text
stringlengths 62
100k
| split
float64 -3.08
3.18
|
|---|---|
To the Editor:
Re “Stimulus Signals Shifting Politics of Poverty Fight” (front page, March 14):
In 1981, Ronald Reagan told us, “Government is not a solution to our problem; government is the problem.” In the 1990s, Bill Clinton claimed the “era of big government is over.” Donald Trump blamed the nation’s woes on the “deep state.”
For the last 40 years our top leaders convinced the American public that government is too big and very, very bad. They sealed the small-government deal with endless tax cuts, spending cuts and privatization of the public sector.
Not surprisingly, according to Pew Research Center, Americans’ trust in government plummeted from 73 percent in 1958 (Eisenhower), to 54 percent in 2001 (G.W. Bush) to an all-time low of 17 percent in 2019 (Trump).
In his March 11 speech President Biden lamented: “We lost faith in whether our government and our democracy can deliver on really hard things for the American people.” With his $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, Mr. Biden recognized that restoring public trust in government and faith in democracy requires, for starters, repairing and strengthening the nation’s severely tattered safety net. | 0.117775 |
Listen and follow The Daily
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher
This episode contains strong language.
Ivan Agerton of Bainbridge Island, Wash., was usually unflappable. A 50-year-old adventure photographer and former marine, he has always been known to be calm in a crisis.
After returning home from a photography trip on the Red Sea, he tested positive for the coronavirus. Initially, his symptoms were not serious: mild respiratory problems and a loss of his sense of smell. But he soon began experiencing psychosis. He spent last Christmas in a psychiatric ward.
Ivan’s story is uncommon, but it is not unique. Dozens of psychosis cases linked to Covid-19 have been reported around the world, and there have been even more reports of neurological symptoms including brain fog, loss of smell, tremors and nerve issues.
Today, we hear from Ivan and look at the potential long-term neurological effects of the Covid-19. | 0.859933 |
“It’s difficult for me when people don’t put on the mask,’’ said Manil Molina, a health aide, who has no choice but to ride the subway to get to her job.
The confluence of factors causing riders to turn their back on mass transit risks stalling the region’s recovery, transportation and economic experts warn. A surge of car traffic into Manhattan would cause gridlock and the loss of productivity and higher air pollution that come with increased congestion. And if ridership does not bounce back, the transportation agency could sink back into a financial crisis.
Before the pandemic, no part of the country depended more on mass transit. Eight million people in the New York region — including over 50 percent of the city’s population — rode public transit every weekday.
“The existential question for the city in the coming years is how do you convince people that transit is safe so they can get back on it,” said Nick Sifuentes, the former executive director of Tri-State Transportation Campaign, an advocacy group.
Some won’t have to, at least for their commutes. Many larger employers have adopted work-from-home policies that will outlast the pandemic. Others are considering creating satellite offices outside Manhattan and in suburbs that are closer to employees’ homes, in hopes of providing dedicated working spaces — away from children and cramped apartments — and offering shorter, more walkable commutes.
Less than 50 percent of people who worked in Manhattan offices in 2019 will be working from those offices in the coming years, according to a recent survey by the Partnership for New York City.
Transit officials acknowledge that shifting ridership patterns will likely dictate what kind of system emerges as the pandemic eases its grip, though they say there are no specific blueprints. | -0.463722 |
One day after the spring break oasis of South Beach descended into chaos, with the police struggling to control overwhelming crowds and making scores of arrests, officials in Miami Beach decided on Sunday to extend an emergency curfew for up to three weeks.
The officials there went so far as to approve closing the famed Ocean Drive to all vehicular and pedestrian traffic from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. — the hours of the curfew — for four nights a week through April 12. Residents, hotel guests and employees of local businesses are exempt from the closure.
The strip, frequented by celebrities and tourists alike, was the scene of a much-criticized skirmish on Saturday night between sometimes unruly revelers who ignored social-distancing and mask guidelines aimed at curbing the coronavirus, and police officers who used pepper balls to disperse a large crowd just hours after the curfew was introduced.
The restrictions were a stunning concession to the city’s inability to control unwieldy crowds of revelers whom the city and the state of Florida have aggressively courted amid the continuing coronavirus pandemic. | -1.270172 |
He added, “It’s going to make a huge difference in people’s lives, and it has already.”
But risks remain. For the economy to fully bounce back, Americans need to feel confident in returning to shopping, traveling, entertainment and work. No matter how much cash the administration pumps into the economy, recovery could be stalled by the emergence of new variants, the reluctance of some Americans to get vaccinated and, in the coming weeks, spotty compliance with social distancing guidelines and other public health measures before a critical mass of Americans is inoculated.
“We’re being really cautious about our expectations about the speed” of the economic rebound, said Heather Boushey, a member of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers. “Part of this is establishing trust with the American people that we contain the virus, and that it’s safe, and then the economic activity will come up.”
Americans will also have to be willing to change their habits. As new infections have declined, so too has coronavirus testing. But public health experts say more testing — not less — will be critical for the economy to recover. When Mr. Biden ran for office, and again after he was sworn in, he promised to create a “pandemic testing board,” akin to the wartime production board that President Franklin D. Roosevelt created to help bring the country out of the Great Depression. Mr. Biden described the approach as a “full-scale wartime effort.”
His coronavirus testing coordinator, Carole Johnson, said the board, composed of officials from across government agencies, had been meeting to discuss how to work with the private sector to expand testing capacity, and to lay out plans to spend tens of billions of dollars from the stimulus bill for testing and other mitigation measures.
“We know that we’re going to continue to need to grow as we go forward,” she said of the nation’s testing capacity.
Mr. Biden made grand promises in pushing his American Rescue Plan to swift passage in Congress this month. | -0.234474 |
The coronavirus pandemic has sickened more than 123,191,600 people, according to official counts. As of Monday morning, at least 2,714,100 people have died from coronavirus.
See vaccinations by country on our new world tracker page.
Hot spots Total cases Deaths Per capita Average daily cases per 100,000 people in past week Few or no cases Share of population with a reported case No cases reported Double-click to zoom into the map. Use two fingers to pan and zoom. Tap for details. Sources: Local governments; The Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University; National Health Commission of the People's Republic of China; World Health Organization. About this data The hot spots map shows the share of population with a new reported case over the last week. Data for the West Bank and Gaza was reported together by the Palestinian Health Ministry and includes only Palestinian-controlled land. Russia is reporting data for Crimea, a peninsula it annexed in 2014 in a move that led to international sanctions. Data for some countries, like the United States and France, include counts for overseas territories. Japan’s count includes 696 cases and seven deaths from a cruise ship that docked in Yokohama.
The coronavirus pandemic is ebbing in some of the countries that were hit hard early on, and the number of new cases has steadily declined since early January.
Cases Deaths Total
cases Per 100,000 Total
deaths Per 100,000 Daily avg.
in last
7 days Per 100,000 Daily avg.
in last
7 days Per 100,000 Weekly cases per capita Fewer More Estonia 95,401 7,223 787 60 1,513 115 9.7 0.74 Jan. 22 March 21 San Marino 4,356 12,893 79 234 33 97 0.3 0.85 Czech Republic 1,469,547 13,830 24,667 232 10,067 95 205.9 1.94 Jordan 535,455 5,378 5,876 59 8,343 84 75.7 0.76 Montenegro 87,212 14,013 1,199 193 503 81 10.0 1.61 Hungary 571,596 5,851 18,262 187 7,872 81 187.1 1.92 Curaçao 5,997 3,752 24 15 127 79 0.3 0.18 Serbia 551,128 7,893 4,934 71 4,979 71 30.7 0.44 Seychelles 3,770 3,896 16 17 65 67 — — Poland 2,058,550 5,420 49,300 130 21,703 57 303.1 0.80 Show all Weekly cases per capita shows the share of population with a new reported case for each week. Weeks without a reported case are shaded gray.
The virus continues to affect every region of the world, but some countries are experiencing high rates of infection, while others appear to have mostly controlled the virus.
The outbreak was initially defined by a series of shifting epicenters — including Wuhan, China; Iran; northern Italy; Spain; and New York. But the pandemic has now reached nearly every country in the world.
New reported cases by day across the world 0 200,000 400,000 600,000 800,000 cases Feb. 2020 Mar. Apr. May Jun. Jul. Aug. Sept. Oct. Nov. Dec. Jan. 2021 Feb. Mar. New cases 7-day average These are days with a reporting anomaly. Read more here Note: The seven-day average is the average of a day and the previous six days of data.
Reported deaths by day across the world 0 5,000 10,000 15,000 deaths Feb. 2020 Mar. Apr. May Jun. Jul. Aug. Sept. Oct. Nov. Dec. Jan. 2021 Feb. Mar. New deaths 7-day average These are days with a reporting anomaly. Read more here Note: Scale for deaths chart is adjusted from cases chart to display trend.
The New York Times has found that official tallies in the United States and in more than a dozen other countries have undercounted deaths during the coronavirus outbreak because of limited testing availability.
United States
The number of known coronavirus cases in the United States continues to grow. As of Monday morning, at least 29,842,900 people across every state, plus Washington, D.C., and four U.S. territories, have tested positive for the virus, according to a New York Times database, and at least 541,900 patients with the virus have died.
Reported cases in the United States Average daily cases per 100,000 people in the past week ← Fewer More → Ala. Alaska Ariz. Ark. Calif. Colo. Conn. Del. Fla. Ga. Hawaii Idaho Ill. Ind. Iowa Kan. Ky. La. Maine Md. Mass. Mich. Minn. Miss. Mo. Mont. Neb. Nev. N.H. N.J. N.M. N.Y. N.C. N.D. Ohio Okla. Ore. Pa. R.I. S.C. S.D. Tenn. Texas Utah Vt. Va. Wash. W.Va. Wis. Wyo. P.R. Note: The map shows the share of population with a new reported case over the last week. Sources: State and local health agencies and hospitals.
The New York Times is engaged in an effort to track the details of every reported case in the United States, collecting information from federal, state and local officials around the clock. The numbers in this article are being updated several times a day based on the latest information our journalists are gathering from around the country. The Times has made that data public in hopes of helping researchers and policymakers as they seek to slow the pandemic and prevent future ones.
Read more about the methodology and download county-level data for coronavirus cases in the United States from The New York Times on GitHub.
About the data | 0.983077 |
There have been at least 4,296,500 confirmed cases of coronavirus in the United Kingdom, according to Public Health England. As of Monday morning, 126,155 people had died. Due to a data entry error, nearly 16,000 people who tested positive between Sept. 25 and Oct. 2 were not recorded in the daily number of reported cases.
The Office for National Statistics also produces a weekly report on the number of deaths registered in Britain that mention Covid-19 on a death certificate. This figure, which includes deaths outside of hospitals, is many thousands of deaths higher than the reported daily death toll.
Reported cases in the United Kingdom Total cases Per capita Share of population with a reported case No cases reported Double-click to zoom into the map. Use two fingers to pan and zoom. Tap for details. Sources: Department for Health and Social Care, Public Health England, Public Health Scotland, Public Health Wales, Public Health Agency of Northern Ireland, Chief Medical Officer Directorate. Regional data for Northern Ireland was not reported by health authorities. Circles are sized by the number of people there who have tested positive, which may differ from where they contracted the illness. About this data For total cases and deaths: The map shows the known locations of coronavirus cases by region. Circles are sized by the number of people there who have tested positive or have a probable case of the virus, which may differ from where they contracted the illness.
Britain has the highest number of Covid-19 deaths in Europe. Here’s where the number of cases and deaths are highest in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland:
Reported cases and deaths by country and local area This table is sorted by places with the most cases per 100,000 residents in the last seven days. Select deaths or a different column header to sort by different data. Cases Deaths Total
cases Per 100,000 Total
deaths Per 100,000 Daily avg.
in last
7 days Per 100,000 Daily avg.
in last
7 days Per 100,000 + Scotland 213,529 3,927 7,552 139 568 10 6.0 0.11 + Northern Ireland 115,932 6,402 2,104 116 148 8 0.9 0.05 + England 3,759,280 6,716 111,011 198 4,528 8 79.3 0.14 + Wales 207,842 6,621 5,488 175 205 7 5.1 0.16
On January 4, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced another national lockdown in England, closing schools and asking Britons to stay home for all but a few necessary purposes, including essential work and buying food and medicine. This is the country’s third national lockdown and will remain in place until at least mid-February, officials said.
The lockdown was imposed in response to a fast-spreading variant of the coronavirus that overwhelmed Britain’s hospitals. Wales and Scotland also implemented their own national lockdowns, and in Northern Ireland, a stay-at-home order went into effect on Jan. 8.
Britain became the first country to grant emergency authorization to the coronavirus vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford, after issuing the first doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in early December. The nation accelerated vaccination efforts in January by adding a third vaccine by Moderna to their roster. Nearly a quarter of the U.K. population has now received a first dose of the vaccine.
As of February, passengers arriving in England from South Africa, Brazil and 31 other hot spots must quarantine in a government-sanctioned hotel for 10 days. The quarantine rules also apply to British and Irish citizens and residents who fly into the country from a listed destination. Foreign nationals from red list destinations who are not residents of Britain are already barred from entering the country.
How Cases Are Growing
Here’s how the number of new cases and deaths are changing over time:
New reported cases by day 0 20,000 40,000 60,000 cases Feb. 2020 Mar. Apr. May Jun. Jul. Aug. Sept. Oct. Nov. Dec. Jan. 2021 Feb. Mar. New cases 7-day average These are days with a reporting anomaly. Read more here Note: The seven-day average is the average of a day and the previous six days of data.
New reported deaths by day 0 500 1,000 1,500 deaths Feb. 2020 Mar. Apr. May Jun. Jul. Aug. Sept. Oct. Nov. Dec. Jan. 2021 Feb. Mar. New deaths 7-day average Note: Scale for deaths chart is adjusted from cases chart to display trend.
The New York Times has found that official tallies in the United States and in more than a dozen other countries have undercounted deaths during the coronavirus outbreak because of limited testing availability.
Where You Can Find More Information
Read more about Britain's rapid vaccine rollout, how the B.1.1.7. variant may be linked to a higher risk of hospitalization and death, and whether vaccines could blunt the epidemic in weeks.
Here is where you can find more detailed information:
About the data | 0.829963 |
There have been at least 933,700 confirmed cases of coronavirus in Canada, according to the Public Health Agency. As of Monday morning, at least 22,676 people had died.
Reported cases in Canada Total cases Per capita Share of population with a reported case No cases reported Double-click to zoom into the map. Use two fingers to pan and zoom. Tap for details. Source: Public Health Agency of Canada. Circles are sized by the number of people there who have tested positive, which may differ from where they contracted the illness. About this data For total cases and deaths: The map shows the known locations of coronavirus cases by region. Circles are sized by the number of people there who have tested positive or have a probable case of the virus, which may differ from where they contracted the illness.
Here’s how the number of cases and deaths are growing in Canada:
Reported cases and deaths by province This table is sorted by places with the most cases per 100,000 residents in the last seven days. Select deaths or a different column header to sort by different data. Cases Deaths Total
cases Per 100,000 Total
deaths Per 100,000 Daily avg.
in last
7 days Per 100,000 Daily avg.
in last
7 days Per 100,000 Saskatchewan 31,637 2,880 418 38 145 13 1.6 0.14 Alberta 141,934 3,490 1,963 48 501 12 2.4 0.06 British Columbia 90,786 1,953 1,421 31 560 12 3.4 0.07 Ontario 328,874 2,445 7,241 54 1,538 11 12.6 0.09 Quebec 302,339 3,703 10,599 130 678 8 8.4 0.10 Manitoba 33,353 2,609 927 73 87 7 1.4 0.11 Nunavut 395 1,099 4 11 2 5 0.4 1.19 Northwest Territories 42 101 — — 1 2 — — Prince Edward Island 148 104 — — 1 <1 — — New Brunswick 1,490 199 30 4 3 <1 — — Show all
Canada’s first known case of coronavirus appeared on Jan. 25. A man who had returned to Toronto from Wuhan, China tested positive for the virus. His wife tested positive a day later.
Quebec soon became the province most severely affected, likely because its winter school break, which saw many families travel to the southern United States and other warm weather destinations, occurred two weeks before provincial lockdown measures began to sweep the country in mid-March.
Until late in the fall, British Columbia, on the Pacific Coast, and the four provinces in Atlantic Canada generally fared the best in the country at controlling the virus which abated over the summer leading to a relaxation of restrictions across the country. The Atlantic provinces, however, continued to require anyone entering from the rest of Canada to quarantine for 14 days.
As with the first round of the pandemic, long term care homes have been hard hit in many provinces by the return of the virus. British Columbia also saw its once enviable record for controlling the virus evaporate.
For most of the year, the pandemic generally had not been a partisan issue nor did it feature that rancor that usually characterizes relations between provinces and the federal government. But in late October Mr. Trudeau’s Conservative opponents and several premiers who lead right of center governments began repeatedly charging that the government has no clear plans or timelines for vaccine distribution, an allegation Mr. Trudeau rejects.
On March 21, Canada closed its border with the United States, with exceptions for freight movements and some essential workers. It was the first time the entire border had been shut since Canada became a nation in 1867. In early December, Mr. Trudeau said that the virus will have to be brought under control worldwide before it reopens.
Many parts of Canada saw the return of restrictions in November as politicians and officials urged residents to not gather during the holiday season.
How Cases Are Growing
Here’s how the number of new cases and deaths are changing over time:
New reported cases by day 0 10,000 20,000 cases Feb. 2020 Mar. Apr. May Jun. Jul. Aug. Sept. Oct. Nov. Dec. Jan. 2021 Feb. Mar. New cases 7-day average Note: The seven-day average is the average of a day and the previous six days of data.
New reported deaths by day 0 100 200 300 deaths Feb. 2020 Mar. Apr. May Jun. Jul. Aug. Sept. Oct. Nov. Dec. Jan. 2021 Feb. Mar. New deaths 7-day average Note: Scale for deaths chart is adjusted from cases chart to display trend.
The New York Times has found that official tallies in the United States and in more than a dozen other countries have undercounted deaths during the coronavirus outbreak because of limited testing availability.
Where You Can Find More Information
Read more about the push to keep schools open during a second lockdown in Canada and the restrictions it involves in the country’s two most populous provinces. Canada has been warning Americans not to sneak across the closed border. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who found himself in isolation at home after his wife tested positive for the virus, was forced to backtrack on one of his more controversial measures for asylum seekers.
Here is where you can find more detailed information:
About the data | -0.131541 |
As a shocked nation reacted to the storming of the United States Capitol on Wednesday by a pro-Trump mob trying to disrupt the certification of the presidential election, one word describing the chaos quickly rose to the top.
“It borders on sedition,” President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. said in his remarks to the nation.
“This is sedition,” the National Association of Manufacturers said in a statement that accused President Trump of having “incited violence in an attempt to retain power.”
And within the first hour of the attack, Merriam-Webster reported that “sedition” was at the top of its searches, ahead of “coup d’état,” “insurrection” and “putsch.”
Sedition — Merriam-Webster defines it as “incitement of resistance to or insurrection against lawful authority” — is a word that echoes across American history, archaic yet familiar. Historically, charges of sedition have just as often been used to quash dissent (the Sedition Act of 1918, for example, made it illegal to “willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of the Government of the United States”) as they have to punish actual threats to government stability or functioning. | 1.325952 |
The banning of menthol cigarettes, the mint-flavored products that have been aggressively marketed to Black Americans, has long been an elusive goal for public health regulators.
But Covid-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement have put new pressure on Congress and the White House to reduce racial health disparities. And there are few starker examples than this: Black smokers smoke less but die of heart attacks, strokes and other causes linked to tobacco use at higher rates than white smokers do, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And 85 percent of Black smokers use Newport, Kool and other menthol brands that are easier to become addicted to and harder to quit than plain tobacco, according to the Food and Drug Administration.
