Innehållsförteckning för August 27/September 3, 2018 från The Nation

If there is one constant to Donald Trump’s presidency, it’s his determination to weaken democratic norms and institutions. Trump and his supporters have attacked the judiciary, threatened to jail political opponents, made false claims about illegal voting, and attempted to redefine the rules regarding presidential accountability. At the core of this assault on democracy is Trump’s unwavering obsession with undermining the media outlets that attempt to hold him to account. Veteran journalist Dan Rather is not being extreme when he says that Trump’s attacks on the press are “straight out of Orwell.” The president is an “authoritarian,” Rather warns, whose “method is to convince people that the only truth is the truth that comes from [him], the ultimate power.” The latest turn in this crusade came after A.G. Sulzberger, the…

When Richard Brummett arrived in Southeast Asia in 1967, he was a true believer in the Vietnam War. But his commanding officer had a penchant for using the unit’s tanks to destroy homes and burn down villages. Then there were the beatings, rapes, and killings of noncombatants by other men in his unit. Brummett says he loaded the munitions that killed 13 people for nothing more than running. Maybe they were enemy snipers; maybe they were just farmers frightened for their lives. In the end, they were dead Vietnamese, so they were chalked up as enemy “kills.” All of this carnage took a toll. Brummett was changed by the war, poisoned by it, obsessed with it. By the time he returned from Vietnam, Brummett was a true believer of a…

Conservation is no longer a “cause”; it is a crisis. Under the impact of a rocketing population, an insatiable spiral of economic expansion, as well as a gargantuan and pitiless technology, the very character of the concern of conservation has shifted. Once preoccupied with the quantity of resources, its attention is now focused on the quality of the environment. Once a question of supply, conservation is now an issue of survival—of species, of habitat, of mankind. Daily, the country is, or should be, shocked by the brinkmanship of the exploitation we live by. This generation is experiencing the convulsions of a dying nature. Only mouth-to-mouth resuscitation will revive her now. However, to be realistic, it must be repeated that these actions are not solutions but expedients, and their most drastic…

In the long annals of hypocrisy nothing can exceed, nothing can remotely equal, the pretense that we seek the allegiance of the ordinary people of Vietnam. No doubt we should be glad to have it, but as for doing anything to deserve it—either we don’t care enough or we believe that if we win militarily the peasants will forget what we did to them in the course of winning. The full story of the ordeal of civilians in North and South Vietnam has not been told, and probably never will be known in all its horror.…

In-Justice David Cole’s paean to Anthony Kennedy outdid itself in being fair-minded and respectful toward this “moderating force” who “this term…voted with the conservatives in all 14 of the Court’s 5–4 decisions” [“Anthony Kennedy’s Legacy,” July 30/August 6]. However, looking back at Kennedy’s support for Citizens United, and his willingness to mangle the Affordable Care Act and dismember the Voting Rights Act, I am not at all surprised that the justice decided to retire well before the midterm elections this year. Surely he knew, with foresight and the courage of his primarily conservative convictions, that giving Trump another appointee on the Supreme Court will utterly destroy any hope of moderation in the Court for generations to come. Cole entirely missed referencing this most tellingly significant judgment of Kennedy’s entire career.…

JOSHUA KOSMAN AND HENRI PICCIOTTO ACROSS 1 Cheerful brew pub to have food (6) 5 Belief in Edmonton athlete’s comeback maintaining soldier? No (8) 9 Like a bull in a china shop or in a sandwich shop, house pet with energy (10) 10 Make needed changes, when retracting what goes out twice a day (4) 11 After short time, discomfort and pain for a runner (6) 12 Communicating with a 15 under the weather (1-7) 13 Onetime campaign manager to staff a military installation (8) 15 A loose relative (6) 17 Congress, for instance, is initially scrupulous and precise (3,3) 19 Those people keeping symbol back to front as a way to understand 5A (8) 21 Diana the Magician embraces abomination (8) 23 Progenitor’s paint in correct English? (6) 24…

6.7% / 6.8% The national black unemployment rate in 1968 and 2018, respectively—both double the rate of white unemployment 59% / 62% Black median household income as a percentage of white median household income in 1968 and 2016 41% / 41% Black homeownership rate in 1968 and 2015—both roughly 60 percent of the white homeownership rate 5.2% / 10.2% Black median household wealth as a percentage of white median household wealth in 1963 and 2016 1.9:1 / 2.3:1 Ratio of black infant mortality to white infant mortality in 1968 and 2015 604 / 1,730 Incarcerated black Americans per 100,000 in 1968 and 2018—5.4 and 6.4 times, respectively, the white incarceration rate…

As political maxims go, this one seems beyond reproach: Don’t go after kids. Yet, once again, the Trump administration is proving itself the innovator. In five distinct areas, the administration has doubled down on policies that impose disproportionate, sometimes fatal burdens on children—especially black and brown ones. To be sure, Trump doesn’t justify these policies by citing their anti-kid effects. Children’s suffering is either foreseeable collateral damage or a tool to be used in a larger cultural and political conflict. But that just makes the administration’s war on kids even more baffling, because it courts controversy and undermines the White House’s own rhetoric of righteous victimhood. So the question is worth asking: Why choose policies that so visibly harm children? Let’s start with the most well-publicized front in the war…

