Innehållsförteckning för January 29/February 5, 2018 från The Nation

@thenation.com Turning Texas Blue? Carey McWilliams, the former Nation editor who spent a lifetime studying and advocating for the Spanish-speaking people, is almost certainly having fits over the prediction made by many, including John Nichols [“Building a Blue Texas,” Dec. 18/25], that 2018 will be a year for the Democrats. Back in the early 1970s, we formed La Raza Unida Party to challenge the one-party dictatorship of the Democrats in Texas and in 16 other states plus the District of Columbia. We lasted a decade before we were outlawed by legislation introduced by Democrats making it harder for alternative parties to get ballot access. Since the mid-1990s, we have endured another one-party dictatorship, this time by Republicans, in Texas and much of the country. Why? For one thing, thousands of…

Marc Raskin, who died on December 24, was a valued friend of this magazine, to which he contributed, over many years, articles, ideas, inspiration, and wise counsel. “Marc mentored and inspired many, and touched us with his brilliance, humanity, and humor,” said Nation editor and publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel. “He was a true radical—never dogmatic, always curious, in search of new ideas, new pathways.” Former Nation editor and publisher Victor Navasky, who originally recruited Marc, commented: “It was my honor and privilege to invite Marc to join the Nation editorial board and work with him over the decades. I always learned from him and counted on him to show us the way. He combined a radical intellect with common sense.” One is tempted to dub Marc the left’s premier idea…

In his final speech to his colleagues, Senator Al Franken expressed his concern “that it feels like we’re losing the war for truth. And maybe it’s already lost.” The measure of our defeat may be seen in the fact that we have a president who, according to The Washington Post’s lowball estimate, tells an average of 5.6 falsehoods per day. Lying presidents are nothing new. I coined the term “post-truth presidency” back in October 2004 to refer to the George W. Bush administration. What’s novel about Donald Trump, however, is that he does not lie in pursuit of some larger political goal or to hide a potentially damaging secret. He just likes to lie, often for no discernible reason. But while Trump is a moron in most respects, he is…

Imagine: A real-estate heir with a fake tan and no qualifications invites the viewing public to join him on an unprecedented adventure. He will, he says, drain the swamp in Washington, DC. Over the course of a few short weeks, he selects contestants for his show, prizing style over substance and fealty over independence. Once the work starts, however, he spends much of his time in a gaudy mansion in Florida, where he plays golf, meets with foreign dignitaries, and tweets his angry meltdowns. Contestants are regularly eliminated. He feuds with several nemeses, but the one he hates the most is the one he has known the longest, and the one who nearly stole the spotlight from him. At the end of the first season, he has failed to drain…

Trump’s election didn’t radicalize Tania Unzueta; that came much earlier. In 2001, the then-undocumented teen testified before Congress on behalf of the Dream Act, which would have granted legal status to certain undocumented immigrants who were brought to the country as children and met a strict set of criteria. Today, Unzueta organizes on behalf of all those people who have been excluded from the squeaky-clean Dreamer narrative. As the legal and policy director for Mijente, a national Latino political hub she helped found in 2015, Unzueta is fighting for immigrants who have been criminalized by the police. And she’s doing it in Chicago, where Mayor Rahm Emanuel said earlier this year: “There is no stranger among us. We welcome people.” Mijente is taking on Chicago’s sanctuary-city and gang-database policies, which,…

Poet, essayist, and Yale University professor Claudia Rankine emerged as a somewhat inadvertent hero of the anti-Trump resistance before Trump had even become the Republican nominee. At a rally early on in his campaign, a young black woman, prominently visible behind the candidate, sat reading a book. That book was Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, a sprawling, essayistic poem, published in 2014, about the scourge of racism in African-American life. (“You can’t put the past behind you. It’s buried in you; it’s turned your flesh into its own cupboard,” Rankine wrote.) The woman, 23-year-old Johari Osayi Idusuyi, said she’d attended the rally “with an open mind” but was quickly turned off by the bullying that Trump and the crowd directed toward protesters. The best way to pass the time, she…