“Covid-19 exposed the discriminatory treatment that Black people have been facing for hundreds of years,” said Dr. Phillip Gardiner, a co-chairman of the African American Tobacco Control Leadership Council, which has been pushing for menthol bans in communities across the country. Calling menthol cigarettes and cigarillos “main vectors” of disease and death among Black Americans, he added, “It’s precisely at this time that we need strong public health measures.”
There is now growing momentum in Congress to enact a ban. In states and municipalities across the country, Black public health activists have been organizing support and getting new laws passed at the state and local level. Public opposition among white parents to all flavored e-cigarettes, including menthol, has brought new resources to the issue. And the F.D.A. is under a court order to respond to a citizens’ petition to ban menthol by April 29. | -0.043092 |
“It hasn’t really gotten better as much as we would have hoped at this point,” said Dave Lewis, the president of SnailWorks, a company that tracks commercial mail and has found that delivery now takes four to five days, after years of averaging 3.5. “It just seems that the Postal Service just hasn’t come to grips with this and hasn’t been able to dig themselves out of it yet from the problems they had in December.”
The delays are compounding problems at a venerable American institution already teetering under widening financial losses, polarizing leadership and questions about what the Biden administration will — or even can — do to right the ship. And they may be a precursor of even worse delays to come as the Postal Service reaches a potential inflection point: The agency cannot fix its finances without addressing its service problems, and it cannot address its service problems without fixing its finances.
Already the postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, is completing a soon-to-be-released plan to stabilize the agency’s finances over 10 years that is expected to prioritize reliability and cost effectiveness over speed. In part, that could mean people like Mr. Pietri no longer find their Christmas gifts lost in transit, but it almost certainly would slow the delivery of some mail even further.
Mr. DeJoy’s report is expected to propose eliminating the use of planes for the first-class mail service to transport letters and other flat mail in the contiguous United States, according to someone familiar with the planning. It is also expected to propose lengthening the agency’s standard delivery time for first-class mail, which includes many envelopes and lightweight packages, from within three days to within five days.
Among other ideas under consideration: shuttering processing facilities and reducing some post office hours. Mr. DeJoy told lawmakers last month that price increases would also be part of the strategy. The plan is part of a concerted effort by the agency to shift its resources to shipping packages, which have become a growing share of its business as traditional mail volumes have declined. | 0.898873 |
A year ago, Georgia was one of four states that had no hate crime legislation.
But the deadly rampage last week that left eight people dead, six of them women of Asian descent, is now providing a test of a law passed last year — and a window into the way that the state’s increasingly diverse electorate has altered its political and cultural chemistry.
Georgia, after earlier false starts, passed its legislation following the shooting death of a young Black man, Ahmaud Arbery, who was stopped, detained and then shot to death by white residents in a South Georgia suburban neighborhood.
Now last week’s shootings, in which Robert Aaron Long, 21, has been charged with eight counts of murder, are providing a major stress test for when the legislation can be applied, what it can achieve and how it plays into the state’s increasingly polarized politics.
Political leaders, civil rights activists, and national and local elected officials condemned last week’s attack as an act of bigoted terror, drawing a connection between the majority-Asian victims and a recent surge in hate crimes against Asian and Pacific Islander Americans. | 0.857547 |
But crucial to their effort to appeal to the average American consumer was the packaging. Innovative package design and brand identity are vital when selling unfamiliar foods to mainstream markets, industry experts say.
“People really do shop with their eyes,” said Chris Manca, a buyer at Whole Foods Market focusing on local products for the company’s stores in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. “If your product doesn’t really jump off the shelf and catch your eye, it’s going to get overlooked.”
In 2019, 182,535 immigrant-owned food businesses, from manufacturing to restaurants, were operating in the United States, according to an analysis of the American Community Survey by the New American Economy, a research organization. Chinese and Mexican immigrants owned most, selling cuisines familiar to American palates. But entrepreneurs from countries like Guinea, Kazakhstan and Senegal are gaining a foothold with less well-known cuisines.
Marketing these foods in the United States has its challenges, like cultural identity and consumer perception. The savviest entrepreneurs work with designers and brand strategists to make their products more approachable. | 0.982091 |
One of the more contentious issues to emerge during America’s Covid-19 crisis concerns the wearing of face masks. Heralded by public health experts as a vital way to halt the spread of the disease, masks have also been attacked by conservatives as unwarranted restrictions on personal freedom. Donald Trump, who was briefly hospitalized with Covid in the final months of his presidency, defiantly refused to wear a mask in public, and he wasn’t alone: Thousands of similarly barefaced supporters attended his rallies, public health consequences be damned. Many Americans have challenged the call to wear masks, and the public health research behind it, as an attack on their rights as citizens of a free country. Last June, protesters stormed a hearing in Palm Beach, Fla., at which public officials were considering whether to require the wearing of masks in public buildings. During the fiery session, one woman claimed, “You’re removing our freedoms and stomping on our constitutional rights by these communist dictatorship orders or laws you want to mandate.” As Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch noted after the meeting:
It was another great day for liberty—and yet a horrible one for tens of thousands of Americans who now may die needlessly because so many cling to a warped idea of freedom that apparently means not caring whether others in your community get sick. The reality is that those devil-worshipping elected officials and their mad scientists are trying to mandate masks in public for the same reasons they don’t let 12-year-olds drive and they close bars at 2 a.m.: They actually want to keep their constituents alive.
Give me liberty or give me death, indeed.
Ah, freedom! Few ideals in human history have been so cherished—or so controversial. The United States, in particular, has built its identity around the idea of freedom, from the Bill of Rights, enshrining various freedoms in the law of the land, to the giant statue of Lady Liberty in New York Harbor. And yet—interestingly, for such a foundational ideal—freedom has throughout history represented both the means to an end and the end itself. We wish to be free to pursue our most cherished goals in life, to make money as we will, to share our lives with whom we will, to live where we choose. Freedom empowers our individual desires, but at the same time it structures how we live with other individuals in large, complex societies. As the saying goes, my freedom to swing my fist ends just where someone else’s nose begins; in the words of Isaiah Berlin, “Total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs.” The tension between individual and collective notions of freedom highlights but by no means exhausts the many different approaches to the idea, helping to explain how it has motivated so many struggles throughout human history. Books in Review Freedom: An Unruly History By Annelien de Dijn Buy this book
In her ambitious and impressive new book, Freedom: An Unruly History, the political historian Annelien de Dijn approaches this massive subject from the standpoint of two conflicting interpretations of freedom and their interactions over 2,500 years of Western history. She starts her study by noting that most people think of freedom as a matter of individual liberties and, in particular, of protection from the intrusions of big government and the state. This is the vision of liberty outlined in the opening paragraph of this essay, one that drives conservative ideologues throughout the West. De Dijn argues, however, that this is not the only conception of freedom and that it is a relatively recent one. For much of human history, people thought of freedom not as protecting individual rights but as ensuring self-rule and the just treatment of all. In short, they equated freedom with democracy. “For centuries Western thinkers and political actors identified freedom not with being left alone by the state but with exercising control over the way one is governed,” she writes. Liberty in its classic formulation was thus not individual but collective. Freedom did not entail escaping from government rule but rather making it democratic.
By opening up freedom to its multiple meanings, de Dijn explores an alternate history of the concept from the ancient world to the Age of Revolution to the Cold War, charting those moments when new notions of freedom—such as freedom from government supervision or repression—deviated from its more classical and longstanding definition as self-government. De Dijn thus shows how the rise of modernity brought about the triumph of a new idea of liberty. At the same time, her book invites us to consider the relationship between these two notions of freedom. For de Dijn, this relationship functions as a fundamental opposition, but one can also find in her history enough points in common between them to realize that individual liberty also requires collective freedom. For many, one cannot be truly free if one’s community or nation isn’t; freedom must belong to one and to all.
De Dijn divides Freedom into three roughly equal parts. In the first, she tracks the rise of the idea of freedom in the ancient world, with a focus on the Greek city-states and the Roman Republic; in the second, she examines the revival of this idea in the Renaissance and the Age of Revolution; and in the third, she considers libertarian challenges to the classical notion of freedom and the rise of a new conception focused primarily on individual rights. Current Issue View our current issue
For most of this long history, de Dijn is quick to note, the classical idea of freedom as democratic empowerment held sway. The turning point, she contends, came with the reaction against the revolutionary movements of the late 18th century in North America, France, and elsewhere. Conservative intellectuals like Edmund Burke in Britain and liberals like Benjamin Constant in France not only rejected the era’s revolutionary ideology; they also developed a new conception of freedom that viewed the state as its enemy rather than as a tool for its triumph. Eventually, in the modern era, this counterrevolutionary conception of freedom became dominant.
The heart of Freedom thus consists of an in-depth exploration of how the demands of democracy gave birth to the original idea of freedom and how, in the face of the democratic revolutions of the late 18th century, the concept was once again remade. In tackling this rather unwieldy subject, de Dijn uses the approach of intellectual history to tell her story, centering her analysis around a series of foundational texts by famous and obscure writers and thinkers alike, ranging from classical scholars like Plato and Cicero through Petrarch and Niccolò Machiavelli to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Burke, John Stuart Mill, and Berlin. She skillfully interweaves this textual analysis with the flow of historical events, vividly illustrating the relationship between the theory and practice of freedom and reminding us that no concept is immune to change over time.
For de Dijn, the story of freedom begins with the Greek city-state, which marked not only the birthplace of democracy but also the origin of the democratic conception of liberty—the ideal of the self-ruling city-state. She notes that a major part of the originality of Greek thinkers was not just to contrast their freedom with slavery (specifically the slavery of the Persian Empire) but also to reconceptualize freedom as liberation from political rather than personal bondage. By 500 bce, several Greek city-states, most notably Athens, had begun to develop democratic systems of self-rule in which all male citizens took part in decision-making through general assemblies. De Dijn argues that ancient Greek ideas of freedom developed in this context, emphasizing that freedom came with the ability of people to rule themselves as free men. I use the words “free men” deliberately because women and, of course, enslaved persons had no right to participate in democratic self-government. That inconsistency in fact reinforces de Dijn’s general point: that participation in democracy was the essence of freedom in the ancient world.
In her discussion of freedom in classical Greece and Rome, de Dijn does not fail to note the many objections to this idea of liberty, some from leading philosophers like Plato and Aristotle. For example, in a passage that, by raising the key issue of property rights, seems all too modern, Aristotle noted, “If justice is what the numerical majority decide, they will commit injustice by confiscating the property of the wealthy few.” Gradually, many in Greece turned to another conception of freedom, one that emphasized personal inner strength and self-control over democratic rights. Yet the idea of democratic freedom did not die, even as these notions of personal rights took shape—and this was especially true with the formation of the Roman Republic.
Similar to the city-states of Greece, the Roman Republic thrived for a while as the embodiment of freedom for its male citizens, grounding liberty in the practice of civic democracy. Overthrown by Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, the republic gave way to the Roman Empire, yet historians and philosophers like Livy, Plutarch, and Lucan continued to praise the virtues of the republican freedom fighters. In contrast, the empire—and even more so its successor (at least in terms of the moral imagination), Christianity—divorced freedom from democracy and instead conceived it as personal autonomy and the choice to accept authority. Out of the collapse of the classical city-states and republics came a new ideal of liberty, one no longer centered on collective life and political activity but instead on individual spirituality and a submission to power.
The defeat of democratic freedom by imperial absolutism would play a key role in shaping the revival of the ideal in the city-states of Renaissance Italy, underscoring the link between artistic liberty and self-government. The second part of Freedom considers this revival in Europe from the Renaissance to the Age of Revolution. De Dijn notes, for example, that Renaissance thinkers embraced the ancient ideal of democratic liberty as a reaction against the aristocratic royalism of the Middle Ages; the rebirth of knowledge was equally a rebirth of freedom.
Like the Renaissance in general, this renewed idea of democratic freedom arose first in 14th-century Italy, where cities like Venice and especially Florence bore a certain resemblance to the city-states of ancient Greece. Humanists like Petrarch and Michelangelo embraced the idea; even Machiavelli, best known to posterity for advising would-be rulers in The Prince, argued in The Discourses for a return to the ancient model of freedom. In Northern Europe, writers and thinkers adopted the idea of democratic freedom in opposition to monarchical rule, frequently characterizing the latter as freedom’s opposite, slavery. This was especially true in England, where the Puritan insurgents who executed King Charles I in 1649, at the height of the English Revolution, referred to ancient models of liberty to justify their unprecedented action.
In de Dijn’s analysis, the revival of democratic freedom laid the ground for the Atlantic Revolutions of the late 18th century, which she refers to as the “crowning achievement” of the movement. Her analysis focuses primarily on the American and French revolutions, especially the former. Although she does mention the Haitian Revolution, it would be interesting to see how a fuller consideration of that event, and of the issue of slave revolt in general, might have shaped her analysis.
De Dijn’s consideration of the American and French revolutions continues her emphasis on two themes: the indebtedness of theoreticians and freedom fighters to the classical tradition, and the link between freedom and democracy. John Adams, for example, compared the American revolutionaries with the Greek armies that stood against Persia. A 1790 Paris revival of Voltaire’s play Brutus, about the most prominent of Caesar’s assassins, won acclaim from the Jacobin public. De Dijn notes how revolutionaries in both countries viewed submission to monarchy as slavery and insisted not just on its abolition but also on the creation of systems of government answerable to the people. She extensively discusses the importance of ideas of natural rights during this era, focusing on key documents like the US Bill of Rights and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, and she disputes the idea that these constituted individualistic rejections of government interference, arguing instead that they reflect the conviction that civil liberties can exist only in a democratic polity.
Yet if the Atlantic Revolutions marked the apogee of the Renaissance’s call for democratic freedom, they also constituted its grand finale, its swan song. In the final section of Freedom, de Dijn explores the historical reaction against democratic freedom that produced the currently dominant idea of liberty as freedom from state interference. This new interpretation arose out of the struggle against the American and French revolutions; as she notes in her introduction, “Ideas about freedom commonplace today…were invented not by the revolutionaries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but rather by their critics.”
This is the heart of de Dijn’s argument in this section of Freedom, and she bases it on several themes. One is the idea, promoted by the German philosopher Johann August Eberhard, that political and civil liberty oppose rather than reinforce each other, that one could enjoy more individual rights and freedoms in an enlightened monarchy than in a democracy. The violence of the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution gave this abstract argument concrete weight, enabling democracy to be portrayed as the bloody rule of the mob and turning many intellectuals against it. Burke was perhaps the best known of these conservative critics, but he was certainly not the only one. Others challenged the idea of majority rule, seeing in it not freedom but a tyranny of the many over the few that was inimical to individual rights. Constant rejected the revolutionaries’ attempts to return to the democratic freedom of the ancient world, arguing instead that, in the modern age, protecting individuals from government was the essence of liberty.
This conflict over the legacy of the Atlantic Revolutions gave rise, de Dijn argues, to modern liberalism, which during much of the 19th century championed liberty and rejected mass democracy as the source of violent revolution and tyranny. Throughout Europe, liberals supported governments based on suffrage limited to men of property; as the French minister François Guizot famously proclaimed, if people wanted the vote, they should become rich. The upheavals of 1848 reaffirmed the dangers of revolutionary democracy for liberal intellectuals. Ultimately, liberalism merged with movements for popular representation to create that strangest of political hybrids, liberal democracy. As suggested by one of its foundational texts, Mill’s great 1859 essay “On Liberty,” a system of limited democracy would allow the masses some stake in government while at the same time protecting individual freedoms and property rights.
The 19th century brought new challenges to the individualist idea of freedom, however. In Europe, liberals viewed the rise of socialism as a threat to personal freedom, above all because it threatened the right to own property. In the United States, the Civil War challenged liberal ideas of democracy and property rights by freeing and enfranchising enslaved Black people. Indeed, we might say that the Civil War was framed around contested notions of freedom: In the South, much more than in the North, the war was initially portrayed as a struggle for freedom—not just the freedom to own slaves but more generally the ability of free men to determine their own fate. Likewise, in the North, “free men, free labor, free soil” become a central mantra of the Republican Party, and the war was also understood eventually as a struggle for emancipation.
As de Dijn argues, these challenges would only continue and increase during the early 20th century, leading to the decline of liberalism in the face of new collectivist ideologies like communism and fascism. The era of the two world wars seemed to many the death knell of individual liberty, perhaps even of the individual himself. Even the attempts to preserve freedom, such as the New Deal in the United States, seemed more inspired by the traditions of democratic freedom than by its liberal individualist renderings. It is therefore all the more remarkable that the victory of these forces in World War II would bring about a powerful revival of individualist liberalism.
In the decade after the collapse of Nazi Germany, intellectuals like Berlin and Friedrich Hayek would reemphasize the importance of individual freedom—what Berlin termed “negative liberty”—and their ideas would land on fertile soil in Europe and America. Much of this perspective arose out of the Cold War, with the Soviet Union representing the same kind of threat to conservative ideas of liberty that the Jacobin Republic had 150 years earlier. Cold War liberals reemphasized the principle of liberal democracy as, in effect, limited democracy with protections for individual rights against the passions of the mob.
De Dijn largely concludes her analysis of freedom’s history with the aftermath of World War II, but it is worth extending her story to explore the success of this vision of liberty since the 1950s. In the United States, in particular, the rise of the welfare state that began with the New Deal and culminated with the Great Society prompted a sharp counterreaction, one that framed its politics around the idea of individual liberty and resistance to big government. Traditional conservatives in the Republican Party as well as a growing number of neoconservatives linked their Cold War politics to their opposition to the welfare state, insisting that the Soviet Union’s and the United States’ experiments in social democracy had eroded freedom in both countries, and they were joined by those resisting the achievements of the civil rights movement, reinforcing the relationship between whiteness and freedom. Triumphing with the election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980, this anti-egalitarian notion of freedom has dominated the Republican Party and much of American political life ever since. The House Freedom Caucus, to take one current example, owes its existence to thinkers like Burke and Berlin.
Freedom is a challenging and compelling analysis of one of the greatest intellectual and popular movements in the history of humankind. De Dijn writes well, making a powerful argument that is both unusual and hard to resist. She shows how the very nature of freedom can be interpreted in different ways by different people at different times. More specifically, she challenges conservatives who wrap their ideology in the glorious banner of freedom, revealing the long history of a very different vision of human liberation, one that emphasizes collective self-government over individual privilege. In doing so, she shows how philosophers, kings, and ordinary folk have used (and sometimes misused) the past to build the present and imagine the future.
This is a very rich and complex tale, one that raises interesting questions and suggests further exploration of some of its key themes. Following the lead of one of the great scholars of freedom, Orlando Patterson, de Dijn notes how many in the ancient world and at other periods in history conceived freedom as the opposite of slavery and yet also built ostensibly free societies that depended on the work of slaves. The denial of voting rights and thus freedom to women during most of history also speaks to this paradox. De Dijn underscores the importance of this contradiction, but it would be useful to know more about how people at the time addressed it. Slavery has existed throughout much of human history, of course, but it is interesting to note that the new antidemocratic vision of freedom emerged most powerfully during a time characterized not only by the height of the slave trade but also by the thorough racialization of slavery. Could it be that it was easier to divorce freedom and democracy when slavery was no longer an issue for white men and when the vision of rebelling against slavery was upheld not only by ancient Greek fighters but also by Black insurgents in the Haitian Revolution?
In her analysis, de Dijn stresses the triumph of the individualist narrative of freedom in the years after World War II, but it bears remembering that those years also witnessed the unprecedented success of social democratic states, which offered an alternate vision of freedom centered on social rights, redistribution, and working-class power. The success of these states came directly out of the wartime experience; millions who took part in the struggle against fascism fought not just against the Axis but for a more just and democratic world.
