Innehållsförteckning för November 29/December 06, 2021 från The Nation

DEMOCRATS WERE SLEEPWALKING TOWARD DISASTER IN THE 2022 MIDTERM elections before they got the proverbial wake-up call on November 2. The party’s off-year election losses in the supposedly blue state of Virginia, along with setbacks in other regions, confirmed the very real prospect that next year’s voting could cost Democrats control of Congress and multiple statehouses. But President Biden and his partisan allies in D.C. and the states face more than the indignity of a disempowerment along the lines of what Bill Clinton experienced in 1994 and Barack Obama confronted in 2010. If they fail to get their act together, Democrats will suffer a defeat that increases the likelihood of Donald Trump’s return to the White House as a full-blown authoritarian. Let’s face it: Trump is running for president in…

MORT SAHL DIED ON OCTOBER 26, AND THE NEWS brought back memories of the 1960s and early ’70s and what it was like to grow up in Los Angeles, where he lived and worked. Sahl’s career was unpredictable and vagrant from the start; he joined the ROTC at 15 to escape the boredom of high school and eventually went into the Army Air Forces. Charged with insubordination and demoted to KP duties, he dropped out of the armed forces and put himself through college at the University of Southern California. After kicking around odd jobs in LA, he followed his girlfriend to Berkeley and became (by his own account) a habitué, brooder, and holder-forth at the local coffee houses, until his break came and he was paid a modest fee…

MONTHS AGO, SENATE DEMOCRATS LET PARLIAMENTARIAN Elizabeth MacDonough kill their chance to pass a $15 minimum wage. When MacDonough, the unelected staffer who interprets the rules of the chamber, decided that a plan to gradually increase the minimum wage didn’t fit Senate rules, Democrats could have ignored the nonbinding opinion or fired her for standing in the way of their agenda, as Republicans have done in the past. Instead, they did nothing about it. Now, as the party rushes to resolve its social spending bill, Democrats are hiding behind the parliamentarian again. This time, they could blow their last chance to establish protections for undocumented immigrants, a promise they’ve campaigned on for decades. MacDonough has already ruled against two separate proposals to provide millions a pathway to permanent residence. She…

A FEW MONTHS AGO, SALLEY MAY SHOWED UP AT A MOSQUE IN HARLEM where a woman was having a mental health crisis, holding children inside and refusing to allow people in or out. About 50 onlookers had gathered outside, as well as a large number of police officers. May, a social worker, talked to the cops, “and we got them to cross the street,” she said, where they stayed. An emergency medical technician from the New York Fire Department took over managing the situation. He was able to enter the building and talk to the woman, to “really engage” with her, May said. He and May eventually brought her husband to the scene. The tense situation was resolved without violence. May and her EMT partner are part of the city’s…

THE SUMMER OF 2020 WAS A SUMMER OF PROTEST. IN the spring, anger over the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin initiated one of the largest and most sustained periods of mass protest in the United States in decades. Enormous Black-led multiracial protests spread across the country, ultimately feeding into a global wave of collective action calling for racial justice and police abolition. Last summer was also the summer before a presidential election—a moment in which the engines of national partisan politics and electioneering were kicking into high gear. So perhaps it was inevitable that the grassroots politics of protest found its way—for better or worse—into the stump speeches of Joe Biden and Donald Trump. At the Democratic National Convention in August, the party seemed to…

ABOUT HALFWAY THROUGH THE NEW NETFLIX HORROR series Squid Game, one of the contestants, a career gangster named Jang Deok-su (played by Heo Sung-tae), comes upon a gruesome new strategy. Thus far, he and several hundred other men and women, dressed in identical green polyester track suits, have been told by an anonymous army of enforcers that they are in a six-round tournament of literal elimination. Each round is a different challenge based on a children’s game, like marbles or tug-of-war; each is played to the death and for an unimaginably large jackpot. Every person who loses dies, and their deaths add to the prize money. Despite these macabre stakes, a sense of fairness has prevailed in the game’s early rounds: Do your best in competition, and if you survive,…

