Barack Obama - Dissent Magazine

The Austerity of the Obama Years

Mike Konczal ▪ January 19, 2017

Austerity, both as a practice and as a metaphor, defined the landscape, culture, and politics of the Obama era.

Milton Friedman, Betsy DeVos, and the Privatization of Public Education

Joanne Barkan ▪ January 17, 2017

For almost twenty-five years, Betsy DeVos has been one of the most dogged political operatives in the movement to privatize public education.

Booked: The End of Managerial Liberalism, with K. Sabeel Rahman

Timothy Shenk ▪ November 30, 2016

K. Sabeel Rahman talks about his new book Democracy against Domination, and why liberals need to recover a language of economic power.

Trump vs. Hamilton

Nicolaus Mills ▪ November 21, 2016

The Trump camp’s response to Friday’s statement from the Hamilton cast reveals a dangerous double standard on civility.

Parties recover from defeat in two ways. They can try to beat the opposition at their own game, or they can try to change the rules of the game. Donald Trump did the latter. Now it’s the Democrats’ turn.

The TPP’s Last Stand

David Singh Grewal ▪ October 19, 2016

A fast-tracked trade agreement of this scale, passed by a lame-duck Congress, would be doubly illegitimate.

Booked: Learning How to Be a Black Man in America, with Mychal Denzel Smith

Timothy Shenk ▪ September 29, 2016

An interview with Mychal Denzel Smith about his book, Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching, and why the language of universalism is not going to solve all of our problems.

How War Lost Its Politics

Mary L. Dudziak ▪ Summer 2016

Election years used to be occasions for pitched battles over whether to go to war. Why aren’t they still?

Racial Politics After Obama

Brandon M. Terry ▪ Summer 2016

Far from heralding a “post-racial” era, the Age of Obama has fostered an intense racialization of U.S. politics and an eruption of agonistic identity politics across partisan lines. These challenges will be among the most vital of the post–Obama era, for both black politics and the resurgent American left.

The Democrats After Bernie

Harold Meyerson ▪ Summer 2016

The young activists who campaigned for Bernie Sanders are clearly the Democrats’ future. Do they have the power and the smarts to remake the Democratic Party?

Protest Politics: Introduction

Michael Kazin ▪ Summer 2016

This fall’s election campaign may be the most tumultuous one since 1968, and with good reason. How did we get here? And what’s next?

Introducing our Summer special section.

Department of Climate Defense

Jeffrey Marqusee ▪ Spring 2016

The U.S. military is one of the world’s top consumers of fossil fuels. But it has also done pioneering research on climate change, revealing how deeply connected climate disruption is with other forms of social and political turmoil. Michael Kazin interviews climate scientist and longtime Pentagon official Jeffrey Marqusee.

Bernie Is Not the New Obama—And That’s a Good Thing

Jedediah Britton-Purdy ▪ January 21, 2016

Bernie Sanders’ surge in recent national polls has brought inevitable comparisons to an insurgent candidate whose enthusiastic young supporters took Hillary Clinton by surprise eight years ago. But Sanders’s campaign is of a very different kind than Obama’s, with deeper potential and a different measure of success.