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Articles by Todd Gitlin
The End of the Biden Era
The End of the Biden Era A preview of our Winter 2025 issue. Cover artwork by Tabitha Arnold Our Winter 2025 issue, out January 13, features special sections on the 2024 election and the housing crisis. Subscribe now to get the issue. In the lead section: election analysis from Wendy Brown, Michael Kazin, Gabriel Winant, Hans Kundnani, and Suzanne Kahn, plus a roundtable discussion with Alyssa Battistoni, Patrick Iber, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Aziz Rana, and Timothy Shenk.
Occupy's Predicament: The Moment and the Prospects for Movement
Thursday 18 October 2012 | 1 hour 28 minutes 25 seconds Erupting in September 2011, Occupy Wall Street was jump-started by a radical core who devised a form of action, occupation, that combined face-to-face with electronic elements. In an election year, the ingenuity of the original core has been overshadowed by the momentum, the stakes, and not least the money of the presidential campaign.
Todd Gitlin: "In Pursuit of Clancy Sigal"
Todd Gitlin Todd Gitlin, at right, speaks with the muckraking journalist I. F. Stone at a 1962 demonstration against nuclear weapons in Washington D.C. Courtesy the author. The golden notebook i first encountered Clancy Sigal, in a manner of speaking, in 1963, during my last semester in college. That’s when I picked up, and devoured, Doris Lessing’s novel The Golden Notebook, which featured a character named Saul Green who was widely known to have been based on Sigal.
A Public Model for Home Insurance
A Public Model for Home Insurance We must reimagine our disaster risk finance system so it reduces exposure and provides protection fairly. and ▪ Winter 2025 With every extreme weather event, housing is damaged and belongings are lost. Insurance is supposed to be the safety net that helps people to recover and restart their lives.
The Whole World Is Watching
About the Book About the Author Reviews Table of Contents Related Books About the Book "The whole world is watching!" chanted the demonstrators in the Chicago streets in 1968, as the TV cameras beamed images of police cracking heads into homes everywhere. In this classic book, originally published in 1980, acclaimed media critic Todd Gitlin first scrutinizes major news coverage in the early days of the antiwar movement.
How the Talmud Can Change Your Life: Surprisingly Modern Advice from a Very Old Book
How the Talmud Can Change Your Life: Surprisingly Modern Advice from a Very Old Book In this stellar outing, journalist Leibovitz (Stan Lee) elucidates how ancient rabbinic debates remain relevant to modern meaning-seekers.
Reflections on 1968 and Environs
The Kurds The Kurds, who share ethnic and cultural similarities with Iranians and are mostly Muslim by religion (largely Sunni but with many minorities), have long struggled for self-determination. After World War I, their lands were divided up between Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey.
What Freud Would Say About Left-Wing Infighting
Todd Gitlin, who died earlier this month at the age of 79, came of age as an activist, serving as the second national president of Students for a Democratic Society in the early sixties. Twenty-five years later, he published The Sixties, a book in which he chronicled, and interrogated, the left politics of that tumultuous decade as he had experienced it. He became a professor of sociology, with a specialty in media studies.
Todd Gitlin, 1943–2022 - Dissent Magazine
Todd Gitlin, 1943–2022 Todd Gitlin, activist, academic, writer, and longtime member of Dissent’s editorial board, died on February 5, 2022. Here he is remembered by his friends, colleagues, and comrades: Michael Kazin, Brian Morton, Susie Linfield, Mitchell Cohen, Jo-Ann Mort, and Jeffrey C. Isaac. Editors ▪ February 7, 2022 Todd Gitlin in 2007 (Flickr/David Shankbone) Todd Gitlin, activist, academic, writer, and longtime member of Dissent’s editorial board, died on February 5, 2022.
From our archives: Todd Gitlin on "Back to the civil rights barricades" after the Bush-Gore election
This essay was originally published by Salon on December 4, 2000, part of Todd Gitlin's coverage of the 2000 Bush-Gore election and its aftermath. Gitlin — a professor, activist and author of nearly 20 books, including 2012's "Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street," died on Saturday at 79.
