The Nation January 23/30, 2023

THE PREGNANT WORKERS FAIRNESS ACT, A BILL THAT WOULD REQUIRE WORK-PLACES to provide reasonable accommodations to allow pregnant workers to safely stay on the job, is poised to become law after years of advocacy work. On December 22, the Senate voted 73–24 to add it as an amendment to the must-pass omnibus government spending package, and the next day the House passed the omnibus over Republican objections. Women make up half the workforce, and more than 70 percent of mothers with children work. Yet pregnant people, whether they are in high-paid roles at law firms or banks or in low-wage positions in retail or fast food, face rampant discrimination. More than one-fifth of pregnant employees hold low-wage jobs, which offer less control over working conditions even though they are more…

IN 1974, WHEN THE IRISH STATESMAN AND HUMANITARIAN Seán MacBride was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, he delivered an acceptance speech emphasizing the urgent need for nuclear disarmament. But at a key moment, MacBride turned to the growing role of mass media in world affairs. The media’s exploding reach and speed, he asserted, could grant “a much greater degree of influence to public opinion in the world than it has ever had.” The US withdrawal from Vietnam proved it. For the first time, MacBride said, a country at war had been stopped in its tracks by public opinion—shaped through the media. But this shift in power was not yet fully understood. “Greater vigilance than ever will have to be exercised to ensure that the press and the mass media do…

EVEN WHILE GIVING REPUBLICANS A NARROW MARGIN in the House of Representatives, voters elected a historic cohort of insurgent progressive newcomers, adding at least 11 new members to the Congressional Progressive Caucus. The CPC, which just reelected Washington Representative Pramila Jayapal as its leader, had numbered 101 members, making it the largest ideological caucus in the last Congress. It will grow in the new one, even after losing members to retirement (like Eddie Bernice Jackson of Texas), election to other offices (Karen Bass as Los Angeles mayor, Peter Welch as senator to Vermont), or election reversals (including, regrettably, one of the true champions of working people in Congress, Michigan’s Andy Levin, brought down by reapportionment and a multimillion-dollar dark money assault in the Democratic primary waged largely by AIPAC and…

HANNAH ARENDT DID MORE THAN ANYONE ELSE TO give the idea of totalitarianism the importance we accord it today. But like her contemporary George Orwell, in her subtlest trains of thought Arendt was seldom writing about the “-ism,” the social and political entity. She was more concerned with the implications of the adjective “totalitarian.” There was, she believed, a totalitarian germ in the Western liberal political order. The instruments for the total control of opinion existed in every advanced technological society—and some of those instruments were already at work in America, even if selectively and half-buried under pretexts and euphemisms. Arendt accordingly devoted considerable energy in her final years to exposing the consolidation of state power here in the US—especially the war powers that could be turned back and deployed…

KANYE “YE” WEST HAS BEEN SPEWING WHITE NATIONALIST talking points for a decade. His current anti-Semitic road show was preceded by years of evident anti-Blackness, from hawking Confederate flag merch in 2013, to declaring that Black enslavement was “a choice” in 2018, to appearing repeatedly at the White House during the Trump years, to attempting, in 2021, to coerce Black election workers in Georgia to falsely confess throwing the vote to Biden. Unsurprisingly, wariness of Ye among Black folks has been steadily growing for years, particularly among disappointed former fans. In 2018, the writer Channing Hargrove wrote a satirical obituary for West; Black Twitter declared him stuck in Get Out’s “sunken place”; and journalist and filmmaker dream hampton indicted him for pushing “the same old white supremacy.” Comedian Zachary Fox…

TWENTY TWENTY-TWO WAS A DECENT year for democracy. Legislative districts remained gerrymandered, but the maps were not as extreme as they were in the 2010s. State governments were still engaging in voter suppression, but it was partly counteracted by pro-voter policies and mobilization by voter turnout groups. Perhaps most important, many candidates who were promoting “Stop the Steal” voter-fraud conspiracy theories lost in the 2022 midterms. Is American democracy out of the woods? The answer, unfortunately, is no. The events of 2022 certainly moved us away from the brink. But the threats remain. The situation is not hopeless, however, particularly if Democrats can focus on long-term strategies, such as rebuilding the labor movement. The 2010s ushered in a new wave of state governments that eroded democratic institutions. States like North…