SUBURBAN FLEECE DADDY GLENN YOUNGKIN LED Virginia Republicans out of the wilderness in early November, winning back white suburban voters to take the governorship. But he did even more: He helped the GOP win back the lieutenant governor and attorney general offices and flip the House of Delegates from blue to red. As I write, Democrats have gone from a 55-45 edge there to a probable 48-52 deficit, with two races in recount territory. Youngkin, the former Carlyle titan, swapped out his suits for his trademark fleece vests and reassured white suburban parents he’s just like them: anxious as hell. During the Trump years—and I start the clock in 2011, when the real estate mediocrity turned reality TV star became a political phenomenon by pitching the lie that Barack Obama…

FOR MORE THAN A YEAR NOW, CONSERVATIVES HAVE BEEN waging war against the misdefined conception of critical race theory that they themselves created. The right-wing campaign against so-called CRT largely amounts to a round-robin chorus of hysterical voices asking, Won’t someone think of the poor white children?! “CRT tries to make kids feel bad because of the color of their skin,” Representative Ron Nate, cosponsor of Idaho’s anti-CRT law, stated just after the bill passed in May. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who successfully led the state school board to ban CRT from public school classrooms last summer, tweeted in June that “Critical Race Theory teaches kids to hate our country and to hate each other.” Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed a bill muzzling history educators over lessons that might make students…

1.2ºC Amount by which the average global temperature has risen since industrialization, according to NASA 417B Number of metric tons of cumulative carbon dioxide emissions released by the US 236B Number of metric tons of cumulative carbon dioxide emissions released by China, the next highest national emitter 22 Number of billion-dollar climate-related disasters in the US in 2020, a new record 2035 Estimated year in which the Arctic Ocean could be ice-free for the first time in approximately 2 million years 110K Number of annual premature deaths in the US that will be caused by heat exposure by 2100, according to one high climate-warming scenario…

BEHIND CLOSED DOORS AND WITH LITTLE FANFARE, on October 8, President Joe Biden signed the Helping American Victims Afflicted by Neurological Attacks Act into law. Known as the “Havana Act”—a misnomer since most of the purported “attacks” took place far from Cuba—the legislation authorizes the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department to compensate a growing number of agents and diplomats who have experienced a cluster of cognitive-related injuries from a mysterious, and still unidentified, source. The impetus for the new law came from complaints by a number of injured US personnel that their own government, particularly during the Donald Trump era, has been dismissive of their medical needs and the legitimacy of their injuries. “We’re not making this up—this happened to real people,” one injured Havana embassy official stated…

Alone I spirit myself awaylooking at the many flowersborn on the balcony,certainly not thanks to me,the gardener was the wind.They skin me with precision,their beauty sinks inwith the same noble knifeused by the missing.I remember your laughterwhirling all aroundwhen I confessedthat flowers frighten me. Mine is a young pain,it’ll take patience,waiting as the birdat the edge of a fieldjust barely sown.I loved you with a human love, liketaking off one’s clothes at night andputting them back on in the morning.Now in these boundless daysI write you an invisible letterto tell you there’s a wonderful patha pearl that goes rolling fastdown a tree-lined avenuetowing lightness with it,towing wakefulness. I see the worldthrough your transparency,I see its awful charms,always faking itself opaquethen once again awake,I see how we are hurtby the lightness…

Get Carter I should be grateful that Rick Perlstein devoted 5,000 words to reviewing my biography of Jimmy Carter [“True Colors,” October 18/25]. That’s a lot of words. Unfortunately, the essay is less a review of the biography than a litany of the author’s complaints about Carter as a politician. For Perlstein, Carter is just not left enough, not liberal enough—and not a populist. I am reminded of a letter that Arthur Schlesinger Jr. sent to Victor Navasky in 1998 when I published a biography of McGeorge and William Bundy: “I would like to have said to Kai Bird that fair-minded scholarship triumphed over evident political disapproval in his very good book on the Bundys.” Perlstein’s review of The Outlier does just the opposite, allowing his ideology to blind him…

