement, delusion and denial in which millions of Americans have ensconced themselves Listen to this story Immediately after the November 2022 U.S. midterm elections, the idea that Americans had “voted for democracy” was being celebrated. The New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote that it felt good to be brought back to reality after being taken in by the Republicans’ fantasy — and her own dread — about the red wave that was supposedly imminent.
“Anti-Israel” and “Pro-Israel” in Michigan Election
[Editor's Note: As a nonprofit, Tikkun never endorses political parties or candidates running for office. Readers are invited to write articles presenting perspectives, even if those perspectives oppose positions we have taken in the past. And still, we do take stands on issues that shape public policy. We oppose the Supreme Court’s opinions overturning Roe v. Wade and limits on gun ownership and its decision undermining the power of the EPA to protect our environment.
A Democratic Socialist’s Fifty-Year Adventure Tikkun
A review by Ronald Aronson of Milton Tambor, A Democratic Socialist’s Fifty-Year Adventure, Fulton Books, Meadville, PA, 2021 Milt Tambor is my friend, which makes this review especially challenging to write. During a great part of his fifty year story we’ve been connected in one way or another. After our being introduced at an SDS meeting in Detroit in 1968, he became the president of my wife’s AFSCME local, and we were among the founders of the Detroit chapter of the New American Movement (NAM).
Where Trumpism Lives
Clockwise from left: Republican representatives Lauren Boebert, Dan Bishop, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Matt Gaetz. All voted in favor of objections to the Electoral College vote. Support for pro-Trump Republicans remains driven by relatively well-off whites in fast-growing, rapidly diversifying suburbs—not by economic despair in rural America.
Our Machiavellian Moment
Much maligned as a mere tactician of power, Machiavelli was in fact a philosopher of the people. His critique of oligarchic domination remains essential today. Machiavelli: The Art of Teaching the People What to Fear Patrick Boucheron, translated by Willard Wood Other Press, $14.99 (paper) Even if 2020 felt apocalyptic, it is reasonable to think we have not yet hit rock bottom.
Decolonizing Psychology: Applications in Research & Clinical Practice
This conference consists of three panels held over three days, from Friday, October 30, to Sunday, November 1. Mainstream psychology continues to privilege and promote the interests of the majority, in particular those in Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) countries.
Why We Need to Forgive Pandemic Debt
COVID-19 has thrown the world’s economies and government coffers into turmoil. In many countries, unemployment has spiked and is expected to remain high as certain sectors, like retail and travel, are forced to reconfigure their business operations. Many expect a wave of business bankruptcies. School systems, from kindergarten to university, are in crisis. The way economies have weathered the pandemic, so far, has been through very muscular interventions by the world’s central banks.
Why The New School Will Survive
Photo Credit: rblfmr/Shutterstock Ginia Bellafante is not the first reporter at The New York Times to call attention to the serious financial troubles of The New School. Since its founding in 1919, the university has repeatedly faced major budgetary shortfalls, the details of which the Times has faithfully and dramatically recorded. Each time, The New School has miraculously bounced back from the brink. As the author of a new history of The New School, let me put the current crisis in perspective.
Why Are There No Protestants on the Supreme Court?
Photo credit: Icedmocha/Shutterstock.com. President Trump’s decision to nominate Amy Coney Barrett for the United States Supreme Court led some Republicans to complain about anti-Catholic bias. Democrats, they charged, were suggesting that Barrett’s Catholic faith could prevent her from making independent judicial decisions. Their evidence?
Biden is Changing What 'Bipartisan' Means
Photo Credit: Pix_Arena/Shutterstock I don’t get annoyed by politicians. Not usually. I understand they must say and do things normal people would never say and do. I don’t hold them to standards I’d normally hold normal people to. Dianne Feinstein, however, is an exception.
Donald Trump politicized the federal bureaucracy. The next president needs to reverse that.
Photo Credit: Lazyllama/Shutterstock.com In an effort to mitigate the political damage from failing to contain the virus and manage its corollary crises, the White House recently mandated that the Department of Agriculture include a signed letter from Donald Trump inside food boxes, claiming credit for the federal program providing food to families in need.