Todd Gitlin
Todd Gitlin wrote about the Chicago events for the Ramparts Wallposter during the Democratic Convention; and later in his book The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage; and then again, exercising his own fiction-making license, in the novel The Opposition, to be published in 2021 by Guernica Editions. In Chicago, when Tom Hayden, bailed out of jail, went undercover, it was Todd Gitlin who purchased his fake goatee. Browse Topics Currently, there is no content with this tag. Loading... By Todd Gitlin
President Biden Needs to Lead an American Democracy Campaign. Now.
Liberal democracy is at risk at home and abroad. We therefore applaud the leadership of the Biden administration in organizing this week’s global Summit for Democracy, which is designed “to listen, learn, and engage with a diverse range of actors whose support and commitment is critical for global democratic renewal.” But we need aggressive leadership on behalf of democracy at home too. Here in the United States, democracy is being whittled away on a daily basis.
Senator Kennedy’s “Unhinged” Red-Baiting: What Is the Matter With These People?
Perhaps John Neely Kennedy of Louisiana, ranking member of the Economic Policy Subcommittee of the Senate Banking Committee, was auditioning for a gig on the Comedy Channel when, at a hearing on Thursday, he ripped into Cornell law professor Saule T. Omarova, President Biden’s nominee to head the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, or OCC, the country’s top bank regulator.
An open letter in defense of democracy
(Editor’s note: This open letter was published simultaneously by The Bulwark and the New Republic and is reprinted here with permission.) We are writers, academics, and political activists who have long disagreed about many things. Some of us are Democrats and others Republicans. Some identify with the left, some with the right, and some with neither. We have disagreed in the past, and we hope to be able to disagree, productively, for years to come.
An Open Letter in Defense of Democracy
Todd Gitlin The New Republic October 28, 2021 This open letter is being published simultaneously by The New Republic and The Bulwark. We are writers, academics, and political activists who have long disagreed about many things. Some of us are Democrats and others Republicans. Some identify with the left, some with the right, and some with neither. We have disagreed in the past, and we hope to be able to disagree, productively, for years to come.
An Open Letter in Defense of Democracy
This open letter is being published simultaneously by The New Republic and The Bulwark. We are writers, academics, and political activists who have long disagreed about many things. Some of us are Democrats and others Republicans. Some identify with the left, some with the right, and some with neither. We have disagreed in the past, and we hope to be able to disagree, productively, for years to come. Because we believe in the pluralism that is at the heart of democracy.
Opinion | I fought South African Apartheid and the Israeli occupation. Sally Rooney’s decision is wrong
Dear Ms. Rooney, No contemporary writer has gotten under my skin as you have.
Look what’s inside the bill, please: The details of the $3.5 trillion package
By Todd Gitlin New York Daily News | Oct 05, 2021 at 5:00 AM Here’s a scary number you’ve probably come across many times in recent weeks: $3.5 trillion. Here’s an inside-the-Beltway jargon term that’s come up an equivalent number of times: reconciliation. (Sounds like a marriage therapy outcome, not a congressional process that now shapes the national destiny.) Reporters endlessly, breathlessly, repeat the numbers of congressional votes presently tallied as pro and con.
Was Occupy Wall Street the ‘Beginning of the Beginning’?
Nonfiction Impressed by the “intensity on the young faces” at Zuccotti Park, Michael Levitin joined in the chaos and the festivity, got “caught in the madness.”Credit...Earl Wilson/The New York Times Sept. 18, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET GENERATION OCCUPY Reawakening American Democracy By Michael Levitin Ten years ago this month, the story goes, a few dozen activists squatted in Zuccotti Park, near Wall Street.
Freedom Summer, then and now: Do voting rights still matter?
By Todd Gitlin New York Daily News | Jun 23, 2021 at 11:30 AM Fifty-seven years ago this week, three civil rights workers — James Chaney of Mississippi, age 21, Andrew Goodman of New York, age 20, and Mickey Schwerner of Westchester County, 25 — were murdered in Neshoba County, Miss., by a white terrorist gang that included a deputy sheriff and other Klansmen. Chaney, Goodman and Chaney were registering Black voters.