Moreover, the postwar era witnessed two of the greatest freedom campaigns in history: the struggles for the decolonization of European empires and the American civil rights movement. Both overwhelmingly cast themselves as crusades for a democratic vision of freedom. Julius K. Nyerere, the founding father of an independent Tanzania, wrote no fewer than six books with the word “freedom” in the title. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, arguably the greatest oration in 20th-century America, ended with the ringing words “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!” One should note that resistance to racial equality played a central role in the formation of contemporary conservative ideology, so that to an important extent, the movement for individual freedom was a movement for white freedom.
Finally, one should consider the possibility that, at times, de Dijn’s two ideas of freedom may have points in common. In 2009, at the dawn of the Tea Party movement, a right-wing protester reportedly shouted, “Keep your government hands off my Medicare!” This statement, grounded in ignorance of the fact that Medicare is a government program, prompted much derision. But we should take a second look at what this suggests about the relationship between these two contrasting ideas of freedom. The civil rights movement, to take one example, was a struggle for individual rights not based on skin color and, at the same time, for the protection of those rights by a more democratic government. To take another example, in June 2015, the movement for LGBTQ rights achieved one of its greatest victories in the United States with the Supreme Court’s legalization of same-sex marriage. But did this represent the triumph of a democratic movement for freedom or the destruction of government restrictions on the rights of individuals to marry? In other words, isn’t protecting individual freedom precisely a key point of modern democracy?
It is to de Dijn’s credit that Freedom: An Unruly History forces us to think about such important questions. At a time when the very survival of both freedom and democracy seems uncertain, books like this are more important than ever, as our societies contemplate both the heritage of the past and the prospects for the future. | 1.12527 |
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Get The Nation’s Weekly Newsletter Fridays. A weekly digest of the best of our coverage. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Fridays. A weekly digest of the best of our coverage.
Thank you for signing up for The Nation’s weekly newsletter.
Join the Books & the Arts Newsletter Enter your email to get the best of The Nation’s Books & the Arts section in your inbox biweekly. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Enter your email to get the best of The Nation’s Books & the Arts section in your inbox biweekly.
Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Support Progressive Journalism The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.
Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?
At a Wednesday press conference Jay Baker, a captain with the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office in Georgia, described the suspect in the Atlanta shootings in sympathetic terms that shocked many listeners. Robert Aaron Long stands accused of the murder of eight people—six of them Asian American women. Many felt that the killings were racially motivated hate crimes.
But Baker put a different spin on it, saying, “He apparently has an issue, what he considers a sex addiction, and sees these locations as something that allows him to go to these places and it’s a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate.” Denying there was a racist motivation, Baker suggested, “He was pretty much fed up and at the end of his rope, and yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did.”
Baker’s dismissal of racism as a factor is particularly hard to credit given his own anti-Asian sentiments. BuzzFeed News reported that in April 2020, Baker posted an image showing T-shirts carrying the slogan C ovid 19 imported virus from chy-na. Baker appended a note saying, “Love my shirt. Get yours while they last.”
Baker may be an unreliable judge of racism. But his seeming empathy for the 21-year-old suspect makes sense when we realize that Long is a strikingly run-of-the-mill accused serial killer, someone whose murderous acts spring from distressingly commonplace attitudes toward race and gender. MORE FROM Jeet Heer The Importance of Logging Off Today 5:00 am Bernie Sanders Is at the Apex of His Power March 17, 2021 Cold War Nostalgia Fuels a Dangerous New Anti-China Consensus March 15, 2021 Author page
As more evidence emerges about Long, the picture that comes into focus is of a monster who is also a strikingly ordinary young white American man. The danger of biographical portrayals is that they humanize someone who has committed horrific violence. But there’s another way to look at the same evidence, as showing that the everyday status quo is not innocent but carries with it the seeds of terrible destruction.
Long is a committed Southern Baptist, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States—and second only to the Catholic Church as the largest religious organization in America. He and his family are active members of Crabapple First Baptist Church in Milton, Ga. The bylaws of the church condemn “adultery, fornication, homosexuality, bisexual conduct, bestiality, incest, polygamy, pedophilia, pornography, or any attempt to change one’s sex.”
Like many other white evangelical churches, Crabapple First Baptist has also resisted challenges to white supremacy. Crabapple First Baptist has aligned itself with Founders Ministries, a faction within the Southern Baptist Convention that decries ideas like “white fragility” and critical race theory as “godless and materialistic ideologies.” Current Issue View our current issue
The theology of the Southern Baptist Convention deserves attention precisely because all evidence portrays Long as a highly pious young man deeply imbued in mainstream evangelical culture. The Washington Post reports, “As a teenager, Long would stack chairs and clean floors at Crabapple First Baptist Church in Milton, Ga., said Brett Cottrell, who led the youth ministry at Crabapple from 2008 to 2017. Long’s father was considered an important lay leader in the church, Cottrell said, and they would attend morning and evening activities on Sundays, as well as meetings on Wednesday evenings and mission trips.” A high school yearbook quotes Long as saying, “I really feel like God is wanting me to be a leader in the church.”
Long developed a habit of watching pornography and going to massage parlors once a month, acts which he saw as sinful. A former roommate named Tyler Bayless told the Post that Long “hated the pornography industry. He was pretty passionate about what a bad influence it was on him. He felt exploited by it, taken advantage of by it.”
Long diagnosed himself as suffering from “sex addiction” and went to two rehab clinics to treat his alleged malady. This combination of puritanism and dubious therapy is, once again, common in white evangelical Protestantism. It also connects evangelicals with the powerful therapeutic culture that has long dominated American life.
This notion of sex addiction is part and parcel of a purity culture that blames women for tempting men into sin. The movement to demonize sex work in the name of anti-trafficking is one of the more visible manifestations of this purity culture, which has an influence that extends far beyond evangelical Christianity.
Long’s attitudes towards gender and race were intertwined. Melissa May Borja, a religion scholar in the Department of American Culture at the University of Michigan, told the Post, “Maybe he didn’t intend to harm Asian Americans, but it’s clearly had a disparate impact on Asian American women.” She added, “Considering the structure of labor does mean they probably were more likely the target of a white man dealing with issues of sex and shame. Maybe he saw these women as more expendable.”
Randy Park, son of Hyun Jung Grant, one of the women killed, described the sex addiction as “bullshit,” telling The Daily Beast, “My question to the family is, what did y’all teach him? Did you turn him in because you’re scared that you’ll be affiliated with him? You just gonna scapegoat your son out? And they just get away scot free? Like, no, you guys definitely taught him some shit. Take some fucking responsibility.”
Long’s actions are extreme, but his ideology is not. He simply took the values he inherited from his culture to their logical endpoint. It’s not surprising that he doesn’t see his own actions as racist, since he was reared in church that is defiantly anti-anti-racist. Taught that sex outside of marriage is the equivalent of bestiality, is it really so surprising that he treated sex workers as cattle worthy of sacrifice and slaughter?
The guilt for Long’s actions belongs only to himself. But his way of thinking didn’t spring from an immaculate conception. The desire to “eliminate” temptation by killing Asian sex workers is the culmination of a culture that dehumanizes people of color, dehumanizes women, and dehumanizes sex workers. Long is an outlier only in the extremity of his actions, not in his attitudes and ideas, which are very much part of mainstream society. In Randy Park’s words, it’s time to “take some fucking responsibility.” | -0.62664 |
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Get The Nation’s Weekly Newsletter Fridays. A weekly digest of the best of our coverage. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Fridays. A weekly digest of the best of our coverage.
Thank you for signing up for The Nation’s weekly newsletter.
Join the Books & the Arts Newsletter Enter your email to get the best of The Nation’s Books & the Arts section in your inbox biweekly. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Enter your email to get the best of The Nation’s Books & the Arts section in your inbox biweekly.
Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Support Progressive Journalism The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.
Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?
Last week, WNYC radio’s Brian Lehrer said that he’d noticed a generational divide in responses to Governor Andrew Cuomo, whom a growing number of public officials have urged to resign over claims of sexual harassment. Lehrer had heard a lot from older callers who fiercely defended the New York governor. Some thought the allegations themselves were no big deal; others thought politicians were wrong to call for Cuomo’s immediate resignation since to do so was to deprive the governor of “due process.” Meanwhile, Lehrer received far fewer calls from younger New Yorkers, who, he sensed, may have been less prepared to defend Cuomo. The division seemed so pronounced that Lehrer dedicated a second segment to the topic, specifically urging younger listeners to call in.
But the generational divide isn’t so simple as pro- and anti-resignation. The more striking trend in recent polling of New York voters is that younger people are less certain about what they think. Voters under 55 are ever-so-slightly more likely than their older counterparts to say that Cuomo should resign now. But that younger bloc, especially 18 to 35-year-olds, are much more likely than older voters to say they just don’t know whether Cuomo should immediately step down—or whether he harassed anyone. The 55-plus category is the most likely to say they believe the allegations; they’re also the most likely to say they don’t.
There are explanations for this trend that don’t speak to dramatic generational divides. Older voters are generally more likely to be up to date on the news; indeed, more of them told pollsters they’d heard a lot about the allegations against Cuomo. Maybe young people are uncertain as a group because we just don’t know what’s going on. Maybe confidence comes with age.
I feel inspired, though, to speak in favor of uncertainty, because I think it’s an underrated position here. To put my cards on the table: I’m a 31-year-old sexual harassment lawyer. Personally, I think Cuomo should resign now based on the accounts that he does not dispute, including grossly inappropriate inquiries into a female subordinate’s sexual history and preferences—textbook sexual harassment. But I won’t pretend the question about how to best address the allegations against Cuomo, and on what timeline, with what kind of investigation, is an easy one.
A lot of people—including older callers to Lehrer’s show—sound quite sure of the solution: “due process.” But what, exactly, does that mean? As a legal matter, due process is a constitutional protection against the government’s deprivation of life, liberty, or property. Cuomo, of course, does not have a due process right for people not to ask him to resign. But we often use the term to appeal to the ethical commitments to fairness that shaped, and are shaped by, our legal rules, even where they technically don’t apply. That can be useful. Even where, for example, private employees are unprotected by the Constitution, calls for the basic principles of due process—notice and the opportunity to be heard, an impartial decision-maker—may be clarifying and rhetorically powerful.
But public debate often assumes that due process is a much more certain, fixed set of procedures than, in fact, it is. Many people expect that due process will always require a proceeding much like a criminal trial. In my experience, that instinct is particularly strong in the context of sexual harms, which many of us can’t help thinking of as crimes that require criminal-like procedures (rather than as, say, civil rights abuses and violations of workplace rules). The truth, though, is that due process is a flexible, context-dependent standard with parameters that shift in response to the stakes for the accused, the different interests at play, and inevitable constraints. There is no single “due process” because every new circumstance presents the question of what, exactly, is due. And to whom. MORE FROM Alexandra Brodsky Can Restorative Justice Change the Way Schools Handle Sexual Assault? April 14, 2016 Author page
All of this is infinitely more complicated when decisions must be made through an inherently political process like impeachment. Strictly legalistic visions of fairness just don’t fit. Some of the hallmarks of due process—like impartiality—are simply impossible. Let’s say that Attorney General Tish James completes her investigation into the governor and lays out her office’s fact-findings in a report. What then? The New York legislature will still have to decide whether to impeach him on that basis. Will lawmakers accept her factual findings? If so, will they think the established facts warrant removal? These decisions won’t be made by an impartial jury but rather by politicians with their own motives—as is always the case in any impeachment, regardless of the allegation at issue. One need look no further than the overwhelmingly partisan votes on President Trump’s impeachments to see that’s so. Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation provides another example. It would be naive to imagine it was mere coincidence that senators split along party lines on the sexual assault allegations leveled against the judge. Current Issue View our current issue
As Representative Jerry Nadler put it, calling on Cuomo to resign isn’t a conviction but instead a political judgment. And that judgment is about more than what the governor allegedly did to whom. We must ask whether Cuomo has the confidence of New Yorkers, and of the party he ostensibly leads, without which he cannot effectively govern. As a practical matter, the answer will be inextricably intertwined with public views of Cuomo’s competence, which vary from MSNBC-themed adulation to outcry over covered-up nursing home deaths. Politicians and their constituents must also weigh the democratic benefits of removing a disgraced leader against the democratic injury of replacing an elected official without an election. That’s a very different situation than when a defendant is criminally charged or an ordinary HR department investigates an ordinary boss—the kinds of situations where due process, as rule or ethical commitment, can guide us well.
In this case, there is simply no removing politics from the equation. To acknowledge that doesn’t trivialize the very real harm Cuomo is alleged—and, in some cases, confirmed—to have caused, or the concrete interests of his alleged and confirmed victims. They have told us that the governor abuses his power. And so now we, the people who gave him that power, have to decide whether he can be trusted to retain it.
Political judgments like these are inherently indeterminate. I have my own answer, based on my assessment of the reported accounts and Cuomo’s responses. But there is no incontrovertible rule to point the way, as the calls for “due process” suggest. I’ve heard enough. Some people haven’t. Many want Cuomo to be governor, and plenty of others don’t. And I’d rather we be honest about the messy project before us than pretend there is a neat legalistic answer. | -0.656989 |
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Get The Nation’s Weekly Newsletter Fridays. A weekly digest of the best of our coverage. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Fridays. A weekly digest of the best of our coverage.
Thank you for signing up for The Nation’s weekly newsletter.
Join the Books & the Arts Newsletter Enter your email to get the best of The Nation’s Books & the Arts section in your inbox biweekly. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Enter your email to get the best of The Nation’s Books & the Arts section in your inbox biweekly.
Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Support Progressive Journalism The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.
Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?
Neera Tanden, the first American forced to withdraw from a cabinet-level nomination because of bad tweeting, has a winning scrappiness. The child of immigrants from India, Tanden experienced the vast social chasm of American life after her parents’ divorce when she was 5. She ended up splitting her childhood between her struggling mother, who on occasion relied on food stamps, and her well-to-do father, who lived in the suburbs.
From her mother, Tanden inherited a fighting spirit. She also possesses an ability, surely honed in her father’s house, to nimbly navigate the world of the affluent. That has served her well in her capacity as president and CEO of the Center for American Progress, where a large chunk of her job consists of drumming up money from corporations, business tycoons, and foreign autocrats.
Tanden’s mother, Maya, admitted to The New York Times that her daughter “can be very aggressive.” But it’s perhaps more accurate to say Tanden can be both aggressive and ingratiating, depending on the situation. She can be two-fisted when going after her political foes—especially on Twitter. As an unreconstructed Clintonian neoliberal, Tanden’s foes include Bernie Sanders–style social democrats as well as Trumpist Republicans. But there’s ample evidence that when she needs to turn on the charm to shake loose some donor money or win over a political ally, she can.
Tanden’s undoing as Joe Biden’s nominee to head the Office of Management and Budget came from the simple fact that the two sides of her persona are mismatched. The punchy tweeter is hard to reconcile with the tactful insider. It’s a striking fact that the decisive turn against her came not from the Democratic left (Sanders, who grilled Tanden about both her tweets and the corporate donations during her confirmation hearings, seemed willing to support her) but from the moderate Democratic Senator Joe Manchin and Republicans like Mitt Romney and Susan Collins, who are known for welcoming Biden’s rhetoric of national unity. MORE FROM Jeet Heer A Mainstream Mass Murderer March 19, 2021 Bernie Sanders Is at the Apex of His Power March 17, 2021 Cold War Nostalgia Fuels a Dangerous New Anti-China Consensus March 15, 2021 Author page
These pillars of the status quo used Biden’s unity language against his own nominee. A spokesperson for Romney said that the Utah senator “believes it’s hard to return to comity and respect with a nominee who has issued a thousand mean tweets.”
As a ritual scapegoat offered up to expatiate the sins of partisanship, Tanden was in a real sense a victim of her own politics. Over the past four years, while abrasively critical of Trumpist Republicans, she also evoked the language of comity and civility. She’s very much been the voice—and face—of the ancien régime “resistance” that dreamed of returning the country to a state of bipartisan cooperation between never-Trump Republicans and moderate Democrats. The Center for American Progress often touts its ability to work with the right-wing American Enterprise Institute.
Tanden is a compulsive, incessant, unstoppable tweeter. Over the past decade, she’s posted more than 88,000 times on Twitter, which even at the old limit of 140 characters is enough to fill several Tolstoyan tomes. A Times profile recounted an evening in March 2019 when “Ms. Tanden feuded on Twitter with liberals over whether [Hillary] Clinton condemned far-right hate-mongers strongly enough more than two years ago. The online bickering raged for an hour…when the woman originally targeted by Ms. Tanden’s tweets delivered a wake-up call: ‘neera, you’re responding to a graduate student on Twitter at 1:40 am.’” Current Issue View our current issue
Even as it alienates establishment stalwarts like Manchin, Romney, and Collins, Tanden’s ferocious tweeting earned her the respect of some of her political foes on the left, whose grudging admiration for a talented enemy recalls that of Ulysses S. Grant for Robert E. Lee. Before she officially withdrew her nomination, Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara tweeted, “A small part of every true veteran of the posting wars wanted to see Neera make it.”
Like many online left-leaning journalists, I’ve had my share of Twitter tussles with Tanden. While I vehemently disagree with her on much, I don’t think any of her posts were
disqualifying—certainly not when compared with the truly vile tweets by Donald Trump, which Republican lawmakers so assiduously ignored throughout his administration. Tweeting, as Tanden did, that “vampires have more heart than Ted Cruz” is both funny and accurate. It shouldn’t cost anyone a job.
More problematic is the small brigade of online minions and digital attack dogs that Tanden has cultivated and encouraged, sharp-fanged creatures I like to call the Tanden Trolls. They often do overstep the bounds of decency. One Tanden Troll, described by her as “my friend,” called Sanders a “fucking fake Jew.” And after Tanden’s nomination was withdrawn, another troubled individual posted tweets insulting and threatening the children of New York Times writer Elizabeth Bruenig and her husband Matt, a think tank head, both of whom have tangled with Tanden in the past. While Tanden isn’t responsible for those threats, it’s undeniable that the drama she generates excites and unsettles lost souls.
Tanden’s Twitter habit is more than a hobby or a form of political branding gone awry. It’s a true addiction. Several in her circle have tried to stage an intervention. A Tanden friend told me that when he urged her to give up tweeting, she responded that this would only hand her foes a victory.
In his excellent polemic The Twittering Machine, the British journalist Richard Seymour lays out exactly how social media can take over a person’s life. “The Twittering Machine invites users to constitute new, inventive identities for themselves, but it does so on a competitive, entrepreneurial basis,” he writes. “It can be empowering for those who have been traditionally marginalized and oppressed, but it also makes the production and maintenance of these identities imperative, exhausting and time-consuming.”
Twitter allows us to play a role on a stage watched by millions, to become a hero in the drama of global debate. But there’s no worse fate for an actor than to confuse a performance for reality—and to let the role they play consume their real life. | -0.170045 |
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Get The Nation’s Weekly Newsletter Fridays. A weekly digest of the best of our coverage. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Fridays. A weekly digest of the best of our coverage.
Thank you for signing up for The Nation’s weekly newsletter.
Join the Books & the Arts Newsletter Enter your email to get the best of The Nation’s Books & the Arts section in your inbox biweekly. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Enter your email to get the best of The Nation’s Books & the Arts section in your inbox biweekly.
Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Support Progressive Journalism The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.
Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?
In March 2021, Kenya announced its plan to vaccinate its 48 million residents against Covid-19. The government, according to its own documents, aims to inoculate just 30 percent of the population: citizens over 50, those that work in health and in hospitality (tourism is a major earner for the country), and those with comorbidities. The authorities have made it clear: There is no proposal for the rest of us—no aspiration even to achieve herd immunity through vaccination.