Court Packing - Public Seminar
October 20, 2020
Chimpanzee Culture Wars
————— Photo Credit: Observing chimpanzee cultures in the wild, Bossou, Guinea / Nicolas Langlitz ————— As the culture wars became more heated in the 1980s, significant parts of American cultural anthropology broke ties with evolutionary anthropology. Supposedly, the evolutionists’ Panglossian perspective regarded human life as perfectly adapted and thereby naturalized the status quo of a racist, sexist, and capitalist social order.
Why Business Depends on Big Government
Photo Credit: Joseph Sohm / Shutterstock ————— One of the most telling statements of our political era was made by Republican Dick Cheney in a Vice Presidential debate with Democrat Joe Lieberman on October 5, 2000, 20 years ago this month. Lieberman jibed that Cheney, the Republican nominee, had profited handsomely from the job he had recently departed as CEO of the Dallas-based government contractor, Halliburton Corporation.
Varieties of Antifascism
National Bolsheviks at the State Duma during the impeachment of Boris Yeltsin in May 1999. Photo credit: V.F. Fedorenko () _____ A question may bе raised as to why, if we wish to explore new resources for combating fascism, we do not give as much attention to the “potential antifascist.” The answer is that we do study trends that stand in opposition to fascism, but we do not conceive that they constitute any single pattern.
Can We Trust Monopolies to Play Fair?
Photo credit: CaseyMartin / Shutterstock.com For the anti-monopoly movement, the past three months have been exciting but sobering. In late July, the House Antitrust Subcommittee held a landmark hearing at which members of Congress forced the CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google to admit to business practices they would rather have stayed private.
Fascism for Our Time?
Photo credit: KelseyJ / Shutterstock.com _____ In August, in the midst of the Democratic Convention, the party’s most prominent progressive, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, declared on social media that this year’s Presidential race between Joe Biden and Donald Trump was about “stopping fascism in the United States.” Shortly afterward, in an essay for The New Republic, a trio of scholars – Federico Finchelstein, Pablo Piccato, and Jason Stanley – emphatically agreed, arguing that the f-word was in...
Why Street Fighting Is No Way to Resist Fascism
Photo credit: Alexander Oganezov / Shutterstock.com _____ It is almost futile to try to pinpoint the ideological underpinnings of antifa.
Far-Right Populism is Bad Enough
Photo credit: Matt Smith / Shutterstock.com From more or less mad Roman emperors to — of course — Adolf Hitler, by now it would seem easier to name historical figures to whom Donald Trump has not been linked than ones whom he has been said to resemble. By the same token, there has been a deluge of articles pointing to prescient thinkers, from Musil to Adorno to Rorty. Arguably, this evermore outlandish search for analogies and prophetic theories is itself without precedent.
On Fascism, Non-fascism, and Antifa
Natasha Lennard in conversation with James Miller JM: Since you’ve written an entire book with the title Essays on a Non-Fascist Life, can you tell me a bit about how you chose that title, and what the term “non-fascist” means to you, in the context of those essays? We both know the appearance of the phrase in the context of the work of Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, written in the aftermath of May ‘68.
Did the Militia Group that Planned to Kidnap the Michigan Governor Commit Treason?
Photo Credit: Sean Pavone / Shutterstock On Wednesday, October 7, the Michigan Attorney General filed 19 state felony charges against seven men who are accused of being members, or associates of, an anti-government militia group calling itself the Michigan Wolverine Watchmen (Wolverines is also the name of the University of Michigan football team).
Last Call for White Supremacy
Photo credit: vector_brothers (Shutterstock.com) Neither a Biden nor a Trump victory on November 3rd is likely to calm America’s political and social turmoil. For one thing, a profound urgency underlies the attack on democracy by Donald Trump and the Republican Party.
Resistance through Silence in Camus’s The Plague
The writer and philosopher Albert Camus grew up in a world of silences in a working class suburb in Algiers. His , was a mysterious figure in his life. The poet and scholar Stephen Watson described her as a Christ-like figure in Camus’ religionless world. Camus’ regular bouts of tuberculosis—contracted when he was 17—placed him, as he struggled for breath, in a “monastery” of “silence.” And then there were, as Camus put it, the “silenced and subjugated” Arabs whom he grew up alongside in Algeria.
2020's Existentialist Turn
Clockwise from top left: Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Martin Heidegger. While existentialist thinking has much wisdom to offer about anxiety, contingency, and death, we must also think concretely about politics and institutions.
