Indholdsfortegnelse for April 11-18, 2016 i The Nation

@thenation.com The United States of Trump Re “Donald Trump Is Dangerous” [March 14]: I’ve been phone-banking around the country for Bernie Sanders—Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Florida—and I can tell you that there are Democrats who voted twice for Barack Obama and support Bernie, but who cannot or will not vote for Hillary Clinton. And I’ve also talked to GOP voters who are Trump supporters, some of whom told me that if Trump doesn’t get the nomination, they will vote for Sanders. Trump’s racism may get some votes, as the polls suggest, but his economic nationalism is what I think binds his voters to him: They feel screwed, and he’s listening to them. Trump’s campaign reminds me of a famous incident involving Slobodan Milosevic. Early in his drive for…

Two things are clear with respect to the nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court: Judge Garland is eminently, indeed supremely, qualified; and the Republicans are dead set against giving him even a hearing, much less a vote. What’s obscured by the heated rhetoric that already surrounds the fight, however, is that the real battleground for the future of the Supreme Court is not this nomination, but the presidential election. Once Republicans understand that, they may well come to rue the day they committed themselves to blind obstructionism. Garland’s qualifications for the Court are unparalleled. A star graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, he clerked for two of the nation’s finest judges, William Brennan and Henry Friendly. He has practiced in the private sector and as…

The “real” Barack Obama—the one who no longer has to worry about running for office—turned in another boffo performance recently. Just before his historic trip to Cuba, The Atlantic published Jeffrey Goldberg’s exhaustively reported, nearly 20,000-word autopsy of the president’s foreign policy. Given the opportunity to speak at length, Obama deftly slices and dices a long-standing sacred cow of the US foreign-policy establishment into ground beef. But Goldberg, a prominent member of this same establishment, goes to considerable length to give the mandarins’ arguments their due. Inevitably, these boil down to the alleged need to deploy US military force almost regardless of the circumstances in order to preserve “credibility,” a word they intone the way some Catholics recite the Rosary. Goldberg frames the piece around Obama’s August 2013 decision not…

As Bernie Sanders’s campaign gained momentum last summer, we quoted from The Nation’s coverage of Robert La Follette’s Progressive Party candidacy in 1924. He would “raise a standard of revolt to which honest men may repair,” the editors wrote. Consider now an editorial published that November, after it became clear La Follette wouldn’t win: “The campaign has aroused in the breasts of millions the hope and the belief that a new and a clean weapon is to be forged by which they may control their destinies and those of the country. Any disappointment of these hopes would further increase abstention from political life, spread widely a contaminating cynicism, arm the extremists, and drive into deeper despair the hundreds of thousands who are now plunged into economic misery and see no…

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Can voting be a radical act? For Bernie Sanders supporters, the answer is yes. After decades of being told that socialism is unthinkable, single-payer healthcare impossible, and corporate domination inevitable, here is a candidate who has not only dared to shout “Enough is enough!” but who drew yuuuge crowds, raised millions of dollars from small donors, and actually started winning primaries. From New Hampshire to Minnesota, from Colorado to Michigan, the Sanders campaign stunned pollsters, defied expectations, and lifted the hopes of millions of voters. Then came Illinois and Ohio, and suddenly his path to the Democratic Party’s nomination, always narrow, began to look whisker-thin. Illinois, where his campaign hoped to profit from dissatisfaction with Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a longtime Clinton ally, instead saw urban voters splitting their tickets:…

The left needs to stop laughing and start preparing for the likely Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump. Trump appeals to voters that the Democrats will need and want in the general election because he speaks to their anxieties, especially around jobs. And even if his campaign implodes, leading to a Democratic blowout, we should be concerned about Trumpism without Trump: the set of economic arguments that will remain part of the political landscape for the foreseeable future. It’s been a difficult 21st century for American workers. Median wages are down 7 percent since 2000, while unemployment has averaged over 6 percent. Trump’s plan is to blame immigration in order to play on the anxieties of white Americans. But this is just a distraction. The effects of immigration, positive and negative,…

Trump possesses a remarkable ability to dominate the news cycle not just through his presence but, as Patricia Williams describes at right, through his absences. In January, Trump declined to participate in the last GOP debate before the Iowa caucuses, calling Fox News moderator Megyn Kelly “very biased” and declaring himself “not a big fan of hers at all.“ His absence resulted in the second-lowest viewership for a GOP debate to that point. About a third of #GOPDebate activity on Twitter was about Trump, according to the socialmedia site. “I kind of miss Donald Trump,” said Jeb Bush from the stage. “I wish he were here.” On March 16, Trump announced that he would not be participating in Fox’s next presidential debate, prompting John Kasich to drop out as well.…