All of this would be egregious enough if it weren’t happening against the backdrop of perhaps the worst display of national selfishness in modern history. The European Union, United States, and Canada have hoarded the vaccine, prepurchasing doses for up to six times their population in some cases. Moreover, because of national agreements with the pharmaceutical companies, they are buying the vaccines at preferential prices. The European Union, for example, is paying $2.15 for each dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine, while South Africa is spending $5.25 for the same drug. Poor countries are paying more for the scraps that remain after rich countries have had their fill.
Wealthy countries are using their control over lifesaving interventions to play diplomacy. The United States, for example, has ordered 300 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, nearly enough for every person in the country—but the FDA hasn’t approved the drug yet. At least 7 million doses have been delivered and remain in storage, with another 20 million expected by the end of April. The United States has already reserved enough of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines for every American, but, instead of freeing up the AstraZeneca doses, has pledged to send just 4 million to Canada and Mexico and stayed mum about what will happen to the rest of the oversupply.
Meanwhile, the COVAX initiative led by the World Health Organization is designed to oversee the distribution of vaccines to poor countries. But rich countries have been slow to support COVAX, and Canada is even actively undermining it by joining the initiative, thereby making whatever scarce doses it acquires through the program even scarcer. Right now, the two most effective vaccines are made by Moderna and Pfizer. Moderna has declined to join the COVAX initiative and is charging the United States $30 for the required two shots and the European Union $36, resulting in billions for a company that is only 11 years old and had not made a profit until this year. Pfizer, on the other hand, has only committed 40 million doses of its vaccine to COVAX.
Countries like China and Russia are also producing vaccines. They may be less effective, but scientists say they are effective enough. UK Foreign Minister Dominic Raab, however, said he would prefer that African countries not get help from China or Russia and instead “wait” until Western countries were done needing their vaccines. No word from Raab on what those under threat are supposed to do while a third wave hits and more contagious variants take root across the continent. Even worse, India and South Africa asked the World Trade Organization to waive intellectual property rights so manufacturers in those counties could fill the gap in production capacity, and were denied. Profits over people. Related Article Africa Is Not Waiting to Be Saved From the Coronavirus Nanjala Nyabola
I’m not sure how to describe what it feels like to be one of the millions—perhaps billions—of people for whom there is no plan. “Abandonment” only scratches the surface of being condemned to the detritus of international greed and human folly. Here, at the intersection of cruel profiteering and woefully mediocre national and international governance, is human life. We are not abstract figures or statistics. We are people, with families and hopes for our futures that are being deliberately endangered by Western governments playing politics with our lives.
But ours are not demands for pity. We are demanding justice. For one, the science affirms that without a global vaccination strategy, it doesn’t matter how many doses rich Western countries hide away. This disease will not go away, and many will die. A study by the Global Vaccines Alliance found that if an 80 percent effective vaccine were distributed equitably based on the population size of each country, 61 percent of global deaths would be prevented. But if nationalistic stockpiling continues, only 33 percent of global deaths will be averted. And this trend of preventing more global deaths simply by making vaccines equitably available holds for less effective vaccines like the Sinovac vaccines, where a vaccine with only 65 percent efficacy will prevent 57 percent of global deaths if distributed equitably, versus 30 percent if hoarded by rich countries. The best way to save millions of lives around the world is to distribute vaccines fairly. Current Issue View our current issue
It’s also worth pointing out that many of these vaccines exist only because of public funding. Operation Warp Speed in the United States, which accelerated the development of the Moderna vaccine, was a tax-funded initiative. The product of such investments should therefore theoretically be available in the public interest rather than for private profit. Moreover, the reason why these companies were able to develop these mRNA-based vaccines so quickly was because publicly funded research sequenced the coronavirus genome and made those findings available in peer-reviewed academic publications. There was not a eureka moment in some corporate lab. It was the culmination of years of scientific inquiry supported by taxes.
To stem a global emergency, poor countries that have the capacity to develop these vaccines are asking for man-made rules on intellectual property to be set aside. Dr. John Nkengasong, the head of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told the US House Foreign Affairs Committee that about six institutions across Africa have the capacity to manufacture these vaccines. Even though medicines are sequences of chemicals that are often made public, international rules on intellectual property prohibit producing the generic drug unless the company or person who licensed it offers a waiver at the request of the country where they are registered. The World Trade Organization has an agreement called the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property that penalizes manufacturing that violates the intellectual property rights of patent holders. Poor countries are asking governments that are party to this agreement to suspend its provisions to allow more factories around the world to make the drugs without fear of punishment. So far, Western governments have refused to permit such a waiver.
At the WTO, the South African delegation reminded participants that “developing countries have advanced scientific and technical capacities…and that the shortage of production and supply [of vaccines] is caused by the rights holders themselves who enter into restrictive agreements that serve their own narrow monopolistic purposes putting profits before life.”
It is that simple, and this isn’t the first time this has happened. The same fight occurred during the last pandemic, when rich countries refused to allow the production of lifesaving anti-retroviral drugs to stop the mass deaths of HIV-positive people in poor countries. In 1996, one in 10 Kenyans were living with HIV/AIDS. At the same time as pharmaceutical giants fought to secure their bottom line, I remember it felt like every family had lost a loved one to HIV/AIDS. It is a reminder that something can be legal and still be unjust. In the end, poor countries like Brazil, India, and South Africa ignored the intellectual property claims of Western companies and started to manufacture generics. They came under tremendous political pressure, especially from the United States, which filed a complaint at the WTO that it eventually withdrew because of public criticism.
Promises to donate doses of vaccines once all people in rich countries have been inoculated do not undo the injustice of this moment. There is a perverse logic embedded in the international order that needs poor countries to be on their knees to validate the feelings—or perhaps even the existence—of rich countries. It also reveals a comprador class within poor countries allied with foreign capital. While the regional coordination within Africa has been stellar, it would be disingenuous not to acknowledge the role that some governments have played in the current situation. The Kenyan government’s plan, for example, is disgracefully insufficient. Instead of focusing on managing this pandemic, the country continues to borrow heavily to fund legacy infrastructure projects that we do not want or need.
At this stage, I could offer an elaborate argument about how the West is jeopardizing its soft power in the developing world by acting in such a brazenly selfish way. But I believe that we are living with the consequences of trying to make arguments for justice through the lens of geopolitical ambition. If people structure their arguments by the rules of the game, then they validate those rules—even those inherently unjust. The idea that the only reason to help people in a crisis is to consolidate a country’s power is part of the reason conflicts in places that have little geostrategic value like the Central African Republic are ignored. It is inhumane and counterproductive for people who want the world to change to succumb to this fallacy. One likely reason rich countries are hoarding vaccines is that they hope to play politics with them. Instead, we should make value-based arguments for doing the right thing—for doing the just thing—because values must still matter. Help people because they are people, not because it might help you. And while I have no idea what is going to happen to me or my peers across this continent, we will continue to live, because we must—and continue to speak up, because all we can do is demand justice in this morally bankrupt system. | 0.697279 |
By next week, opponents of California Governor Gavin Newsom will almost certainly have gathered enough signatures to qualify for the ballot either in the late summer or autumn of this year.
It’s a bizarre state of affairs, to say the least: In a state that has defined itself as a liberal bastion in a country roiled by conservative upheavals, a quintessentially liberal governor with a surprisingly ambitious agenda is at serious risk of being recalled. What makes it more disconcerting is that the effort to recall him has become nationalized, with Trumpites not only in California but around the country seizing on Newsom’s decline in popularity at the tail end of a year of pandemic shutdowns, and looking to score a shock upset in the heart of blue America.
It’s not as if California’s GOP has had a kumbaya moment and is now tacking to the moderate middle—quite the reverse. The handful of GOP Congress members from California include such luminaries as Devon Nunes and Kevin McCarthy, who have continued to hew closely to Trump’s paranoid script. The leading GOP candidate to replace Newsom is former San Diego mayor Kevin Faulconer, who, while he pitches himself as a get-things-done pragmatist, failed to break with Trump during the 2020 election, even as Trump veered further rightward and preached ever-more-destructive conspiracy theories. Meanwhile, the state GOP has been roiled with infighting over infiltration efforts by the Proud Boys and other extremist, street-fighting groups and individuals.
There is, clearly, a lot at stake in this recall election, not just around whether the GOP can rehabilitate itself after its shameful embrace of Trump and his efforts to overturn the election results—or, on the other hand, around the sitting governor’s pandemic response. More generally, a host of big-picture social justice themes, from the notion of a wealth tax—gaining steam among progressive legislators in California—to the idea of universalizing health care by expanding MediCal to include the undocumented, will effectively be on the ballot during the recall election. More From the Left Coast Biden’s Rescue Plan Will Be a Huge Benefit for Undocumented Workers Sasha Abramsky Why Congress Must Pass Voting Rights Reform Now Sasha Abramsky
Also among the social justice themes on the line are a series of ongoing efforts to reform California’s policing and criminal justice systems.
Despite its liberal veneer, California is one of only four states not to have a decertification process locked into law for police officers found to have used excessive force. It also has, in raw numbers, the highest number of fatal police shootings in the country, at between 100 and 200 per year, with a higher number of such shootings per capita than the national average. In short, for far too many years, California’s police agencies have operated with a dangerous, and frequently lethal, sense of impunity.
Newsom has pledged to introduce greater accountability and more of an emphasis on racial justice into California policy discussions. And, in recent months, a broad coalition of reformers have pushed him to sign legislation that will tackle this crisis. Current Issue View our current issue
Last year, state legislators passed a bill, which Newsom did sign, mandating that the state, rather than local DAs, investigate all fatal police encounters with unarmed civilians.
Now, state Senator Steven Bradford, who represents a district in Los Angeles, is pushing forward SB 2, which would create a civilian oversight commission to investigate, and potentially decertify, rogue police officers who use excessive force against civilians. The bill would address a recurring problem, where officers frequently leave one department under a cloud only to get hired on by another police department within the state.
At a recent press conference, a coalition of SB 2 supporters explained the purpose of the legislation. Farzia Almarou, her head covered by a wide-rimmed black hat adorned with a red ribbon, talked of how her son was gunned down by police in mid-afternoon in a city park in Gardenia, in the spring of 2018. The officer who shot her son in the back, she said, had previously killed three other suspects. “This officer has never been held accountable.”
Rocio Zamora, of the California Stop Coalition, described, in painful detail, how in early 2017 her cousin was shot in the back 16 times by an officer in San Diego. “The police have not protected us,” she concluded. “Rather, they have been the perpetrators of violence.”
Leticia Barron, from the city of Riverside, talked of how her mentally ill son was shot in the head two weeks before his 27th birthday by a police officer with nine previous allegations against him of excessive use of force.
The police associations and unions oppose SB 2, and other law enforcement agencies are also likely to come out against it. If Newsom is replaced before SB 2 passes, it’s unlikely a GOP governor would sign it into law. More generally, a swing to the right in California gubernatorial politics would likely be a death knell for systemic criminal justice reform in the state. After years of bipartisan “tough on crime” legislation, the state is finally getting serious about introducing a politics of inclusion and of racial justice to the law-and-order conversation. It would be a tragedy if the recall campaign were to derail this. | 0.090101 |
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Get The Nation’s Weekly Newsletter Fridays. A weekly digest of the best of our coverage. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Fridays. A weekly digest of the best of our coverage.
Thank you for signing up for The Nation’s weekly newsletter.
Join the Books & the Arts Newsletter Enter your email to get the best of The Nation’s Books & the Arts section in your inbox biweekly. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Enter your email to get the best of The Nation’s Books & the Arts section in your inbox biweekly.
Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Support Progressive Journalism The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.
Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?
For those of us who’ve been lucky enough to work with him, Roane Carey, who is leaving The Nation after 32 years, is not simply an editor of rare sensitivity and intelligence. He is also a person of extraordinary integrity, kindness, and humility. To write for Roane is to feel protected—not just from your enemies but from your own errors, which he corrects in the gentlest fashion, since he never takes pleasure in correcting you (another rare quality). To write with Roane, as I did on a few occasions when I was the magazine’s literary editor, is to experience the true meaning of solidarity, where the assertion of ego is a distraction from the cause on which you’ve embarked together: speaking truth to power. Has another editor in American journalism demonstrated his level of commitment to racial justice, or to Palestinian freedom, or to exposing the injustices of US foreign policy? If so, I’m not aware of one.
In the offices of The Nation, that claim would seem uncontroversial. No one who has spent time at the magazine is unaware of Roane’s moral passion, his informed and humane radicalism, his dedication to stories that most of the media has overlooked, either through indifference or—as in the case of Palestine, on which he also edited two important anthologies, The Other Israel and The New Intifada—with deliberate disregard. But outside The Nation, Roane—a modest, soft-spoken Southerner who studied history at Swarthmore College—is less well-known, for the simple reason that he has never drawn attention to himself.
I don’t mean to make him sound like a saint. A dear and close friend, Roane is as complex as they come, with a salty sense of humor and a love of life and its pleasures that is anything but monastic. I think of him, rather, as a brilliant ensemble musician—a bassist in a jazz rhythm section, say, or a violist in a string quartet. All too easily overlooked by the audience, he is indispensable to the music’s power, its binding force, such that when he leaves the group, it will never sound quite the same again. After more than three decades of devoted work behind the scenes at The Nation, Roane has left not only the magazine but the country, for a new life in Barcelona. We will miss the music he helped make at The Nation, but we’re also excited to hear him solo, as an American expatriate in Spain. | -0.539802 |
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Get The Nation’s Weekly Newsletter Fridays. A weekly digest of the best of our coverage. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Fridays. A weekly digest of the best of our coverage.
Thank you for signing up for The Nation’s weekly newsletter.
Join the Books & the Arts Newsletter Enter your email to get the best of The Nation’s Books & the Arts section in your inbox biweekly. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Enter your email to get the best of The Nation’s Books & the Arts section in your inbox biweekly.
Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Support Progressive Journalism The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.
Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?
When Bernie Sanders weighs in on behalf of workers, it’s a big deal—for the workers and for our understanding of the workplace issues his interventions highlight.
That’s what happened this week when the Senate Budget Committee chairman leveraged his considerable presence on social media to support Wisconsin nurses who are prepared to strike in order to win a contract that “supports nurses who have worked on the frontlines throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.” The message from Sanders was loud and clear.
“I stand with nurses in Madison, Wisconsin, who are demanding a safe work environment and paid sick leave,” he announced. “They are on the frontlines in our fight against COVID-19. We must treat them like the heroes they are.”
Sanders focused on the Madison fight because of his concern for nurses not just in Wisconsin but nationally. As Americans are being vaccinated and governors speak of getting “back to normal,” unions that represent nurses and other health care workers are pointing out that their members have been through hell. They’re seeking new contracts that recognize and respect the sacrifices made during the pandemic. And, yes, they are talking about striking if it is necessary to secure those contracts. MORE FROM John Nichols Representative Ro Khanna Explains Why He Called Out Biden’s Air Strike in Syria Today 5:00 am The Essential Pandemic Relief Bill Is Medicare for All March 18, 2021 Harry and Meghan’s Interview Has Given a Welcome Boost to the Anti-Monarchy Movement March 17, 2021 Author page
“Nursing and public health experts warn that without adequate support, large numbers of frontline healthcare workers will likely experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other psychological consequences from the stress of responding to the pandemic,” explains SEIU Healthcare Wisconsin, the union that represents more than 850 nurses at the UnityPoint Health-Meriter Hospital in Madison. With a boost from Sanders, along with other elected officials, these nurses say they are prepared to strike “to ensure nurses can take care of themselves and their patients, heal and recover after a traumatic year, and be valued and respected for their essential work.”
As a mayor, a member of the House and Senate, and a presidential candidate, Sanders established a record of standing with unions. And he has been doing a lot of it since the pandemic arose: demanding the protections for workers be included in relief bills, championing union-backed drives for a $15 wage, and signaling support for RWDSU’s organizing drive at the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Ala.
But the senator’s message with regard to the struggle of the nurses in Madison turns up the volume in two important ways:
Sanders has embraced workers who are talking about striking, something that many political figures—including Democrats who are otherwise sympathetic to unions—are sometimes cautious about doing. Standing up for union workers before they walk out is vital because it strengthens their hand at the bargaining table. When a former presidential candidate who now chairs a key Senate committee engages with a local struggle, it builds confidence on the part of the workers and draws the attention of the broader community to the labor fight. Sanders has highlighted new issues that have arisen during the pandemic, and that the Service Employees International Union and other labor organizations representing health care workers are making part of new and most robust bargaining strategies. In addition to traditional calls for increased wages and benefits, unions and their members are demanding that hospital executives recognize the need for a work-life balance that allows nurses to better care for their families and themselves.
After a year of staffing the front lines in the fight against Covid-19, the Madison nurses began negotiations by developing a “contract platform” that explained,
During the pandemic, nurses and healthcare workers at UnityPoint Health-Meriter Hospital have been on the front lines and in the trenches, risking our lives and the lives of our families to provide quality, compassionate care to our community. Despite being called “heroes,” we have not felt respected as professionals, and have struggled with inadequate personal protective equipment, grueling schedules, and a lack of transparency from management. As Meriter nurses enter contract bargaining, we intend to set a new course to get us through the pandemic and beyond. It is a moral imperative for hospital executives to address our concerns so we are actually treated as heroes, and can care for ourselves, our families and our patients.
Carol Lemke, a Meriter nurse with 32 years of experience, says the issue of burnout is real, and must be addressed.
“Nurses will bend over backwards to make sure our patients get the care they need, even if it means we put our own needs on hold,” she explained this week. “We work long hours in stressful situations. Many of us step up to work extra shifts when we don’t have enough staff, giving up time with our families and we’re proud to be there for our patients. After all we went through this year, nurses need time to recover, to be with our families, and be there for ourselves. We need Meriter to show us they value our commitment and sacrifices during this pandemic.” Current Issue View our current issue
While hospital negotiators had agreed to several key demands by mid-March, differences remained when it came to the work-life balance issues that nurses have made a priority. “The pandemic has revealed deep systemic problems which must be fixed now, so nurses can protect ourselves and provide the care our patients deserve,” says Reno Gatton, a nurse in Meriter’s post-anesthesia care unit. “We have been putting our lives and the lives of our families in danger, have worked to exhaustion, and have been wracked with anxiety about this unknown, terrifying disease. Many nurses have left our hospital either because they got sick or wanted a safer work environment. Our contract platform is vital, because we need to have staffing incentives, and ways to recruit and retain more RNs.”
Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers, Senator Tammy Baldwin, and Representative Mark Pocan, three of the state’s most prominent Democrats, have recognized the urgency of these demands. On Thursday, they expressed solidarity with the nurses—joining legislators such as state Senator Melissa Agard, D-Madison, who last week declared, “Nurses have been here for us throughout the worst pandemic in a century, it’s time for us to be there for them.”
When SEIU members rallied outside the state Capitol this week, they were joined by Agard and state Senator Kelda Roys, D-Madison, who recalled, “For a year, nurses stood in rooms that were too dangerous for the rest of us to stand in. Nurses held up iPads so that we could say goodbye to our loved ones as they died. Nurses held their hands as they died. The least we can do is stand with them today—by ensuring a fair contract and restoring the earned time off that they lost through no fault of their own as they stepped up during this deadly pandemic.”
Like Bernie Sanders, Wisconsin officials are stepping out of their legislative chambers and into a fight for health care workers whose sacrifices during the pandemic must be recognized and respected.
“This year was exhausting for all of us, but it was nothing compared to the fatigue that our nurses have been through this past year,” says state Representative Francesca Hong, D-Madison. “Emotional labor and burnout are real. Nurses have gone above and beyond to do their jobs. UnityPoint Health-Meriter needs to do theirs. Honor, value, and pay your nurses.” | 0.685675 |
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Get The Nation’s Weekly Newsletter Fridays. A weekly digest of the best of our coverage. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Fridays. A weekly digest of the best of our coverage.
