Innehållsförteckning för May 9-16, 2016 från The Nation

@thenation.com Too Much Trump! I suspect I will be but one among many of your readers choosing to comment on the ironies apparent in the March 28/April 4 double issue. On page 3, the editorial by John Nichols, “Trumped by the Media,” complains about too much Trump (which there certainly is) by talking about him. On page 5, there are two quotes featuring T. ( I hate using his name) plus a photo, along with an article by Eric Alterman on… you guessed it. Then a refreshing and too-short break until page 11, which features yet another photo of T., this time kissing a child (who is, as he or she should be, crying). Fortunately, T. then disappears ( I think) and the reader can breathe again. This evil man…

$20.5M Amount raised by Hillary Clinton in New York in individual contributions $1.5M Amount raised by Bernie San-ders in New York in individual contributions $353K Cost (for two) to sit at the head of the table with George and Amal Clooney at a San Francisco fund-raiser for Clinton days before the New York primary “We had some protesters last night… and they’re right to protest, they’re absolutely right—it is an obscene amount of money.” George Clooney, in response to the people who criticized the ticket prices at events he cohosted in California…

North Carolina could do a lot of things to show that it takes male violence against women seriously. It could process the rape kits sitting on dusty shelves, for starters; the state doesn’t even require law enforcement to track how many there are. (In Fayetteville, the police chief revealed with some chagrin last year that the department had destroyed 333 kits collected before 2008 in order to make space in its evidence room.) How pathetic is it that Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. (a damn Yankee) and the big, bad federal government had to send funds to help process the backlog? What ever happened to state sovereignty? North Carolina could also pass a law declaring that one can withdraw consent to sex once sex has begun. Right now,…

“I don’t know. What do I know about it? All I know is what’s on the Internet,” announced Donald Trump on Meet the Press last month. He was attempting to excuse his false assertion that a protester at one of his rallies “had ties to ISIS.” It was certainly a startling assertion, at least to me, bookish woman of the writerly profession that I am. Of course, everything that man says startles me—but this time it made me think about the general status of knowing, knowledge, and its online production. The Internet is hardly the first technology of information transmission to be suspect. In Phaedrus, Plato described the Egyptian king Thamus and his suspicion of the written word. Thamus feared that writing was untrustworthy because it “will create forgetfulness in…

IN MARCH 2012, NEARLY A MONTH AFTER George Zimmerman killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, hundreds of high-school students in Miami-Dade and Broward counties staged walkouts to protest the fact that Zimmerman hadn’t been arrested on any charges. A group of current and former Florida college activists knew that they had to do something too. During a series of conference calls, Umi Selah (then known as Phillip Agnew) and others in the group planned a 40-mile march from Daytona Beach to the headquarters of the Sanford Police Department—40 miles symbolizing the 40 days that Zimmerman had remained free. On Good Friday, 50 people set off for Sanford. The march culminated in a five-hour blockade of the Sanford PD’s doors on Easter Monday. The marchers demanded Zimmerman’s arrest and the…

Despite winning 49 New York counties to Hillary Clinton’s 13, and more votes in the state than Donald Trump and John Kasich combined, Bernie Sanders is not going to be the next president of the United States. For those of us who really thought he might, his defeat here hits especially hard. The temptation to abandon ourselves to recrimination and despair will be strong. Yet it must be resisted. For one thing, Sanders himself fights on, in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Oregon, and California: states where he can continue to inspire a movement and upend the “pragmatic incrementalism” that marks the limits of conventional politics. It also makes no sense to walk away in the middle of a debate that Sanders is winning on every issue, from a $15 minimum wage to…

The United States lags behind the rest of the world in providing paid family leave. In a study of 185 countries, only two besides the United States failed to ensure that new mothers get paid time off from work; the United States was also one of very few countries that doesn’t extend paid leave to fathers. Some US states, however, are experimenting with ways to catch up with the rest of the globe: Four of them, now including New York, guarantee residents paid leave. But some forms of paid leave are better than others at fighting gender inequality. When done right, parental leave can do a lot to help working women. It gives them a much-needed break to recover, adjust, and bond when a new child arrives. For heterosexual couples,…

Today’s movement for black lives is the latest chapter in a struggle against racist oppression that has occupied black Americans since the country’s founding. In this issue, Dani McClain explores how social media shapes perceptions of leadership in the movement (page 18). Below, she recommends five books about organizing the struggle, yesterday and today. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression by Robin D.G. Kelley University of North Carolina Press, 2015 Robin D.G. Kelley’s account of Alabama sharecroppers in the 1930s and 1940s describes the Communist Party’s vision for the United States, revealing a left political program that transcends the Cold War rhetoric with which many of us heard it described as kids. Kelley brings Hosea Hudson and his comrades alive to show how black rural Southern workers…