Let’s be honest about what we know, and don’t, about the Atlanta murderer’s motives
By Todd Gitlin New York Daily News | Mar 19, 2021 at 6:22 PM This booking photo provided by the Crisp County Sheriff's Office shows Robert Aaron Long on Tuesday, March 16. Long was arrested in the killings of multiple people at three Atlanta-area massage parlors, most of them women of Asian descent, authorities said.
A Reality-Show Coup with Real Fascists Inside
Photo Credit: Johnny Silvercloud/Shutterstock.com On January 6, Donald Trump’s spectacular MAGA insurrection radiated far beyond Capitol Hill. It was screened everywhere, over every known medium—broadcast, social, antisocial, what have you. The events and their meanings have been stockpiled in a cornucopian arsenal of propaganda, digital weaponry that is not done ravaging the world. The videos will circulate endlessly, just as after Sept.
Trump mob attack on the Capitol: 10 urgent security questions that need answers
For months, supporters of President Donald Trump have mounted acts and threats of violent insurrection against federal and state governments. Thousands true believers were pumped up by the president and other major figures in the Republican Party, clamoring that the election was “stolen” and “fraudulent”; claiming “voter fraud” (for which there was, and is, no shred of evidence); and calling to overturn election results.
Pro-Trump mob attack on the Capitol: 10 urgent security questions that need answers
For months, supporters of President Donald Trump have mounted acts and threats of violent insurrection against federal and state governments. Thousands true believers were pumped up by the president and other major figures in the Republican Party, clamoring that the election was “stolen” and “fraudulent”; claiming “voter fraud” (for which there was, and is, no shred of evidence); and calling to overturn election results.
‘We Are Not Saved. We Are Reprieved.’ On the Defeat of Donald Trump
“I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” –Albert Camus I. The nightmare arrived in broad daylight. We were not even asleep.
The Democratic left needs Biden to succeed. Stop trashing the winner and help him deliver.
Some prominent figures on the American left don’t want to waste time celebrating deliverance from authoritarian rule or figuring out how to make the most of a Biden administration pledged to an accelerating program of renewable energy, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, paid family leave, support for unions, restoring voting rights and a host of other progressive measures. As Donald Trump fades in the rear-view mirror, the all-or-nothing caucus has more urgent concerns.
The Democratic left needs Biden to succeed. Stop trashing the winner and help him deliver.
Some prominent figures on the American left don’t want to waste time celebrating deliverance from authoritarian rule or figuring out how to make the most of a Biden administration pledged to an accelerating program of renewable energy, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, paid family leave, support for unions, restoring voting rights and a host of other progressive measures. As Donald Trump fades in the rear-view mirror, the all-or-nothing caucus has more urgent concerns.
The Battle for People’s Park, Berkeley 1969
In eyewitness testimonies and hundreds of remarkable photographs, The Battle for People’s Park, Berkeley 1969 commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of one of the most searing conflicts that closed out the tumultuous 1960s: the Battle for People’s Park. In April 1969, a few Berkeley activists planted the first tree on a University of California-owned, abandoned city block on Telegraph Avenue. Hundreds of people from all over the city helped build the park as an expression of a politics of joy.
Retrying the Chicago Seven
Aaron Sorkin’s movie about the whacked-out conspiracy trial prosecuted by Richard Nixon’s Justice Department charging eight (later seven) men with organizing protests at the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention crosses historical lines to incite a fairy tale.
Republicans have already packed the Supreme Court. Unpack it by making it bigger.
Now that President Donald Trump has named a third of the highest bench in the land, the Supreme Court is already firmly packed. So are the courts just below it, the 13 Circuit Courts of Appeals. In fewer than four years, Trump and Senate Majority Leader McConnell have filled every circuit court vacancy, for a total of 53 (though another opened up Monday with the death of a 1st Circuit Court judge).
Republicans have already packed the Supreme Court. Unpack it by making it bigger.
Now that President Donald Trump has named a third of the highest bench in the land, the Supreme Court is already firmly packed. So are the courts just below it, the 13 Circuit Courts of Appeals. In fewer than four years, Trump and Senate Majority Leader McConnell have filled every circuit court vacancy, for a total of 53 (though another opened up Monday with the death of a 1st Circuit Court judge).
