Innehållsförteckning för November 2-9, 2020 från The Nation

IF DONALD TRUMP CAN BE SAID TO BELIEVE IN ANYTHING BESIDES HIS OWN ENRICHMENT, it is the power of positive thinking. His family worshipped at the Marble Collegiate Church in New York, whose pep-talking preacher Norman Vincent Peale came up with the positive-thinking creed. Trump married two of his wives—Ivana Trump and Marla Maples—in the church; his parents’ funerals were also held there. It’s this unassailable faith in boosterism that has led him to respond to his diagnosis of Covid-19 with a narrative about how he’s learned valuable lessons that will make him an even better president. On October 4 he tweeted a video in which he said, “I learned a lot about Covid. I learned it by really going to school. This is the real school. This isn’t the…

THERE’S A MOMENT IN THE PRINCESS BRIDE when the evil and conniving Prince Humperdinck, eager to finish a sham wedding to his unwilling bride, Buttercup, demands that the priest cut to the chase. As the bride’s rescuers prepare to charge the castle, Humperdinck insists, “‘Man and wife.’ Say ‘man and wife’!” That’s basically where we are with the confirmation process for Amy Coney Barrett. As a majority of the people in this country (and, apparently, a karmically contagious coronavirus) object to the idea of rushing Barrett’s appointment, Republicans just want the Senate to say, “Supreme Court justice!” They don’t care how the Senate gets there or whether the process is so corrupt, it makes a mockery of the principle of advice and consent. They just want the votes counted. Now.…

$372B Annual lost wages for Americans due to imprisonment or conviction—enough to provide every homeless person in the US with a house worth at least $500,000, according to a new Brennan Center report 52% Average loss in annual earnings for a person who has spent time in prison, or about $484,000 over a person’s lifetime 7.7M Americans who have been incarcerated at some point in their lives $6.7K Estimated annual earnings of a formerly incarcerated person in the US $2.1K Average annual cost of phone calls, commissary items, and other related fees for the family of an incarcerated person in New York state 700% Increase in the incarcerated population in the US since 1970…

WHITEDATE.NET looks innocuous at first: its home page could be cribbed from Ashley Madison, or FarmersOnly, or any number of niche dating sites. A stock-photo, glossy-lipped blonde smiles into her beau’s suited shoulder, lowering her lashes demurely; a slogan reads, “We know where we come from, where we belong, and wish to share the feeling with like-minded partners.” Beside a pink and purple heart, the words “for European Singles” hint at WhiteDate’s purpose: to connect white supremacists seeking to preserve the future of the white race through love and procreative nookie. The landing page, adorned with stylish white couples, coyly advertises its commitment to an anachronistic, ossified view of gender: “We follow classic roles where strong men take the lead and graceful women play the game. Wisely.” As a mouthy,…

HERE IS A VERSION OF THE OLD ROCK-PAPER-SCISSORS game, on a topic that should be of urgent concern to people on the left: How did Trump’s America happen, and what can we do to dislodge its hold on our politics? One can argue that Donald Trump didn’t really win the 2016 election or that he won it only through some combination of voter suppression, Russian meddling, and the peculiarities of the American constitutional system. Even so, somebody who shouldn’t have been a serious candidate got tens of millions of votes, and it’s legitimate (urgent, if we are to avoid a repeat performance this November) to ask why. Was it racism? Misdirected economic frustration? Expert manipulation of public opinion? A deterioration of democratic norms? All of these combined? Three new books…

Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown wears a pin of a canary in a cage, recalling the days when coal miners carried the birds underground to detect poisonous gases. Brown has spent three decades warning Americans about the danger of trade policies that prioritize profits over workers and the public interest. He continues to highlight the error of letting corporate interests and pliant politicians shape our trade and manufacturing policies, particularly in light of the supply shortages that have made fighting the coronavirus pandemic so challenging. We talked about the need for policies that renew our sense of public goods and necessities. —John Nichols JN: When Covid-19 hit, we suddenly had shortages—not enough ventilators or masks. Governors cut deals to import personal protection equipment. Is this a consequence of wrongheaded trade and…

DONALD TRUMP TELLS LOTS OF LIES. BUT HE lies most adventurously about elections. Even when it was clear he had lost the popular vote by millions of ballots and won the Electoral College by a handful of razor-thin margins in battleground states, he claimed on November 27, 2016, that “in addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” Both statements were false. But Trump was determined to control the narrative, and he has maintained that determination to such an extent that his supporters imagine him to be far more popular than polls have ever suggested. So what are the chances that an embattled and desperate Trump will try to control the narrative when the…

