Indholdsfortegnelse for September 2024 i The Nation

THE FAILED CAMPAIGN TO SAVE NICOLA SACCO AND Bartolomeo Vanzetti—the Italian immigrants and anarchists who were executed in 1927 for a bank robbery and murder they didn’t commit—prompted John Dos Passos to lament, in his novel The Big Money, that “our nation has been beaten by strangers who have bought the laws and fenced off the meadows and cut down the woods for pulp and turned our pleasant cities into slums and sweated the wealth out of our people and when they want to they hire the executioner to throw the switch.” In his impotence and rage, Dos Passos came to recognize a deep political truth: We are not all in this together. Not in the America of the radical-hunting Palmer Raids, or in the “return to normalcy” promised by…

IN AN INTERVIEW THIS SUMMER, VICE PRESIDENTIAL candidate Tim Walz made the sort of blunt statement about poverty that has long eluded his fellow Democrats. “People are poor because they don’t have money,” Walz told Pod Save America, rattling off a long list of what he called “chain reactions” for children in America, including low performance in school. That vision is at the heart of the Harris-Walz populist economic agenda, but it also casts the education policy of a Harris-Walz administration as a means of supporting kids and families. This contrasts sharply not just with Republicans but also with previous Democratic administrations. From the recently proposed $6,000 credit to support newborns in their first year of life to a universal school meals policy to provide every child with free breakfast…

THE COMPLETION IN 1869 OF THE SUEZ CANAL, ONE OF the great engineering feats in human history, filled Walt Whitman with wonder not only at the scientific accomplishment, but also the cultural and spiritual possibilities that he saw the canal opening up. For Whitman, the canal presaged not just more colonial trade but something more hopeful: the birth of a new global culture that would bring the Americas and Europe closer to Africa and Asia for a spiritual exchange among equals, one that would also deepen personal connections between the peoples of the world. Whitman gave expression to these hopes in his poem “A Passage to India” (1871), where the great rhapsodist of democracy foresaw The earth to be spann’d, connected by network,The races, neighbors, to marry and be given…

Rather than accept the narrow parameters of existing US politics, Bernie Sanders has always believed that ordinary people can change those parameters. His legendary persistence paid off during the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns, when he showed that his vision of economic and social justice had a mass base in the United States. I met with the Vermont senator at his office in Washington, DC, on July 10 to discuss his political past, the lessons from his two campaigns, and his advice for a new generation of organizers. SUNKARA: As a lifelong independent, were you hesitant about running in a Democratic primary? And more broadly, what were your goals and expectations for the campaign? SANDERS: Look, the Democratic Party is a corporate-dominated party which was increasingly moving to the right…

I AM LUJAYN, A 14-YEAR-OLD GIRL WHO HAS survived many wars in Gaza, though this is the worst one I have ever experienced. In the last week of May, my family and I had to leave the place where we were living after the occupation forces threatened to invade Rafah. It was the ninth time we’d had to move since October. At the beginning of this war, we were bombed out of our beautiful home in Gaza City, which was destroyed. Ever since then, we have been displaced to different houses, makeshift shelters, and even tents in Khan Younis, Rafah, Deir al Balah, and Al Bureij. This time, we tried to find a place that’s safer than the so-called safe zones, which were in the same areas where the occupation…

I CONTACTED JANE MCALEVEY FOR A PROFILE IN THE NEW Yorker in March 2023, just a few days before she celebrated the publication of her fourth book and her latest triumph over what would ultimately prove to be a fatal blood cancer. Jane was enthusiastic, even generous, about the prospect of a near-stranger probing her life in order to put facets of it on public display. “Between the Chicago mayor’s race and the UAW, UPS fight, there’s so much potential for good right now,” she wrote to me when I first raised the idea with her. “I think this new book, probably my last though I did have a plan for one more—on power—lands at a very good time.” Almost immediately, she offered me contact information for her family, friends, and…

HOW DID THIS HAPPEN? HOW DID DEMOCRATS DO THE RIGHT THING—ACTUALLY, one right thing after another? As his reelection bid became increasingly untenable, President Joe Biden ended his campaign; moments later, he endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as the new presidential nominee. Just two weeks after that, she picked the popular former high school teacher/football coach/all-around fun dad, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, as her running mate, to acclaim from across the Democratic spectrum. And perhaps most consequential of all, Democratic voters around the country united, almost ecstatically, behind Harris and Walz, showing up to their rallies in numbers usually reserved for pop stars, and putting Harris above Donald Trump in several swing-state polls. For a party that was facing the very real possibility of a landslide loss to Trump, the…