Vats of ink have been spilled trying to figure out whether the coming right-wing majority on the Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade. The truth is, we just don’t know; it will all come down to what’s in the hearts and minds of five anti-abortion, very conservative men. If I were one of them, I would definitely opt for keeping Roe and letting it dangle in the wind. Upending the precedent could awaken the majority of Americans who want to keep abortion legal. Right now a lot of pro-choicers still don’t pay attention to restrictions on abortion, no matter how stringent they are, as long as the procedure is technically lawful and available to them personally. How do I know this? Abortion is already greatly restricted in many states…

Lyndon B. Johnson should not seek re-election. The Administration is in a truly alarming state. Irrationality spreads through Washington like a contagion. The nerves of key officials are frayed. They are no longer thinking, only reacting, and their reactions are mechanical and predictable. Their troubles are bound to multiply, for they are prisoners of their own views, of the outdated and inapplicable dogmas of the cold war, and of the war in Vietnam in which they have invested so improvidently and recklessly that they can no longer see a way out. The President is jeopardizing not only the country but his own party, even while he keeps insisting that only the Democratic Party (with himself at its head) can save the country. The fact is—and now it must be obvious…

I believe that the crisis in the Communist world, which culminated in the occupation of Czechoslovakia on August 21, was inescapable. The old guard in the central committees of all the Communist countries still employed a way of thinking and working which might have been appropriate to an uneducated, poverty-stricken proletariat. That dissatisfied and poorly educated mass provided nothing but strength. Intelligence had to come from elsewhere, and with it an iron discipline. A totally different situation exists today, when a worker has a far better education and a higher living standard than did a schoolmaster or official fifty years ago. The authorities are no longer dealing with an easily manipulated mass but with a large number of independently thinking individuals. And the moment man starts thinking, his first indispensable…

President Trump recently upbraided the Federal Reserve for raising interest rates. “I don’t like all of this work that we’re putting into the economy and then I see rates going up,” he said. The remarks elicited a furious response. “Attacking central bank is one more step in what seems like a Presidential strategy of turning the United States into a banana republic,” tweeted Larry Summers, the former treasury secretary (during the Clinton administration) and wannabe Fed chair (under Obama). In a lead editorial, The Washington Post scolded Trump for once more trampling on presidential norms: “Presidential respect for the independence of the Federal Reserve is an unwritten rule but vital to modern American governance.” There’s no question that Trump has busted yet another norm. But tradition aside, why should the…

It is difficult to feel sympathetic toward the Wallace following, and emotionally gratifying to refer to them as boobs and jerks, as some commentators are in the habit of doing. But it is better sociology to see the issues as Wallace supporters see them. They feel they are being “squeezed,” as in fact they are. They see a great fuss being made about the blacks, but no one is making a fuss about them. They feel excluded from the two-party system, and to a large extent they have been. Their insecurities are heightened by fear of losing status. After all, the only status they have is the fact that Negroes are below them on the ladder—Negroes and welfare recipients. They may feel fairly confident that they can keep off welfare…

There are many kinds of revolution and for each one can find more than one explanation. But there is always a radical shift in mass consciousness. Suddenly, it seems, people begin to perceive socio-economic situations in a new way. The perspective shifts, the shift is momentous, but it is not as abrupt as it appears on the surface. The change has been gestating over a period measured in years, not in weeks or days. The happenings in Paris are a case in point. It is a revolution less against the state as state, than against the current form of society, against the whole technological-bureaucratic pattern of civilization. Somewhat the same thing is happening in Prague as in Paris: we may be seeing a world-wide uprising against repressive institutions. The institutions…

Long ago, the American Presidency became a dangerous office. No one attacked the persons of our first fifteen Presidents, but from Lincoln on four have died by the assassin’s bullet and three others—Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman—have been shot at. In the past few years, killings at a lower political level have been numerous; witness the martyrs of the civil rights cause, with Martin Luther King, Jr., the latest victim and the greatest loss from the standpoint of a nonviolent solution to the race problem. And now Robert F. Kennedy, the most senseless killing of them all. It is tragic for the victim; tragic for the Kennedy family, so blessed with ability and wealth, so dogged by fate; tragic for a country which must seem to…

Let us give Richard Nixon his due. The astonishing way in which this man has rebounded from the humiliations of 1960 and 1962, when after defeat in California he took out his rage on the press, is proof that he is a phenomenon even among politicians of his type. In contrast to those dark days, he is now a model of equanimity; he even looks better. Credit for this must be given to his TV make-up and the cosmetics industry in general. Inside his head, where his political thoughts swirl, he is of course the same old Nixon. The marks of a demagogue are many, but the principal ones are an appeal to the emotions, the lower the better; a contempt for consistency, which also implies a contempt for the…

HURRICANE MARIA SENT MAGHA GARCIA BACK TO the beginning. In 2010, a brigade of 18 farmers had helped her cut trees, open roads, build a cistern, and start to plant a nursery for her new farm, Pachamama Bosque Jardín, on 13 acres of land in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico. Five years earlier, Garcia had been living in the city of Corozal when mass layoffs hit. She lost her job as a social researcher, and wondered what to do next. Garcia was 45, an age at which capitalism “doesn’t consider you a person who’s producing anymore,” she says, unless you’re someone with knowledge capital, “a consultant or adviser.” That was not Garcia’s case, and so her future in the city looked grim. She had been raised on a farm, in a family…