Innehållsförteckning för February 29, 2016 från The Nation

@thenation.com Hunger Pains Red alert! Call IT security immediately! The Nation has been hacked by right-wingers! In the January 25 issue, they slipped in a vicious parody of left-wing craziness called “Asking for a Friend,” in which someone posing as a socialist condones the theft of private property as long as the victim meets certain politically incorrect criteria. This hit piece makes it look as if Democrats and socialists have no respect for the rule of law and utterly lack ethical standards and moral values. Please be vigilant and do not allow this kind of dirty trick to appear in your pages again. ERIC SAUND SAN CARLOS, CALIF. I was flabbergasted and horrified to read in Liza Featherstone’s advice for “Hungry but Principled” words to the effect that shoplifting doesn’t…

The Obama administration has just recklessly escalated its military confrontation with Russia. The Pentagon’s announcement that it will more than quadruple military spending on the US-NATO forces in countries on or near Russia’s borders pushes the new Cold War toward actual war—possibly even a nuclear one. The move is unprecedented in modern times. With the exception of Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, Western military power has never been positioned so close to Russia. The Obama administration’s decision is Russian roulette Washington-style, making the new Cold War even more dangerous than the preceding one. Russia will certainly react, probably by moving more of its own heavy weapons, including advanced missiles, to its Western borders, possibly along with a number of tactical nuclear weapons. Indeed, a new and more dangerous…

Writing near the turn of the 20th century, the great American scholar, memoirist, and novelist Henry Adams observed that politics has “always been the systematic organization of hatreds.” The robber baron Jay Gould took this to heart when he explained his own theory of staying on top: “pay one half of the working class to kill the other half.” If you think you’re hearing echoes of our own time in the politics of the Gilded Age, you’re right. In his new book The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics, the historian Jefferson Cowie observes: “The Republicans sought to retain the power of the native-born Protestants, support industry, and [lead the battle] against a raft of ‘intruders.’” Republican Congressman Fred S. Purnell said he found “little…

Three years ago, as the Republican-led House of Representatives engineered a brief government shutdown, Congressman Marlin Stutzman (R-IN) explained the strategy underpinning the protest. “We have to get something out of this,” he said. “And I don’t know what that even is.” The shutdown wasn’t a tactic so much as a tantrum, an act of collective petulance posing as politics—inexplicable to the outside world, incoherent in its aims, and incandescent in its rage. The bizarre circus that the GOP presidential primary has become is not a freak occurrence. Regardless of the eventual nominee, the rise of Donald Trump (“I would bomb the shit out of [ISIS]”), the ascent of Ted Cruz (“To God be the glory”), and the endurance of Ben Carson (“Putin is a one-horse country: oil and energy”)…

THE ENTHUSIASTIC BUT LARGELY WHITE CROWDS SURrounding Bernie Sanders suggest he has a race problem. No Democratic presidential candidate has won a majority among white voters in 50 years, so progressives are understandably excited about his appeal to working-class whites, the lost Reagan Democrats. But what of the Obama Democrats, the multiracial coalition that forms the party’s present and the country’s future? Whether we can combine these constituencies poses a fundamental challenge for the left. Can progressives finally come together around a unifying message that resonates with whites on class, people of color on race, and the 99 percent on both? We emphatically say yes. But first, the left must challenge our own orthodoxy, which defines racism as something that solely victimizes people of color. The truth is, a middle…

In cartoon worlds, if you’re struck on the head the small birds that encircle your scalp are known as a “halo” or “circling birdies”—a cartoonist’s motif or trope or idiom. Trope is misused in the context and idiom bent to fit the warped view the sufferer is perceiving. At the top of the block late this afternoon, four or five yellow- rumped thornbills, electric between lucerne and eucalypts, suddenly flocked about my head and began circling, or encircling—making me dizzy with long shadows pulling my feet out from beneath me, their shattering tiny glass voices enticing yet repellent. I thought of Hartnett’s “Necklace of Wrens” which I could only partially recollect and even now can’t quite configure, while realising it had something to do with the order of words, and…

On February 9, America felt the earth move. It wasn’t just that, for the first time in our nation’s history, a socialist candidate actually won a presidential primary (the first Jew, too, for that matter). It was also the scale of that victory. Behind by double digits in the summer, Senator Bernie Sanders took on the most formidable machine in modern American politics and won the New Hampshire Democratic primary by more than 21 points. And while Hillary Clinton and the corporate media began discounting the state’s significance from the moment Sanders began to lead, New Hampshire was in no sense a state that Clinton’s campaign wrote off. The state that made Bill Clinton the “Comeback Kid”—and where Hillary’s own wounded candidacy got its second wind in 2008—was too important…

