Innehållsförteckning för February 22/March 01, 2021 från The Nation

THE US SENATE WAS A MISTAKE. IT’S A FUNDAMENTALLY ANTIDEMOCRATIC INSTITUTION that gives political power to land instead of people, and it was structured that way at the request of slavers who worried about losing their “right” to hold people in bondage. Abolishing it should have been part of the conditions of surrender at Appomattox. As it is, nothing can be done to change the Senate’s antidemocratic structure. (Article V of the Constitution literally mandates that equal representation of the states must be preserved in the chamber.) But something can be done about the Senate’s anti-majoritarian nature. Ending the filibuster is one way to make the Senate less beholden to a ruthless minority and more responsive to the majority of its members. It’s also the only practical way for Democrats…

ON JANUARY 6, 250 YEARS OF AMERICAN POLITICAL history seemed like it might come crashing down as men cosplaying patriots, armed with zip ties and semi-automatic weapons, laid siege to the Capitol. Watching the terrifying absurdity of traitors filming themselves as they dangled from the building’s facade was a reminder of what the framers knew from the start: Factionalism is endemic to democracy—and to its undoing. “The friend of popular governments never finds himself so much alarmed for their character and fate, as when he contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice,” James Madison wrote in The Federalist Papers (No. 10). Going on to assure the reader that a minority faction can be controlled by “the republican principle, which enables the majority to defeat its sinister views by regular vote,”…

ON JANUARY 6, AN ARMED MOB SOUGHT TO OVERTURN AN ELECTION AND INSTALL A president who had lost the popular vote. But this was just a violent version of the pervasive constitutional embedment of minority rule in our country. The Confederate flags waved during the Capitol Hill riot followed planning for the insurrection in a Facebook group called Red-State Secession, amid a wave of demands for secession by red-state leaders and conservative commentators. It is blue states, however, that have the real case for secession, because American politics systematically tilts money and power to smaller and more conservative states, undermining the interests of the majority of the population. Twice in the past 20 years, a GOP candidate who lost the popular vote took the presidency—and 2020 came uncomfortably close to…

IN EARLY 2009, THE HISTORIAN AND SOCIAL critic Mike Davis sat down for an interview with Bill Moyers to discuss what was then the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. When asked whether, as a socialist, he had anticipated the crisis, Davis said he couldn’t have predicted its scale or devastation. Davis’s modesty won out over the truth. Four years earlier, he had, in fact, done just that. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, he laid out the fundamental problems of the housing bubble then underway. Noting its particular precarity in Southern California, he also went on to discuss how it might affect the country and the world: The “national economy may be equally vulnerable to property deflation, with a mild jolt sufficient to end the current American boom,…

KALI UCHIS’S MUSICAL APPROACH IS REDOLENT OF THE past—mostly thanks to the smoky, nostalgic quality of her voice, which often feels like it’s being broadcast live from a hazy, tobacco-stained lounge. “La Luna Enamorada,” the opener from her sophomore album, Sin Miedo (Del Amor y Otros Demonios), takes full advantage of her vocals as she purrs over a rich, undulating bolero rhythm. But the song isn’t simply a chance for Uchis to show off her singing chops. It’s a cover of the Cuban classic “La Luna en Tu Mirada,” written by the composer Luís Chaniveky and performed in 1964 by Los Zafiros, a Cuban filin quartet that took inspiration from American doowop and harmony groups. Here, it serves as an introduction to the way Uchis explores her Latinx roots on…

I COME TO YOU HAVING WITNESSED SIX EXECUTIONS and engaged in 35 years of dialogue about the death penalty. I’m on fire to abolish government killing because I’ve seen it far too close-up, and I have a pretty good idea by now how it works—or doesn’t. I wasn’t at all surprised to see Donald Trump order 13 federal executions carried out before he left office: He had the discretionary power, and he used it. He was operating within the hopelessly flawed guidelines for government killing that the Supreme Court set forth in 1976 in Gregg v. Georgia, when it reinstituted the death penalty. After a national hiatus on executions from 1972 to 1976, Gregg renewed our capricious, racist, broken death penalty system, which has caused and is perpetuating unspeakable suffering.…

