Innehållsförteckning för May 1/8, 2023 från The Nation

EVER SINCE MANHATTAN DISTRICT ATTORNEY ALVIN BRAGG INDICTED DONALD Trump on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, Trump has responded by attacking Bragg as well as the district attorney’s wife; Juan Merchan, the judge presiding over the case; and the Biden administration, all while exhorting his supporters—some of whom attempted to violently overthrow the government—to rally to his defense again. In other words, Trump has chosen to fight the charges against him like a lawless thug. It’s tempting to allow ourselves to feel inured to Trump’s authoritarian antics, but we should never lose our ability to recoil at what he’s doing. Trump isn’t attacking the law; he’s attacking the rule of law. Instead of availing himself of the process afforded to every citizen who is accused of a crime,…

ISWORE THAT I WAS DONE WRITING ABOUT ANDREW Cuomo. But the problem with shameless psychopaths is that they can easily cow a weakened media into reporting their nonsense as actual, relevant fact. And that’s where we find ourselves today. Cuomo, like Donald Trump and other serial abusers, continues to insist that the lack of criminal charges against him is proof of innocence. Rather than just quote him, though, reporters are now uncritically repeating his spin, ostensibly in the service of journalistic “context.” A recent Daily Beast article read: “Cuomo, who resigned in the wake of numerous allegations of sexual harassment or misconduct—which he still denies, and never faced any criminal charges over—remains one of only three New York governors without a portrait on display.” These kinds of caveats are meaningless…

Democracy in Tennessee Three Democratic lawmakers were cited for breaching the decorum of the Tennessee House of Representatives by participating in a demonstration for gun-safety measures on the House floor. The two Black lawmakers were ejected by a Republican supermajority; the white lawmaker survived the vote. —News reports Since decorum was breached the two were kicked out,Though supporters made sure they’ll be back.And perhaps the infraction that gave such offenseWas, in fact, legislating while Black.…

A Higher Bar In “The Governing Gap” [March 20/27], Chris Lehmann considers why public opinion hasn’t caught up with Joe Biden’s economic achievements. Any president who would veto Medicare for All, stopped a proposal to give paid sick leave to rail workers, and doesn’t push for a negotiated settlement in Ukraine needs more negative—not positive—PR. We know Biden is better than Donald Trump and the Republicans, but that’s not good enough. PATRICIA BLOCHOWIAK Impeding Our War Machine “Why Protest Matters,” by David Cortright [February 20/27], started out with an anti-war message, but then it turned out not to be really anti-war at all, at least when it comes to Ukraine. What is needed now is an immediate cease-fire, not protracted negotiations that may lead nowhere as the death toll and…

THE END OF THE COLD WAR WAS SUPPOSED TO USHER IN a better world. After four decades of struggle, the great battle between liberalism and Bolshevism had ended in the former’s decisive victory. Many in the West hoped that liberalism would now have free rein to shape events around the world. Utopia, at least of a liberal form, was finally within humanity’s grasp. No essay embodied this feeling more than “The End of History?” Published in 1989 in The National In terest and written by a then-unknown State Department official named Francis Fukuyama, the piece proffered a simple three-step argument. First, Fukuyama claimed that throughout the world, people had decided that liberal democratic capitalism was superior to the authoritarian communism produced by Bolshevism and Maoism. Second, he argued that liberalism’s triumph…

CYRIL LIONEL ROBERT JAMES WAS A MAN OF PARADOX. The Trinidadian-born revolutionary was a lanky 6-foot-3—“lean as a pole,” with “long pianist fingers” that one could easily imagine flying across a typewriter keyboard as well. However, as we learn in John Williams’s new biography, CLR James: A Life Beyond the Boundaries, he “never learned to type and relied on women to type up his handwritten articles and manuscripts,” of which there was a veritable tsunami. Likewise, while James cared little for money and possessions—other than books and albums—he was a connoisseur of exquisite wine and tasty meals. A fierce “anti-Stalinist,” he still collaborated fruitfully in 1930s London with the decidedly Russophilic Paul Robeson, widely suspected of being a member of the Communist Party, and he recommended the writings of US…

TWO YEARS AGO, JOE BIDEN’S AGENDA SIGNALED that the Democratic Party wing of our governing class was finally ready to face the long-accumulating economic, political, and social crises facing the country. It was never going to be easy. The costs of transition to a secure and prosperous future are enormous—and it is a task of decades. In his first year in office, Biden took some important steps: investments in infrastructure, technology, clean energy, social programs, and workforce diversity. He withdrew us from the quagmire in Afghanistan, forswore regime change, and promised a foreign policy for the middle class. A year later, we Americans can kiss tomorrow goodbye. With bipartisan support from establishment politicians, plutocrats, and pundits, Biden has now committed us to a four-front global crusade against Russia, China, Iran,…

LOUISVILLE, KY., IS BEST KNOWN FOR BOURBON, BASEBALL bats, and horse racing. The races can sometimes surprise you. Just last year, an unknown horse named Rich Strike—with the second-longest odds against him in the Kentucky Derby’s entire 147-year history—finished ahead of an elite field. In another upset, in this right-to-work state where only 7.9 percent of the workforce are covered by union contracts, the members of Local 1447 of the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) beat back racist divide-and-conquer proposals by management last November to win a great contract. But their victory relied on method—not luck. “I had just been elected the year before the negotiations started,” Lillian Brents, the 47-year-old president of the local, tells The Nation. “Everything was a lot of firsts for us, including the approach called ‘open…

