The world today hardly brims with bright spots. Find good news wherever you can. Bangladesh may just be your ticket: After the brutal and kleptocratic Awami League was ousted from power last autumn by an organized group of enraged students, there has been some hope for a better future there. We asked our colleague Shehryar Fazli, who has been spending time in the country for some years, to give us a sense of how Bangladesh’s founding in 1971 is being recontested in the wake of Sheikh Hasina’s overthrow. His piece is at once inspiring and clear-eyed.
Our other commissioned essay comes from the political philosopher Michael Marder, who ingeniously revives the concept of perestroika, long associated with the late Soviet regime, to critically reconceive and try to solve the polycrisis affecting the planet today. Long-suffering Gorbachev fans, this is your moment!
We kick off our curated content with a trio of pieces about Artificial Intelligence. Leading the pack is Qiaoyu Cai’s arresting examination of the cultural politics of technology, specifically AI in China.
We follow with an unusual reading of the political theorist Judith Shklar, which focuses on a lesser-known aspect of her oeuvre: the concept of ideology. Unsurprisingly, Shklar stakes a realist ground that is hard to shake.
Not many universities outside Hungary and North Korea have illiberalism studies programs (though those should be a growth industry). George Washington University does, and Usha Kumar dissects for its in-house publication the toxic advance of nativist Hindutva politics within the Indian diaspora in America.
Last, Marshall Steinbaum takes another swing at what afflicts post-neoliberal politics, emphasizing all the things the US has gotten wrong in its ambivalent attempts to achieve more equality.
For our musical selection, and in honor of Fazli’s essay, we offer a traditional raga, a melodic mode that dominates classical Bangla (and Hindustani) music. This one features the sonorous voice of Vidushi Shanti Sharma.
—Leonard Benardo, senior vice president at the Open Society Foundations
An Inescapable Past
Shehryar Fazli
The Ideas Letter
Essay
The destruction of the historic home of Sheikh Mujib, Bangladesh’s founding president, in Dhaka last month was a symbolic act of resistance against the rule of his daughter, Sheikh Hasina, and it reflected enduring divisions over Bangladesh’s liberation history and political legitimacy. Fazli argues that while competing narratives about the country’s founding in 1971 have long shaped its politics, a new generation of activists is shifting the focus away from historical grievances.
“Arguments over 1971 have so saturated the country’s politics that national reconciliation may to some extent depend on an open debate about them. But the more compelling struggle ahead may not be between different accounts of the country’s birth, but between those who want a new politics focused on justice, equity and democratic governance and those who want to stake their claim on high office by summoning the ghosts of liberation past.”
A Case for Global Perestroika
Michael Marder
The Ideas Letter
Essay
Marder argues that perestroika, the late–Soviet era policy of restructuring initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s, was not just an economic reform but a broader attempt to revitalize Soviet society. He proposes a global perestroika as a dynamic approach to restructuring societies today because it transcends both reform and revolution, offering a model for addressing contemporary global crises like climate change, inequality, and political disorder. This time, it would be a bottom-up movement led by marginalized and displaced groups, designed to rethink governance, coexistence, and ecological sustainability.
“Perestroika was perhaps the first attempt in history at neither a revolution nor a reform but at something combining elements of the two while also moving beyond them—a project that attended to both the structural problems at hand and the enlivening impulse those problems tend to block. Revolution calls for the reversal of power structures. Reform entails tinkering with parts of the system while maintaining it intact. Perestroika implicitly acknowledged that life and living together (in a community, in a state, and, of course, on a planet) are a work in progress without any assured foundations. In fact, living together means constantly working on the very foundations of coexistence: re-founding or reinventing them, reaffirming and recommitting to what has been forgotten or neglected. First principles are not objectively given once and for all. They are to be negotiated anew, politically, again and again, with openness and the participation of all.”