GLOBAL WARMING IS, IN THE END, NOT ABOUT THE NOISY POLITICAL BATTLES HERE ON THE PLANET’S surface. It actually happens in constant, silent interactions in the atmosphere, where the molecular structure of certain gases traps heat that would otherwise radiate back out to space. If you get the chemistry wrong, it doesn’t matter how many landmark climate agreements you sign or how many speeches you give. And it appears the United States may have gotten the chemistry wrong. Really wrong. There’s one greenhouse gas everyone knows about: carbon dioxide, which is what you get when you burn fossil fuels. We talk about a “price on carbon” or argue about a carbon tax; our leaders boast about modest “carbon reductions.” But in the last few weeks, CO2’s nasty little brother has…

Yes, they had been brave in the face of it. The Geiger counter at navel-gazing. Down here, Earth vespers nothing but its tinfoil sermon. How to Survive These Extraordinary Days. Particle angels and lost radio stations teach you how to read your self. I sink like a pinprick through that Sunday hymnal, and scour the worlds for proof of us. Sputnik in the news. Mother in her vestal suit, clutching the whimpering canine, both of them orphans, inscrutable. Stray smiles emerging. Did I imagine it? The moon between the pews, searching for a tuppence, the milky congregation gone. Her voice hanging its white frequency in my ear. Gamma radiating some kind of fractal the dark growing older between us. Each day mute in its numbness. We learned too well this…

19 Number of years Merrick Garland has served on the DC District Court of Appeals 76–23 Margin by which Garland won his nomination to the DC Circuit Court in 1997 63 Garland’s age, making him the oldest nominee since Lewis Powell in 1971 “He is not only a fine nominee, but is as good as Republicans can expect from this administration. In fact, I would place him at the top of the list.” Senator Orrin Hatch (R) in 1997, supporting Garland’s appointment to the DC Circuit Court by President Bill Clinton…

On the Sunday talk shows during the run-up to the Iraq War, Dick Cheney twice invoked Jeffrey Goldberg’s infamous New Yorker article, “The Great Terror,” on Saddam Hussein’s purported links to Al Qaeda. Goldberg long ago acknowledged that he got Iraq wrong, but he nevertheless found the war “impossible to denounce.” Since then, Goldberg has been noticeably coy on a number of subjects. In 2012, he shared that he wouldn’t comment on the Iran nuclear talks because “I don’t think anything will come of them.” Same with Peter Beinart’s book critiquing the American Jewish establishment for its failure on Israel (“I’m not that interested in debating Peter’s new book”), and with one of Washington’s most influential foreign-policy lobbies (“I try to be careful these days not to be overly critical…

The Republican debate scheduled for the week of March 21 was canceled at the last minute because Donald Trump decided not to participate, invoking a prior engagement: “I’m doing a major speech in front of a very important group of people…that night” (the general electorate being not so important, one is left to suppose). Trump’s condescending engagement with the process has apparently run its course: “I think we’ve had enough debates. When Trump canceled, John Kasich did too. That left only Ted Cruz, so Fox News pulled out, citing the impossibility of debate in the form of soliloquy; the network wasn’t going to risk airtime for the sad sound of one hand clapping. But frankly, the Republican debates had become a one-man show long ago. Kasich’s decision was probably right:…

THE LIBRARIAN WAS NONDESCRIPT IN THE WAY THAT EVERYONE standing behind a counter is, probably in her 30s, with straight, fox-colored hair. When she took my stack of books, I noticed the way her sweater draped over a conspicuous melon-shaped belly, and I felt a tug in my chest and warmth rise in my stomach. It took a moment to recognize this sensation as envy. Then came another feeling: shock. I had never been jealous of any woman for carrying what looked like an uncomfortable load, or for what would come next: the messy, In my late 20s and early 30s, I was terrified of becoming the sort of woman who was “baby crazy,” afraid motherhood would circumscribe my life. I politely admired but didn’t gush over my friends’ new…

ACROSS 8 Backward cry of disdain at a longtime Cuban dance (8) 9 On the radio, happy beat from Scotland (6) 10 Vow loyalty, initially, for false god (4) 11 A tall nurse is cracked up by a comic actor (4,6) 12 In the sound (a body of water), halting to assert a right (3,5) 15 Emergency responder beginning to investigate powerful Italian family (6) 17 Heads of lettuce often appear nice in advance (4) 18 Musical ensemble from Orange County at the lunar New Year (5) 19 Frenchman’s good name in former European capital (4) 20 Takeoff, like one-tenth of 7 (6) 21 Communist leader exploits the thing to take occupancy temporarily (5-3) 23 Pays heed to scrambled laser, outside trial runs (10) 26 Greeting dog out loud (4)…