IS IT TIME TO BID FAREWELL TO ROE V. WADE? IF AMY Coney Barrett is seated on the Supreme Court, as seems likely, she will be the sixth anti-abortion justice. That means John Roberts’s respect for precedent, which last summer led him to strike down restrictions on clinics because they were identical to those the court struck down in 2016, won’t matter. He can play the dignified centrist while the other five tip Roe into the grave. Of course, they might leave it technically in force while approving every restriction that crosses their desks. That would be the politically clever thing to do, because it would keep anti-abortion voters riled up while lulling into complacency the many pro-choicers who don’t read beyond the headlines. “Court Upholds Roe” will be what…

BEFORE THE PANDEMIC HIT, JOHN MADE A DECENT LIVING mowing people’s yards and doing landscaping in Houston. He had a place to live with his 15-year-old son. He even had health insurance that he bought for himself and his son “in case anything happens,” he said. Then Covid-19 swept across the country. Nobody wanted “somebody they don’t really know on their property, in their house,” said John, who wanted to use only his first name. His work dried up. He had to send his son to live with his deceased wife’s cousin in Dallas. He ended up evicted and homeless; he slept for a few weeks on a bench near his house and then for a week under a bridge. And he had to let his insurance coverage lapse because…

AT THE 1995 SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL, A CENTURY AFTER the Lumière brothers presented the first celluloid motion picture, director Michael Almereyda interviewed a crop of independent filmmakers about their thoughts on the future of movies. Were they optimistic or pessimistic? It’s a question broad enough to elicit many different answers, from pointed to digressive. Almereyda and his collaborator Amy Hobby recorded the responses on a plastic Fisher-Price PixelVision camcorder, eliciting an unspoken formal tension between cinema’s past and its technologically democratized future. The resulting documentary, At Sundance, is an interesting, albeit slight, curio, but two aspects of the film still stand out. First, the number of directors interviewed who remain active and familiar 25 years later: Richard Linklater, James Gray, Todd Haynes, Danny Boyle, and James Mangold, to name just…

JoAnn Wypijewski takes no prisoners. As faithful Nation readers will know, the magazine’s longtime Carnal Knowledge columnist has never been one to float along with the current of conventional wisdom or uphold the shibboleths of liberal piety. Her battlefield dispatches from the sex wars breathed life into the journalistic cliché about afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted. Wypijewski takes her responsibilities in that department seriously, extending her empathy and sense of fellow humanity even to those—like the so-called pedophile priest Paul Shanley, Abu Ghraib torture defendant Lynndie England, and celebrity pariah Woody Allen—the rest of us have been authorized to despise. Her new essay collection, What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About #MeToo, deprives readers of the easy satisfactions of self-righteousness and mob justice. This is never…

Yes! KIM KELLY THE POLICE WERE NEVER SUPPOSED TO have a union. In 1897 the American Federation of Labor, which would merge with the Congress of Industrial Organizations to form the AFL-CIO, rejected a petition from a group of Cleveland officers on the grounds that “It is not within the province of the trade union movement to especially organize policemen, no more than to organize militiamen, as both policemen and militiamen are often controlled by forces inimical to the labor movement.” In the ensuing 123 years, the attitude of police toward the working class has not changed. You’ll never see cops join a picket line; instead, they’re the force that the bosses call to break the strike. Over the years, police have killed countless laborers, from coal miners at Blair…

AS THE CORONAVIRUS RICOCHETED through New York City this spring, among its many casualties was a certain image of life in the Big Apple. The foodie destinations, posh galleries, and pricey cocktail lounges sat deserted while city hospitals long scorned as antiquated, clunky, and ineffective became crowded, bustling centers of activity and pandemonium. If they didn’t abscond to their second homes, financiers and lawyers huddled in their apartments, and grocery store employees, doormen, UPS drivers, and postal workers all became consummate risk-takers. Spaces segregated from the middle class—homeless shelters, nursing homes, jails—were revealed as inextricably linked to the rest of the city on a microbial level, as the virus could not be kept out or contained within. In the pandemic city, the oft-praised prosperity of New York in the early…

Trouble in Mind Re “Is Trump Planning a Coup d’État?” by Sasha Abramsky [September 21/28]: I believe the answer is yes. Jeanine Pirro on Fox News asked President Trump what he would do if there was a “threat of riots if [Democrats] lose” and how he would handle people protesting the outcome of the election. He stated, “We’d put it down within minutes…. It’s called insurrection.” That is the first time I heard him use the word “insurrection.” Since he labeled peaceful protest with this term, I believe he would justify attacks on protesters, stating that these citizens are revolting against the government. His comment is the kind of language we associate with dictators. And it could indicate he is willing to use violence against protesters—violent or peaceful. He has,…