AS THE UNITED KINGDOM COMES TO GRIPS WITH A recent surge in far-right, anti-immigrant violence, a troubling pattern has come into view. Many of the 23 towns and cities besieged by riots, which broke out after a devastating knife attack at a children’s dance class in Southport, have three important things in common, a Financial Times analysis of UK Home Office data suggests. Liverpool, Hartlepool, Middlesbrough, Blackpool, Hull, Blackburn, and Manchester—all of which were flooded by rioters who looted, lit fires, launched projectiles at police, and attacked Muslims, asylum seekers, and people of color—are among the 10 poorest places in Britain, and several others, including Southport, are among the top 20. These areas are also home to large populations of asylum seekers, thanks to a cost-saving Tory policy that turned cheap…

IN 2017, I (ANTHONY) WAS INVITED TO OBERLIN College to debate JD Vance, the recently famous author of Hillbilly Elegy. I came to the event loaded for bear: Like most Appalachians I knew, I objected to the simplistic conclusions he had drawn in the book, often couched in stereotypes of the region’s people and culture. Vance’s memoir took a leap from his personal experience to inform the non-Appalachian world that the roots of the region’s problems lay not in a century of extractive industries, absentee land ownership, or disinvestment. Rather, the problem was a dysfunctional culture—and lazy people on the dole. Having lived and worked in Appalachia for 40 years, I was eager and, I thought, well prepared to unravel Vance’s arguments. But once the debate got under way, I…

On a cloudy Friday morning in mid-June, dozens of members of the Chinook Indian Nation gathered for their yearly First Salmon Ceremony at Tansy Point, at the mouth of the Columbia River in Oregon. As part of the celebration, this Indigenous nation, which is unrecognized by the federal government, honors its fishermen as well as its connection with the land. Tribes that are federally recognized can access federal funds to protect their legacies. Without those resources, many tribes are trapped in a Catch-22: The funding that would help them maintain their archives hinges on a preservation effort that many unrecognized tribes need federal resources to carry out. To read the full essay, go to TheNation.com. This story was published in partnership with The Margin. The reporting for this story has…

ON APRIL 1, 1933, THE DAY OF THE NAZI boycott of Jewish businesses, my father, Wolfgang Yourgrau, then 24 years old, was attacked by a group of storm troopers in a Berlin shop. He fought back furiously (he was a university boxer) but was badly beaten. Through almost grotesque luck, he managed to recover from his injuries and avoid arrest—hiding out at a gynecological sanatorium for Nazi ladies run by an old girlfriend. After more furtive weeks in Berlin, my father, an assimilated Jew and a vocal anti-fascist who would later become an internationally known physicist and philosopher, left Germany and the collapsed Weimar Republic on a forged passport. From 1934 to 1948, he found refuge in Palestine under the British Mandate—not as a Zionist but as a political exile.…

IN A 1974 ESSAY ON THE POETRY OF LUIS de Gongora, the high priest of the Spanish Baroque, the Cuban novelist Severo Sarduy coined the concept of la metáfora al cuadrado—metaphor squared, or metaphor to the second power. Writing in a period of imperial decline, Sarduy explained, Gongora turned metaphors on their head, hoping to make them new and find vitality in an era of attenuated exhaustion. Where a lesser poet might write that “water is crystal,” Gongora would instead write that “crystal is water.” Looking for his materials in the “eroded, already gnawed-on terrain” of a flagging Spanish empire, he had to refashion the conventional and cliched into the strange and unfamiliar, even the nonsensical. The result, Sarduy noted, was that Gongora unleashed a “geometric multiplication of metaphor”: His…

Something is always broken in the house—The dryer vent, the smoke alarm, the range,A glue trap with a not-quite-murdered mouse,The coffee pot, a bulb that needs a change.I right some wrongs, and others I put off.I clean, I exercise, I take a nap.The kids need picking up. One has a cough,The other watches TV in my lap.We’re out of pita bread, we’re out of soap.I might walk to the market, I might not.Bedtime grows later. There is always hopeFor sex if we’re not tired. We’re tired a lot.My wife works hard. I do the best I can.No one who looks at me can see a man.…

WHEN KAMALA HARRIS CHOSE MINNESOTA GOVERNOR Tim Walz to be her running mate, many progressives were overjoyed. Beyond their general enthusiasm about Walz, his selection was seen as proof of the strength of their campaign to block Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro from the ticket. And given that the anti-Shapiro push was grounded in opposition to his views on Israel and Palestine in general and the genocide in Gaza in particular, progressives took Walz’s elevation as a sign that Harris didn’t want to overtly antagonize the pro-Palestine movement—a calculation that she almost certainly would not have made if not for the past 11 months of activism. Behind the scenes, some Democrats also breathed a sigh of relief. As a strategist close to the Harris camp told NBC News, “Bringing Gaza back…