All in It Together? From the Pandemic to the Uprising against Racism
It is no accident that the movement against police murders of black people has been taking place in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. Or that months of ostensibly being “all in it together” should lead to the greatest uprising against racism in American history. But what exactly is the connection between this anti-racist wave and the months of fear, loss, sheltering in place, unaccustomed dependency, heroic effort, gratitude, unemployment, financial devastation, and sharpening inequality?
Camus’ Plague Is Not Ours
Camus’ great novel about Oran under siege by nature has a number of things to teach us about living amidst plague – for example about the sense of coping with it day after day while waiting for the epidemic to end, and about being able to unheroically do what has to be done to mitigate its effects.
It's No Secret Why Republicans Win
Clockwise from top: Sean Spicer, William F. Buckley, Charlie Kirk, Ben Shapiro. The right’s success in media is not a shadowy conspiracy; it has been achieved out in the open, largely through ordinary politics. Much of it can be countered the same way. Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right Anne Nelson Bloomsbury, $28 (cloth) At his first official press conference in 2017, Press Secretary Sean Spicer made a telling choice.
Hospitalization Among Patients With Atrial Fibrillation and a Recent Acute Coronary Syndrome or Percutaneous Coronary Intervention Treated With Apixaban or Aspirin | Circulation
The optimal antithrombotic therapy among patients with atrial fibrillation who present with acute coronary syndrome (ACS) or require percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) can be challenging, with combination therapy, including both dual antiplatelet therapy and oral anticoagulation, markedly increasing bleeding risk.1 Recent trials with rivaroxaban2 and dabigatran3 have demonstrated the safety of using a non–vitamin K oral anticoagulant with a P2Y12 inhibitor, without aspirin or with...
Time for a Wealth Tax?
Image: flickr / teadrinker In 1995, Forbes magazine counted a record 129 American billionaires.
Solid Trumpism | RealClearPolicy
“I can't imagine him doing anything that's not good for the country.” In an interview given on New Year's Day this year, Jerry Falwell, Jr.—the son of the reverend, and now president of the evangelical school he founded, Liberty University—crystallized better than anyone the unswerving allegiance of Donald Trump's core supporters.
Beautiful Resistance
Revolutionary Theater in Palestine I arrived on my first trip to Ramallah well prepared. The checkpoints; the separation wall; the crumbling, half-constructed buildings; the fatigue-clad and heavily armed kids checking IDs; the freshly paved settler roads; the ever-expanding Jewish settlements rising from hilltops laying siege to Palestinian villages below—I’d seen it all before in books, articles, on YouTube, though now it was real, tangible, elbowing my heart, burning my eyes.
The Holy Game
Big spectacle games are made for professions of faith, and holy language is exactly the right fit. Denver Broncos quarterback and outspoken man of faith Tim Tebow may have lost his chance for this year’s Super Bowl ring three weeks ago, but if you think that was a season-ender for the holier voices of football, brother, you don’t know this game.
Solid Trumpism - Boston Review
“I can’t imagine him doing anything that’s not good for the country.” In an interview given on New Year’s Day this year, Jerry Falwell, Jr.—the son of the reverend, and now president of the evangelical school he founded, Liberty University—crystallized better than anyone the unswerving allegiance of Donald Trump’s core supporters.
Solid Trumpism
A Trump rally in Nashville, Tennessee, in May 2018. Image: flickr / Tabitha Kaylee Hawk Donald Trump has the most stable approval rating of any president since Harry Truman. As we gear up for the 2020 election, the challenge we now face is the remarkable stability of his support.
Reclaiming the Commons
Jun 1, 2002 46 Min read time The silent theft of our shared assets and civic inheritance need not continue. They hang the man and flog the woman That steal the goose from off the common, But let the greater villain loose That steals the common from the goose. —English folk poem, circa 1764 One of the great questions of contemporary American political economy is, who shall control the commons?
A Hidden Order of Reality
Closeup of a portrait of Claude Lévi-Strauss at the Abode of Chaos in France. Image: Thierry Ehrmann / flickr Far from being consigned to the ash heap of intellectual fashions, the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss, a new biography shows, is in many ways still with us.
Two Years Later: Resisting Trump in Michigan
Two years ago, on January 18, 2017, nearly a hundred people crowded into the library meeting room in Huntington Woods, our small suburb north of Detroit. Our turnout at this first gathering of the local resistance to President Donald Trump shocked those of us who organized it, the Huntington Woods Peace, Citizenship and Education Project, as did the participants’ eagerness to get to work.