Thank you for signing up for The Nation’s weekly newsletter.
Join the Books & the Arts Newsletter Enter your email to get the best of The Nation’s Books & the Arts section in your inbox biweekly. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Enter your email to get the best of The Nation’s Books & the Arts section in your inbox biweekly.
Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Support Progressive Journalism The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.
Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?
President Joe Biden has signed his first big legislative package, and to quote him in the past, it’s a “big fucking deal.” Not only does it send desperately needed aid to those suffering the most from the pandemic, but it also marks a sharp departure from how the Democratic Party—and the nation—has approached persistent poverty in the wealthiest country on the globe.
The tax-related provisions alone are hugely progressive. After the dispersal of the $1,400 stimulus checks, the enhanced monthly child tax credit payments, and the increases to the earned-income tax credit and the child and dependent care tax credit, the poorest fifth of Americans will experience a more than 20 percent increase in their incomes. The richest fifth, on the other hand, will receive less than a 1 percent boost, while the top 1 percent will get nothing at all.
And those are not the only provisions in the package. Congress has also increased unemployment benefits by $300 a month through September, while offering $30 billion in rental assistance and $5 billion for schoolchildren to get emergency food benefits. It has offered free health insurance plans through the Affordable Care Act to people on unemployment and expanded subsidies for everyone so that no one has to pay more than 8.5 percent of their income on insurance premiums. Many of those benefits will flow to people who are unemployed or working for low pay.
All told, these measures are projected to reduce poverty by more than a third, bringing the number of people living below the federal poverty line from 44 million to 28 million. Related Article Democrats Make a Down Payment on a Radically More Just Economy Joan Walsh
Yes, these are emergency provisions in response to a crisis we haven’t experienced in a century, and many of them are set to expire. But it still shows how much our approach to helping the poor has changed, especially among Democrats. It was only 25 years ago that President Bill Clinton triumphantly declared that he was ending welfare as we knew it. Rather than offering the poor money to help them climb out of a financial hole, the bill he signed required them to start climbing out of it on their own, by logging hours at work, before the government tossed them a ladder. It was emblematic of the party’s overall stance on poverty. Some of the very tax credits being offered to all poor American families in the Democrats’ relief plan, such as the child tax credit, have until now been withheld from families with little to no income, under the assumption that if they’re not working and earning money, they don’t deserve our help.
Biden voted for welfare reform in 1996 as a senator from Delaware. And yet in 2020 he made a child tax credit expansion to all low- and moderate-income parents part of his presidential campaign platform for responding to the pandemic.
Democrats have shifted so dramatically that they are already promising to make the child allowance a permanent feature of the American social safety net. Under Biden’s relief plan, families making $150,000 or less will get monthly payments of $300 for every child age 5 and under and $250 for older kids—even families with little to no income. This has the potential to cut the number of children living in deep poverty in half.
The allowance sunsets within a year, but the gamble is that once Americans get a taste of what most other developed countries long ago instituted—regular cash payments to ease the financial stress of parenting with too little income—it’ll be all but impossible to stand in the way of making it permanent, even for conservatives and moderates. Who will want to vote in favor of dramatically reducing most families’ incomes? Democrats have already said they’ll start fighting to ensure it lives on indefinitely as soon as the ink on the relief bill dries.
If they succeed, it will mark a complete reversal of how this country has approached alleviating poverty. Even as wages have stagnated and basic costs like health care and housing have skyrocketed, we’ve pretended that poverty is a personal failing. This allowed us to turn a blind eye to the highest level of relative poverty in the developed world while offering the least in taxes and benefits to reduce it. Now the Democrats are unabashedly championing a new approach: giving poor people money so they can afford the things their children need to thrive, so they can escape the Catch-22 of being so financially burdened it’s impossible to climb out of the hole—so, in short, they’re no longer poor. | 0.522339 |
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Get The Nation’s Weekly Newsletter Fridays. A weekly digest of the best of our coverage. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Fridays. A weekly digest of the best of our coverage.
Thank you for signing up for The Nation’s weekly newsletter.
Join the Books & the Arts Newsletter Enter your email to get the best of The Nation’s Books & the Arts section in your inbox biweekly. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Enter your email to get the best of The Nation’s Books & the Arts section in your inbox biweekly.
Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Support Progressive Journalism The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.
Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?
The Irish Post’s report on the latest example of the Royal family’s toxicity featured a headline that went to the heart of the matter: “Irish political party calls for ‘racist parasite’ British monarchy to be abolished.”
That’s saying it!
I am an anti-monarchist, with a disregard for royalty that informs my anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist sentiments. I take my cues from Tom Paine, who famously observed that “we cannot conceive a more ridiculous figure of government, than hereditary succession, in all its cases, presents.” As an American, my discussions of the British monarchy are usually limited to debates about impeachment, which the drafters of the US Constitution wisely embraced as a guard against kingly abuses of presidential power.
Of late, however, I’ve been engaged in more freewheeling discussions about the monarchy; it’s come up in radio interviews and podcast tapings, during book events, and in casual conversations. My experience is not, of course, unique. We’ve all been reflecting on the fact that, as the columnist Cynthia Tucker notes, “The British monarchy came in for well-deserved criticism in the throne-shaking interview Oprah Winfrey conducted with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle. I believe every allegation the couple made, including the bombshell accusation that one family member expressed concerns about the skin color of the couple’s progeny.” MORE FROM John Nichols Representative Ro Khanna Explains Why He Called Out Biden’s Air Strike in Syria Today 5:00 am Bernie Backs Covid Nurses Who Are Prepared to Strike for Humane Work Conditions March 19, 2021 The Essential Pandemic Relief Bill Is Medicare for All March 18, 2021 Author page
I have joined in these discussions with relish because of the opportunity they present to consider the fundamental matters related to the monarchy—and to the fascination that so many people who do not live in the United Kingdom retain for it. This is a chance to go deeper on the issue, which is something Americans rarely do. We could do for a few more discussions of the monarchy, aristocracy, plutocracy, and oligarchy in this country—especially as we wrestle with the authoritarian legacy of Donald Trump, whose obsequious obsession with the British crown was on grotesque display when he and his cabal trooped off for tea with the Queen in 2019.
In many parts of the world, former British colonies continue to have lively debates about the lingering influence of the British royals, the fading empire they represent, and the organization of democracy as an alternative to governing with deference to entitled and empowered elites. These discussions are both theoretical and practical. Barbados is in the process of making its break with the British crown—and the commonwealth relationship that retains the UK’s monarch as head of state—just now, as the government of progressive Prime Minister Mia Mottley has declared, “The time has come to fully leave our colonial past behind.” In Australia, which has a robust republican movement, former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull responded to the Harry and Meghan interview by announcing, “Our head of state should be an Australian citizen, should be one of us, not the Queen or King of the United Kingdom.”
My anti-monarchist worldview is informed by my long acquaintance with the late British parliamentarian Tony Benn, the former government minister and socialist campaigner. He taught me many years ago to see the monarchy as a bulwark of an often corrupt and corrupting status quo. Recalling another moment of fascination and concern with the royal exiles—during the 1936 constitutional crisis that arose when King-Emperor Edward VIII proposed to marry a commoner, American socialite Wallis Simpson-Benn once noted, “[British Prime Minister] Stanley Baldwin very soon realized that the empire would not accept Mrs Simpson as queen, and forced the king to sign the instrument of abdication as the necessary pre-condition for the continuation of the crown itself. This was seen as essential to those who make up the establishment because it performs many functions that are held—by them—to be central to the maintenance of their own power and influence.” Current Issue View our current issue
Bingo.
Even in a modern state, with constitutional guarantees, the monarchical mindset is powerful. “Above all,” as Benn explained, “the existence of a hereditary monarchy helps to prop up all the privilege and patronage that corrupts our society; that is why the crown is seen as being of such importance to those who run the country—or enjoy the privileges it affords.”
So I’m all in for discussions of monarchy, in the United Kingdom, where I am on the side of the republicans who want to see the royals out, and in the United States, where it is always healthy to be reminded of why the American Revolution was a good idea. That reminder is needed because, while this country may not have a king, it surely has an aristocracy. Even before the coronavirus pandemic supercharged the fortunes of the billionaire class, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders was explaining, “The move toward oligarchy in our country not only impacts our politics, it impacts our economy and the standard of living of working people. Let’s be clear. The current grotesque level of income and wealth inequality in this country is not only immoral, it is causing massive suffering for the working families of our country.”
Swap the word “oligarchy” for ”monarchy” and the discussion starts getting to the point. Elites go by different names, but they are always about the work of maintaining their inherited power and purchased influence.
A knowing discourse about the monarchy—and about the commonalities between throned royals and mercenary plutocrats—is necessary, even in countries where “the Crown” is primarily empowered on streaming services. The Duke of Sussex Harry Breaks Free From the Racial Contract—and Pays the Price Kali Holloway
My taste in these matters tends less toward gossip about the CEOs of the royal “Firm,” whom Paine decried as “crowned ruffians,” and more toward the political impulse to make a clean break with monarchism. So I was struck by the response of Ireland’s People Before Profit Party, which for a number 0f years now has maintained the left flank in the Dáil Éireann, the principle chamber of the republic’s legislature, while also electing representatives to the Northern Ireland Assembly.
The PBP, a proudly radical party, offered a blistering reply to the most jarring revelation from Winfrey’s interview with the self-exiled royals.
“So it turns out the British Royal Family are racist parasites… who knew?! Sure, there were little hints—centuries of colonialism, slavery, and genocide—but it was finally confirmed last night by Meghan Markle in an interview with Oprah Winfrey,” began the party’s social media rejoinder, which amplified an #AbolishTheMonarchy hashtag along with observations on how
The Royal family are wealthy scroungers who live off the largesse of British taxpayers. They promote a culture of hierarchy and racism. Their deep racism comes directly from a history of empire. Throughout the ages, the British Monarchy justified their crimes by claiming the people of India or Ireland were either half savage or childlike, awaiting the benefits of British ‘civilisation.’ There is a relatively prevalent idea that racism comes from ‘uneducated’ people. But Markle’s revelation shows that it often comes from the top and is spread throughout society to divide and rule. Meghan Markle and her husband Harry are also privileged wealthy individuals. And even they were not inoculated against the Monarchy’s notorious racism. How much worse must it be for working class people of colour who face racism everyday of their lives.
There’s not much more to add, save Tom Paine’s observation: “In a word, whoever demands a king demands an aristocracy.”
Leaving the monarchy was a good first step on our part. But abandoning monarchical thinking is a necessary next step in the work of rejecting homegrown aristocracy—and billionaire-class oligarchy. | 0.289973 |
EDITOR’S NOTE: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Get The Nation’s Weekly Newsletter Fridays. A weekly digest of the best of our coverage. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Fridays. A weekly digest of the best of our coverage.
Thank you for signing up for The Nation’s weekly newsletter.
Join the Books & the Arts Newsletter Enter your email to get the best of The Nation’s Books & the Arts section in your inbox biweekly. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Enter your email to get the best of The Nation’s Books & the Arts section in your inbox biweekly.
Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Support Progressive Journalism The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.
Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?
President Biden’s bold $1.9 trillion rescue plan is rightfully lauded. Both liberals and conservatives have suggested that it marks the end of the conservative era that Ronald Reagan launched 40 years ago. But although the new president deserves kudos for his domestic policy, when it comes to foreign policy initiatives, the new era looks hauntingly like the old.
Biden’s foreign policy team—carefully curated exemplars of the establishment—usually says all the right things: The world has changed; new crises—a climate emergency, global pandemic, crushing economic downturn, crippling corruption and inequality—demand attention; revitalizing our democracy and fixing our economy are the top priorities. Americans are “rightly wary,” Antony Blinken noted March 3 in his first major speech as secretary of state, “of prolonged US military interventions abroad.” The president has emphasized addressing the climate crisis, rejoining the Paris accord, naming former secretary of state John F. Kerry as his envoy for climate change and making climate topics central to his first meeting of allies.
But old establishment views maintain their grip on Biden’s foreign policy. The president says that “the simple truth is, America cannot afford to be absent any longer on the world stage.” Biden comes to office with the United States engaging in military action in several countries, confronting Russia on its borders and China in the South China Sea, and maintaining an estimated 800 bases across the world, the largest collection for a country in world history. It will take a wrenching change of priorities and commitments, a fundamental rethinking of national security, to extricate the United States from the inertial force of this institutionalized engagement on the world stage. And the early indications are that the Biden foreign policy team isn’t exactly looking for the exits.
Read the full text of Katrina’s column here. | -0.254787 |
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Get The Nation’s Weekly Newsletter Fridays. A weekly digest of the best of our coverage. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Fridays. A weekly digest of the best of our coverage.
Thank you for signing up for The Nation’s weekly newsletter.
Join the Books & the Arts Newsletter Enter your email to get the best of The Nation’s Books & the Arts section in your inbox biweekly. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Enter your email to get the best of The Nation’s Books & the Arts section in your inbox biweekly.
Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Support Progressive Journalism The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.
Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?
This week’s massacre of eight people, including six Asian women, in Atlanta was sadly predictable. From the moment Donald Trump started blaming the coronavirus pandemic on “China,” everybody paying attention knew that his rhetoric would result in violence against the many, varied Asian communities all across this country. Anti-Asian bigotry is nothing new in this country, but to distract from his own incompetence, Trump was all too happy to add fuel to that always smoldering fire.
Increased violence toward Asian Americans throughout the pandemic is not theoretical, and it’s not anecdotal. It was a documented fact long before this week’s mass murder. Hate crimes against Asian Americans living in major cities rose 150–200 percent in 2020, even though hate crimes overall fell as people were cooped up indoors. Violence against Asian people has been the other epidemic during this past year.
That surge of violence doesn’t get talked about as a “crisis,” in part because the mainstream white media is complicit with the forces encouraging the violence. I wrote, last year, about how repeating Trump’s racist-slur nickname for Covid-19 would get people killed. I knew that would happen not because I’m Mr. Cleo but because whenever leaders blame an “out group” for a disease they don’t understand, somebody goes off and starts killing members of the out group. It’s happened in every plague throughout history.
All media—print, TV, and social—continued to give Trump unfettered access and opportunity to make racist statements that put vulnerable communities at risk. Lying about an election he had already lost got Trump kicked off of Twitter. But slandering Asian communities for nine months was just, what, “adhering to the terms and conditions of the user agreement”?
You have to understand what the media has already done to understand what is happening now with the coverage of Robert Aaron Long, the suspected mass murderer of these Asian women. The mainstream white media has a vested interest in making Long out to be anything other than the most likely outcome of their long-standing complicity in anti-Asian rhetoric.
Long is white, so he was already going to benefit from every bit of character rehabilitation this society has to offer. The cops report that Long said his motives were not “racial in nature,” and the media has run with that.
But let’s examine those cops. First of all, they took Long alive, which is not a privilege usually accorded to suspected mass murderers of color. Cherokee County Police spokesman Capt. Jay Baker says that Long saw the massage parlors as a “temptation” that he wanted to “eliminate.” And then Baker said, “He was pretty much fed up and had been kind of at the end of his rope. Yesterday was a really bad day for him, and this is what he did.” Current Issue View our current issue
It should surprise no one that the officer who characterized the massacre of eight people as a “bad day” for the shooter has also adopted Trumpian racist rhetoric. Internet sleuths later found that Baker had posted pictures of T-shirts on Facebook calling the coronavirus imported virus from chy-na.
There is simply no reason to think that cops as racist as this are accurately assessing the motives of the suspect. In fact, the police and the rest of the mainstream media are not reporting on other statements Long allegedly made. One survivor, interviewed by a South Korean newspaper, says Long screamed, “I will kill all the Asians!” before opening fire at one location. What the suspect said while shooting people seems at least as relevant as what the suspect said after shooting people. But I bet Officer Chy-na over here thinks interviewing witnesses in their native language is “woke supremacy” run amok.
Even if the cops are merely reporting what Long himself said to them, there’s no reason to think Long is accurately representing his true motives for the crime. Why does the media constantly allow racists to self-define the contours of its own racism? You don’t see the media reflexively adopting the suspected criminal’s narrative in other crimes. Nobody writes: “Man claims dog made him kill eight people, hunt for dog ongoing.” Only white men get to do something racist, claim it wasn’t racially motivated, and have the media react with a general “Welp, guess it wasn’t racism then. Phew. Onto the real motive.”
This impulse to exclude racism also stems from the wholly white belief that people are either all racist all the time or “don’t have a racist bone in their body.” Racism is more nuanced than that. It’s entirely possible for people to be motivated by racial animus and a bunch of other factors as well. Here, it clearly seems that Long was motivated not only by racism against Asians but also a toxic hate for women—and that the two forces were so closely fused they can’t be disentangled. There is, for instance, enough scholarship on the long and nasty history of the exoticization of Asian women to know that it’s simply foolish and ignorant to discount the racialized aspects of this crime. If Long were purely motivated by a desire to “eliminate” “temptation,” a random sampling of sex work in Atlanta would not result in six Asian women dead. That Long was targeting Asian women is evidenced by the body count.
But white media gonna white. Having spent a year fueling anti-Asian hate, it makes sense that they’re now trying to recontextualize anti-Asian violence as something else. A cop at one of the press conferences offered the unsolicited observation that two white people were murdered along with the six Asian women, as if his catching some white people in the crossfire somehow absolved Long of racist intent. Some people seem achingly desperate to have this crime be anything other than a racist hate crime.
I guess I understand why. There are (white) people in the media who have largely pinned their entire careers on the idea that racism either doesn’t exist or isn’t as dangerous as people of color say it is. There are people who have spent the last two weeks telling you that the most dangerous threat to America is not white domestic terrorism but the canceling of certain Dr. Seuss books (which, the astute reader will remember, were primarily decommissioned for their anti-Asian caricatures). So when angry white boys kill, their media apologists contort themselves into pretzels to come up with some other “grievance” behind the violence, other than the racial one staring everybody in the face.
You didn’t need a crystal ball to see this eruption of violence against Asians coming. You didn’t need to be “woke” or sensitive to the history of anti-Asian stereotypes. You just had to listen to white media for the past year and know what white men are capable of. | -1.482676 |
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Get The Nation’s Weekly Newsletter Fridays. A weekly digest of the best of our coverage. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Fridays. A weekly digest of the best of our coverage.
Thank you for signing up for The Nation’s weekly newsletter.
Join the Books & the Arts Newsletter Enter your email to get the best of The Nation’s Books & the Arts section in your inbox biweekly. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Enter your email to get the best of The Nation’s Books & the Arts section in your inbox biweekly.
Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Support Progressive Journalism The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.
Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?
The most important breaking story in sports is not something you’ll see on ESPN or the assorted copycat networks. It is a story that affects multiple sports, but most primarily football. The NFL is in the midst of a free-agent frenzy, signing players to $100 million deals to the breathless panting of sports media carnival barkers—but new developments in the science of diagnosing brain damage threatens not only those nine-figure contracts but the entire multibillion-dollar football industry as well.
Until now, diagnosing the remorseless brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) could only be done after death. Former NFL players have died (many by shooting themselves in the chest or hanging themselves, to preserve their skulls) and their families have donated their brains to science so CTE could be diagnosed postmortem.
These studies have been damning, yet critics have always said that the high rate of CTE found in these players’ brains is flawed since they were donated from people who have “shown signs” of CTE. In other words, if a former player has symptoms such as early onset Alzheimer’s, memory loss, suicidal ideation, or other forms of what is, in layman’s terms, “brain damage,” then their families are more likely to donate their brains to these studies. MORE FROM Dave Zirin So What the Hell Is Race Norming? March 12, 2021 Kelly Loeffler Just Lost Her WNBA Team to a Player She Refused to Meet March 3, 2021 Welcome to the Real March Madness February 25, 2021 Author page
This explanation has also allowed NFL executives, franchise owners, players, and fans to put CTE out of their thoughts. Meanwhile, the league has adopted cosmetic changes to the rules and the equipment to market the illusion that it is safer (or even safe at all) to play tackle football.