ON JULY 6, SONYA MASSEY WAS SHOT AND KILLED IN her home in Sangamon County, Illinois, by Sheriff’s Department Deputy Sean Grayson, after she had called 911 to report a possible prowler outside her house. Fifteen days after Massey’s killing, President Joe Biden announced his decision to bow out of the 2024 presidential race and throw his weight behind Vice President Kamala Harris as his replacement at the top of the Democratic ticket. The juxtaposition of these two moments is a rhetorical device, of course, but it is one that can shed some light on significant features of our current political situation, particularly regarding the imminent threat of an authoritarian putsch and what will be required to turn it back. The fact that these two Black women’s lives—and concerns, no…

$1.7T The total amount of student loan debt in the United States $84K The average amount held by people with a master’s degree $125K The average amount held by people with a PhD $168B The amount of student loan debt that President Biden has canceled since he took office 40% The potential increase in Black Americans’ wealth if all student loan debt were forgiven 15.2M The number of undergraduates enrolled in college for the 2023–24 academic year 29% The proportion of students who said getting a four-year degree is not worth the cost…

When the first issue of The Nation rolled off the presses in 1865, Abraham Lincoln’s body had been laid in the ground only weeks earlier. For years, the country remained in the grim shadow cast by the president’s assassination. And then it happened again—and again. In 1881, James Garfield became the second president to be killed in office, shot by a jilted job-seeker who ambushed him at a Washington train station. The Nation noted an important contrast: Whereas the bullet fired at Lincoln’s head was “the last shot of the civil war,” coming as “men’s pulses were still throbbing with the hates and fears and hopes and sorrows of the struggle through which the country had just passed,” Garfield’s senseless slaying in a time of peace brought only “sympathy and…

FIVE PATIENTS SIT ON MAUVE-AND-GRAY CHAIRS IN the waiting room at the Planned Parenthood health center in Sarasota, Florida, waiting to be sorted under the cruel math of the state’s six-week abortion ban. Some are already too late to terminate their pregnancies. Some are just in time. Until the ultrasound probe touches their bellies, they won’t know for sure. Two friends lean toward each other, chatting in Spanish, while a woman with a sunflower tattoo rests her head on her partner’s shoulder. A young woman in gray sweatpants comes back into the waiting room, gives her boyfriend a tight smile, and nods. They’ve made it. Just minutes later, another woman wearing purple Crocs comes out crying and texting frantically. She hasn’t. Of the 25 women who come to the clinic…

IN FEBRUARY 2022, DAMON JONES, THEN 23, WAS PULLED over while he was driving in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. The officers found a firearm in his car and took him to jail. Jones was charged with two weapons violations. A judge set his bond at $25,000, which Jones was able to meet after his family paid a nonrefundable deposit to a bail agent and his girlfriend offered her house as collateral. He was released later that day to fight the gun charges from home. But two days later, police swarmed his girlfriend’s house and arrested a confused Jones for a second time. Although he’d already met bail and been released, he was booked back into Allegheny County Jail (ACJ), a notorious and sometimes deadly facility in Pittsburgh. More than two years…

IN THE CHILLING SPEECH HE GIVES AT THE END OF THE film Margin Call, Jeremy Irons says that no one should say they believe in equality, because no one really thinks it exists: The very idea camouflages the endurance of hierarchy in an essentially unchanging form. “It’s certainly no different today than it’s ever been,” he explains to an underling. “There have always been and there always will be the same percentage of winners and losers…. Yeah, there may be more of us than there’s ever been, but the percentages? They stay exactly the same.” For many others, the response to the 2008 financial crisis was very different from Irons’s cynical response. The crisis led to more consciousness and criticism of inequality than had been seen in the past 50…

GARTH GREENWELL WAS BORN AND RAISED IN LOUISVILLE, Kentucky; spent his high school and university years in Michigan, Missouri, New York, and Massachusetts; and has lived in the United States for the past decade, during which time he has become celebrated for his sensuous, searching novels and short stories. Yet in the minds of his readers, Greenwell’s narrators have always lived abroad. His previous two books, What Belongs to You and Cleanness, were told from the perspective of a gay man with roughly the same biography as Greenwell who teaches poetry to high school students in Sofia, Bulgaria, as the author did for a few years between earning graduate degrees. Life in Sofia affords Greenwell’s protagonists a certain liberty: While Bulgaria is their chosen home, they remain relatively unfettered by…