The Nation August 22/29, 2022

IT’S NO SURPRISE THAT DEMOCRATS ARE UP AGAINST IT THIS FALL. THE PRESIDENT’S party generally does worse in midterm elections. Inflation is at a 40-year high. The mainstream media trumpet that crime is up. And the centerpiece of President Biden’s domestic agenda has been torpedoed by united Republican obstruction—and, until the recently brokered spending deal, by the Democratic Senator Joe Manchin III. But a more long-term difficulty was revealed in a recent New York Times–Siena College poll: Though they enjoy a 20-point advantage over Republicans among white, college-educated voters, Democrats have a working-class problem—and the climate deal, while welcome, isn’t going to fix it. Currently trailing the GOP by 12 points, Democrats are becoming the party of upscale urban and suburban voters, while Republicans are beginning to consolidate a…

STEVE BANNON CALLED IT ON JANUARY 5, 2021, when he announced that “all hell is going to break loose tomorrow.” Bannon knew what was coming on the eve of President Donald Trump’s violent coup attempt. And he knows what’s coming now as he promotes a “populist revolt” that he predicts will see an army of partisans flooding polling places this November to usher in a new era of right-wing extremism. What Trump’s coconspirator is talking about is very different from the normal politics of a midterm election year. Bannon is plotting a “precinct strategy” takeover of the electoral infrastructure of the nation—by inserting MAGA supporters in key election oversight positions and by creating chaos where necessary—to ensure Republicans get control of Congress and statehouses in 2022 and of the White…

WE LIVE IN HISTORIC TIMES. THE HEARINGS OF THE January 6 committee are Watergate 2.0. Maybe they’ll have an even bigger impact than Watergate 1.0. At any rate, democracy is at death’s door, and if we want to ensure the future of our republic, we need to hold former president Donald Trump responsible for his deplorable behavior. And it doesn’t hurt that the hearings are must-see TV. So goes the story line that has permeated much of the mainstream and progressive media. But this narrative obscures more than it reveals. Its popularity indicates that there’s something rotten at the heart of contemporary liberalism. We don’t deny that January 6 was a grotesque moment in US history. The actions of the rioters who stampeded the Capitol, whipped up by the nonsensical…

UNLESS YOU ARE A PUBLISHER—OR HAPPEN TO BE reading this in prison—you may be unfamiliar with the “Exclusion Notice” that prison authorities use to justify the withholding of magazines and other printed matter from incarcerated subscribers. Over the past several months we at The Nation have received a number of these notices from the Office of Publication Review (OPR) at the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation, and Reentry. The explanations the OPR provides for banning a given issue are—true to its Orwellian name—invariably vague and lack any specific citations of the allegedly offending material. Our April 5/12, 2021, issue, for example, was suppressed because it allegedly falls under the categories of “Promotes Superiority of One Group Over Another, Racism, Degradation” and “Acts of Violence.” Since they gave no further details,…

THE JEWISH POSITION ON ABORTION IS SIMPLE: IT’S permitted. However ignorant the ancient rabbis may have been about the female reproductive system, they managed to land on the revolutionary concept that women are people too—a finding that eludes the 21st-century United States Supreme Court. But could the court’s radical transformation into a theocracy, all but annihilating the distinction between church and state, bite them in the ass when it comes to a Jewish First Amendment case for abortion? Halacha, the collective legal texts that guide Jewish life, justify abortion well beyond contemporary notions like “safe, legal, and rare” or “to save the life of the mother.” The earliest reference to the ethics of terminating a pregnancy is a short passage in Exodus, which reads like a civil tort, stating that…

IN HIS SALAD DAYS, DURING THE HIGH COLD WAR OF THE 1950s and ’60s, L. Brent Bozell Jr. was a notorious right-wing polemicist whose ideas influenced everyone from Joseph McCarthy to Barry Goldwater to Ronald Reagan. Yet he always bristled at the misfortune of living his entire adult life in the shadow of a celebrity relative. “It’s a hindrance to be William F. Buckley’s brother-in-law, because people are under the assumption that I share his views,” Bozell told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 1971. “I do not. He is the right-wing establishment. I consider myself outside the establishment.” Buckley and Bozell, relatives by marriage whose once-tight friendship eventually splintered over political arguments, remain a fascinating study in contrasts. Their divergent paths illuminate the conflicting factions of the right. After a period…