A IA E EU

This speech (from Lioness - S03E05) raises a well-known critique of the Western left, but it mixes a historically plausible observation with a problematic factual attribution. What is the speech criticizing? The argument goes something like this: There are people in the West who advocate for seemingly humanitarian causes — peace, equality, anti-colonialism, workers' rights — and who, out of sympathy for certain revolutionary movements, end up politically favoring authoritarian regimes or projects that do not truly share those same values. In other words, the critique is not simply "progressives are communists." It is more sophisticated: a person can have good intentions and, precisely because of them, become politically useful to someone whose goals are very different from their own. The mechanism would be: legitimate ideal → emotional identification with a cause → suspension of critique → defense of a movement → utilization of that defense by a political structure. Thi...

Contemporary criticism of Walt Whitman has increasingly moved away from the question of whether he should be regarded as a democratic, progressive, or even radical poet. The more difficult question is what kind of democracy his poetry actually imagines, and who is able to inhabit it without being absorbed, idealized, or excluded. Whitman remains one of the most powerful poets of American democracy, but his democratic imagination is now read with considerably greater suspicion. His famous rhetoric of inclusion—his desire to embrace workers, lovers, soldiers, strangers, women, Black Americans, immigrants, and the dead—can no longer be separated from the racial, imperial, sexual, and gendered structures of nineteenth-century America. One of the most consequential developments in Whitman scholarship has been the reconsideration of his relationship to race. Whitman's early poetry contains strikingly humanizing representations of Black Americans, and his work has rightly been associated ...