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Active McFarland: Exercising Democracy

Blog posts : "Long posts"

Antitrust Law and the Regulation of Corporate Concentration

Ron Berger --

This article was initially published on Wise Guys, Jan. 8, 2020.

When I think about the myriad issues that are being raised during the current Democratic Party presidential primary, I am reminded of the advice given by James Carville, Bill Clinton’s political strategist, during t…

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Deconstructing the Center of American Politics: A Conversation

Ron Berger, Jeff Berger, Charles Cottle, and Dave Gillespie --

This discussion was initially published on Wise Guys, Sept. 17, 2019

Eric Levitz is a journalist, opinion writer, and associate editor of the “Daily Intelligencer” blog of New York Magazine. In July 2017, six months after the i…

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Is Donald Trump a Fascist?

Ron Berger

This article was originally published on Wise Guys, Jan. 4, 2019.

Last November I was one of two speakers at a forum on “Fascism and the Holocaust in Historical and Contemporary Perspective” that was part of the Baeumler-Kaplan Holocaust Memorial Lecture Series at the University of …

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The Politics of Identity: Insights from Francis Fukuyama

Ron Berger

This article was originally published on Wise Guys, Oct. 27, 2018.

In his slim but useful book, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018), Francis Fukuyama offers insights into one of the most perplexing questions of our times, t…

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Let's All Move to Norway

Jeff Berger

This article was originally published on Wise Guys, Feb. 23, 2018.

Last January Donald Trump tweeted that immigrants to America should not be allowed to come from “shithole countries” like Haiti and nations in Africa. Instead, he said, he preferred people from countries like Norway…

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Divided We Fall: The Fractured Coalition of the Democratic Party

Ron Berger

This article was originally published on Wise Guys, Nov. 28, 2017.

Here we are, more than a year after the November 2016 presidential election, and Democrats are still fighting the last war. In her recently published campaign memoir, What Happened, Hillary Clinton admits to having m…

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What Went Wrong: One Pollster's View

Ron Berger

This article was originally published on Wise Guys, Oct. 23, 3017.

In the latest issue of The American Prospect, long-time Democratic Party pollster Stanley Greenberg weighs in on what he thinks went wrong with Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Greenberg was the lead pol…

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Watergate: The Benchmark Political Scandal

Ron Berger

This article was originally published on Wise Guys, May 2, 2017.

We are currently in the midst of a political scandal that has the potential to rival the infamous Watergate scandal of the early 1970s. A political consensus has emerged, based on available information from U.S. intell…

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Reflections on Fake News

Jeff Berger

This article was originally published on Wise Guys, Apr. 17, 2017

Recently I read an article by Sharon Noguchi in my local newspaper, the San Jose Mercury, about teachers helping students to distinguish between fake news and real news. The article focused on teenagers who naively g…

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Climate Change and Nonviolent Resistance

Ron Berger

This article was originally published on Wise Guys, Feb. 27, 2017

Last November Bill McKibben, a leading environmental activist, delivered the inaugural Jonathan Schell Lecture at the New School in New York City. The lecture, which was entitled “On the Fate of the Earth,” was co-spo…

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U.S. Immigration Policy and the Jewish Refugee Crisis of the 1930s

Ron Berger

This article was originally published on Wise Guys, Feb. 6, 2017

George Santayana famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The mere act of remembering, however, does not guarantee that the lessons of history will be learned. Thus, on Internatio…

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How Much Is Enough?

Bob Bates

This article was originally published on Wise Guys, Jan. 26, 2017

Most thinking humans for a long time have known an effective societal problem-solving process: (1) identify needs, (2) identify ways these can be met, (3) apply analysis, prioritizing, and strategic planning to deliver…

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Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few, by Robert Reich

Ron Berger

In his most recent book Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few (2015), Robert Reich aims to explain how “the increasing concentration of political power in a corporate and financial elite…has been able to influence the rules by which the economy runs.” He lays the groundwork for …

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Policing, Profiling, and Crime

Ron Berger and Marvin Free

In the current presidential campaign, Donald Trump has positioned himself as the “law and order” candidate and an advocate of aggressive “stop-and-frisk” policing practices in some urban communities. This policy, which is praised by some as vital to police effectiveness…

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Travelogue of an Unpolitician: Trying Not to Go Negative

Karen McKim

July 4, 3:00 PM

I wish I had time to blog about the campaign every day. It is more interesting and fun than I’d anticipated. I think it helps that I’m running for no other reason than to promote understanding about, and improvement of, election procedures. If I win---fabulous! …

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Travelogue of an Unpolitician Running for Office

Karen McKim

As recently as about a year ago, whenever I was asked if I had ever considered running for office, my answer was an adamant and sincere NO!

I have a hard time remembering names. I don’t like being the center of attention. On personality tests, I score ten in cooperation, zero in co…

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Reflections on The Big Short

Ron Berger

The Academy Award nominated film The Big Short is an entertaining dramatization of Michael Lewis’s book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. Most people have not and will not read the book, and it is my impression that while the film conveys the general nature of the sy…

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The Populist and Progressive Traditions in American Politics

Ron Berger

One of the aims of my contribution to the Active McFarland blog is to educate readers and offer political analyses and historical background that place our voting preferences and grassroots political work in broader context. In an earlier post, I cited Paul Starr's observation that Ame…

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The Color of Geography: Rural versus Urban Voting

Ron Berger

In his keynote address to the delegates at the 2004 Democratic Party convention, Barack Obama, an Illinois state senator and nominee to the U.S. Senate, gave a rousing speech that would catapult him to the forefront of the Democratic Party and eventually the presidency of the United St…

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19 blog posts