Indholdsfortegnelse for June 15-22, 2020 i The Nation

In France, health care workers have tended tirelessly to the sick and dying. For several weeks, I’ve documented the doctors, nurses, and support staff at one of Paris’s major hospitals, the Groupe Hospitalier Paris Saint-Joseph. Here the body of someone who succumbed to Covid-19 awaits cremation or burial. Calvin Trillin Deadline Poet A FOURTH INSPECTOR GENERAL BITES THE DUST The IG had Pompeo in his sights. An IG’s independence is required—Or was. Pompeo needed just a word With Trump to get that pesky fellow fired.…

EVERY BIG IDEA CHERished by progressives—including the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, universal child care, and tuition-free college—requires massive government spending and a robust regulatory structure. None of these urgent proposals will come to fruition without the ability to reverse four decades of withering austerity by raising taxes on corporations and the superrich. For the past 45 years, right-wing culture warriors and the corporate elite have united around one simple concept that enables them to achieve their agenda: cutting taxes on themselves and dismantling the enforcement powers of every agency dedicated to anything good, including civil rights, public education, the environment, and labor. Rather than rely on presidential candidates as our saviors or endlessly revise utopian policy proposals, it is crucial that we examine which strategies, led by whom,…

ORGANIZED LABOR IS PARALYZED AT PRECISELY THE TIME WHEN COLlective action is needed most. Since the election of Donald Trump, most unions have done little more than protect their own jurisdictions, offering no guidance on what must be done during the pandemic. Yet the spread of Covid-19 and its economic fallout have created an opening for labor to lead a mass movement. These events have shown how little remains of the social safety net the working class helped build nearly a century ago. Unions can now push the country toward a Third Reconstruction, an idea developed by several writers, most notably the historian Manning Marable. The term invokes both the Reconstruction era after the Civil War and the civil rights movement of the 1960s, a Second Reconstruction. While weaker than…

“This is the firing line not simply for the emancipation of the American Negro but for the emancipation of the African Negro and the Negroes of the West Indies; for the emancipation of the colored races; and for the emancipation of the white slaves of modern capitalistic monopoly.” W.E.B. Du Bois delivered these lines before a large crowd in Columbia, S.C., in the fall of 1946. The people gathered before him were neither strictly Marxist nor communist; they were mostly members of the Southern Negro Youth Congress, which was founded in 1937 to organize young people, workers, and other disaffected groups across the South. But no one in that audience was shocked by what he had to say. For them, like Du Bois, breaking the back of Southern white supremacy…

LIKE MORE THAN HALF OF AMERICANS, I LIVE IN THE suburbs. Luckily, I don’t have to commute to the city every day—or even wear pants—because I’m a writer. But if I had a real job, it would take me well over an hour to get from my door to The Nation’s offices. As it is, going into New York City for a meeting starts with a 12-minute walk from my house to the commuter rail. That train takes 38 minutes to get to Grand Central station. I then spend about six minutes walking up and down various ramps to get to a subway. The subway takes about eight minutes to get to Port Authority. From there it’s a 10-minute walk to the office. And that’s when everything is running on…

THE SIMPLE FARMHOUSE WHERE HENRY Wallace was born and came of age can be found in Orient Township, on the southern side of Iowa’s Adair County, just off what is referred to as a minimum maintenance road. Drivers are advised to travel it “at your own risk.” That pretty well sums up the approach that has been taken with Wallace, Franklin Roosevelt’s second vice president, over the 75 years since he battled for the soul of the Democratic Party at its 1944 convention, struggled to keep alive the promise of the New Deal, failed as an anti–Cold War presidential candidate in 1948, and retired to the political wilderness. On the December morning when I visited the farm, no one was there. I brushed the snow off a plaque mounted on…

Birthright citizenship is the foundation of American democracy. The birthright principle, rooted in common law and the Reconstruction era’s 14th Amendment, guarantees citizenship to the children of US citizens and to everyone born within the country’s borders. The grant of citizenship at birth has a powerful egalitarian effect, making every American—at least in theory—an equal stakeholder in the political community. Yet it brings about this desirable result through what can only be described as arbitrary means. One inherits citizenship from one’s parents or acquires it based on the happenstance of one’s place of birth. Our democracy of equal-born citizens is therefore built on a fundamental inequality: the unearned privilege of winning what the scholar Ayelet Shachar has called “the birthright lottery.” Two recent histories explain how the illiberal birthright principle…

CARMELLA SALINAS TRIED TO KEEP HER PRESCHOOL IN NEW MEXICO open for as long as she could. When the novel coronavirus started to spread through the United States, she began to take everyone’s temperature each morning and required staff to wear masks. Parents told their children not to give hugs. But it became untenable. “We’re constantly in contact with kids, their fluids,” she said. Salinas has chronic asthma and was worried what would happen if she got the virus. She decided to close. “We want to do whatever we can for our community, but at the same time, we have to look out for ourselves, too. It really is a difficult, difficult choice to make to leave your classroom.” She and her staff have been doing what they can to…

AN INDIAN NAMED COWBOY ONCE TOLD A LECTURE hall full of Frenchmen that us Natives are a postapocalyptic people. Cowboy is a Blackfoot filmmaker from the Piikani and Kainai Nations near Calgary, in the Canadian province of Alberta. And like almost every Indian I’ve met, he is on a mission to reclaim things. He even changed his last name to Smithx—a rejection of Smith, the name missionaries imposed on his family, and an ode to Malcolm X. Cowboy and I were two Natives invited to a literary festival in Paris, where they put the Indians in the auditorium. Maybe we got the big room because the French are still entranced by the myth of the noble savage, but I think, even in a crowd that included luminaries like Colson Whitehead…

In his commentary on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, Swiss theologian Karl Barth wrote that “man cannot know God, for he is ever the unknown God.” CBS’s television series God Friended Me would disagree. Watch a handful of episodes of the comedy-drama, and you can sketch God’s personality in broad strokes: God likes Fibonacci, the song “That’s Amore,” AI-generated art, mixed martial arts, cops, causing drama at family gatherings, and The Maltese Falcon. If you have a secret child (as many characters in the show do), God thinks that you absolutely should seek him or her out for a reconciliation, no matter the circumstances. God is all right with monarchy (as long as rulers advocate for incremental, progressive change) and thinks it’s an acceptable payoff to hack into personal medical…