Innehållsförteckning för April 3/10, 2023 från The Nation

WHEN LOUIS BRANDEIS DECLARED THAT THE STATES WERE LABORATORIES OF democracy, it’s a safe bet the Supreme Court justice wasn’t thinking of the rolling authoritarian agenda of Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor now positioning himself for a run at the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. DeSantis came to national prominence as a founding member of Congress’s hard-right Freedom Caucus. As governor, he’s transformed the Sunshine State into a model of antidemocratic reaction, making Florida the place “where woke goes to die,” as his informal state motto has it. Not satisfied with banning mentions of sexuality or baseline guarantees of gay and trans tolerance from Florida public schools, he responded to dissent by Disney and other major Florida employers by launching a separate culture war against the specter of “woke capitalism.” Though…

LEAVE IT TO GEORGE W. BUSH TO MISSPEAK HIS WAY to the truth about the Iraq War that he launched 20 years ago. Last May, in a speech addressing Ukraine, he lambasted Vladimir Putin’s “wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq.” Bush, stammering, quickly corrected himself but then conceded the point, murmuring, “And Iraq, too. Anyway…” His audience laughed awkwardly, allowing the former commander in chief, then 75, to deflect the significance of the moment with a senility joke. It was indicative of how deeply the United States has avoided reckoning with the barbarism of invading, occupying, and privatizing Iraq, a reckoning that might have cast Putin’s war in an uncomfortably familiar light. Instead, Iraq demonstrates an innovation in American imperial amnesia: You don’t have to consider the lessons of…

$778b Amount the United States spent on its military in 2020 750 Approximate number of US military bases around the world as of July 2021 159 Number of countries with US boots on the ground as of 2020 251 Number of military interventions launched by the US since 1991 275k Minimum number of Iraqi civilians killed in direct war-related violence since the 2003 US invasion $85b Amount the US paid private companies for products and services during the Iraq War between 2003 and 2007 900k Estimated number of people killed directly in major US wars since September 11, 2001…

He Was a Mensch To say I loved Victor adds little to the commentary, as most everyone felt the same [“Remembering Victor Navasky,” Feb. 20/27]. He was very kind and deeply respectful, fervent in his beliefs yet as lighthearted as one can be while aware of so much injustice, and consistent in integrity and principle. In the years I worked with him, I never saw any hypocrisy, so unusual in a person connected to politics and power. MARY VAN VALKENBURG HOBART, N.Y. The writer is a former director of finance of The Nation. Get Out the Message Re “Once Upon a Time in Arizona,” by Sasha Abramsky [Jan. 9/16]: What is happening now is something that progressives have been building for well over a decade. Arizona is contested terrain today…

I FIRST MET JONES CARME ON AN EVENING IN MARCH 2022. He was in front of his apartment on the outskirts of Tapachula, Mexico, a tropical city of some 350,000 people in Chiapas, just 20 minutes from the border with Guatemala. Tapachula was founded by the Aztecs in the 15th century, and just as it was then, the region today is an agricultural hub and a major producer of crops like corn, coffee, mangoes, and bananas. I’d come to this neighborhood to talk to migrants working in local agriculture, and this cluster of worn stucco apartments was a short walk from a massive mango plantation and packing house. Carme, who had just arrived home after working a 12-hour shift in the mango fields, was rail thin with high cheekbones. He…

THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION WILL SOON IMPLEMENT a policy that will “encourage migrants to avail themselves of lawful, safe, and orderly pathways into the United States, or otherwise to seek asylum or other protection in countries through which they travel, thereby reducing reliance on human smuggling networks that exploit migrants for financial gain.” One could be forgiven for thinking that this regulation, slated to go into effect in mid-May, expands access to the asylum process. In fact, it does the opposite. The new policy “encourages” lawful pathways by further criminalizing the most common existing pathways. Once the rule goes into effect, anyone who passes through another country on their way to the United States and crosses the border between official entry points will be deemed ineligible for asylum unless they applied…

AS ENTIRELY EXPECTED BY ANYBODY WHO HAS SPENT time with white people, corporate America’s post–George Floyd commitment to diversity was as enduring as a Kardashian’s love of Pepsi. A new study of over 600 companies from workforce analytics firm Revelio Labs reports that “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” officers, hired en masse after the protests following Floyd’s murder, are now being quietly phased out of their positions. The study found that the attrition for DEI officers was 33 percent at the end of 2022, compared with 21 percent for non-DEI roles. For some corporations these days, “diversity” is basically a white lady with dreadlocks wearing a Black Lives Matter T-shirt and sharing her potato salad recipe with a white CEO ahead of their trip to Davos, which they’ve rebranded as a…

