Innehållsförteckning för December 2024 från The Nation

In a democracy, elections are more than just vote-counting exercises or contests between candidates. They are a kind of collective dream, drawing on disparate sources whose logic and meaning can be difficult to interpret. And as Freud reminded us over a century ago, dreams are always overdetermined—born from multiple causes, which in turn generate a variety of effects. Even now, with time to at least begin to digest the results, the most honest answer to “What happened on November 5?” is probably a list. Waleed Shahid, an activist in the Uncommitted campaign (and a member of The Nation’s editorial board), published a helpful summary of 10 different genres of explanation on his Substack. A cousin of mine in DC outdid him, e-mailing her running tally of 20: • Inflation •…

In late october, the british television network ITV released a documentary called Kingdom Uncovered: Inside Saudi Arabia, which exposes the conditions of migrant laborers as they suffer and die on the job for Saudi Vision 2030, a massive government program that includes the multibillion-dollar architectural megaproject Neom and the horizontal skyscraper—excuse me, “linear smart city”—known as The Line. According to the documentary, 21,000 migrant workers from India, Bangladesh, and Nepal have died so far laying the foundations for these works in the Saudi desert. The Hindustan Times reports that another 100,000 workers have gone missing. As shocking as these numbers are, this is not the first time that Neom has had blood on its hands. Four years ago, The Guardian reported on the forced removal, under threat of imprisonment—and, in…

$11b Amount spent on political advertising during the 2024 election 5:1 Ratio of money raised by Kamala Harris to money raised by Donald Trump $200m Amount that Elon Musk’s super PAC spent to get Trump elected $70b Amount by which Musk’s wealth has increased since the election 250k Number of subscribers lost by The Washington Post after the paper announced it would not endorse a candidate for president $250M Amount that Jeff Bezos paid for the newspaper in 2013 $7.1b Amount by which Bezos’s wealth has increased since the election…

In 2023, when Georgia launched a Medicaid program that was tied to a strict work requirement, Republican Governor Brian Kemp framed it as a way to help people get healthcare coverage. He made this claim even though the state was—and still is—refusing to expand the program under the Affordable Care Act. The new plan would be “innovative,” Kemp said, putting “Georgians and their access to care first.” He said that 50,000 people would join in the first year and that eventually 345,000 eligible people would enroll. A year and a half later, his promises haven’t been borne out: As of the end of October, just 5,118 people were enrolled in the state’s Medicaid work-requirement program—that’s 5 percent of the people who said they wanted to sign up. Part of the…

A BLUE-CARPETED, NEON-LIT COURTroom in downtown Joliet, Illinois, a former steel town about 40 miles southwest of Chicago, fills with the sounds of clinking metal as a handful of people in handcuffs are led in on the afternoon of August 28. Only three people sit in the pew-like wooden benches at the back that are reserved for the public. At 1:45 pm, the first defendant, a Black woman with blond hair, is called to stand at a podium facing the judge’s dais. This court appearance will determine whether she will be put in jail or go free while awaiting a trial. Just a year ago, her fate would likely have been determined by whether she had enough money to post bail. But Will County Judge Matthew Bertani, a white man…

AT THE BEGINNING OF EACH YEAR, THE DIRECTOR OF National Intelligence provides Congress with a report on “worldwide threats to the national security of the United States.” And over a dozen years or so, the DNI’s report has consistently identified the same four nations as constituting the “most direct, serious threats” to US security: China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. The ranking of these antagonists has varied over time, with China receiving top billing in the 2024 edition, but all four are routinely singled out for extensive discussion in the DNI’s annual report. Only after many pages of such analysis, in a section on “transnational issues,” are we told that climate change also poses a risk to US security, by triggering mass migrations and unrest overseas. Missing from the DNI’s…

THE STORY OF COMMUNISM IS ONE OF THE GREATEST tragedies in modern history. The movement grew, above all, out of horror at the terrible human toll of early capitalism. Out of that horror came hope for a better, more just future as well as a theory explaining how this future would arrive. As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels explained in their 1848 Manifesto of the Communist Party, capitalist systems in the world’s most highly industrialized states would not only grow corrupt and exhausted as they matured and expanded; they would also, as they forced more and more workers to sell their labor for a wage, create their own gravediggers: a proletariat capable of rising up and establishing a new social order. In the decades after The Communist Manifesto appeared, a…

CONSIDER THE PECULIARITIES OF SVALBARD, AN ARCHIpelago in the Arctic Ocean midway between the North Pole and the northern coast of Norway: Its territory technically belongs to Norway (though “technically” is doing some heavy lifting here). Its laws are written by Norway. The governor of Svalbard is Norwegian. Kids learn Norwegian in Svalbard’s Norwegian schools. You would be forgiven for thinking that these nearly 24,000 square miles of territory are simply a group of islands that form a part of Norway. But a closer look reveals that the archipelago’s islands are not quite under Norway’s sovereignty. Some of the taxes that apply on the Norwegian mainland do not exist in Svalbard. Norway, as well as the 47 other countries that are signatories to the Svalbard Treaty, is also prohibited from…

The stunning victory of donald trump, with republicans also capturing the House and Senate, triggered a fierce debate among Democrats even as the votes were still being counted. Given the scale of the defeat and the efforts to deflect blame, the debate will be particularly venomous. Here are some commonsense propositions to consider before the heat distorts the light. Throwing the Bums Out: Trump’s victory saw him gaining a higher percentage of the vote across various parts of the population than in 2020, even as he remained personally unpopular. Voters punished the incumbent party for the pain they experienced during the pandemic, including the economic shutdown and the inflation that accompanied the reopening. The Biden administration navigated the disruption better than most other governments did, and Trump will inherit an…

