Innehållsförteckning för January 24/31, 2022 från The Nation

WE HAVE REACHED THE POINT WHERE THE US SUPREME COURT HAS BECOME ONE OF the greatest threats to public health and welfare in this country. At a moment when many thousands of people are falling ill every day with Covid and state legislatures are taunting the Supreme Court by passing hundreds of laws that blatantly violate long-recognized constitutional rights relating to gun safety, reproductive rights, and voting, the court’s conservative justices insist that the most pressing constitutional emergency today is a conjured threat to religious liberty. In a series of recent cases, the new conservative majority has accomplished a radical realignment in the way fundamental rights are recognized and enforced. The significance of this revolution cannot be overemphasized. Unlike previous decisions that shrunk the scope of equal rights, the court…

EONS AGO—IN 2019—LINDA SARSOUR, TAMIKA Mallory, and Bob Bland stepped down from their leadership positions on the Women’s March board after a series of self-inflicted wounds. Aside from the widespread mismanagement that starved state chapters of funding and alienated them over trademark wars, the leadership’s failure to grapple with how it had cozied up to Louis Farrakhan exposed a gaping ignorance that many, especially Jewish women, simply could not abide. Two years later, the Democratic Socialists of America seem determined to make the same mistake, one that’s common on the US left: offending Jews. This is a bad idea. It’s bad because Jews vote in higher numbers than the electorate at large. It’s bad because Jews have a long history of left-leaning activism. And it’s bad because—especially after Charlottesville and…

THIS WINTER BRINGS A BLEAK SENSE OF DÉJÀ VU TO the Boston-area ICU where I work. Once again, beds are increasingly occupied by critically ill patients with Covid-19. When I join Zoom calls with physicians from other hospitals to coordinate regional “load balancing” of ICU beds—exchanging patients between facilities to prevent overload—the tone is again tense. They too, seem about to burst. Compared with our last big surge a year ago, things should be much better now. After all, we have highly effective vaccines. But in many ways, things feel worse, and not just because of Omicron. Over the past two years, meaningful policy supports helped sustain us through the Covid pandemic. They were nowhere near sufficient, but nonetheless constituted a stronger and wider safety net than we had seen…

DAVID BROOKS IS THE PRODIGAL SON OF THE DEMOCRATIC Party. As an undergrad at the University of Chicago in the early 1980s, he identified as a democratic socialist. But upon graduating he got caught up in the spirit of Reaganism, starting off as an intern for William F. Buckley Jr. Now, after more than three decades of being a formidable Republican advocate, Brooks is ready to return to the Democratic fold. In an essay in the January/February issue of The Atlantic originally titled “I Remember Conservatism,” Brooks concedes that the Republican Party is likely to remain enthralled by some version of Trumpism, a degraded and bullying populism that threatens American democracy. “A lot of my friends are trying to reclaim the GOP and make it a conservative party once…

ON APRIL 16, 2020, OFFICER PRESTON PANANA walked up to Joleen Nez at the corner of Texas Street and Zuni Avenue in Albuquerque. Nez was living in a nearby encampment in a neighborhood known as the War Zone, along with dozens of other unhoused Native Americans. About six months pregnant with her fifth child, Nez, who is Navajo and Zia Pueblo, was getting her meals at the Albuquerque Indian Center, where she’d known some of the staff for years. Panana was with four other police officers when he heard Nez and a man arguing. As the two quarreled, the man set a paper cup and bowl down on the sidewalk, and Nez knocked them over. That’s when, as Panana wrote in the incident report, he advised her “to pick up…

Josephine Baker’s French Exile Gary Younge writes in “The Dancer Was a Spy” [Dec. 13/20]: “Embracing exiles from their ally-cum-rival [the United States] gave the French a sense of being morally and culturally superior—even as they wrestled with their military and economic inferiority.” Indeed, one might also see elite US institutions’ “embrace” of French intellectuals of color (The Washington Post’s and Georgetown University’s recent hiring of French journalist Rokhaya Diallo comes to mind) as obscuring the political, economic, and cultural hegemony the United States wields in today’s world. Certainly, France’s refusal to fully come to terms with its colonial past disqualifies it to provide any lessons in matters of racism. WILLIAM POULIN-DELTOUR It was good to see Gary Younge in your pages again. He never disappoints. Thanks! NINA RAMOS I’m…

I WAS ALWAYS UNSURE HOW TO GREET HER, THE radiantly brilliant scholar named Gloria Watkins who wrote worlds into being as bell hooks. She was a neighbor of mine in the 1990s; we lived within blocks of each other in Greenwich Village. I did not know her well, but our paths crossed with some regularity because we wrote on overlapping topics—race, gender, class. She was the eminence whose 1981 book Ain’t I a Woman?, written while she was an undergraduate, had revolutionized second-wave feminism. She forced an epistemic rethinking of intersectionality, encapsulated well by the title of the landmark 1982 anthology All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave. One afternoon I ran into her at a bistro in the Village. The…

Underneath all the economic reporting of 2021, there was a hidden story: Aided by the American Recovery Act and other stimulus measures, low-wage workers launched a small-scale revolution. Employees and contractors used the additional resources of the past year to successfully demand better pay and working conditions. This occurred alongside giant job gains—over 6 million new jobs this year—creating a recovery about eight times faster than the one that followed the Great Recession of 2008-9. The way in which this is happening is one of the more important and hopeful stories about the labor market today. Typically, labor conditions are quite bad during the initial recovery from a recession. This was especially true following the Great Recession, when stories of people being unemployed for more than 99 weeks or having…

SINCE MARCH 2019, HONG KONG HAS CONFRONTED THE GREATEST CHALLENGE TO ITS RELATIVELY free and open civil society since it was transferred from British to Chinese rule in 1997. In incidents spanning more than a year, local police faced off against enormous crowds of young demonstrators fighting a losing battle to maintain the city’s autonomy within the People’s Republic of China. Using batons and more than 10,000 canisters of tear gas, officers crushed the protest movement in 2020, but the repression has continued: By February 2021, more than 10,000 Hong Kongers had been arrested in connection with these demonstrations, and over a quarter of those had been prosecuted, while tens of thousands more had sought asylum in Britain, Canada, or Australia. For Promise Li, a young member of the Democratic…

IN 1956, THE FORMER COMMISSIONER OF THE INTERNAL Revenue Service made a surprising political turn: He announced in an essay in The Washington Post that he saw taxation as a Marxist scheme to “bring capitalism to its knees.” Even though T. Coleman Andrews had served in government only a year before, under Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower, once out of Washington he turned against the entire enterprise of the modern state. Any progressive or liberal, he insisted, was “either a dupe or, at heart, a dictator.” Andrews’s bold words made him a hero within a growing world of right-wing activists, and they drafted him to challenge Eisenhower for the presidency. His supporters were a motley crew comprising members of For America (an organization that built on America First, which had…

Rebecca Solnit, the great essayist of this time, gave us a fresh understanding of George Orwell with her brilliant 2021 book Orwell’s Roses (Viking). But as with all things Solnit, Orwell’s Roses is about a good deal more than its nominal subject: the flowers that the author of Animal Farm and 1984 planted in the garden of a rented cottage in the English village of Wallington. I spoke with Solnit about the need for bread and roses—especially in perilous times. —John Nichols JN: Why Orwell? Why now? RS: The book kind of ambushed me. Although I’d known the essay where he described planting those roses well, I’d never thought about what it meant that our great prophet of totalitarianism, the man famous for facing unpleasant facts, was planting roses. It let…