On Voting: It's Always the Most Important Election of Your Life
I. This is an election like no other. The most important election of our time. The election that opens the future or slams it shut. That rewrites the past. The most important election of your life. Anyone’s life. The most important election since the last election that was called the most important election of your life. You know, it was almost always true. Boy cries wolf. No wolf. Boy cries wolf again. No wolf. Boy cries. Wolf shows. Then a pack. This time, a pack as big as a forest in flames. Glaciers melt.
Op-Ed: Trump conservatives think they are loathed by 'elites.' Are they?
Many Trump supporters are deeply invested in believing they are held in contempt by liberals. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) Academics and journalists tell us that Trump voters feel abused, mocked, humiliated and despised by liberal “elites.” To the degree conservatives feel any animus toward those abusive liberals — or so they say — it is strictly defensive. But are Trump-leaning conservatives actually despised and deplored by “elites”? It’s certainly true that many on the right think so.
First, stanch the Trump bleeding. Whatever progressives think of Biden, we can't sit out 2020. Original
The United States of America is on life support. Donald Trump’s calamitous reign has accelerated disaster on every front: Convulsive climate change is out of control. The government deceived us about a pandemic that has already killed almost 200,000 Americans,the largest number in the world. Right-wing vigilantes, with police and federal allies, wreak violence on peaceful demonstrators who have the temerity to say that Black Lives Matter.
Reflecting on Forty Years of Sociology, Media Studies, and Journalism: An Interview with Todd Gitlin and Michael Schudson
Authors Jiang Chang Shenzhen University http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8992-5410 Jiang Chang, Ph.D., is Distinguished Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Shenzhen University, China. He's currently working on the politics of digital countercultures in contemporary China, and the theorization of digital journalism.
Lessons for Kenosha and elsewhere: What we can do to keep protests peaceful
Tuesday night, Aug. 25, at the gateway to the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison, a crowd gathered to hear speakers protest the atrocious shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha. As one of us (Soglin) joined the protest, walking with the African immigrant Samba Baldeh, a Democratic nominee for an assembly seat, a man at the edge of the crowd was shouting, “Break things! Break it!” Soglin and Baldeh wondered who this could be.
Lessons for Kenosha and elsewhere: What we can do to keep protests peaceful
Tuesday night, Aug. 25, at the gateway to the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison, a crowd gathered to hear speakers protest the atrocious shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha. As one of us (Soglin) joined the protest, walking with the African immigrant Samba Baldeh, a Democratic nominee for an assembly seat, a man at the edge of the crowd was shouting, “Break things! Break it!” Soglin and Baldeh wondered who this could be.
Lessons for Kenosha and elsewhere: What we can do to keep protests peaceful
Tuesday night, Aug. 25, at the gateway to the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison, a crowd gathered to hear speakers protest the atrocious shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha. As one of us (Soglin) joined the protest, walking with the African immigrant Samba Baldeh, a Democratic nominee for an assembly seat, a man at the edge of the crowd was shouting, “Break things! Break it!” Soglin and Baldeh wondered who this could be.
Gitlin: This isn’t a replay of 1968 - it’s 1969
TODD GITLIN TODD GITLIN IS A THE AUTHOR OF “THE SIXTIES: YEARS OF HOPE, DAYS OF RAGE.” June 14, 2020, 12:09AM The "Follow This Story" feature will notify you when any articles related to this story are posted. When you follow a story, the next time a related article is published — it could be days, weeks or months — you'll receive an email informing you of the update. If you no longer want to follow a story, click the "Unfollow" link on that story.
Perspective | This isn’t 1968. It’s 1969.
When windows are smashed, shops go up in flames, looters ransack and police open fire, the collective psyche automatically clicks over to 1968 — in particular, to April, after Martin Luther King Jr. was shot down in Memphis and more than 100 American cities burst out in riots (or, as many participants preferred to call them, rebellions). Governors called in the National Guard, 43 people were killed, more than 3,000 were injured and some 20,000 were arrested.
Trump in crisis wants to recreate Nixon's law and order campaign. But 2020 is not 1968.