1866 In April of 1866, just over 150 years ago, John Richard Dennett filed the last of his dispatches for The Nation on “The South as It Is,” the 36-part series that helped make the new publication’s name. After traveling through Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana, reporting on the uncertain aftermath of the Civil War and emancipation, Dennett offered a few observations of what he had seen. Whites, he wrote, “were but little inclined to accept what may be called the natural results of the war…. The people were sorry for nothing but their ill-success.” The South’s racism was effectively its only possession to survive the war intact. “They were very ready to hear and repeat any story made against the freedmen,” Dennett wrote of the white people…

A BEAUTIFUL THING IS HAPPENING: ADVOCATES FOR RACIAL JUSTICE and for environmental protection—too often, movements quite distant from each other—are coming together in a new way. One can see it in the campaign of National People’s Action and the Climate Justice Alliance for a just and locally empowering transition to clean energy; in the New Economy Coalition’s inclusive membership and commitment to frontline communities; and in the projects of the Evergreen Cooperatives, in inner-city Cleveland. These new efforts (may they multiply!) are grounded on a strong foundation. When one explores the roots of both the environmental and civil-rights movements, one finds a strikingly similar radical critique. Both movements have called for a deep restructuring of society and the economy; in both cases, that call was based on an affirmation of…

Over the past 50 years, the philosopher who’s played the most significant role in the cultural life of the United States isn’t Richard Rorty, Jerry Fodor, or Martha Nussbaum, but rather Immanuel Kant. This is largely because of his impact on postwar trends in moral philosophy. Kant’s influence during this period coincided with the rise of ethics as a dominant concern in political theory. John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, and Thomas Nagel are among the most prominent examples of this widespread tendency. It is possible to exaggerate the novelty of this development; after all, questions of morality have always had a place in reflective debate about politics. Yet the strict subordination of politics to morals in recent decades does represent some kind of departure, or at least a return to a…

ACROSS 1 & 27 Traitor goes before that woman sooner (6) 3 Mercury is alive (11) 9 Nobel Prize–winning writer reviewed Fleming and Newman (7) 10 Foster child, returning to have dinner, comes to a halt (5,2) 11 Apple overhauled iCloud (i.e., server) at first (6,9) 12 Hide mysteriously around large city (5) 14 Vietnamese borders engulfed in a second campaign (8) 17 Directions from Arizona huts? I’m disoriented (8) 18 Flurry of half-vitality (5) 20 Dog running back in Swiss city’s sports field (8,7) 24 Sue, when unguarded, is like some gems (4-3) 25 Mom foolishly invested in most of Garbo’s ring (7) 26 Navy errs, in a bizarre occasion that will help complete three of the Across clues (11) 27 See 1 DOWN 1 Deserter’s grenade exploding near…

The United States has routinely intervened in Latin America, overthrowing left-wing governments and propping up right-wing dictators. President Obama pressed a reset button of sorts in March when he traveled to Argentina on the 40th anniversary of the military coup that ushered in the country’s “dirty war,” in which up to 30,000 civilians were murdered in the name of fighting communism. Obama said, “We’ve been slow to speak out for human rights, and that was the case here.” That failure to “speak out” looks benign in contrast to the active role that Washington played in El Salvador’s dirty war in the 1980s, which pitted a right-wing government against Marxist guerrillas. The United States sent military advisers to assist Salvadoran security forces, as well as hundreds of millions of dollars in…

Republican legislators aren’t exactly known for their enlightened approach to gender-based violence—in fact, 160 GOP lawmakers voted against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act in 2013. But now they claim that sexual assaults would increase if trans people were allowed to use bathrooms that align with their gender identity. In this, Republican lawmakers have achieved the impressive feat of exploiting the survivors of sexual assault and demonizing gender-nonconforming people, all in one repellent stroke. 9 states have active bills to ban trans folks from using public bathrooms that fit with their gender identity. 3 Republican officials in recent years have been arrested for bathroom harassment, whereas 0 trans people have. But luckily, 224 cities and counties prohibit discrimination based on gender identity.…

On March 23, the University of California’s Board of Regents approved a report that outlined “Principles Against Intolerance”—but, notably, not before amending its language, which conflated anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism, and would have condemned anti-Zionist speech in the UC system. The original report, drafted by a Regents Working Group, came amid outside pressure to censor speech critical of Israel. Activists from Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace feared that it would threaten their organizing on campus. The report previously stated that “Anti-Semitism, Anti-Zionism and other forms of discrimination have no place at the University of California,” thereby conflating bigotry against Jewish people and culture with opposition to Zionism, a political movement and ideology. Students engaged a cross-section of organizations to protest this language, including unions, legal groups,…