Yet science is not on the NFL’s side, and the more our ability to detect CTE in the living improves, the more greater the existential threat becomes to the future of the almighty religion that is football. The latest scientific news is that over two dozen scientists, funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, have produced the first consensus criteria to diagnose CTE among the living. This paper, which went public on Monday, is a step toward a “biomarker” that can definitively say whether a living person is suffering from CTE.
Robert Stern, director of clinical research at Boston University’s CTE Center and one of the paper’s authors, said upon releasing the study, “Although I wish I could say it’s a game-changer right now, it’s a game-changer for the future. We’re really not at the point of being able to diagnose CTE during life yet. We’re getting much closer, and this new paper is an important step forward.”
This study, while not perfectly able to “diagnose CTE during life,” will help identify CTE’s unique symptoms that result from head injuries, determine its prevalence among athletes, and allow medical professionals to better determine the risks involved from suffering concussions. It’s a massive step forward. Current Issue View our current issue
In the near future, athletes of any age will be able to be diagnosed. Currently the great unknown for CTE is when it develops: youth football? High school? College? The pros? We know from youth suicide cases that CTE can be not only detectable at an early age but also shockingly widespread throughout the brain. That was the condition of New England Patriot and murderer Aaron Hernandez, who was found to have a terrible case of CTE following his jailhouse suicide by hanging.
I reached out to Dr. Chris Nowinski, cofounder and CEO of the Concussion Legacy Foundation, a nonprofit organization leading the fight against concussions and CTE. Several lifetimes ago, Nowinski was a professional wrestler who suffered from concussions. He said, “As we inch closer to definitively diagnosing CTE in living people, we should anticipate many difficult conversations. For example, CTE in athletes is preventable, and we know the onset of the disease can occur in minors. If we diagnose a 16-year-old football player with CTE, should youth football continue? Adult athletes may soon learn they have CTE while they are still playing. Will they retire? It’s difficult to predict how individuals will respond when we can finally diagnose the disease in life, but we should begin to prepare for that day.”
Nowinski really hits the nail on the head (pardon the expression). CTE is a degenerative disease that worsens with repeated impact and abuse to the brain. If youth, high school, or college football players can be diagnosed with it, it puts the NFL’s entire talent pipeline in a great deal of jeopardy—not to mention its future financial prospects.
The days of plausible deniability—by the NFL, by players, and by fans—will be coming to a screeching halt in the next several years. The league’s plans for dealing with that inevitability remain an unknown. One thing is certain: slogans like “Football is family” and “Moms for football” athletic clinics are no longer going to cut it. We are officially past the point of CTE’s being a subject of debate. The new debate will be over football itself. | -0.99332 |
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Get The Nation’s Weekly Newsletter Fridays. A weekly digest of the best of our coverage. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Fridays. A weekly digest of the best of our coverage.
Thank you for signing up for The Nation’s weekly newsletter.
Join the Books & the Arts Newsletter Enter your email to get the best of The Nation’s Books & the Arts section in your inbox biweekly. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Enter your email to get the best of The Nation’s Books & the Arts section in your inbox biweekly.
Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Support Progressive Journalism The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.
Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?
In 2018, Donald Trump considered reappointing Janet Yellen, now the nation’s treasury secretary, as Federal Reserve chair. But according to The Wall Street Journal, he worried that the 5-foot-3 economist “might be too short to convey stature” at the Fed, though she’d been running it ably for four years.1
Speaking of stature, Trump is the first twice-impeached former president, and Yellen is the first female treasury secretary.2
Throughout her life, Yellen has been known as a collector—of rocks, stamps, and also firsts. She is the first person to hold the nation’s top three economic jobs (in addition to being treasury secretary and running the Fed, she chaired President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers). In 1971, she was the only woman to graduate with a doctorate in economics from Yale University. A leader over the last quarter-century in economic policy-making, Yellen will need all that experience in a role that makes her the captain of efforts to right the Covid-19-battered economy while also addressing the underlying inequities the pandemic exposed.3
Yellen did not speak to me for this profile. But we persevered, because she represents a new day at the Treasury—not just because of her gender, but also because of her career-long focus on how markets fail, especially the way they fail the unemployed and people on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. She will be central to keeping Biden’s promises about “building back better,” in his words, and pushing the country toward the kind of innovations “better” will require.4
Yellen is also something of a throwback to an earlier age of bipartisan comity. At her Senate Finance Committee confirmation hearing in mid-January, she got repeated praise from Republicans. The Senate confirmed her appointment 84-15. Yet progressive economic and racial justice advocates also praise Yellen, in superlatives. I had the odd experience of having several people ask to talk to me off the record because they will have to work with the new Treasury head—not to criticize her but to praise her, without appearing to curry favor. “She is the most progressive treasury secretary in history,” says someone who expects to work closely with her.5
“Janet sees the world in terms of people living paycheck to paycheck, and how economic policy influences their lives and their ability to build a secure future,” says Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, who some on the left preferred to see in Yellen’s job.6
“Biden could not have made a better pick, given that we are operating within the realm of mainstream D.C. politics,” agrees Robert Pollin, a founding codirector of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Yellen, a career-long Keynesian economist, is “firmly left of center,” Pollin adds. “She actually cares about the well-being of working people and the poor.”7 Current Issue View our current issue
Her pop culture star is rising. Early in her term as Fed chair, the progressive activist group Fed Up, which agitates for the central bank to focus on problems of unemployment and racial and economic inequality, hailed Yellen’s tenure by depicting her in iconic Rosie the Riveter garb, symbolizing her focus on workers over Wall Street. Admirers say that, in her instantly recognizable sensible white bob and jewel-toned jackets, she could inspire the kind of feminist fandom that the late Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg did in her later years. When Biden nominated Yellen, he suggested that she deserved a tribute on the order of the musical Hamilton—and the Hamilton Twitter account morphed a portrait of Alexander Hamilton into Yellen. Then came “Who’s Yellen Now?” by Dessa, a member of the hip-hop collective Doomtree. Here’s the bridge, to the tune of Mary J. Blige’s “Family Affair”:8
Don’t want no tax evasion
Forgers faking
In her Treasury
Trying for higher wages
For the nation
Less disparity.9
N10
But Yellen will need more than a stellar résumé, pop culture adulation, and even bipartisan admiration to do her job well. The treasury secretary’s role is crucial, if poorly understood. She (or he) is the top salesperson for the president’s overall approach to the economy. Under Republicans, over the last half century at least, that has meant liberating the so-called free market by pushing tax cuts and corporate deregulation. Under Democrats—but especially, it seems, under Biden, at least so far—it has meant a robust defense of government spending (or investment, as Yellen likes to call it) to heal an economy cratered by Covid and tilted even more toward the white and wealthy by Trump’s financial deregulation spree.11
Trump’s treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, either ignored or helped dismantle many of the 2010 Dodd-Frank guardrails Congress enacted after the 2008 financial crash, most notably by lowering the capital requirements on banks intended to prevent taxpayers from having to bail them out again, deregulating nonbank lending institutions (such as the insurance giants AIG and Prudential), and gutting other consumer, investor, and taxpayer protections. When Yellen assumed her role in January, she immediately confronted the scandal over the wild inflation of the stock of GameStop, a declining retail chain, by Reddit users and uber-wealthy investment sharks, often via the controversial Robinhood trading app. But the problem went way beyond GameStop or Robinhood. The role of established casino-capitalist institutions like hedge funds highlighted the accelerating “gamification of Wall Street,” says Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown.12
“This is not a game for people who have money in pension funds, for people trying to save for their kids’ college, for people trying to get a mortgage,” says Brown, the chair of the Senate banking committee and a longtime Yellen admirer. He thinks she and other Biden appointees will be able to rein in the financial industry.13
Yellen can also reshape the Internal Revenue Service, which the Treasury runs, to do the same, Brown believes. Depleted over several administrations and thoroughly debased by Trump appointees, the IRS is now an accelerant of income inequality and racial disparities more than an engine of equity, far more likely to audit low-income Americans—especially those of color—than the rich, while creating a booming tax avoidance industry for individuals and corporations.14
“We’ve heard a lot of talk about ‘I just want things to go back to normal, before Covid,’” notes Representative Katie Porter. But “normal” wasn’t good for everyone, maybe even most Americans, the whiteboard-wielding California progressive observes. “We have to acknowledge there were problems in our economy before Covid—the gender pay gap, the racial wealth gap,” among others. “We have to ask: What fundamentals of our economy do we need to reorder as we rebuild?” As Yellen presides over Covid relief, financial reregulation, and IRS reform, Porter sees her as “the perfect person to raise those issues.”15 MORE FROM Joan Walsh Stacey Abrams Knew Another Round of Attacks on Voting Was Coming March 16, 2021 Democrats Make a Down Payment on a Radically More Just Economy March 11, 2021 Is a Tax on ‘Ultra-Millionaires’ the Answer to Massive Inequality? March 4, 2021 Author page
In her first two months in office, Yellen has largely met her progressive admirers’ expectations. She fought aggressively for Biden’s $1.9 trillion Covid-relief package, which passed Congress with zero GOP support. It marked a dramatic expansion of the social infrastructure that Yellen and the new president—perhaps nudged by the Democratic Party’s rising left—have pledged to enact.16
“A key job for a Treasury Secretary is to make sure the country is on a sound fiscal course,” Yellen told The New York Times’ DealBook conference in late February. “If you don’t spend what is necessary to get the economy back on track, that has a fiscal cost as well.” She actually has a better version of that pitch: “I think the price of doing too little is much higher than the price of doing something big,” she told CNBC the same month. But she’s not really given to sloganeering. She tends to speak in paragraphs, not sound bites.17
Yellen has committed to appointing a top Treasury official to oversee climate change efforts, which might include everything from imposing a tax on carbon pollution and regulating investors’ climate risk to directing Treasury bonds, tax incentives, and other funding to green energy priorities.18
And in an early demonstration of her commitment to racial equity, in March Yellen directed $9 billion in Treasury-controlled funds to lending institutions in low-income communities, especially those of color. One of Yellen’s very first meetings after she was nominated included civil rights advocates, observes attendee Dorian Warren, president of Community Change, a progressive organizing group for low-income people. “It was really good—she listened and took copious notes,” he recalls. Ultimately, though, Warren cautions, progress will require “continuing outside pressure and movement work.”19
The pride of middle-class, mid-20th-century Brooklyn, Yellen paid tribute to her roots at her confirmation hearing. The economist praised her father, a doctor who had an office in the family’s Bay Ridge home, where patients from the nearby factories and docks came to wait for appointments on their stoop. “Those remain some of the clearest moments in my childhood,” she told the committee.20
“He was the kind of doctor who treated the whole patient. He knew about their lives, about when they had been fired or couldn’t pay,” Yellen said. “Economics is sometimes considered a dry subject, but I’ve always tried to approach my science the same way my father approached his: as a means to help people.”21
A friend and classmate at Fort Hamilton High School in the 1950s wrote a piece about her headlined “Janet Yellen: Brainy, Brave and Brooklyn Strong.” Writing in The Fiscal Times when Yellen was appointed Fed chair, Jacqueline Leo reminisced about the high expectations at their public school, where many teachers were World War II refugees, and about a culture remarkably free of sexist stereotyping. “The editors of all three high school publications—the newspaper, the literary magazine and the yearbook—were all girls.” So was the valedictorian: Janet Yellen, who also edited the school newspaper, The Pilot, in her senior year. (She interviewed herself for it and gave herself a tough time.)22
“We were expected to take charge, just as our mothers and grandmothers did when men went off to war,” Leo wrote. Yellen’s mother had been a public school teacher during the war years; in the post–World War II recovery period, she stayed home to raise her children.23
If her upbringing in post–Great Depression Brooklyn was formative, so was Yellen’s decision to seek a doctorate in economics from Yale, which she received in 1971. Her key advisers were the late James Tobin and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, two legendary left-liberal economists. A half century later, Stiglitz, now at Columbia, recalls Yellen as “engaged, amiable, organized, and self-composed.” That last quality was particularly important, he says, because Yale College didn’t admit female undergraduates until 1969, and there were few women in its graduate schools when Yellen arrived in 1967.24
Academics aside, Yellen’s Yale experience was formative in two ways. As she had in Brooklyn, she absorbed the post-Depression, post–World War II values of the economics department of the time. “Many people there, including Jim Tobin, had been very affected by the Great Depression,” Stiglitz recalls. “They were much more concerned about equality” than economics departments tend to be now.25
And they were having those discussions situated adjacent to the struggling, majority-Black neighborhoods of New Haven, just as the so-called War on Poverty’s programs were winding down, leaving poverty victorious despite the millions spent to combat it. “Yale was located right at the boundary where the wealth gap was very clear,” Stiglitz notes. “And we were sensitive to all of those issues.”26
Yellen confirmed that the first time I met her, at the 2006 National Community Reinvestment Conference, which she convened as president of the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank. “I was drawn to economics, not, as you might think, as a result of an early fascination with interest rates,” she said wryly in her opening welcome, “but because I wanted to understand the underlying causes of the Great Depression.” In the same speech, she discussed what she’d learned on the ground in New Haven about the Great Society initiatives that left the city blighted by urban renewal projects in the 1960s, with its African American population more isolated and practically as poor as before.27
I’d been invited to that convention to share lessons from the community development initiatives I’d written about over the previous decade. Yellen had already studied them. The conclusions she’d drawn from her time in late-1960s New Haven meshed with what many anti-poverty activists found in their research almost four decades later: that revival efforts had to go beyond “bricks and mortar” to weave together the health care, education, employment support, and access to credit that low-income communities need. Another neglected element, she added: “Resident participation is vital to the success of any redevelopment effort.” The community revitalizers in her audience rarely heard such words from central bankers. The same could be said of the bankers who were there.28
Yellen became one of the most powerful advocates of the Community Reinvestment Act, passed in 1977 to direct more credit into poor and minority communities neglected or redlined by mainstream banking. As Stiglitz recalls, “She and I supported the CRA when we were in the Clinton administration, but the rest of the financial community was very hesitant about it.” Yellen stood up to the analysts and pundits, especially on the right, who blamed CRA-supported loans to low-income home buyers for the banking and mortgage crash in 2008.29
“Most of the loans made by depository institutions examined under the CRA have not been higher-priced loans, and studies have shown that the CRA has increased the volume of responsible lending to low- and moderate-income households,” Yellen told the 2008 Community Reinvestment Conference. She warned against using foreclosure trends “as justification to abandon the goal of expanding access to credit among low-income households.”30
These and other positions won her overwhelming progressive support to succeed Ben Bernanke as Federal Reserve chair in 2014 over former treasury secretary Larry Summers, widely considered to have been President Barack Obama’s top choice. One of the advocates’ best arguments for Yellen was empirical, not ideological: She had been remarkably prescient about future economic troubles as both San Francisco Fed president and Fed vice chair. In 2006, she warned about the housing bubble; by 2007, she predicted that troubled housing and mortgage markets would shake the overall economy; and in late 2008, she became the first Fed official to declare that the economy was in recession.31
That streak continued. Examining nearly 700 predictions by the 14 top Fed officials between 2009 and 2012, The Wall Street Journal ranked Yellen number one in terms of accuracy. Other Fed low-interest-rate doves also deserved high marks, the business broadsheet found; inflation-obsessed hawks were the least accurate.32
Meanwhile, Obama’s oddly vocal support for Summers also helped Yellen. Ezra Klein wrote about a “subtle, sexist whispering campaign” against Yellen by Obama allies and financial analysts, who told him on background that the Fed vice chair lacked “toughness” or “gravitas.” (As I wrote at the time, gravitas “is a well known Beltway code word for ‘penis.’”) One-third of Senate Democrats signed a letter sponsored by Brown backing her nomination. They ranged from progressives like Brown, Warren, and Oregon’s Jeff Merkley to centrists like Maine’s Angus King and California’s Dianne Feinstein.33
Whether because of the empirical, ideological, or feminist arguments, Summers took himself out of contention, and Yellen got the job. Immediately, she began advancing policies to lower unemployment and spread resources in low-income communities of color by keeping interest rates low, using Fed funds to promote employment, and nudging private bankers toward public responsibility. “She was the very first Fed chair to really take on inequality,” says Stiglitz. Early in her tenure, Yellen visited a manufacturing program at a South Side Chicago community college; soon after, Brown recalls, she toured an Alcoa aluminum plant in Cleveland. “These aren’t places Fed chairs usually go,” says UMass Amherst’s Pollin, adding that she also came to his own public university “and spent hours talking to our grad students.”34
Angela Glover Blackwell, the founder and former CEO of PolicyLink, a group promoting racially equitable growth policies (disclosure: I’m on its board), found herself invited to join Yellen’s 15-member Community Advisory Committee, one of only two such bodies connected to the Fed. After their first meeting, Blackwell says, “I was so impressed with how she immediately took to the data we presented [on] poverty and unemployment.” Yellen asked them, “What are the jobs in the future going to be? How many people of color? And how were they doing?” Blackwell remembers that Yellen wove the data and analysis into future speeches.35
Activist Ady Barkan, best known for his advocacy in defense of the Affordable Care Act in the Trump years, was back then a leader of Fed Up. “She has long demonstrated a willingness to listen to the voices and experiences of people left behind, which is the first step towards fixing the problems,” Barkan tells me via e-mail. “She understands the racial and economic inequities that are plaguing us. She also seems ready to invest huge sums of Federal dollars into the economy.”36
Yellen also made the right enemies. At a 2015 congressional hearing, then-Representative Mick Mulvaney, the South Carolina Tea Partier who would become one of Trump’s many hapless chiefs of staff, blasted the popular Fed chair for her focus on inequality. “You’re sticking your nose in places that you have no business to be,” he fulminated.37
Given her unparalleled experience, a track record of correctly reading economic trends, a commitment to racial and economic equity, and admiration from progressives and even some centrist Republicans, does anyone apart from has-been wing nuts like Mulvaney have worries about Yellen’s coming tenure?38
Progressives have raised some concerns, including her public support for deficit cutting in 2018 and her acceptance of millions of dollars in speaking fees from corporate giants and Wall Street titans after leaving the Fed the same year. Yellen also disappointed many left-leaning activists when she began to raise interest rates, albeit slightly, starting in 2016, when unemployment was still comparatively high. “The economy was still kind of soft,” recalls the economist Robert Kuttner, a Yellen admirer, and progressive economists especially saw a need for the Fed to keep its focus on unemployment and its lending rates low. Yellen’s move drove Fed Up leaders to criticize their former Rosie the Riveter. (Stiglitz attended a Fed Up demonstration outside a 2016 Fed symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyo., according to The Washington Post.) Kuttner terms her interest-rate hawkishness “an asterisk” in an otherwise progressive career, while adding that her position was widely shared at the time by the central bank’s board of governors.39
A bigger asterisk, to some, is her relatively recent embrace of cutting the federal deficit and “reforming” entitlements. At Charles Schwab’s 2018 Impact conference, Yellen called the federal debt “unsustainable,” adding, with a memorable flourish,”If I had a magic wand, I would raise taxes and cut retirement spending.” The next year, she suggested Social Security and Medicare might need cuts.40
Elizabeth Warren, for one, says that doesn’t worry her. “Janet gets that we’re in a completely different world now,” she tells me. “While we may have differed in years past about the effect of the deficit, today her focus is entirely on an economy that has left millions of families behind and threatens to destroy economic opportunity and widen the racial wealth gap.” Kuttner agrees, noting that Yellen’s 2018 comments “came in the context of Trump’s tax-cutting spree” and that, at the same time, she recommended tax hikes—which will ultimately be necessary to pay for Biden’s priorities, including the American Rescue Plan Act and his massive infrastructure investment.41