We are in a perfect avalanche. Racist violence on the part of police in Minneapolis and Louisville and vigilantes in southeast Georgia have metastasized into national revolt and backlash. Malevolence and incapacity at the White House have worsened a pandemic that is nowhere near wrapping up. Economic catastrophe and consequent hunger are already facts of life for tens of millions of Americans. The whole is more, and worse, than the sum of the virulent parts.
Trump in crisis wants to recreate Nixon's law and order campaign. But 2020 is not 1968.
Todd Gitlin, Opinion contributor Published 3:15 a.m. ET June 3, 2020 | Updated 7:28 a.m. ET June 3, 2020 U.S. president Donald Trump said he would deploy the military if state officials didn't quell the violence amidst protests after George Floyd's death. USA TODAY My sense of tragic doom in 1968 was realized in assassinations and war. At least now there is hope we can rediscover our better angels this fall. We are in a perfect avalanche.
Trump, the incredible shrinking president: His insults are becoming more fevered for a reason
By Todd Gitlin New York Daily News | May 29, 2020 | 5:00 AM U.S. President Donald Trump receives a briefing on the 2020 hurricane season in the Oval Office May 28, 2020 in Washington, DC.(Doug Mills/Getty Images) The “very stable genius” is tilting seriously as his wheels come off. Donald Trump thrashes at enemies not because he knows so much because he understands so little. As he feels like more of a loser, his insults become more fevered.
The Enigma Of Constancy The Resilience Of Trumps Base
What follows is part two of Todd Gitlin’s deconstruction of the Trump phenomenon in American culture and politics. Part one appeared in our Fall 2019-Winter 2020 issue, number 204-205, under the title “For The Love of Sin: Toward An Understanding of Trump’s Base” (pages 67-94).
For The Love Of Sin
“TRUMP 2016: FINALLY SOMEONE WITH BALLS,” read a button at a rally in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. 1 One of Trump’s chief evangelical supporters, megachurch preacher Robert Jeffress of Dallas, declared in an April 2016 interview: When I’m looking for a leader who’s gonna sit across the negotiating table from a nuclear Iran, or who’s gonna be intent on destroying ISIS, I couldn’t care less about that leader’s temperament or his tone or his vocabulary.
Rupert Murdoch, Fox News’ Covid-19 misinformation is a danger to public health
Photograph: Gary Hershorn/Getty Images Americans consistently rate the Fox News Channel as one of the most trusted TV channels. The average age of Fox News viewers is 65. It is well established that this population incurs the greatest risk from the Covid-19 pandemic. In other words, Fox News viewers are at special risk from the coronavirus.
What Allan Bloom Got Right
Alex Williamson for The Chronicle Review “You can slam its young people into universities with their classrooms and laboratories, and when they come out all they can talk about is Babe Ruth. America is a hopeless country for intellectuals and thinking people.” Babe Ruth is the giveaway. These words were spoken in 1923, and the speaker was Theodore Dreiser, who had dropped out of Indiana University after one year.
David Brooks Flies to Europe to Bash Cosmopolitanism
David Brooks, self-hating cosmopolitan, could visit Disneyland and report back that it goes to show that small town virtues are alive. In the latest installment of his ongoing series on the worthlessness of left-wing cosmopolitanism, the NYT columnist reports today that “In Europe, the fans are much younger” than in the U.S. In Madrid, they went nuts for Bruce Springsteen. But how could it be that a bunch of Spaniards are screaming themselves hoarse for “Born in the USA”?
Have Economists Learned From the Great Recession?
If an unanticipated earthquake measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale had just sunk the island of Manhattan, I’d like to think that departments of geology worldwide would be feverishly reexamining their research priorities, curricula, and syllabi. But I have the impression that no such urgency is evident in the profession of economics after most of it resoundingly failed to anticipate the global meltdown of the last decade (and continuing).
Moral Crisis, Anyone?
According to the NYT, a report by the inspector general of the Department of Housing and Urban Development concludes: Managers at major banks ignored widespread errors in the foreclosure process, in some cases instructing employees to adopt make-believe titles and speed documents through the system despite internal objections. ... Managers were aware of the problems and did nothing to correct them. The shortcuts were directed by managers in some cases.
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