Innehållsförteckning för August 1-8, 2016 från The Nation

@thenation.com Remembrance of Elections Past D.D. Guttenplan encouragingly describes Bernie’s “soldiers” as energetic, intelligent, and realistic in “The Future of Bernie Sanders’s Grassroots Army” [June 20/27]. Yet too many of them are planning to duplicate my mistake of 48 years ago. In 1968, I worked for Gene McCarthy. You all know what happened. Hubert Humphrey was not my candidate, and I chose going down in flames over selling out. Richard Nixon became president. I know it isn’t solely my fault that we ended up with Nixon. Still, I will vote for Hillary—as will Howard Dean, Elizabeth Warren, Jerry Brown, and, no doubt, Bernie. To do otherwise risks killing what remains of the New Deal. We need a progressive Supreme Court. We need Obamacare. Hillary’s coziness with Wall Street and hawkish…

Clinton must inspire the public at the convention in Philadelphia. The committee drafting the 2016 Democratic platform voted to remove a reference to Donald Trump because, as Indiana member Carli Stevenson explained, “This is our aspirational document.” Stevenson got it exactly right. The candidates and strategists planning this year’s Democratic campaign—not just Hillary Clinton’s historic presidential run, but fights for control of Congress and statehouses across the country—must keep the word “aspirational” in mind as they gather in Philadelphia on July 25–28. It will be tempting for top Democrats—in a year when the Republican Party, which long ago steered itself out of the political mainstream, is veering off a cliff with Donald Trump—to simply say “We’re not them” and expect to reap an electoral windfall. But if the volatile 2016…

Writing in the most recent issue of Foreign Affairs, Aluf Benn, editor in chief of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, surveys the Israeli landscape and concludes that recent transformations are rendering “the largely secular and progressive version of Israel that once captured the world’s imagination” obsolete. Benn notes that “Israel was always in some ways a fantasy,” though one with foundations in reality. Today, however, “that reality has changed, and the country that has replaced it is profoundly different from the one its founders imagined almost 70 years ago.” I recently spent 10 days in Israel, where I spoke with Benn about the current state of the country as well as that of Haaretz—which New Yorker editor David Remnick, in a lengthy 2011 article, termed “easily the most liberal newspaper in…

Contrary to the recent nostalgia for days when presidents were picked by bloated power brokers in smoky (always smoky) back rooms, national party conventions haven’t changed all that much. Consider this dispatch from the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia in 1872, a gathering that looked “much more like a body of men who were thoroughly conversant with the running of political machinery than like anything particularly brilliant and stately.” The first day was rainy and “rather depressing”; because “the hall was not completely filled…the voices of the orators echoed dismally from the empty upper gallery.” Reporters, meanwhile, “were throughout irreverent, and for the most part indifferent,” behavior the writer thought unbecoming “citizens in convention assembled, and occupied in securing the results of the war, protecting American industry, reviving our commerce,…

A viable, sustainable political revolutionthat could upend both the Democratic and Republican parties as we know them requires making new mistakes—not repeating old ones. The first and primary task is to ensure that the country is not run by a fickle fascist who is willing to use increased suffering and growing discontent to create even more suffering and division. That means connecting the coastal “political revolution” to Middle America’s suffering and anger—without succumbing to racism and xenophobia. That means not just standing on soapboxes, but engaging real people about the conditions in their lives and lifting up their vision on how to better their communities as a core component of a political platform. That means continuing to hold the Democratic Party accountable for its epic failure to address the needs…

WE ARE AT A PIVOTAL MOMENT IN TIME for progressives. Active social movements are reshaping our sense of what is possible and necessary—from the immigrant-rights movement to Black Lives Matter to the Fight for $15 and more. A presidential candidate who identifies himself as a democratic socialist made an unprecedented bid for the White House that opened new ideological space and political possibilities. At the same time, we must be honest with each other that here, as in Europe, dark forces are gathering that threaten to bring not only retrograde policies but also deep assaults on democratic institutions and practices. The emerging progressive movements, which have yet to achieve their long-term goals or consolidate power through mass organization, could be smothered and potentially extinguished by an electoral disaster this year.…