Last fall, derek black visited the kennedy school of Government at Harvard University to talk about hate. Derek is the son of Don Black, the founder of Stormfront.org, the oldest and one of the most influential hate sites on the Internet, boasting some 300,000 members, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. The site features vile anti-Semitism—“the Jewish problem” and the alleged Jewish conspiracy to “rule the world” figure prominently—as well as old-school white supremacy, with references to the “Browns and Blacks” flooding the United States and Europe. I joined Derek on a panel to learn more about his father’s teachings and also why he had abandoned them. Derek is a soft-spoken, wide-eyed twentysomething with a round face and a mop of reddish-brown hair. He’s thoughtful, clear and careful in…

From the Bronx to Oxford and Not Quite Back BY NORMAN BIRNBAUM This new memoir from the noted sociologist and Nation editorial board member tells the story of the Cold War through his life on the left, with portraits of Henry Kissinger, Willy Brandt, and Isaiah Berlin. (January 2018) Divining Desire BY LIZA FEATHERSTONE This sweeping history by the Nation contributing writer reveals how focus groups became fixtures of how companies and politicians sell products and messages. (February 2018) Cruel Futures BY CARMEN GIMÉNEZ SMITH The poems in the new collection from The Nation’s poetry co- editor analyze pop culture, explore the lives of women, and sing with beauty and wisdom. (April 2018) A Nation Unmade by War BY TOM ENGELHARDT Engelhardt argues that in the past decade and a…

Gustav Åhr, better known by his stage name Lil Peep, had just turned 21 when he died last November of an overdose of Xanax, the prescription anti-anxiety medication, and fentanyl, a powerful opioid. For some, this sudden end was expected—Åhr never hid the fact that he was a heavy substance abuser, in either his lyrics or his life. Days before he was found dead on his tour bus, he left posts on his Instagram account that alluded to a deep depression. The caption to one photo read: “When I die You’ll love me.” Another was a video that showed him taking unidentified pills, likely Xanax. After the news of Åhr’s death broke, tributes poured in from across the industry; everyone from Juicy J to Alice Glass noted the tragedy of…

As he marks the end of his first year in office, Donald Trump, the self-proclaimed “very stable genius,” stands astride the political world like a cartoon dybbuk, an orange menace of terrifying impulsiveness. With his tweet-spasms spewing venom on adversaries, his reckless fomenting of racial division, his unending lies, and his predilection for vulgar schoolyard taunts, Trump fuels rage and resistance. Already his act is losing whatever appeal it had for his supporters. Even Trump’s closest aides, as Michael Wolff reports in his new book Fire and Fury, doubt that he has the temperament or the capacity to be president. Remarkably, despite a stock market at record heights, unemployment down, wages beginning to rise, low inflation, and ISIS on the run, Trump’s approval ratings remain at record lows. Trump’s erratic…

There are many reasons that the GOP tax overhaul will be unpopular. It increases the national debt by more than $1 trillion, while still raising taxes on millions of people. For most individuals who will see cuts, the benefits are small and temporary, while the savings for corporations are expansive and permanent. Yet what will infuriate people the most is the staggering unfairness of the bill’s many loopholes. What will infuriate people the most is the staggering unfairness of the bill’s many loopholes. The revamped tax code will create a vast and easy game for accountants to play. The newest hide-the-money strategy will be to create a so-called pass-through business—a company whose income is passed through to the owner as profit. As the Brookings Institution’s Adam Looney notes, “People doing…

Since the new year, Americans—or at least those who work in the media—have been ridiculing the denizens of Oregon for being unable or unwilling to pump their own gas. For more than 65 years, the state had barred customers from filling their own cars’ fuel tanks at gas stations, but a law that went into effect on January 1 loosened the prohibition in some counties with fewer than 40,000 people. (New Jersey is now the only state where it’s always illegal to refill your own automobile.) The Oregon legislation won’t affect many people, but content-hungry news sites plucked a few Facebook comments out of context and invented a full-blown self-serve-gas panic. The website Jalopnik, in a typical example, titled its article “Join America In Laughing At Oregonians Freaking Out About…

IT TOOK A MOMENT FOR THE NEWS TO SINK IN, TO FULLY GRASP WHAT had happened on that fateful Tuesday morning. But once I did, I felt like I was drowning. How could I not? The magnitude of the event was as overwhelming as a massive ocean wave, and after the initial blow, I knew immediately that we—Muslim Americans—now had to prepare to be swept away by it. We, like the rest of the United States, had been caught completely off guard, and so many people across the country suddenly seemed afraid for the future. But we Muslim Americans knew enough to assume the worst. Our fears were not abstract. Almost instantly, mosques were vandalized. Muslim parents agonized over their children’s safety at school. Violent assaults increased not only in…