“Caring a little about the deficit is not necessarily a bad thing, especially when it comes to reining in rich people on taxes,” adds Jeff Hauser of the Revolving Door Project. The Economic Policy Institute’s Josh Bivens adds, “I think her deficit concerns actually help her in building support for the [American Rescue Plan] proposal,” he says. “Nobody thinks she’s always soft on deficits.”42
Still, after winning admiration from progressives for avoiding the revolving door between top government jobs and Wall Street for her entire career—Yellen left the Fed for a perch at the Brookings Institution in 2018—she nonetheless disappointed some when her financial disclosure forms, filed after her nomination in late 2020, revealed she’d received over $7 million from corporate behemoths, among them big banks, investment firms, and hedge funds. Barkan, who says he remains optimistic that Yellen will “be an excellent Treasury Secretary,” was disappointed by that news. “We need her to be a really tough regulator,” he says in an e-mail. “I hope that in the coming years, she proves that she is on the side of poor and working class Americans, not the financiers.”43
Sherrod Brown, when asked if the news of Yellen’s financial disclosure forms worries him, answers immediately: “It really doesn’t. She told me about that when I first talked to her [about her nomination]. I know her integrity and record and character well enough to know she’ll do a good job.”44
So what, exactly, do Yellen’s left-liberal admirers believe, or at least hope, she can accomplish?45
The advocates and economists fighting to reverse the huge advantages that the federal government has bestowed on the financial industry over the last 30 years—a bipartisan problem going back to Clinton—say she must revitalize the Financial Security Oversight Council, a Dodd-Frank reform that pulled together agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to protect Americans from known abuses and look out for new threats. Just holding regular meetings would be a start, says one Senate source, who adds that the Trump administration left the FSOC “decrepit and abandoned.” The point isn’t meetings for the sake of meetings; Yellen needs to reinvigorate the entire roster of federal regulators charged with policing the field.46
Meanwhile, there’s the fight, even after passage of the American Rescue Plan Act, over continued government spending to achieve greater racial and economic equity. Porter thinks Yellen is the right person to make the case that underspending, which typifies the GOP’s approach, “is fiscally irresponsible. Spending is the fiscally responsible path.” Brown wants to see the act’s expanded child tax credit—which he says would lower child poverty by 40 percent and the poverty rate of children of color by an astonishing 50 percent—made payable monthly, instead of once a year. (An expanded earned-income tax credit could be delivered that way too.) Yellen probably can’t make all of that happen by herself; other congressional or White House regulatory tweaks may be necessary. But her support, especially in her role as IRS boss, will be crucial.47
Brown, Warren, and other progressives also hope that, as the government directs more money into American homes via those reforms, Yellen and others in the administration will get behind establishing forms of no-fee banking so that low-income people without bank accounts can use those funds without paying sky-high fees. The initiative has been characterized as “postal banking,” Brown says, but “it can also include community banks, credit unions,” and other institutions.48
Perhaps most radical, Yellen is committed to tackling climate change as the economic threat that it is. Part of what she’s pledged to do involves regulation: Big banks and investment firms fund the carbon-producing industries that cause climate change, and they don’t accurately account for the coming risks, like financing mortgages in areas threatened by floods or wildfires. New financial rules could require lenders and investors to price in those risks, Yellen says. She also favors a tax on carbon emissions—weak tea to a lot of progressives, but a proposal that could make a difference as part of a broader agenda. Pollin, an expert on the Green New Deal, supports some of the same reforms and adds that Yellen could be instrumental in setting up a $50 billion green-bond-funding program, in which the Treasury issues bonds that are then purchased by the Fed and invested in clean energy development.49
Porter, the deputy chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and Representative Pramila Jayapal, the caucus chair, are equally hopeful that Yellen’s leadership could prove transformative. She’s been close to the economic traumas of the past 70 years, from the lingering aftermath of the Great Depression in Brooklyn through the unfinished business of the Great Society in New Haven to the Democrats’ inadequate approach to the 2008 financial crash. All of that, they believe, will help her chart a future that requires a multiracial 21st-century New Deal and an even greater Great Society.50
Stiglitz agrees. “Her whole life has been about understanding this moment, where government can play a big, important role,” he says.51
Porter says Yellen (and Biden) will have to deal with the fact that government moratoriums on rent and mortgage payments don’t permanently waive those bills for people who still can’t afford to pay them. Like Porter, Jayapal believes Yellen sees those people. Last year, Yellen helped Jayapal develop her Paycheck Guarantee Act, which would provide grants to employers of all sizes to enable them to keep paying and offering benefits to employees during the crisis (though the measure is not part of the Biden administration’s rescue plan).52
“She was so thoughtful about the proposal, about where we were in the economy, the challenges to minority communities,” Jayapal recalls. “She made it stronger.”53
“That’s not to say we’ll have no disagreements—I’m sure we will,” Jayapal adds. Indeed, not long after we spoke, Yellen expressed reservations about Jayapal’s and Warren’s proposed “ultra-millionaires’ tax,” a wealth tax that the new treasury secretary warned “has very difficult implementation problems.” Nevertheless, Jayapal says, “I have a tremendous amount of hope.”54 | -0.148442 |
Vivian Gornick’s writing has often given me the sensation of finding myself in the same place but much changed. This is as true of her criticism and journalism as it is of her memoirs—a straightforward and piercing desire for rediscovery conquers the text, no matter its voice. Perhaps this can help account for why a writing career that has persisted across five decades has in the past couple years been enthusiastically reexamined and reissued by ascendant generations of feminists, and Gornick herself. A collection of essays on rereading released last year, Unfinished Business, was also an exercise in rewriting previously published material, inducing dialectical déjà vu in anyone keeping up with her work. In her second book, 1977’s The Romance of American Communism, reissued last year by Verso with a new, somewhat regretful introduction, Gornick interviewed dozens of former Communist Party members, choosing to organize their lives into the periods before, during, and after membership. Her subjects wander across the fulcrum of political realization and tip over as they sit in their homes and talk to her.
Gornick, born 85 years ago to leftist working-class Jews in the Bronx, has never strayed far from home, at least not for long. She received her undergraduate degree from City College and her master’s from New York University. Her writing career began in the 1970s at The Village Voice, where she was free to chase down what interested her and became irrevocably involved with the women’s movement, which she covered extensively and credits with radically altering her political subjectivity. In memoirs about her youth (Fierce Attachments) and her mature adulthood (The Odd Woman and the City) she never stopped writing about New York City as a crucible, a romance, a teeming mesh of stories.
Her new collection, Taking A Long Look, spans Gornick’s entire career, beginning with her reporting on the feminist movement and concluding with book reviews—written in the past couple decades for outlets like Bookforum, The Nation, and the Boston Review—with sketches of New York City life and cultural criticism sandwiched between. The collection goes backward in time rather than chronologically, opening with essays from the early aughts on Lore Segal, Herman Melville, Alfred Kazin, among others. Why backwards? “It didn’t occur to me for a minute that it would be interesting for the reader to encounter me at my worst rhetorical beginnings,” Gornick told me, “I thought, well see me at my best and then maybe you’ll take me at my worst. It was what I could live with.”
Home is where I reached her and where she reached me. While we were introducing ourselves over the phone from Manhattan and Brooklyn, Gornick asked if I was going into the Nation offices, and I told her I was doing the assignment freelance but imagined nobody on staff was going in much these days. What I didn’t mention is that the very first time I read Gornick’s writing I was at the Nation office, an old version of it that doesn’t exist anymore. I read the piece because, as an intern, I’d been assigned to fact-check it. It didn’t go perfectly. I don’t remember exactly how (I don’t remember any facts); what stays with me is the feeling of being fastidious in some of the wrong ways, pedantic, annoying. Rereading the piece—which appears in this collection—without any anxiety, was rewarding in quite another way. When I was 22 I could certify every word of what I read as truth. At 29, I can see some of my own mistakes, changes, and ever faithful suggestions show up in other people’s lives. This, too, I learned from reading Vivian.
—Hannah Gold
H annah G old: You get pretty personal in several of your book reviews, staying close to the text but also allowing space in your essays to examine the lives—the foibles, intimacies, obsessions, politics—of the artists and academics you write about. How close can, or should, one get to an author’s life through the act of literary analysis?
V ivian G ornick: I think it was Baudelaire who was the first literary person that I know of to describe criticism as autobiography. The first time I ever saw that sentence I understood how true it was. In other words, what any writer does is essentially give the reader a view of how the writer sees the world. Randall Jarrell wrote two long, marvelous pieces on Robert Frost, whom he regarded more highly than almost any other poet that he knew of, because, he said, Robert Frost’s poetry gives you the very long view of how a single man has lived in the world. I realized a long time ago that this is true for the critic too. After all, the idea that the critic is omniscient, is committing in ironclad terms the right and the wrong, the good and the bad, as if coming from above, is ridiculous. It’s just not true. This is the way I see the world; there is no other way for me to approach literature, or anything else.
Now, the trick in criticism, which of course is true in the making of imaginative literature too, is how to be persuasive that the way I see the world is worthwhile. To know exactly how much of yourself to openly put into it so that you don’t sound neurotic and self-absorbed, to sound like what you have to say is worthwhile because you are aligning it, or comparing it, or using your own experience as a litmus test as well as can be done. Now, there are lots of critics who don’t employ it as directly as I do, but they’re all doing the same thing. Since we live in a therapeutic culture, it’s always seemed natural to me to associate my own experience to what I was writing about. The trick throughout my years has been how to find the right formula. When I was starting out, I discovered that my style was that of the personal journalist. I went out into the world; this, this, and this happened; and this, this, and this is how I saw it. I began with feminism, I was on the barricades for radical feminism, and that taught me how to have a point of view and how to employ a point of view, and then how to learn how to control it.
HG: The Diana Trilling and Mary McCarthy essays in this collection seem like companion pieces in that Trilling, as you depict her, is a writer who becomes totally absorbed in her husband’s life, his circle, his ambitions, whereas you write about McCarthy, who traveled in similar circles, “What fools McCarthy made of her men! Not knaves, fools. Just to see them so portrayed, lowered into a bath of scorn, was to see ourselves raised up.” Can you speak a bit about how these women writers handle foolish men, as artists?
VG: In the 1950s, when I was young, every woman writer essentially wrote about—the favorite phrase was “the war between the sexes,” “the battle between the sexes,” that kind of thing. And the only way in which women could write about themselves as women up against men was to hold them up to scorn. Clare Boothe Luce, Eve Merriam, they all wrote ironically and with scorn. And McCarthy was the best of all of them. She was the most talented, and she was ruthless. When I was in college we were reading all of this—we didn’t recognize ourselves as who we were and the world that we were going into, but we must have felt it, because me and my friends just adored all this stuff.
Then with the women’s movement you gave up irony. Irony went overboard, and it was sobering and it was like, “Screw the irony, this is terrible! This is who we are, this is what the world is, this is what history is, no more fun and games, no more nice girls.” In the 1970s and ’80s women like me were waking up in shock, and our shock is what gave birth to all the writing that comes out of those feminist years, like, “Gee whiz, can you believe it? This is what we are, where we are, what we’ve been living through—it isn’t funny.” Now I’m laughing!
HG: Maybe irony is back a little bit then.
VG: Maybe! But for many years I had absolutely no sense of humor about men and women, about feminism. You know, men and women—but mostly men, in those years, the 1980s, and then the ’90s too—would make fun of our sobriety, our earnestness, our anger, and I would stare stony-faced at every one of them! I never had a laugh in me. And that was the change from Mary McCarthy to my generation. She didn’t know how else to do it except, as you say I say, “hold them up to scorn.” Therefore to read her today the writing feels very arch, very overdrawn, and the shrewdness is fun but not terrifically admirable anymore. You know Clare Boothe Luce’s famous The Women—you know that movie?
HG: I haven’t seen it.
VG: Well see it—it is the absolute synthesis of everything I’m saying now. You’ll see how old-fashioned it seems; it is not able to outlast its social environment. A great work lasts beyond the social context in which it’s written. But an inferior one, a second-rate one, doesn’t. You feel it’s time-bound. And in a way McCarthy feels like that.
HG: I really admire your essay on James Salter, which kicks off with a perfect lede. In the last sentence of the lede you come straight out and ask, “Who is this man, and what is he actually talking about?” It feels like the kind of question you write in all caps above the essay while drafting it and delete later.
VG: I was waiting to write that for 20 years! That came straight out and I knew that was the beginning. Who the hell is he? What is he talking about? Nobody ever talks about what he’s talking about. It gave me great satisfaction also to say he has a lot to answer for. But anyway I’m very proud of that piece because it practically came out whole as written.
HG: I also loved your essay “The Reading Group,” about a small group you joined in the ’90s that read and discussed memoir together, where you write, “Every book has its poetic respondent among us, the one for whom the book, whatever its shortcomings or eccentricities, delivers an inner clarity that resonates in that part of the expressive self where intelligence serves sensibility,” and you propose that at times in the group a conversation is taking place “between a book and its one true reader.” This sounds very romantic. Are there any books so personal to you that you wouldn’t want to share your thoughts on them in a reading group or an essay?
VG: Yes, there are, no doubt. I can’t think right this second, but I’ll give you an analogy. One of us in the group was in love with a book called—I think it was called Intimacy by Hanif Kureishi; you know, that British Pakistani writer, who himself is one of the worst sexists, in this book. She adored this book and with great trepidation asked us all to read it, and her trepidation was well placed because we all hated it, and it gave her great pain. I remember thinking to myself, If I have a book that I feel tender about for exactly these reasons, I’m not gonna bring it here. There are books that you feel about as if they were a friend, or a child. They’re not lovable but you love them, and you don’t want to hear them criticized. That’s a very good question, and it goes to the heart of relations between the reader and the writing and the books that we read, that you can feel about them as if they were your intimates, even if they are hapless, or eccentric, or immature.
That group that I wrote about, in a way I did come to feel romantic about it. I had never been in a reading group before. We were together 15 years, and I never experienced anything like it again. I sort of wanted to memorialize it, because it taught me things I’d never dreamed of before and which I hold dear now. That idea that there’s always one person in the world who can see the poetry in a particular book, this insight came to me years before and it had to do with people—in fact, it had to do with marriage. You know when you look at a married couple and you think, ‘What the hell does he see in her?’ or ‘What does she see in him?’ or ‘Why are these two together?’ I came to understand that it’s a secret, And then it became the same with the books we read in the group. It is a romantic view, but what can I say, it was a romantic experience.
HG: In another piece, “Consciousness,” from the ’70s, you explore the idea of consciousness raising—which you define as “the feminist practice of examining one’s personal experience in the light of sexism”—then go to a meeting where women are practicing that by asking questions of one another in a group setting. It struck me that all the coverage I read of the Me Too movement consisted of individual opinion pieces or pieces where a reporter would go out and talk to subjects, a few women working in the same industry perhaps or who were accusing the same man. I did not see a record of the conversations women were actually having with one another. Can you comment on the form of that essay?
VG: That was the key to our generation. We invented consciousness raising and it spoke for itself, and I hope that piece speaks for itself. I reread it many years after I wrote it and I was amazed at how it captured the whole experience. It was meant to show that, to feminism, conversation was like an apprenticeship. You went in an initiate and you came out a practitioner. Which is exactly how the movement went forward; it was as if we were converting each other, discovering ourselves. Ours was such a political generation. Me Too is not political the way we were. When it’s a political time, that means the world is full of hope. If you’re out there and there are 10,000 people out in the street.
HG: Sticking with the women’s movement, in your early essay “The Women’s Movement in Crisis,” I was interested in this part about the founding of Ms. magazine, where you write, “Steinem and Ms. could do nothing but become themselves. That self, as it turned out, was not my self, or the self of many other feminists. The magazine proved to be slick, conservative, philistine (Ellen Willis hit the nail on the head when she said Ms. was interested in editors, not in writers). Its intellectual level is very low, its sense of the women ‘out there’ patronizing, its feminist politics arrested at the undergraduate level.” Can you explain more about this divide in feminist media at the time as you see it? Do you stand by this assessment?
VG: Oh, absolutely! I still know Gloria Steinem to this day, but we’re not friends. I mean, we’re friendly. I think that she has all these years felt very wounded by the intellectual scorn that’s been heaped on her. But she’s won the day; she’s the most popular and most powerful feminist of our generation. Gloria Steinem is the spokesperson for Thelma and Louis. A couple of years ago we both were at this book fair in Australia, in Sydney. My talks were given in large rooms and I had a full audience, hers were given in, stadium-like auditoriums where thousands of women packed the halls. Now I have to say without any undue immodesty that I’m more of an intellectual than Gloria is. Gloria gives them pep talks on how to become yourself, how to do this and that and the other, and it’s at the level of a pep talk to a football team or something. She’s been delivering the same talk for 30, 40 years.
It’s Feminism 101, and there are thousands of people out there who need to hear what she has to say. When I was younger, when I wrote that piece for instance, I didn’t have enough respect for what that meant. But she talks in a way that reaches people. We were self-styled intellectuals, snotty, and superior, and they were meat and potatoes; they were speaking at levels that thousands, millions of women who were not at all theoretical, not at all intellectual, but certainly felt what we were all talking about, felt the acuteness of their subordination, and they lived terrible, terrible lives. They still do! I mean, after all, they still do. Therefore, Gloria and Ms. still had a role to fulfill. But we were purists, that’s what that was all about. And like any radical movement there was a lot of internecine bickering and a lot of blaming of each other for not being pure and all that.
HG: Are there feminist publications you read now? What kind of feminist publication would you want to read, or see in the world, if you were being totally idealistic?
VG: Well it’s really too late for that. There is nothing. I don’t read anything.
HG: Too late for you or for—?
VG: No, no, not at all; everyone has to keep doing what they’re doing. Every feminist effort, every angry young feminist your age who’s mad about this, that, and the other should go to print and write about it; she should do everything. Yell and scream and work, and do everything. But I’ve heard it all a hundred times already, so it’s hard for me—it doesn’t interest me anymore.
HG: In your essay “Why Do These Men Hate Women?” about Norman Mailer’s book about Henry Miller, and Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift and Philip Roth’s My Life as a Man, you observe that these books illustrate “what is fatal in writers: men who hate and fear the moment in which they are living, men who are in flight from their times, at a profound remove from the inner experience of their time and place, filled with a conservative longing for an inner truth that is no longer the truth.”
VG: Oh, my god, did I write that?!
HG: Yeah, it’s so good.
VG: Oh, it sounds good!
HG: So, I was very interested in this idea you put forth that abandoning one’s times is fatal to writers and was wondering if you can explain more what you meant by that and what it means to you now?
VG: Well, it means the same thing. I have been very gratified over the last many years that young people like you read my work and respond to it, and like my writing. And I’ve often said to myself, “what am I writing that people that young are attracted to what I’m saying?” And I realize, essentially, they must recognize that we’re quote-unquote living in the same time. There’s no other reason why someone 50 years younger than me responds to what I’m writing—except that either I’m childish or they’re mature.
I do feel acutely attached to my time, to this moment which has lasted all my long life. For instance, feminism itself is a mark of the time even the New Left, which is now the old, was filled with men who were horrible as far as sexism was concerned. They recognized that the feminists had hit something that they couldn’t touch, that we were more representative of the liberationist movements, that this was the new politics. I was into it and they were not, and that is what I mean.
