Thomas Powers

Nov 13, 2024 | nybooks.com | Anne Enright |Thomas Powers |Verlyn Klinkenborg |Coco Fusco

Astra Taylor • Michael Greenberg • Coco Fusco • Verlyn Klinkenborg • Thomas Powers • Anne Enright* On election night, before Harris’s loss set in, some exit polls showed that “democracy” was a top concern for voters. Many liberals took the result as an auspicious sign. But what is democracy? That was the title of a documentary I made during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Aug 2, 2024 | nybooks.com | Thomas Powers

Joe Biden’s departure from the 2024 presidential race produced almost instant clarity and relief—a tangle of doubts and fears brushed aside in a day. There was no scramble to seize his place, no mean-spirited list of reasons why Kamala Harris wouldn’t do, no shrug from a spiritless party. Against the president, for not quite a month, Donald Trump had the grin of a man who smelled blood. Now it’s a new day and a new race. Trump may win but I think it likely he won’t.

May 29, 2024 | commonwealmagazine.org | Thomas Powers |Charles McNamara |Stephen Pope |Regina Munch

In June 1945, Commonweal associate editor C. G. Paulding denounced an essay by Major George Fielding Eliot, then a military analyst for the New York Herald Tribune, that proposed a large-scale gas attack against Japan to end World War II. “There is no use arguing whether poison gas is a little worse or not than the flame thrower, the Japanese houses in flames, the millions of Japanese civilians killed,” Paulding wrote. “Worse or not, it is one thing more.

Feb 5, 2024 | theconstitutionalist.org | Benjamin A. Kleinerman |Thomas Powers

Thomas F. Powers is Professor and Chair in the Department of Political Science at Carthage College. He is the author of American Multiculturalism and the Anti-Discrimination Regime: The Challenge to Liberal Pluralism. Brown v.

Nov 14, 2023 | commonwealmagazine.org | Thomas Powers |Dominic Preziosi |Shaun Blanchard |Mollie Wilson O’Reilly

Everyone in the United States is in favor of a free press, until you get down to particulars. Then qualifications abound. Justice Hugo Black was almost unique in saying that freedom of the press was absolute and anyone could print anything he liked, from libel to pornography, without exception.