Marianne Williamson announced her presidential run on March 4 in Washington, D.C., making her the first Democratic challenger to Joe Biden’s expected reelection bid. The best-selling author, spiritual counselor, and unsuccessful 2020 presidential candidate faces a daunting task at a point when prominent Democrats—including many of Biden’s 2020 rivals—say they want him to seek a second term. As Williamson was preparing for campaign swings in South Carolina and New Hampshire, I spoke with her about why she’s throwing her hat in the ring once more. JN: You ran in a crowded field four years ago. Now you have positioned yourself as perhaps the most prominent primary challenger to a sitting president. Why did you decide to run again? MW: My choice really doesn’t have to do with who’s in the…

“ROGER, HELLO FROM JERUSALEM,” read the message from the Israeli secret agent. Dated August 12, 2016, it was addressed to Roger Stone—at the time a key player in Donald Trump’s presidential election campaign. “Any progress? He is going to be defeated unless we intervene. We have critical intel. The key is in your hands! Back in the US next week.” Later, the agent promised, “October Surprise coming!” While the American media and political system fixated on Russian President Vladimir Putin and his armies of cyber warriors, trolls, and bots, what was completely missed in the Russiagate investigation of 2016 was the Israeli connection. No details of it were ever revealed in the heavily redacted Mueller Report. Nor was there any mention of an Israeli plot in the similarly redacted Senate…

IN A MOVING TRIBUTE TO HIS FRIEND Ned Rorem, the American composer famous for art songs and sex diaries, who died last year at 99, the critic Joshua Barone reports that one of Rorem’s signature gags was to insist that everything in the world—from music to food to people—was either German or French. In that same facetious spirit, I’d like to propose that every era in the history of taste can be classified into one of two categories: those that prefer the Ópera Prima and those that prefer the Late Masterpiece. Periods that favor debutantes are romantic and avant-garde, or else give rise to a classicist revival in which the old forms are imbued with youthful vigor. Times that admire maturity gravitate toward the baroque and the mannered, or else…

Alex, any time, and at a moment’s noticeyou should give me the numberI ask for. Unlock my phone, my moneySomebody fucking stole my Gucci scarfAnd tell mom my son is not her childSister, bring them into the light. Alex, it’s morning, come into the lightKnow I write just like you, you notice?My father still owes me, when I was a childHe’s on my side now, he’s got my numberconnect with him, will you, get me that Louis scarfRemember? The last time I saw you, that money. Biden Harris Biden Harris, your father owes me moneyHe doubled down now his pockets lightI’ma get this Gucci scarf, you too, you the Louis scarfGo get my portion, put your father on noticeTell him call me at this numberDon’t talk to me like I’m…

WE SAT IN RED VELVET SEATS UNDER THE KYIV opera house’s soaring dome, waiting for a ballet adaptation of one of Ukraine’s most celebrated literary works to begin. My friend and translator Yuliia Kasianova explained that in the event of an air raid, the ballet would pause, and the cast and audience would head to a bomb shelter until the danger had passed. The adaptation Yuliia and I were there to see was of The Forest Song, a 1911 play by Lesya Ukrainka. An ardent believer in Ukrainian independence, Ukrainka opposed Russian czarism and was a member of Ukrainian Marxist organizations. (In 1902, she even translated The Communist Manifesto into Ukrainian.) The author’s name is a pseudonym she used when writing in Ukrainian—a language that was banned under the Russian…

IT SEEMS LIKE EVERY YEAR WOMEN’S HISTORY Month gets less political and more corporate-celebratory. Yay, women! Who would have dreamed in 1980, when Jimmy Carter proclaimed the first Women’s History Week, that we would see Hershey’s honoring the month in 2023 by releasing limited-edition chocolate bars. But we have bigger issues than candy. Around the time of the Dobbs decision last summer, Michelle Goldberg and Susan Faludi each wrote a piece for The New York Times warning that women were being pushed backward, and both criticized the feminist movement for failing to meet the moment. Faludi argued that feminists had become obsessed with celebrity and individualism, while Goldberg noted the numerous ways that feminism was increasingly unpopular—perceived as “cringe” by young women, and less favorably by younger men than by…

The economy has recovered all of the jobs that were lost during the pandemic, but the childcare sector is still lagging. There were 57,600 fewer childcare workers in January of this year than in February 2020, even as the number of children needing care grew. Childcare employment is 5.5 percent lower than it was before many centers closed in February 2020 and others scrambled to stay open for the children of essential workers. The strain proved too much for many providers. According to Child Care Aware of America, a nonprofit research organization that advocates for childcare investment, from December 2019 to March 2021, nearly 16,000 centers or family-based programs shuttered, about 10 percent of the pre-pandemic supply. The childcare providers that have managed to stay open are struggling, desperately trying…