WHERE WE GO FROM HERE DEPENDS, OF COURSE, ON WHETHER it’s President Clinton or President Trump. If it’s President Clinton, it then depends on which Hillary shows up—femi-nist Hillary (yay!) or Hillary the hawk (likely). If it’s President Trump, then we’re pretty much doomed. I think Trump will win. So, basically, think doomed. Not much more to say here. Except... If the Democrats in Philadelphia want to ensure victory, they’ll declare Bernie Sanders their candidate—because, in every single poll, he beats Trump hands down. He’s the only candidate in either party with a “positive” approval rating. And don’t we all, deep down, really want to have the final battle played out, in our lifetime, on the great field of democracy: “The Capitalist vs. the Socialist.” I want to see what…

REPUBLICANS WILL COME HARD AND FAST AT HILLARY CLINTON, hoping that misogyny will inflame the opposition against her just as racism did with Obama. It will be ugly—again. Regardless, we cannot repeat the mistake progressives made in 2009: relying too much on the “inside” power of a Democratic president and Congress. Progressives ceded the “outside game” to the right; Obama became the left pole of the debate as the Tea Party made what was once considered outrageous mainstream. The GOP failed to block Obamacare, but they succeeded in mobilizing public sentiment and won the 2010 midterm elections decisively. Their “inside-outside” strategy was powerful: grassroots activists and mega-donors, right-wing media and think tanks, elected and insurgent candidates, all pulling in the same direction. Together, they defined the terms of debate. It’s…

LET’S TALK MONEY. IN 2016, OVER $4 BILLION will be spent on TV ads that will do little to turn out a single new voter in any battleground state. If we shift just 1 percent of that money ($40 million), we could fully fund all of the most effective grassroots groups in key states—from the Ohio Student Association to the Florida Immigrant Coalition—that organize year-round and actually turn out voters, too. As Steve Phillips argues in Brown Is the New White, communities of color win elections—if they are properly invested in (studies show that face-to-face interaction substantially increases voter turnout). Ditto for millen-nials, the largest, most diverse, and most progressive generation in American history. A voter wave among these groups in 2016 and 2018 would undo GOP gerrymandering and make…

PUTTING ALL OF OUR PROGRESSIVE EGGS IN THE presidential basket is a hierarchical and dangerous move. Right now, Republicans and Democrats are simply two branches of the party of money, neither with much obligation to ordinary people. Progressive power comes from organizing block by block, and taking our fights to the streets. But while I place little faith in the presidential election, I do see glimmers of electoral hope. It lies in changing the political landscape of statehouses and municipal and county boards. Running candidates for these offices will require grooming lots of folks who can tolerate the vagaries of our broken political system. It will mean turning up for elections like this one, in which you may not like the top of the ticket, but can still cast your…

TWO IMMEDIATE CHALLENGES CONFRONT THE campaign of Bernie Sanders, the most broadly mobilizing presidential campaign of the modern era besides those of Barack Obama in 2008 and Jesse Jackson in 1988. The first is the defeat of Donald Trump or, on the off chance that he is ousted at the GOP convention, his successor. The Republican threat is far greater than many progressives and leftists wish to acknowledge. Some sectors of the right are working to gain enough support in the states to call a constitutional convention. The prospect of right-wing changes to the Constitution, such as a balanced-budget amendment, should send chills up the spine of any serious progressive. The second challenge is to develop a long-term, state-by-state electoral strategy. Those who have answered Sanders’s call for a political…

Before Alton Sterling’s name became a hashtag, he was a friend, a father, a son, and, as his cousin told The Washington Post, a talented CD salesman who “could converse with everybody.” Philando Castile was a loved and respected figure at the J.J. Hill Montessori Magnet School, where he worked for more than a decade before he was killed by a St. Anthony, Minnesota, police officer in the presence of his remarkable fiancée, Diamond Reynolds, who live-streamed the immediate aftermath. In the wake of these black deaths, people once again filled the streets to make a simple, sadly radical assertion: Sterling and Castile’s black lives mattered. Within hours, however, Micah Johnson had taken five more lives in Dallas, adding to the carnage of yet another week of wrenching American violence.…