IN THE NEARLY 50 YEARS SINCE THE SUPREME Court decided Roe v. Wade, there has perhaps never been a more consequential moment for abortion rights than the one we are in now. This fall, the nation’s highest court is hearing not one but three cases that could upend the fundamental promise at the heart of Roe: that pregnant women in the United States have a right to an abortion until a fetus becomes viable, which is around 24 weeks. On November 1, the court heard the first two of these cases, Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson and United States v. Texas, which addressed Texas’s near-total abortion ban, the law known as SB 8. And on December 1, the court will hear arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which…

THE UNITED STATES SENATE WAS A BAD idea from the start. At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, populous states like Virginia supported the idea of a unicameral national legislature, with representation based on the population of each state. That’s the kind of system one would expect in a representative democracy. But less populous states like Delaware and New Jersey wanted a unicameral legislature in which all states would enjoy equal representation regardless of population, which is a system one might expect of a confederacy or a conglomerate of independent sovereign nations. Instead of resolving the issue in favor of democratic self-government, the convention went for a compromise plan. There would be two houses: a lower house, or House of Representatives, in which representation would be based on the population of…

A MID THE PUBLIC STORM IN AMERICA OVER THE FALL OF KABUL, IT IS important not to lose sight of other looming crises around the world—some of them potentially much more dangerous than Afghanistan. For if the US political elites were so surprised by the speed of the Afghan state’s collapse, that was largely because the US media stopped paying attention to developments on the ground in Afghanistan once most US forces withdrew and Americans stopped dying there in large numbers. Of these potential crises, one of the most menacing is the armed standoff between the Ukrainian military and Russian-supported separatist forces in eastern Ukraine. Limited numbers of Russian troops (lightly disguised as “volunteers”) are stationed in the Donbas region, and Russia has deployed large forces in southern Russia to…

GEORGE PACKER IS ONE OF THE MOST SUCCESSFUL long-form journalists of his generation. For more than two decades, he has been among this country’s leading liberal commentators. Offering a political and often personal chronicle of the vicissitudes of American liberalism over the past century, he has sought at once to reclaim and repurpose a political tradition he knows is in crisis. With each book, the task has gotten harder for him. In an early treatise, Blood of Liberals (2001), Packer reckoned with a New Deal and Great Society liberalism that had been assailed from the right and abandoned by the Democratic Party. Taking an inventory of this liberalism’s decline through the life of his maternal grandfather and namesake, Alabama Congressman George Huddleston, an agrarian populist who opposed the New Deal…

It was like waking up in California—the awkward blossoms,the sky an aggressive blue. I remember the smellfrom your armpits, the greenhouse windows covered in white paint,where the air was heavy. The silverweeds. A small herdof farm animals at the Agricultural Collegewore the field to dust.The wind was hot and freshon our faces. The donkey looked so dumbtrying to walk. It was simple: Beneath your shirtwas skin. I remember that first year,pulling your briefs from the hamper.…

an independent publisher putting the regional and global in conversation Dancing in the Streets: Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs of New Orleans with essays by Rachel Carrico, Freddi Williams Evans, Charles “Action” Jackson, Matt Sakakeeny, and Michael G. White hardcover • 326 pp. • $49.95 “The greatest real-life free show on earth.” “Church for dancers.” “Four hours of therapy.” These are but a few ways people have described the spectacle and energy of second line parades. Combining archival and contemporary photography, Dancing in the Streets presents a comprehensive survey of every social aid and pleasure club on the scene today. Follow @visit_thnoc on social media All THNOC publications in print are available from The Shop at The Collection, (504) 598-7147, hnoc.org/ourbooks, or from your favorite local independent bookstore. Booksellers: contact…