“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”—Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (1930) DELIVERING HIS INAUGURAL ADDRESS IN A GARRISONED city where more than 20,000 troops from the National Guard were stationed only two weeks after Donald Trump egged on thousands of his followers to attack Congress in order to overturn the election, Joe Biden naturally organized his speech and the day’s festivities around the theme of “unity.” Not that he needed to be nudged in that direction: Biden’s campaign had often harped on how he would be a national healer and unifier who would end his predecessor’s fomenting of divisions. Trump’s aborted putsch—a sinister event, no matter how clownishly executed—made…

50+% Percentage of Latino immigrants in New York State who experienced Covid-19 symptoms and did not seek care due to fear or a lack of insurance 75% Percentage of New York City frontline workers who are people of color 14.4M Number of people excluded from the CARES Act due to their own or a family member’s undocumented status 40.7% Percentage by which Covid deaths would have fallen if the federal government had enacted a blanket moratorium on evictions from early March through November 4% Percentage of the white population in 14 states that received a Covid vaccine by the end of January, compared with 1.9 percent of Black people and 1.8 percent of Latinos 43 Number of states that don’t release data on racial disparities in Covid testing…

TOM UDALL USED HIS FAREWELL ADDRESS as New Mexico’s senior senator to deliver a dire assessment of the chamber in which he had served for 12 years. “The Senate is broken,” he said in December. “Our government is supposed to respond to the will of the majority while protecting the rights of the minority. Instead, we have the tyranny of the minority. That minority is superwealthy, politically powerful, and dangerously out of touch with the American people.” “We have to do something to fix this,” he said, concluding with a warning to his colleagues: “We do not have any time to waste.” Udall’s urgency was well-placed, as was his implicit warning that Senate Democrats must seize every opening to govern boldly if they hope not only to repair a broken…

THE NOVEL IS A SURVIVOR. IN THE CENTURIES SINCE Cervantes turned the endeavor inside out, so many writers have set out to make the form, well, novel. From Proust’s long game to postmodern tricksters like Julio Cortázar to the contemporary faction of autofiction writers devoted to blurring the space between fiction and fact, the novel adapts even as it endures. Throughout her career, the Scottish writer Ali Smith has been interested in the novel’s elasticity. Her debut novel, 1997’s Like, comes in two parts: a story, then a journal by another character illuminating the story just told. How to Be Both, from 2014, is likewise made up of two narratives—an artist in Renaissance Italy, a teen in modern-day Europe—but in some editions of the book, the contemporary comes before the…

Overtures to Trump Voters Pramila Jayapal says “we must pay attention to why more than 74 million people voted to reelect Trump” [“Biden’s First 100 Days: Congress,” Jan. 11/18]. Trump sponsored huge tax cuts for the rich, attempted to gut the Affordable Care Act, denied the existence of climate change, appointed three very conservative Supreme Court justices, savagely disparaged the Black Lives Matter movement, and brought white supremacy back into the political mainstream. His presidency was a rejection of virtually every value that Representative Jayapal advocates. Democrats need to face up to the fact that a progressive agenda does not pay attention to Trump voters. We should not make overtures to them at all if they are going to be empty ones. ARTHUR LEVY Paging the Surgeon General Gregg Gonsalves…

TONIA BAZEL DIDN’T WANT TO STRIKE DURING A PANDEMIC, TAKING TIME away from the patients on the infectious disease floor where she works. Nevertheless, she and the other nurses at Albany Medical Center in New York took to the picket line on December 1. They had been bargaining for two years following their vote to join the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) in 2018, and although wages and benefits had been the source of their initial concerns, conditions during the Covid-19 crisis had become the focus of their action. As a second wave of the virus began to wash over the state, they went on strike to demand better protective equipment and safer staffing levels. “Staff have been leaving,” Bazel explained, adding that their departures have only exacerbated the…

There she wasin that lavender dress,in that room,in that apartment,turning aroundto answerhis fistpounding that doorin the middle of that daythat must’ve been a dayin August,the start of that seasonwhen all around them,all that could bechanged by violenceand violently changed,the hills and the valley,the canyons and the cliffstongue-kissedby the Santa Ana,burst into bright seams of silver smoke,and though it wasunclear how he burstthrough that door,why her dress fellto that floorlike that flame and flashlashing the bedstrawand the sunflowersuntil the flowers benttheir heads from the sun,or what they sawin each other—who was whosehorse, rider, ride, reins, neckpulled, pulling, arching, archedback like the curvesof that wildfire’s hips,that scorched hourgrinding intothe next, there, in that room,in that apartment—my mother and fatherbecame my mother and fatherand, the next spring,for the first time,brought me homethrough that…