There was a time, way back in the last century, when the Super Bowl was a guaranteed clunker: a preordained blowout where the only reason to tune in would be the ingenious, quirkily creative commercials—stunning examples of the mangled collision of commerce and art. Maybe you had to watch a lopsided 38–9 game, but you got to see Apple leading a revolution in black-and-white against Orwellian subservience. This year’s Super Bowl was a return to that turgid past, with the Denver Broncos beating the Carolina Panthers 24-10, in a contest with enough flags, fumbles, and failed plays to make up a season-highlight package for the 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Yet this year there wasn’t even the saving grace of inventive ads. If you were visiting from another solar system, you’d…

Michelle Alexander’s article in this issue cites W.E.B. Du Bois’s refusal to vote in the 1956 presidential election, an argument that he outlined in these very pages that October. Arguing that “there is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say,” Du Bois denounced the Eisenhower administration as “dominated and directed by wealth and for the accumulation of wealth. It runs smoothly like a well-organized industry and should do so because industry runs it for the benefit of industry. Corporate wealth profits as never before in history. We turn over the national resources to private profit and have few funds left for education, health or housing.” Du Bois’s grim conclusion: “Democracy is dead in the United States. Drop the…

92% Black voters who correctly identified Hillary Clinton in an August 2015 poll 33% Black voters who correctly identified Bernie Sanders in the same poll 21% Black and Latino voters who supported Sanders as of January 2016 71% Black and Latino voters who supported Clinton in the same poll 88% Average support for Democratic presidential and congressional candidates among black voters since 1980 “He has a decades-long track record of fighting for the reforms that he is proposing.” Actor Danny Glover, endorsing Bernie Sanders in The Huffington Post…

Why do we no longer have a majorsocialist party in the United States? The answer is complicated, but the question elides the modest success that American socialism enjoyed in the 20th century. 402,489 Votes cast in favor of Socialist Party of America candidate Eugene V. Debs in the 1904 presidential election—nearly 3 percent of the popular vote 1910 The year that Milwaukee became the first major city to elect a Socialist mayor (Emil Seidel). In the 20th century, at least 100 socialists served as mayors of American cities and towns 6 Number of times that Socialist Party candidate Norman Thomas ran for president. In fact, Thomas ran in every presidential election between 1928 and 1948 118,045 The Socialist Party’s dues-paying members in 1912 36% Americans who said they viewed socialism…

30% may be the most disturbing number of this presidential primary season thus far. It’s the percentage of GOP voters who favor bombing the sultanate of Agrabah, which looks like this: In fact, it’s the fictional kingdom from the Disney movie Aladdin—which is hardly enough to deter the GOP’s most warlike contingent of supporters, who are apparently quite happy to bomb anything with an Arabic-sounding name. Thanks to a deft bit of trolling by the firm Public Policy Polling, we’ve also learned that 44% of Democrats support accepting refugees from this nonexistent land of genies, shape-shifters, and flying carpets into the United States.…

HILLARY CLINTON LOVES BLACK PEOPLE. AND BLACK people love Hillary—or so it seems. Black politicians have lined up in droves to endorse her, eager to prove their loyalty to the Clintons in the hopes that their faithfulness will be remembered and rewarded. Black pastors are opening their church doors, and the Clintons are making themselves comfortably at home once again, engaging effortlessly in all the usual rituals associated with “courting the black vote,” a pursuit that typically begins and ends with Democratic politicians making black people feel liked and taken seriously. Doing something concrete to improve the conditions under which most black people live is generally not required. Hillary is looking to gain momentum on the campaign trail as the primaries move out of Iowa and New Hampshire and into…

Lessons in Censorship How Schools and the Courts Subvert Students’ First Amendment Rights. By Catherine J. Ross. Harvard. 356 pp. $39.95. Whether or not you’re a parent with kids in school, you’ve probably heard stories like these. A public-school student refuses to salute the flag on the grounds that her religion forbids it. A 15-year-old wears an armband to class to protest war. Another makes a sexually suggestive speech to support a friend’s student-government election campaign. At a school-sponsored off-campus event, a boy wears a T-shirt that seems to support drug use; student editors prepare to run stories in the school newspaper about the potentially controversial topics of teenage pregnancy and divorce; a girl mutters an insult under her breath that is overheard by a teacher who takes offense; friends…

What Belongs to You By Garth Greenwell. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 194 pp. $23. The word “shame” occurs frequently in What Belongs to You, Garth Greenwell’s exquisite first novel, and it is always related to desire. His narrator is gay, which causes him shame as a child; later he’s ashamed of the places—public toilets and other cruising grounds—where he goes to look for sex. It’s in one of these places, the bathrooms of Bulgaria’s National Palace of Culture in Sofia, where he meets a young hustler named Mitko, and it’s the peculiar, lopsided relationship between them, suffused with desire and shame, that is the subject of the book. As might be expected, Mitko is rough, from a poor background. He’s in his early 20s, has a broken front tooth, is…