The Cultural Politics of Artificial Intelligence in China
Qiaoyu Cai
Theory, Culture & Society
Journal Article
This article challenges dominant neoliberal frameworks and proposes the concept of “postsocialist AI” to explain the state’s complex interplay with market forces and socialist legacies. China’s AI development cannot be fully understood within Western neoliberal paradigms; instead it must be apprehended through the unique historical and ideological conditions shaping its modernity.
“In this essay, my central purpose is to re-politicize the discourse on AI by examining the underlying historical consciousness and collective subjectivities that, although marginalized in the era of depoliticized developmentalism, are decisive in shaping the dynamics of AI development across different national and social contexts. The kind of re-politicization I advocate for begins with an exploration of the cultural politics of AI. Here, ‘cultural’ does not refer to techno-cultural essentialism (such as ‘Confucian AI’) or niche-culture aesthetics (such as ‘Cyberpunk Martial Art’). Instead, it serves as a provisional placeholder for a radical type of historical consciousness and the politics of the collective, manifest through the discourse and praxis of AI development within specific political and socio-historical contexts.”
Ideological Self-Consciousness
Judith Shklar on Legalism, Liberalism, and the Purposes of Political Theory
Edward Hall
Social Philosophy and Policy
Journal Article
Hall examines Shklar’s view that ideology is an unavoidable aspect of political thought and critiques the notion that political theorists can operate free from ideological influence. He explores her argument that legalism falsely claims to offer a neutral, rules-based way of adjudicating political conflicts and highlights her call for ideological self-awareness as a necessary component of political theory.
“Rather than propagating a noble lie, it is thus perhaps better to read Shklar as endorsing the pluralist claim that we can and often do occupy multiple perspectives and standpoints that enable us to regard our institutions and practices under different aspects, and that these perspectives are often in tension with one another. For Shklar, this kind of double-mindedness is not necessarily confused or inconsistent, but a condition of life in pluralistic societies.”
How ‘Yankee Hindutva’ Became a MAGA Satellite
Usha Kumar
Illiberalism
Essay
The Hindutva movement, which advocates Hindu supremacy in India, has increasingly aligned itself with the MAGA agenda in the U.S., integrating Hindu nationalism into the broader far-right political landscape. This convergence, while granting the movement political visibility in the United States, has also rendered it dependent on Trumpism, raising questions about its future influence and the response of liberal institutions to its growing presence.
“Today, US Hindutva’s animating narratives, long focused on intra-community fault lines, have increasingly found new articulations. For example, the movement’s long opposition to protections against caste discrimination, which have prompted a series of failed legal challenges, are now being hastily re-articulated as opposition to ‘DEI excesses.’ Terms like ‘Critical Caste Theory,’ borrowed from ‘Critical Race Theory,’ and ‘Hindu in Name Only’ (HINO), a riff on RINO (Republican in Name Only), have proliferated.”
A Real Post-Neoliberal Agenda
Marshall Steinbaum
Boston Review
Essay
The U.S. Democratic Party’s failure to confront economic inequality over the past decade—despite early momentum from the 2014 “Piketty moment”—has weakened its ability to counteract rising plutocracy, ultimately enabling Trump’s return to power. Steinbaum critiques the party’s habit of relying on elite-driven, technocratic policymaking instead of mobilizing mass political movements, and it highlights missed opportunities regarding taxation, labor rights, welfare expansion, and antitrust reform that could have built a durable working-class coalition against economic concentration and inequality.
“The loudest critique of the Democratic Party to have emerged in the wake of Trump’s reelection is that it has become too beholden to shadow constituencies without any real popular following. There is a half-truth in this argument. The real story is that the most influential progressive philanthropic efforts on economic reform largely confined themselves to doing prestige politics as usual; when they did win a seat at the table, there was no popular base to answer to and no serious effort to build one. Instead, the ‘theory of change’ was that intellectuals and insiders could take care of the policy and the politics would take care of itself. The result was a catastrophe out of which almost nothing lasting was achieved.”