The Nation September 2024

THE FAILED CAMPAIGN TO SAVE NICOLA SACCO AND Bartolomeo Vanzetti—the Italian immigrants and anarchists who were executed in 1927 for a bank robbery and murder they didn’t commit—prompted John Dos Passos to lament, in his novel The Big Money, that “our nation has been beaten by strangers who have bought the laws and fenced off the meadows and cut down the woods for pulp and turned our pleasant cities into slums and sweated the wealth out of our people and when they want to they hire the executioner to throw the switch.” In his impotence and rage, Dos Passos came to recognize a deep political truth: We are not all in this together. Not in the America of the radical-hunting Palmer Raids, or in the “return to normalcy” promised by…

HOW DID THIS HAPPEN? HOW DID DEMOCRATS DO THE RIGHT THING—ACTUALLY, one right thing after another? As his reelection bid became increasingly untenable, President Joe Biden ended his campaign; moments later, he endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as the new presidential nominee. Just two weeks after that, she picked the popular former high school teacher/football coach/all-around fun dad, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, as her running mate, to acclaim from across the Democratic spectrum. And perhaps most consequential of all, Democratic voters around the country united, almost ecstatically, behind Harris and Walz, showing up to their rallies in numbers usually reserved for pop stars, and putting Harris above Donald Trump in several swing-state polls. For a party that was facing the very real possibility of a landslide loss to Trump, the…

WHEN KAMALA HARRIS CHOSE MINNESOTA GOVERNOR Tim Walz to be her running mate, many progressives were overjoyed. Beyond their general enthusiasm about Walz, his selection was seen as proof of the strength of their campaign to block Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro from the ticket. And given that the anti-Shapiro push was grounded in opposition to his views on Israel and Palestine in general and the genocide in Gaza in particular, progressives took Walz’s elevation as a sign that Harris didn’t want to overtly antagonize the pro-Palestine movement—a calculation that she almost certainly would not have made if not for the past 11 months of activism. Behind the scenes, some Democrats also breathed a sigh of relief. As a strategist close to the Harris camp told NBC News, “Bringing Gaza back…

IN AN INTERVIEW THIS SUMMER, VICE PRESIDENTIAL candidate Tim Walz made the sort of blunt statement about poverty that has long eluded his fellow Democrats. “People are poor because they don’t have money,” Walz told Pod Save America, rattling off a long list of what he called “chain reactions” for children in America, including low performance in school. That vision is at the heart of the Harris-Walz populist economic agenda, but it also casts the education policy of a Harris-Walz administration as a means of supporting kids and families. This contrasts sharply not just with Republicans but also with previous Democratic administrations. From the recently proposed $6,000 credit to support newborns in their first year of life to a universal school meals policy to provide every child with free breakfast…

AS THE UNITED KINGDOM COMES TO GRIPS WITH A recent surge in far-right, anti-immigrant violence, a troubling pattern has come into view. Many of the 23 towns and cities besieged by riots, which broke out after a devastating knife attack at a children’s dance class in Southport, have three important things in common, a Financial Times analysis of UK Home Office data suggests. Liverpool, Hartlepool, Middlesbrough, Blackpool, Hull, Blackburn, and Manchester—all of which were flooded by rioters who looted, lit fires, launched projectiles at police, and attacked Muslims, asylum seekers, and people of color—are among the 10 poorest places in Britain, and several others, including Southport, are among the top 20. These areas are also home to large populations of asylum seekers, thanks to a cost-saving Tory policy that turned cheap…

ON JULY 6, SONYA MASSEY WAS SHOT AND KILLED IN her home in Sangamon County, Illinois, by Sheriff’s Department Deputy Sean Grayson, after she had called 911 to report a possible prowler outside her house. Fifteen days after Massey’s killing, President Joe Biden announced his decision to bow out of the 2024 presidential race and throw his weight behind Vice President Kamala Harris as his replacement at the top of the Democratic ticket. The juxtaposition of these two moments is a rhetorical device, of course, but it is one that can shed some light on significant features of our current political situation, particularly regarding the imminent threat of an authoritarian putsch and what will be required to turn it back. The fact that these two Black women’s lives—and concerns, no…