FEMINISM IS BACK, WITH A VENGEANCE, AND YOU CAN THANK Donald Trump for that. No, seriously. The pussy-grabbing scam artist, ignoramus, and vulgarian with zero government experience, who ran on “Lock her up!” and gold-plated racism, won the White House against a former US senator and secretary of state, a woman with many progressive and pro-woman positions who also happened to be sane and the most qualified candidate in living memory—and, adding insult to injury, who got more votes! It was the loudest wake-up call since alarm clocks were invented. Even plenty of women who didn’t like Hillary Clinton could see the problem with a “Hillary Sucks but Not Like Monica” T-shirt. The Trump campaign was like overhearing your co-workers and finding out that, while they might be polite to…

WHY NOW? IN TRYING TO MAKE SENSE OF TRUMP’S EFFECtive use of racism to win the presidency, many have pointed to a long tradition of dog-whistling, reaching back decades. Trump is the nationalization of Nixon’s Southern strategy, the shadow cast forward by Reagan’s welfare queens and George H.W. Bush’s Willie Horton. Writing before the general election, Slate’s Jamelle Bouie linked Trump’s politicized racism to his predecessor’s upending of the racial hierarchy. After the vote, Ta-Nehisi Coates described Trump as the country’s first white president, in that whiteness is a negation of blackness, and Trump’s driving passion seems to be a desire to negate the legitimacy and legacy of Barack Obama, the country’s first African-American president. Coates’s point is profound, especially when read against those moral philosophers who say the right…

WHENEVER SOME NEW MASSACRE IS PERPETRATED IN THIS country, the usual voices say that the tragedy should not be politicized. This response is so inevitable that it can be assumed to produce the desired effect: the tamping down of outrage in deference to the horror of the crime. Their right to sanctimoniousness having been tacitly conceded, these concerned voices add that in such moments of national crisis, we must all come together. There should be no divisiveness, they say, which in practical terms means no assigning of responsibility. Yet the moment of unity and calm deliberation never comes, because there is always a new massacre, or because the horror of these crimes is not of a kind to be diminished by time, or because the implied promise that the problem…

The prototypical member of the resistance may be that nice woman down the street who’d never shown much interest in politics until she was shocked into action by Donald Trump’s election. But there are also those mild-mannered public servants who’d largely worked behind the scenes—until they recognized Trump as a threat to the democracy they had taken for granted under previous administrations, and then threw themselves into the fight to preserve it. Andy Slavitt served as the acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) during the last 21 months of the Obama administration, commuting between Washington, DC, and his home in Minnesota. In the weeks before the 2016 election, he and his wife had been pondering whether they’d take their two boys out of high school…

ACROSS 1 Nine-dimensional fantasy? (7) 5 In reference to a travel requirement, credit card has no backing (3-1-3) 9 Sticky substance found by apostle in cover sheet (9) 10 Bite a cut of lamb containing a piece of mint (5) 11 Sufficient help may hold it back (5) 12 Drone alit, i.e., crashed in disgrace (9) 13 Design style, mostly garish, originally involves as little as possible (zero, potentially) (5,8) 17 1932 play that clues the answer and location of another entry in this puzzle (6,2,5) 21 Government agent is South American man with a great self-image (9) 24 Attracted Romeo in early morning (5) 25 Attach to a horse (5) 26 What you might enjoy at breakfast: yodeling and skiing, perhaps? (5-4) 27 “Radioactive element is hot,” snarled westbound…

President Trump is expected to unveil his infrastructure bill later this month. Here are just a few of the challenges it will have to address: 200 Estimated number of years it would take to fully replace the nation’s drinking-water pipes at the current rate D+ Grade given to the country’s energy infrastructure by the American Society of Civil Engineers; the grid would cost nearly $5 trillion to replace 188M Trips taken every day across structurally deficient bridges in the US; repairing them would cost more than $120 billion $200B Total federal infrastructure spending over the next 10 years that Trump is expected to announce; Democrats have proposed $1 trillion in new investment…