Dear Liza, I am a woman in my 20s, and I’ve been encouraged to apply for grants and fellowships intended to support people of color. They seem like great opportunities, but I’m not sure if it’s right for me to take them. On the one hand, my entire family is from the Middle East, I have a conspicuously foreign-sounding name, and I’d probably get some funny looks at a Trump rally. On the other hand, I grew up in Europe, went to top American universities, and consider myself a very privileged individual. I don’t think my “race” (whatever that might be) has ever significantly helped or hurt my career, and until recently, it never occurred to me that I might be considered anything but “white” in a personal or professional…

On June 5, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order requiring all state entities to boycott businesses and divest their money from institutions that “participate in boycott, divestment, or sanctions activity targeting Israel, either directly or through a parent or subsidiary.” Channeling the disgraced anticommunist crusader Joseph McCarthy, the governor will create a blacklist for the growing number of companies joining the BDS movement. After dismissing the movement as inconsequential for years, influential donors have now applied pressure to government officials and funded a string of anti-BDS bills in state legislatures over the past year. These people include Sheldon Adelson, who decries BDS as anti-Semitic, yet has no problem endorsing the same presidential candidate hailed by David Duke. Both the Koch brothers and Haim Saban attended one of…

While bernie sanders came achingly close, he won’t arrive in philadelphia withenough delegates to secure the Democratic nomination. Even so, Sanders and his supporters made an unprecedented insurgent bid—winning 22 states, 43 percent of the popular vote, and almost 1,900 delegates, and raising nearly $230 million, mostly in small donations. In doing so, they revealed to progressives our own strength—reflected also in the victories in the Fight for $15; against fracking and the Keystone XL pipeline; and in the rise of new social-justice movements. Looking ahead to next year, how do we build on this political revolution? What are the key battles to take on, issues to drive, strategies to embrace? On the eve of the Democratic National Convention, we asked a group of progressive activists and leaders—as well as…

IF THERE’S ONE THING THIS CAMPAIGN SEASON HAS taught us, it’s that politics makes even stranger bedfellows than we thought. At its best, the progressive movement is flexible, creative, and better at horizontal organizing than our top-down conservative counterparts. We need to embrace that spirit and keep our eyes on our goals at the same time. A movement that tries to do everything accomplishes nothing— but a movement that works together and breaks down silos can be more powerful than ever. The progressive movement must focus on issues that bring together diverse constituencies and strengthen those horizontal ties. We’ve already seen the power of this new organizing in Puerto Rico, for example, where Republicans attempted to use the recently passed financial-assistance bill to remove federal protections for a national wildlife…

SENATOR BERNIE SANDERS’S PRESIDENTIAL CAMpaign showed us that millions of people are ready to embrace a bold progressive agenda. His defeat shows us just how much work remains to be done. We must continue to wage big fights that can energize people across the nation. As Sanders hits the campaign trail for down-ballot candidates, we must continue training and running our own movement candidates. But we can’t do either without the creation of an on-the-ground, party-like political infrastructure. “If Hillary Clinton is elected, she will represent another historic first. We must have a clear understanding that Republicans will do to her exactly what they did to Obama.” —Susan Adelman, president of the Lucy and I.B. Adelman Foundation Too few independent political organizations grounded on the state level endorsed Sanders. That’s…

FIFTEEN YEARS INTO THE WAR ON TERROR, THE toxins of perpetual war are in the bloodstream of the body politic. War without any hint of an end has become normal. A sustained leap of moral imagination and powerful activism will be necessary to lift the United States out of what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the madness of militarism.” The recent sit-in by Democrats on the House floor for a gun-control measure was impressive. But there’s no serious talk in Congress about gun control at the Pentagon. Meanwhile, the Obama administration is on pace to exceed the number of bombs dropped and missiles fired by the George W. Bush administration. From the outset, we should be clear-eyed about the foreign-policy outlook of the likely next president. Leading neoconservative hawk Robert…