The Philosophy of Our Time
Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre meet with Che Guevara in Cuba, 1960. Jean-Paul Sartre’s existential Marxism offers a radical philosophical foundation for today’s revitalized critiques of capitalism. Nearly forty years after his death in 1980, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre is best remembered as the father of existentialism.
The Philosophy of Our Time
Nearly forty years after his death in 1980, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre is best remembered as the father of existentialism. We are most familiar with him as the theorist of freedom, authenticity, and bad faith in philosophical treatises such as Being and Nothingness (1943) and literary works such as Nausea (1938) and No Exit (1944).
Hoverboarding While Black
In the era of digital neighborhoods, social networks embolden a new kind of racial surveillance. On a warm day in Baltimore last summer, with public school almost out for the year, someone—call her Jane—posts to her neighborhood Facebook page. According to her profile picture, Jane looks to be a white woman in her thirties. She adds four photos of a group of black male teenagers in various formations, mostly looking warily behind them. One carries a hover board.
Walking on Eggshells: Talking about Israel and Palestine by Ronald Aronson
I. After January’s Martin Luther King Day celebration at Detroit’s Central Methodist Church, a couple of friends, my wife, and I joined the march going further into downtown in order to show our support for continuing action against racial inequality and especially for Black Lives Matters’ mobilization against police violence against African Americans.
High in Uruguay
Uruguay’s government may soon be the first in the world to produce and distribute pot. “A better hit comes from legal cannabis,” promises the bright green graffiti along a main boulevard in downtown Montevideo, Uruguay’s capital. In style and substance, the message reflects the bold policies of Uruguay’s leftist government, which has recently legalized same-sex marriage and abortion and now is redefining the debate on marijuana.
Social Hope in the Time of Trump
Election night 2016 dealt a profound shock to the majority of Americans who voted against Donald Trump. You can probably remember where you were and how you felt at the moment it became clear that Trump was going to win. The mainstream mood was captured in Gustavo Viselner’s poignant cartoon sequence a few weeks later showing Barack and Michelle Obama preparing to leave the White House. Their bags are packed and they’re about to go.
Austerity by Design
Image: Ververidis Vasilis/Shutterstock Yanis Varoufakis's lessons for reasserting European social democracy. Adults In The Room: My Battle With Europe’s Deep Establishment Yanis Varoufakis Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28.00 (cloth) In the spring of 2015, a series of debt negotiations briefly claimed a share of the world’s attention that normally goes only to events where celebrities give each other prizes.
Picnicking with Tories? Roger Ratcliffe turns green at the thought - Big Issue North
If you go down to the Westminster woods today you’re in for a big surprise. You’ll find lots of cuddly Conservative politicians who won’t frighten the children and love nothing better than to feed nuts to fluffy-tailed red squirrels, save foxes from vicious packs of hounds and plant millions of trees across the north of England.
The Left Needs More Socialism
It’s time to break a taboo and place the word “socialism” across the top of the page in a major American progressive magazine. Time for the left to stop repressing the side of ourselves that the right finds most objectionable. Until we thumb our noses at the Democratic pols who have been calling the shots and reassert the very ideas they say are unthinkable, we will keep stumbling around in the dark corners of American politics, wondering how we lost our souls–and how to find them again.
Marcuse Today
aussiegall Fifty years later, One-Dimensional Man looks more prescient than its author could have imagined. When Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man appeared fifty years ago, it was a revelation. To many of us who were becoming the New Left, Marcuse reflected and explained our own feeling of suffocation, our alienation from an increasingly totalitarian universe that trumpeted its freedom at every moment.
The “Members Only” President
Image: Steve Jurvetson Trump's paternalistic language of care draws an exceptional circle around whites only. Police officers are required to guard the heads of people they arrest as they load them into the back seat of a police car, lest they bump their heads. The current president told a gathering of police this summer that they should reconsider this gesture.
Why Don’t We Just… hope? - Big Issue North
Why don’t we just give up the illusion that each of us is a wholly separate individual and learn to solve our collective problems by acting together? This is beginning to happen. A “we” is taking shape that needs us to join in. Today’s change is unexpected, because of what I call the lie of the “I”, which has remade so much of the world. Margaret Thatcher sounded its keynote.
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