Milton Glaser, the legendary graphic designer behind the “I ♥ NY” logo, has turned his attention to a subject he hates: the presidency of Donald Trump. In December, Glaser debuted a series of three posters in the New York City subway system that seeks to counter Trump’s divisive rhetoric. Glaser produced the posters for “Underground Images,” a campaign by the School of Visual Arts that has graced the city’s subway stations fo Congress Glaser has also responded to the Trump era with a reissue of his 2005 book The Design of Dissent, co-edited with Mirko Ili?, which assembles several decades’ worth of dissident artwork from around the world. Old posters and stickers decrying authoritarian repression in Europe and Bush-era imperialism in the Middle East are now complemented by installations lampooning…

Employees at Motel 6 locations in Washington State handed Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers the personal details of thousands of customers in order to help the federal agency arrest undocumented immigrants, according to a lawsuit filed in January by the state attorney general. Some Motel 6 locations would provide their guest lists to ICE on a “near-daily basis”; ICE officials would circle “Latino-sounding names” that the agency would then target, according to a report in The Washington Post. In one location, the motel allegedly supplied names to ICE on 228 occasions over a 225-day period. The lawsuit follows an investigation by Phoenix New Times last September, which revealed that two Motel 6 locations in Arizona had been alerting ICE to report guests they thought might be undocumented. That article prompted…

People say that this moment of athletic activism started with Colin Kaepernick taking that knee during the national anthem. But as Kaepernick would be the first to acknowledge, it didn’t begin with a knee; it started with the Black Lives Matter movement and the pressing need to stand up to racism and police violence. Just as, today, you can’t talk about the civil-rights movement of the 1950s without talking about Jackie Robinson, or of the 1960s without talking about Muhammad Ali, or of the women’s-liberation movement without talking about Billie Jean King, in future years you won’t be able to talk about this new millennial resistance to racism without talking about Colin Kaepernick. We should also remember that it’s not just what Kaepernick did; it’s what he said. When asked…

Zephyr Teachout doesn’t quit. I sat down with her for a chat on what was probably the worst day of her political life—November 8, 2016. She was about to lose a race in New York’s 19th Congressional District against John Faso, a former lobbyist. She’d run a good campaign in a part of the state where she’d polled well ahead of Andrew Cuomo in 2014. But having billionaires Paul Singer and Robert Mercer donate over $1 million to her opponent’s PAC didn’t help. Though the numbers weren’t encouraging, she kept up a feverish pace of speaking until the polls closed, confident that whatever happened in her own race, Hillary Clinton was about to make history. By the time Teachout gave her own concession speech, even that was looking shaky. An…

When I spoke with Kelly Fowler back in August, the Virginia Beach candidate for the state House of Delegates was on the verge of leaving the race. Depressed by conflicting messages from state Democratic leaders, she didn’t understand the chicken-and-egg approach taken by all the establishment groups: Candidates had to raise a lot of money if they wanted to raise more money, and wasn’t that just making the rich richer? There were 17 candidates running in GOP-held districts that Hillary Clinton carried in 2016. Fowler was one of them, but she didn’t have enough cash even to pay the campaign manager who was set to start the next week. At this crucial moment, Fowler got the help she needed to stay in the race, and she won her seat on…

When Hurricane Maria lashed Puerto Rico in late September, wreaking havoc upon the island, San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz was cast into a familiar role: the local official scrambling to secure aid for her beleaguered constituents. When she wasn’t wading through the capital’s flooded streets and personally guiding residents to safety, she was agitating for a stronger response from the federal government, which was struggling to get food and rescue workers to the commonwealth. After viewing the wreckage, then–acting Secretary for Homeland Security Elaine Duke claimed the disaster was “really a ‘good news’ story in terms of our ability to reach people and the limited number of deaths.” Cruz’s response to Duke, aired on CNN, was unsparing. “This is, damn it, this is not a ‘good news’ story. This…

In 1953, Frank Olson, a bacteriologist employed by the Army Chemical Corps to research biological weapons, fell to his death from the 10th floor of the Statler Hotel in New York City. Olson’s death was ruled a suicide. In 1975, the Rockefeller Commission issued a report detailing abuses by the CIA, including, among other things, experimentation with LSD as part of its MKUltra mind-control studies. Olson, it was revealed, was one of a number of government workers who were surreptitiously drugged, apparently for interrogation purposes. The Rockefeller report charged that Olson’s consumption of LSD contributed to his mental deterioration—he had a nervous breakdown shortly after—and may have led to his suicide. After the report came out the Olson family received an apology from the US government, which was delivered personally…