News

The exhibition catalogue Emil Nolde: The Artist during the Third Reich, by Soika and the Cambridge historian Bernhard Fulda, provides a new historical narrative for an artist who fashioned himself a martyr of the Nazi regime—a narrative that has had political reverberations for the current German government. 
 

Historian Richard Aldous reviews the third volume of Charles Moore’s biography of the iconic and divisive British prime minister. In 1987, Margaret Thatcher won a landslide third term as prime minister of the U.K. Beneath the sheen of triumph, however, her administration would be beset by decay.

Mariel Fiori, managing editor of La Voz, and Martha Tepepa of the Levy Economics Institute at Bard  College will speak as part of “Immigration Advocacy in the Hudson Valley,” a Chronogram Conversation presented in partnership with Radio Kingston and The River Newsroom. The public is invited to hear from community members who have organized to counteract what they view as unjust federal policies targeting immigrants. Wednesday, December 4, at 6:00 p.m., Holy Cross/Santa Cruz Episcopal Church in Kingston.

As America’s fiscal deficit nears $1 trillion for the first time since the financial crisis, the House Budget Committee held a hearing on November 20 seeking answers to a crucial question: Does it pose a clear and present danger to the economy? Professor Wray’s response: “Federal deficits and debt are not so scary. Neither is on an unsustainable path. Rather, persistent deficits and rising debt are normal.” Wray is one of the leading advocates of Modern Monetary Theory, an emerging school of thought that says countries like the United States, which borrow in their own currency, can pursue growth through deficit spending so long as prices are under control. His paper for the committee argued that MMT has never said deficits or debt don’t matter but that they are best viewed as outcomes of policies aimed at lifting the economy, not goals in themselves. When economists and lawmakers push for debt reduction, said Wray, “MMT cautions that what we might be reducing is economic growth.”

In their new book False Alarm: The Truth about Political Mistruths in the Trump Era, Ethan Porter ’07 and Thomas J. Wood find that if you correct untruths you can make people’s opinion of the facts substantially more accurate; you can also correct outright fake news. “That, however, is the end of the good news,” writes columnist Daniel Finkelstein in the London Times. “Porter and Wood provide a depressing reason why factual correction is possible: it is that facts just aren’t that important to people in forming their political views. So people can accept a correction of a fact that supports their candidate or partisan view without feeling fundamentally challenged. Their basic position and affiliation doesn’t crumble when a mere fact is corrected, so they are content to accept the correction. As the authors put it: ‘People do not care enough about facts to engage in motivated reasoning against them.’”

On November 20 at 10:00 a.m., the U.S. House Committee on the Budget will hear testimony about the growing debate on the costs and consequences of debt, the different perspectives that are driving this important conversation, and the implications of recent economic developments for how we think about our fiscal challenges. Among the expert witnesses is L. Randall Wray, professor of economics and senior scholar at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. The hearing will stream on the Committee’s website and Professor Wray's remarks will be available on the Levy Economics Institute website.

Stern, director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate, spoke on “Antisemitism as a Form of Hate” as part of the UNC College of Arts and Sciences’ Countering Hate initiative on November 7.

So much of what has catapulted race and racial identity into the mainstream over the past 10 years has been molded by our political climate. Of course, this emphasis on identity politics happens on the left as well as the right—and it’s growing. “It’s a bad strategy to have an identity-based strategy on the left,” says Williams. “Deemphasizing identity all around would help our politics because we would have to pay more attention to the issues. We may have to pay more attention to class if we didn’t have these self-defeating identity agendas.”

Thomas Chatterton Williams has been teaching the Bard College course Retiring from Race this semester, and he spoke, alongside some of his students, at the Hannah Arendt Center fall conference last month.