Five months before president george w. bush was reelected in 2004, Thomas Frank published a book that answered the question on every liberal’s mind: Why were Republicans clobbering us? What’s the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America painted a picture of a dyspeptic heartland in the throes of a class-inflected right-wing backlash against liberal elites. Kansas had long skewed Republican, but Frank observed two major shifts in the 1990s: The Kansas GOP transformed itself from a party of pragmatic centrists to one dominated by right-wing culture warriors who fulminated over the evils of teaching evolution and of rap music but devoted themselves to cutting rich people’s taxes and causing “incalculable, historic harm to working-class people.” This new breed of Republican drew its support from an unlikely…

IHAD HEARD RUMORS ABOUT MEN HAVING sex in Mexico City’s subway system. But nothing prepared me for what I witnessed on my first ride in the último vagón. It was early afternoon, outside of peak commuting hours. Only a handful of passengers were in the last car of the train as it headed out of the city center and pulled above ground, zooming along the highway. My eyes darted back and forth between a middle-age man in dusty overalls, presumably a day laborer, and a preppy, college-age man in a polo. The younger man stood with his forearms resting on a handrail. He stared at his phone, slightly bent over. The older man was braced against the door, his hand stuffed into the younger man’s sweatpants. I tried not to…

There’s an old segment of the today show that circulates periodically online—maybe you’ve seen it. It’s 1980, and Donald Trump, then 33, is being interviewed by a 40-year-old Tom Brokaw. They’re discussing Trump’s burgeoning skyscraper portfolio in Midtown Manhattan, but the reason the clip retains such fascination has less to do with the subject matter than with Trump’s delivery. Anyone who watches it comes away struck by how much more articulate and focused the 45th president once was. The Queens accent is recognizable, and there’s a certain familiar bluster, but instead of the rambling, free-associative conspiratorial diatribes we’ve come to expect, what we see is a young man on the make who is confident, lucid, and seemingly wellinformed about the workings of the real estate market. Though already a nationally…

Pennsylvania, one of the swingiest swing states, is also the mushroom capital of the world. Our back roads are dotted with windowless concrete blocks you could be forgiven for thinking are meth labs—but are actually tanning beds for fungus. Mycelium, the miraculously adaptive living network of tiny, branching, interwoven filaments that bloom into mushrooms in those grow houses and in the woods, form a life-sustaining network for water, nutrients, and communication between trees. Without it, many ecosystems would collapse. In recent years, the activist and writer adrienne maree brown has begun calling for what she refers to as “mycelial organizing,” inspired by the natural wisdom of mushrooms. It’s a handy metaphor to guide us through the near future. The resistance now emerging against fascism in the United States will be,…

In his first term, donald trump presided over perhaps the most brazenly plutocratic government the United States has ever seen, with the president proclaiming in 2016, regarding his cabinet picks: “I want people that made a fortune!” Forbes later noted that Trump’s cabinet included “17 millionaires, 2 centimillionaires and 1 billionaire. They’re worth $3.2 billion in all.” Just three of them were worth $3 billion combined: Education Secretary Betsy DeVos ($2 billion), Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross ($600 million), and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin ($400 million). Trump’s return to the White House will be a reprise of this government of the rich and for the rich. Axios reports that “Trump will fill his top ranks with billionaires, former CEOs, tech leaders, and loyalists.” Trump’s top surrogate, Elon Musk, often listed as…

One of the many mysteries that future historians will have to try to explain as they mull what exactly befell the American Republic in the first quarter of this century is our failure to dismantle the decrepit piece of constitutional machinery known, bizarrely, as the Electoral College. Twice already, in 2000 and in 2016, a president was elected despite losing the popular vote—in the latter case, by nearly 3 million ballots. In 2020, the incredibly slow, needlessly complicated tallying of Electoral College votes left an opening for the defeated incumbent to launch an attempted coup d’état. The fact that this year’s gruesome election results spared us such a fiasco is a mighty slim silver lining. As befuddled as future historians will be, Americans of the past would likewise be horrified…

If there is anything good to say about the next Trump administration, it is that it’s an opportunity for a serious reevaluation of the United States’ policy toward the war in Ukraine. It is abundantly clear that the present course is unsustainable; if it continues, it is likely to lead sooner or later either to the collapse of Ukraine or to direct NATO involvement in the war with Russia. Even some neoconservative US commentators, such as Robert Kagan, have tacitly admitted this, though Kagan has not been willing to tell Americans that they must go to war in order to prevent a Ukrainian defeat or a compromise peace. One Trump adviser, Bryan Lanza, has stated publicly that Ukraine has no chance of regaining its lost territory, though he has not…

It occurs to me—I’ve never talked to both of you at the same time. Now feels good. Okay, even.Each of you, together again, on that side of eternity. Me, on this side, so close to Milan where you drewportraits of turtles before I was even a thought, where your big brothers said you’d never make itafter having a baby. I’m here now. Where the lizards tick and scatter over the tile and the grass burns sage.I’m in Italy where even the talking sings and your New York is just a marble behind my eye.I feel you about/above/emitting from my gums and my savior laughter. When I said “Don’t go”this is not what I meant. C’est la vie—the town just across the lake is always pressed downlonger by the thumb of…