Nearly two and a half centuries after the storming of the Bastille, does our historical present still have something to learn from the French Revolution?
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I think we can all agree, for a start, that the weaponization of the transgender issue by Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and the minions of the Republican Right — and their outrageous claims — are reprehensible. But the “transgender-affirming” Left isn’t much better — they too have weaponized the issue, turning one’s subjective sense of gender identity (especially among minors, who are too young to even qualify for a learner’s permit for a driver’s license!) into an objective “alternative fact” — to invoke Kellyanne Conway’s infamous phrase.
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On January 3, 2025, Platypus Affiliated Society member M. P. Byrne interviewed Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat, poet, and professor emeritus of English at the University of California Berkeley. His critical writings on deep politics have focused on the clandestine operations of the American state from Vietnam through the War on Terror. Scott’s books include The War Conspiracy: The Secret Road to the Second Indochina War (1972), Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1993), and most recently Reading the Dream: A Post-Secular History of Enmindment (2024).
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This essay argues that DSA’s commitment to electoralism within the Democratic Party, its reformism without a developed theory of the state, its class composition, and its ideologically diffuse “big tent” model together forms a set of contradictions that Marxist analysis reveals as structural rather than accidental.
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On February 2 and March 4, 2025, Platypus Affiliated Society member D. L. Jacobs interviewed Yassin al-Haj Saleh, a Syrian writer and dissident who participated in the Syrian Revolution and the Arab Spring. Saleh was imprisoned from 1980 to 96 for his membership in the Syrian Communist Party (Political Bureau). Saleh is the author of The Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy (2017) and other books.
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