FOR ALL THE ELITE HAND-WRINGING WE’VE SEEN over the scourge of right-wing “populism” these past seven years, the awkward fact of the matter is that populism has never aligned very closely with the long-term goals of American conservatism. Originally an uprising among the self-styled producing classes of the early industrial age, Populism sought to broaden and deepen the fundamental precepts of American democracy via the direct election of senators, popular ballot initiatives, and a new system of currency designed to reward labor over the speculative accumulation of capital. Contemporary centrist thinkers, following the lead of mid-century anti-populist scholars like Richard Hofstadter, have overlooked the historical roots of capital-P Populism in favor of an all-purpose definition of “populism” as anti-elite bigotry. This conflation permits the blurry, quick-and-dirty depictions of urban real…

I MET MALCOLM HARRIS ONCE, BACK IN 2011. He was part of an escort of young activists who helped me navigate making a brief address, by means of a “human megaphone,” to the crowd at the People’s Library in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park. I’d been living in California, and it was the first time I’d visited the park. Harris and some others steered me in, and afterward we ate Vietnamese food. I was able to place Harris as part of the crowd around a magazine called The New Inquiry. He made an impression. This was a time of a kind of collective awakening for the US left. It was for me as well. A politically depressed 47-year-old carrying in his body a family legacy of revolutionary disappointment, I was at that…

I FIRST HEARD THE TERM “KAIROS TIME” FROM THE REV. David Gerth. A minister based in St. Louis, he had seen both his life and his political practice transformed by the Ferguson movement, the rebellion that took over the streets in the wake of Michael Brown’s killing by police officer Darren Wilson. As young Black people faced down the weapons of the National Guard, things seemed to happen within a different time frame. Night after night, Gerth joined the protests, recognizing that “there is something of God present in what’s going on here right now.” His perception of time began to blur: The speed at which events unfolded, and the duration of the days of the uprising, made everything move faster and yet slower than normal. “You’re spending 14-, 16-hour…

 FOR ANTI-COLONIAL THINKERS OF THE LAST CENTURY, decolonization was not a mere transfer of power. It was about reparation, including repair of the self. “Decolonization is the veritable creation of new men,” wrote Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth. As Jean-Paul Sartre made clear in a preface to the book, decolonization was equally required of former colonizers: “Let’s take a good look at ourselves, if we have the courage, and let’s see what has become of us.” But the “new humanism” envisioned by these thinkers could not flourish, as first the Cold War, and then the so-called War on Terror, hindered the emancipation of decolonizing nations, renewing the commitment to the ideas of Western civilizational superiority that had long upheld Western empire. In recent years, however, calls to…

71 Average number of tornado-related deaths in the US per year 63 Number of tornado-related deaths so far this year 1.2k Average number of tornadoes reported in the US each year 367 Number of confirmed tornadoes in the US since January 9 Number of states that had 20 or more tornadoes between January 1 and April 5 $51.1b Amount in the Biden administration’s proposed FY 2024 budget allocated to tackling climate change $2.5t The cost of weather and climate disasters since 1980 $165b The cost of weather disasters in the US last year, the third-most-costly year on record…

Yes! SASHA ABRAMSKY IN THE CITIES OF THE AMERICAN West, the number of homeless people is at near-historic highs. California is the epicenter of this crisis; fully half of the nation’s unsheltered homeless live here. Once restricted to well-known skid rows, tent encampments are now everywhere: in parks, along thoroughfares, on residential side streets, in parking lots, along freeways and riverbanks, behind restaurants, and near schools and businesses. There are roughly 170,000 homeless people in California. Upwards of 115,000 of them, according to the latest counts, are unsheltered. The state has thrown billions of dollars at the problem, yet the number keeps spiraling upward. What California is experiencing is partly the legacy of the 2008 housing market collapse. But there are other reasons: thousands of homes lost to fires and…

ON JANUARY 5, JUST HOURS AFTER THE NATION POSTED MY ARTICLE revealing why the Harvard Kennedy School had rescinded its offer of a fellowship to former Human Rights Watch director Kenneth Roth, I received an e-mail from Roth saying that The Guardian had already contacted him for an article. “Maybe the Kennedy School will re-invite you,” I jokingly wrote back. “Fat Chance!” he replied. Two weeks later, the Kennedy School did re-invite Roth. The reinstatement followed a wave of protest and media coverage directed at Dean Douglas Elmendorf, who had vetoed the offer from the Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights on the grounds that Human Rights Watch has an “anti-Israel bias” (as a faculty member described it to me). On January 7, Mathias Risse, the center’s faculty director,…

Who am I to say that the hawk circling above the deckwasn’t really the murdered sister of our host,as she insisted? Who says the dead stay dead,or even human—for all I know our souls stream out and leapinto the nearest form, manzanita, termite,light pole, to begin the challenges of figuring outwhen to break into blossom, how to find a mateor glow softly each eveningwithout a single glass of wine. Our hostwas downing grape juice and growing wild-eyedabout the government, unable to stop reliving the dayher sister died on the Kent State Commonswhen the Guardsmen turned in unison and fired on the students.She was right about politics and false narrativesbut wrong about the winged creatures swarmingfrom the eaves as we talked. Those weren’t mothsbut they were sort of lovely until we…