IN HIS 1963 NOVEL V, THOMAS PYNCHON WROTE that “History is a step-function.” In other words, history is not linear; sometimes it jumps to a higher level or drops to a lower one. 2016 could well be a step-function year. So our first job as progressives is to prevent a historic drop by standing nonviolently against the racism, sexism, and proto-fascism of Donald Trump. Our second job is to give history a chance to jump by keeping young people engaged. Bernie Sanders gave us a “yuuuge” gift by opening the door to a skilled, diverse millennial generation that could change the course of American politics for decades. We need to keep the energy of young people engaged by focusing on issues that matter to their future: climate change, inequality, and…

We went to Bull Run, or was it Manassas, one of those, past Battlefield Ford, past Glory Days bar in the strip mall, or was it before the mall was built, or was it after the mall was abandoned. I was grizzled with age, I was twenty one, at the small beige visitor center. I remember it without sound. They had a machine there that sucked up sound. It was mostly made of hollows, blanks, lack, and also plastic. It came with a smaller version of itself, whose job was to suck the sound of the larger sound- sucker. It did its work. It was about the size of a foot. Either run that, or the place would be filled with ordinary sounds, squirrels twitching their tails, chattering, one to…

$4.7K TO $8K Estimated cost to attend the four-day Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia $449 Per-night cost of the DNC-appointed hotels for the New York delegation (with a five-night minimum) $0 Amount provided by the DNC for delegate travel expenses (though superdelegates receive funding) 260+ Number of low-income Sanders delegates who have started crowdfunding campaigns to attend $27 Average donation on AdoptABernieDelegate.com “It would pretty much wipe out everything I’ve saved for my future education.” Genevieve Mina, 20, a Sanders delegate and president of the College Democrats at the University of Alaska, on paying out of pocket…

1919: Haaretz is founded by socialist-oriented Zionist immigrants, mostly from Russia. These days, it is Israel’s oldest surviving newspaper. 1935: Salman Schocken, who fled to Palestine from Germany in 1934, buys the paper. 1990s: Haaretzdisbands its union. According to Amos Schocken, the current publisher, “After a number of years of fighting and suffering slowdowns and strikes, we just won and got rid of them.” 2005: Haaretz reduces its op-ed page and expands its business and economic supplement (TheMarker), as well as its sections for arts and sports. 2006: German publisher Alfred Neven DuMont buys 25 percent of the Haaretz Group from the Schocken family, sparking controversy because his father had been a member of the Nazi Party. Dec. 2011: Leonid Nevzlin, a Russian oil tycoon who emigrated to Israel, buys 20 percent of…

“What’s the purpose of your visit?” the officer asked. The epaulets on his blue button-down shirt hung over his narrow shoulders. His eyebrows joined above the bridge of his nose. “I’m here to give a reading,” I replied. I had come to Palestine with a group of writers and poets for a literary festival, with scheduled stops in Ramallah, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nablus, and Haifa. The officer glanced at the line behind me. “How many are in your group?” “I don’t know.” “How many US passports?” “I don’t know.” He raised a suspicious eyebrow. “Everything is ‘I don’t know’?” But I really didn’t know. I had met the other writers at a hotel in Jordan the night before, and it hadn’t occurred to me to count them while we were on…

The left’s big takeaway from the primaryelections? We didn’t win, but we could have. We came that close. That’s thrilling. It’s also terrifying. Because if we can win, it means that we must win. That’s a heavy responsibility. Right now, a great deal of post-Bernie campaign energy is going into plans to run progressive candidates at every level of the political system, from school boards to Congress. Many are also focused on reforming the Democratic Party to remove systemic roadblocks to a progressive insurgency in the future (such as the superdelegates and super PACs). All of that is great, but we can’t let the electoral realm usurp the progress needed on two other important fronts. The first one is the need to build and support independent social movements. Politicians didn’t…

