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Stephen Amberg
STEPHEN AMBERG is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Texas, San Antonio. He authored "Reconfiguring Industry Structure: Obama and the Rescue of the Auto Companies" in Political Creativity: Reconfiguring Institutional Order and Change (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) edited by Gerald Berk, Victoria Hattam, and Dennis Galvan.
NOTES FROM TEXAS
This is What Oligarchy Looks Like
By Stephen Amberg
Oligarchy is a term we’ve been hearing more frequently to describe the future of the United States—whether it’s the patrimonial capitalism predicted by Thomas Piketty, based on his comparative historical income statistics which support an interpretation that the huge wealth of the top 0.1 percent creates a dynamic of heritable privilege for a tiny and powerful set of our fellow citizens, or whether it’s the feared consequences of the Supreme Court’s several decisions to gut the laws governing campaign finance and voting.
How to Overcome the Patriotic Gore of Racism
By Stephen AmbergIn 1962, in the midst of the Cold War and the civil rights movement, Edmund Wilson published a book that decried the Civil War literature of “patriotic gore” by which men and women of the time justified horrors and bore tremendous burdens.
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