WE ARE LIVING IN A MOVEMENT MOMENT, one that just came astonishingly close to launching Bernie Sanders into the White House. While we ultimately didn’t win the nomination, the Bernie campaign succeeded as a laboratory for testing tactics and strategies to transform grassroots energy into a powerful force for change. Movements are about issues, but elections are about power. The 2016 Democratic primary taught our movement how to win elections with the help of digital and social platforms that connected volunteers and voters not only to the Sanders campaign but, more importantly, to one another. Enabled by social-media platforms like Slack, Face-book, Reddit, and Google Apps, a new generation of leaders is teaching, testing, and entrusting volunteers to take on campaign roles typically restricted to paid staff. This movement has…

Fracking is America’s primary battleground in the fight against climate change. In the name of protecting the climate and eliminating coal, the fossil-fuel industry is rushing to lock in our reliance on fracked gas for decades, with the Democratic establishment going along. But it’s a scam. Fracking emits massive amounts of methane, a heat-trapping gas at least 86 times stronger than carbon dioxide over a period of 20 years. Peer-reviewed research finds that shale gas is worse for the climate than coal or oil. That’s why we must ban fracking and start building renewables now. Bernie Sanders made that call loud and clear, and it doesn’t just resonate with progressives. Most Americans and 75 percent of Democrats oppose fracking. As a member of the Democratic Platform Committee, I demanded that…

IT’S A MISTAKE TO THINK THAT PROGRESSIVE POWER comes from people—a noun. In truth, progressive power has always come from what our people do—verbs. We love our analysis over here on the left, but it’s our action that makes us powerful— and not just any action, but a very particular action. It’s the action of standing up for one another, not just for ourselves; of standing behind people who are different from us, but whose fate we believe we share. This is the secret to progressive power. This is the behavior we must scale across our country if we want to make any political revolution real. The new black leadership we have seen in the last year—from challenging racism in policing (Ferguson, Baltimore, New York City, Chicago, Texas) to challenging…

BERNIE SANDERS’S INSURGENT PRESIDENTIAL campaign has inspired millions of people and cracked the foundations of US politics. A new generation is discussing democratic socialism and the need for an alternative to our failed capitalist system. Campaigning for a $15 minimum wage, Medicare for all, and a free college education, Sanders defied the brutal neoliberal orthodoxy of both major political parties. Now the search has begun for a way forward. There was always a fundamental contradiction built into Bernie’s campaign: trying to carry out a political revolution against the billionaire class while running in a party controlled by that same class. In the primary elections, the (un-)Democratic Party exposed itself as completely hostile terrain for the 99 percent, with a leadership that fought Sanders every step of the way. Though Bernie…

THE BERNIE SANDERS CAMPAIGN IS THE latest and largest wave of a rising populist tide, gaining force from the Occupy movement, the Dreamers, Black Lives Matter, the Fight for $15, the Wisconsin showdown, and more. The failure of the political establishment has been exposed, but the center still holds. So what’s next? First, Sanders is right: Beating Donald Trump is vital to ensuring that bigotry and nativism do not poison and discredit the new populist moment. Once Trump has been defeated, the progressive movement should focus on defining issues and politics from the bottom up. The next movement waves—climate change, student debt, protests against systemic inequality and brutal policing—will continue to shake the establishment. Battles over these defining issues will deepen the understanding that there is an alternative. At the…

ACROSS 1 Block Pat’s construction with asphalt (8) 6 Some fakirs cherish alcoholic drink (6) 9 An embankment for a legendary gardener? (4) 10 Stochastic model’s basic principle, trendy in retrospect, occupies hierarchical position (6,4) 11 Ostensible progenitors—one looking back, the other looking forward (8) 13 Language of Sephardic Jews and some Southeast Asians involving noise (6) 15 One way of paying to prepare wool after direct variation (6,4) 17 Chair of committees, ultimately, to consume… (4) 18 …only fish (4) 19 Pig call, ample in sound, is unlike anything else (3,7) 20 Went crazy in Othello’s title part… (4,2) 21 …like, for example, Othello garbling “…thine own…” (8) 23 Floor put up in movie sketches (10) 25 French for “rain” (4) 27 Knight is happy? Yes, but heartless (6)…