The books that men like Roth and Bellow wrote subsequently hated the ’60s; all they saw was death and corruption and everything falling apart. I used to say—and I’ve said it probably throughout my entire life—the times are chaotic, the culture is fracturing all over the place, and you’re either stimulated by it or you’re depressed by it. And if you’re stimulated by it, then you learn more about what you’re actually living through. If you’re depressed by it, then all you do is attack it. So when Roth wrote a book like American Pastoral or Bellow wrote a book like Mr. Sammler’s Planet, these books are horrifying because they hate the time in which they’re living. They hate it, and they attack it. They do not see the reason for all the chaos, and they resent and fear the chaos more than the reasons for it.
It’s the same with political correctness. I hate political correctness. But I can’t attack it, because I understand its roots; I understand there are reasons for it, and the reasons for it stop me from attacking it. But if I don’t understand those reasons and I’m just depressed by the whole thing, then I attack. That’s how I came to understand conservatism versus—not liberalism, but the open-mindedness to be more interested in why this is happening than you are to attack it. That’s essentially what I mean by understanding the time in which you are living.
HG: You write in “Toward a Definition Female Sensibility,” another of your essays from the ’70s, “Rarely, in the work now being written by women, does one feel the presence of writers genuinely penetrating their own experience, risking emotional humiliation and the facing-down of secret facts, unbearable wisdoms.” Then you mention a few writers, like Kate Chopin, who you think did that well. Do you have a sense of who has been doing it well lately. I mean “lately” broadly; there’s no time limit on that.
VG: Who writes well as a feminist—is that what you mean?
HG: I guess women who you admire in that way that you talk about admiring The Awakening or something like that, where women are writing about their experiences—
VG: No, I guess I don’t, really. Actually, I can never answer a question like that because I never come up with a name when I’m asked to name somebody I enjoy reading. Probably if I had a list in front of me I could. But the fact is our movement has not produced great art.
HG: The feminist movement?
VG: The feminist movement. None of the liberationist movements. I think it will take a lot longer before these experiences can become the metaphor for really a great piece of literature. That’s my snotty take.
HG: Do you think some writing men have done is better because they have no movement? That seems hard to believe.
VG: Say that again?
HG: That the writing of men you admire is somehow better, more full, more complete?
VG: You mean now in these last 20, 30 years?
HG: Yeah.
VG: No, no, no, no. No, I don’t think it’s a time of art at all.
HG: Oh, dear. That’s too bad for us, isn’t it?
VG: Yeah. [Laughs] But I’m sure you don’t feel it. I’m sure I’m wrong on this—I mean, I’m positive I’m wrong on this. I just, I don’t—you know, I live a very narrow life, I wouldn’t put myself up by any means as a good arbiter of what is substantial art these days. I really wouldn’t at all, so I really shouldn’t be answering these questions at all. I’m not an arbiter of it. There are all kinds of people who have fully fleshed opinions on it, much more valuable than mine. | 1.016416 |
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Get The Nation’s Weekly Newsletter Fridays. A weekly digest of the best of our coverage. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Fridays. A weekly digest of the best of our coverage.
Thank you for signing up for The Nation’s weekly newsletter.
Join the Books & the Arts Newsletter Enter your email to get the best of The Nation’s Books & the Arts section in your inbox biweekly. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Enter your email to get the best of The Nation’s Books & the Arts section in your inbox biweekly.
Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Support Progressive Journalism The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.
Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?
Even before the pandemic hit, the feeling was pervasive: When we’re raising children in America, we’re going it alone. Demands for more support are growing, but the persistent lack of interest by our government in the essential work of child-rearing has fueled the sense that launching children safely into the world is something we have to figure out on our own. We were struggling—some much more than others—even before Covid-19 roared into our lives. But the pandemic has fully exposed the brutal logic of modern parenting. Too many families entered the crisis with too little. With schools shuttered, many of these children lost access to meals, counseling, and clean clothes. Suddenly without child care, thousands of mothers were pushed out of the workforce. Shut inside our homes, cut off from family and friends, robbed of the solidarity forged at the playground, we battle an isolation that feels more acute than ever.
That isolation may seem inevitable, even natural. But it isn’t, say the contributors to this issue—The Nation’s first ever special issue on parenting, guest-edited by Dani McClain, author of We Live for the We: The Political Power of Black Motherhood. In the following pages, we consider the ways in which parenthood can push us to recognize our interdependence and spur us to fight harder for justice and equality. Jamilah Lemieux and Courtney E. Martin write about how choosing a school can be an act of resistance. David M. Perry shows that rejecting ableism requires us to rethink the way society responds to human needs. Jenni Monet profiles an Indigenous midwife fighting the maternal health crisis in the Native community. Kathryn Jezer-Morton considers what really mattered about the commune life she grew up in. Andre M. Perry demonstrates that even the struggle to become a parent can be an exercise in resisting racism.
Our contributors encourage us to recognize the radical acts of love parents commit in the face of hardship and oppression. Chesa Boudin and Sylvia A. Harvey share stories of parental love strong enough to scale prison walls. Maritza L. Félix writes about immigrant parents who take enormous risks on behalf of their children. Nefertiti Austin highlights the importance of continuity for children in foster care. Imani Perry considers the way the essential power of love becomes clearer when illness comes into our lives. Carvell Wallace illuminates the truth that children are not ours to make in our own image. And Angely Mercado reports on parents supporting their children’s fight to save the world.
These stories bring us the joy, resilience, and power that comes from reliance on community and embracing collective action. They teach us that showing up for our children can be an act of resistance and fierce dignity. They bring us to the radical heart of parenting.
You can find all the articles in the special issue here. | -0.062233 |
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Get The Nation’s Weekly Newsletter Fridays. A weekly digest of the best of our coverage. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Fridays. A weekly digest of the best of our coverage.
Thank you for signing up for The Nation’s weekly newsletter.
Join the Books & the Arts Newsletter Enter your email to get the best of The Nation’s Books & the Arts section in your inbox biweekly. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Enter your email to get the best of The Nation’s Books & the Arts section in your inbox biweekly.
Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Support Progressive Journalism The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.
Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?
Ana brushes her hair in front of the mirror with a haunted look in her eyes. Minutes pass; her hair is still wet. She feels cold and realizes she was lost in her own thoughts again. In a rush, she puts her hair in a ponytail and leaves her small bedroom. Her head is spinning. I have to take the children to school, clean the house, go to the supermarket, worry about money… and lunch! Will my husband find work today?1
The pandemic hit Ana’s family hard. Her husband, Isaí, goes weeks without picking up work. Sometimes they have to borrow money and stretch supplies to cover household expenses. God will provide, she likes to think. They are healthy, and for now, that is enough. She smiles, as she always does. But it’s a smile that hides pain.2 Editing support for this article was provided by Feet in 2 Worlds, where Maritza Félix is an editing fellow.
Ana lives with her husband and their two children in a mobile home in Selmer, a remote area of Tennessee about two hours from Memphis. Cell phone coverage is poor, and there are no Hispanic supermarkets nearby. Her trailer is small, but it has the feeling of home. They don’t have a lot: two sofas and an armchair in the living room, a small dining room, a rug and curtains with flowers. But the patio is large, and Isaí mows the grass regularly while Ana rolls handmade tortillas in the backyard over an open fire. It’s different from her place in Guatemala. It’s quieter, and it’s missing a lot of family. It’s been almost three years since they left everything behind in their home country.3
In June 2018, Isaí and Envil, their son, left Guatemala, crossed Mexico, and arrived at the Arizona border to seek asylum in the United States.4
“We had to flee the country because of things that were happening there, violence. We were being extorted,” Ana explains. “First my husband and my son came…. We were hopeful. We did not expect what happened to them.”5
Under the Trump administration’s zero tolerance policy, migrants—including asylum seekers—who attempted to cross the border without authorization were detained and criminally prosecuted. The policy, preceded by a 1997 court ruling, was intended to discourage unauthorized border crossings into the United States and reduce the burden of processing asylum claims. Almost 3,000 minors were separated from their parents in less than two months; Isaí and Envil were part of that group.6
Envil was 9 years old when he got to the border with his dad. They were placed in a detention center in Arizona. “It was cold, dirty, and packed. I remember a lot of kids crying,” Envil says. He was separated from his father. Envil says the agents—he doesn’t know if they were from Customs and Border Protection or Immigration and Customs Enforcement—beat him. Isaí remained in Arizona, and Envil ended up in a shelter in New York. Ana was still in their hometown of Santa Rosa.7 Current Issue View our current issue
“They told me that I would never see [Envil] again, asked why I had brought him, told me that it was my fault,” Isaí recalls. “I did not know how to tell [Ana] that they took our son from me, how to explain to her that I had lost him.” Almost three years later, Isaí is crying, something he rarely did before the separation. Remembering is painful. Usually, they try to forget, to change the subject and move on.8
“I remember the afternoon when I received a call, and they asked me if I was the mother of my son…. I was still in Guatemala, and I didn’t know what had happened,” Ana says. “I answered yes, and they told me that they were calling on behalf of immigration. They had my son, and he had been separated from my husband. That news destroyed me.”9
Isaí was not the only father separated from his child that day. “The parents from whom the children had been taken cried together in the detention center—we hugged each other, asking God, on our knees, ‘My God, please, bring our children back,’” Isaí recalls.10
After more than 40 days apart, Envil and Isaí were reunited in Arizona. When the children arrived on buses, Isaí saw that they were dirty, with lice and pimples. He noticed bruises. The immigration guards told the children to point out who their parents were, saying they had to recognize them. “The children were crying, and some of them said to their parents, ‘I don’t love you anymore. Why did you leave me?’” Isaí says. But Envil ran to him instantly.11
“They told me that my dad didn’t love me, that he had abandoned me, that he would never come back,” Envil says. Isaí noticed the difference in his firstborn immediately. Before the separation, Envil was a curious, friendly child with an easy laugh. Now, the little boy with brown skin and expressive eyes looked gray, thin, and haggard, as if something had escaped his body. “He had a color that I don’t know how to explain, like the color of sadness,” Isaí remembers. “But I told him, ‘Now you’re here, mijo. We’re together now.’”12
They were released a couple of days later and moved to Tennessee, where Isaí’s uncle lived, to start over. But just two weeks after they got to Selmer, the uncle was arrested for driving without a license and deported. They were left on their own.13
Within weeks, Ana and her 5-year-old daughter, Herlin, set out on the same journey. They got to the Texas border a couple of weeks after a federal judge, in June 2018, ordered a halt to family separations under the zero tolerance policy. Ana and Herlin applied for asylum and remained in the custody of immigration authorities for more than 20 days, though they were kept together the entire time. At the end of the summer, they were able to join Isaí and Envil in Tennessee.14
When Ana saw her son, she barely recognized him, she says. For some time Envil sought out his parents, snuggled with them, and hugged his dad tightly, afraid they’d be separated again, as kept happening in his dreams. Envil would tell them, “Hold me—I’m afraid to wake up and see that you are not here again. Don’t leave me again, please.”15
Ana’s husband wasn’t the same either. Isaí cried regularly and apologized constantly. They rarely talked about what had happened. “The trauma is so profound that they lose affection and start hating us for what happened,” Isaí says. “As parents, that is so difficult to accept.”16 Parenting as a Radical Act of Love Parenting in Prison: A Love Story Sylvia A. Harvey Across Prison Walls, I Felt My Parents’ Love Chesa Boudin Could Indigenous Midwifery Improve Maternal Health for Native Women? Jenni Monet
In many Latino families, it is considered impolite to talk about money, sex, or other difficult subjects at the dinner table. Those topics are to be discussed in private, among adults. But family separation is a reality that can’t be ignored.17
Two years after the separation, 12-year-old Envil and 7-year-old Herlin are still afraid and angry. “If only Trump could feel what it is like to be separated from someone you love so much,” Envil says. “He needs to pay for what he did to me, to other children.” Envil blames Donald Trump for the almost hypothermic nights in “the coolers,” the lice, the weight loss, the worms in his belly, the salty tears that dried night after night on his dusty cheeks. He doesn’t forget or forgive his time in the custody of the US government.18
“I don’t think he will close this wound. He has been strong, but this hurt him so much,” Isaí says. “I tell him to put this trauma aside, and he tells me, ‘Daddy, I can’t.’ Neither can I.”19
Envil’s adolescence arrived before his immigration court date. He, who just two years earlier was still a child, is becoming a teen. His voice is changing, and his features and eyes have hardened. There are days when his parents don’t understand what is happening to him. Sometimes he doesn’t even understand himself.20
“He changed a lot. I feel he is desperate at times. I see him as angry and full of fear, very different,” Ana says.21
She has changed too. “After everything I went through, I’ve gotten sick often,” she says. “Sometimes I have bad dreams. I relive the same thing, and I wake up and I try to convince myself that it is just a nightmare, that we are together and it won’t happen again.”22
President Joe Biden has begun to reverse Trump’s family separation policy, which tore at least 5,500 children from their parents between July 2017 and June 2018. He has also announced a task force to reunite the hundreds of migrant children still separated from their parents.23
“Trump administration policy was on enforcement and removal,” says Hugo Larios, an immigration attorney based in Arizona. He believes that Biden is returning to “the traditional way of keeping families together.” Larios hopes that the administration will adopt a policy, “if the children come by themselves, to locate a family member or someone in the United States so that child can go to a family member instead of being detained at an immigration detention center.”24
But for hundreds of families, the separation crisis is not over. “It’s one thing to say that you want to reunite all these kids,” says Julie Schwietert Collazo, cofounder of Immigrant Families Together, a foundation dedicated to reuniting and supporting families separated at the US-Mexico border. “I think it’s another to really look squarely in the face of ‘What resources do you have to actually do that?’ You know, what documentation exists that will reconnect these parents [or] guardians with their children?”25
And for families like Ana and Isaí’s, the harm to their mental and physical health still reverberates, though the federal government has done little to address it. Ana and her daughter have not received psychological help after the trauma of crossing the border; Envil and his dad started sporadic sessions in December. The family was referred to a specialist by an association that works with immigrants. But they don’t know if therapy will help. “The truth is that we are not very well aware how it works,” Ana explains. She says she’s seen no progress in her family’s emotional healing. “My child does not speak much.”26
Ana and Isaí also have fears about their legal status. While Envil and his little sister already have Social Security numbers, their parents do not have official identification or work permits. Without documents, they are still vulnerable to being deported. The federal government has not offered help. “They tell us that we have to wait until our court date in 2023, because our lawyer told us it couldn’t be done before,” Ana says.27
The immigration courts still have more than a million pending cases. The Covid-19 pandemic has made it worse. “The problem is that there are not enough judges to accommodate all these claims. I mean, that’s why it takes forever,” says Larios, the immigration attorney. According to him, we should expect asylum seekers to be allowed to apply for work permits after 150 days, as they did before the Trump administration. “It doesn’t help anyone, even the US government…to not allow them to work if they’re already here anyway,” he says. He also emphasizes the urgency of DACA reform with a path for citizenship, “so that DACA-eligible individuals can apply for actual legal permanent residency, if not…a full comprehensive reform in the next two years, before the midterm elections.”28
Thus far, Biden has not included most of these provisions in his immigration plans. Some advocates also demand financial restitution for the harms done. Others just want these families to have the opportunity to live safely and legally in the United States. “The priority is to really bring these cases before an immigration judge to resolve their asylum cases,” says Schwietert Collazo.29
Ana and Isaí have to rely on the help of others to make ends meet. Isaí works as a gardener and takes whatever gigs he can get, but he gets paid under the table. He says that he tries to be a good, law-abiding citizen, but a mistake, no matter how small, could get him deported.30
The family cannot imagine going back to Guatemala. Despite the nervousness they feel when they see a police car or an ICE agent or hear Trump on television, they feel safe in the United States. They have not forgotten Spanish, but they feel more comfortable speaking English. The two siblings joke, talk, and fight in a language they did not know before stepping onto American soil. They love their school, and their teachers tell Ana they are great students.31
“We work hard to prove that we deserve to be here,” Isaí says. But that is not enough to heal and thrive.32
“We need to get asylum,” Ana says.33
Ana still has mixed feelings about her family’s decision to come to the United States. She and her husband talked with their children before leaving Guatemala. They explained the situation—the violence and intimidation they were experiencing—and how leaving their homeland was the only option. They dreamed together about what life would be like in the United States. She still gets excited thinking about freedom and opportunity. But then her thoughts turn to family separation, immigration uncertainty, a lack of job opportunities, and the challenges of being a migrant in the United States.34
“I start to think about my children’s lives, what will become of them, how they will grow up, and immediately I get a headache,” Ana says.35
Psychologist Enjolie Lafaurie, an expert on emotional stress and multicultural counseling, says that internal conflict is to be expected. “These parents are making incredibly difficult individual decisions in a system that’s not supportive of them, that does not take their experience into account,” she says. “It’s like making a decision with your arms tied behind your back and your feet shackled.”36
“A lot of the families have said to us, ‘We wouldn’t have come here if we could have made a life for ourselves in our country of origin,’” says Schwietert Collazo. “We need to understand the reasons that people came here. They want to be your neighbors. They want to contribute here, and in many ways they’re already doing that. They want to be safe.”37
Ana knows that she needs help too. She still cries when she remembers what happened: the family they left behind in Guatemala, the uncertainty of their future in the United States, the fear of being separated at one of their immigration check-ins. But for Ana, there is no better therapist than God. “He is so great that he has not abandoned us,” she says. “He has put good people in our lives, who help us, even here, in this small town, where there are almost no Hispanic people.” Faith is what has kept them together in times of uncertainty, especially when Trump was president.38
“I get very worried because I know that we are in a country that may send us back,” Ana says, “and my children, they are already adapting to life here.” To stay legally in the United States, they need asylum. To keep going, they need faith. To stay together, they need to forgive. The United States has closed its doors to many, but some still got in. Maybe a window will open, and they’ll find a way to come out of the shadows—to be free and no longer afraid. Maybe.39 | 0.650494 |
When a crew of cannabis activists reached the Mexican Senate here in Mexico City in February 2020, shovels in hand, they started digging up the yellow-tipped bushes near the security check, then the knee-high grass that surrounds the plaza. They planted skinny cannabis stalks, and smokers dropped their own cannabis seeds into a glass jar, each one a tithe for their cause. The operation was a gleeful but pointed jab at the politicians inside, who had used marijuana and other drugs to justify an ongoing war, carried out in partnership with the United States, that had made Mexico one of the most violent countries in the world. They were far more likely to be taken out by a bullet, the activists said, than by smoking a joint. They wanted to make sure reform would be done right. Reporting for this story was funded by a grant from Fundación Gabo. All photos by Alejandra Rajal.
The stunt was just the latest sign that Mexico’s marijuana-legalization movement, which once consisted of a handful of protesters, had transformed into a diverse and vocal lobby. The seeds this movement planted are finally yielding results: After decades of strict drug policy, Mexico’s congress is expected to pass a federal law this year that would for the first time create a legal cannabis trade in the country—the Senate passed the bill in November, and the lower house is set to vote on it this spring. But many of Mexico’s marijuana proponents are still opposed: The bill would allow for a cannabis industry on terms that they say favor corporations, and would still impose fines and prison sentences on people without connections or power. If the current version passes, advocates ask, who would the law be for?
The idea that a country owes something to its citizens as it starts to undo some of its mistakes is not a new one, but Mexico seems to be stumbling as it at once admits that past administrations’ drug policies failed while also doing little to undo the militarized enforcement that got the country into its current morass of violence. Though the Mexican Cannabis Movement, which organized the garden outside the Senate, is representative of only one faction in the legalization movement—they believe in no limits on marijuana possession for personal use—the pall that settled over their camp after senators passed the bill last year was palpable. Guadalupe Espejel, a psychologist with a Velma-style bob, was dismayed: As she puffed on one of the thin glass vapes she sells, she explained that the law would still leave people like her at risk of arrest—or at the very least, police might continue to ask her for bribes. “This plant has been stigmatized for over a century,” Espejel said. “This isn’t a step forward, it’s a step back.”
Spaniards brought cannabis to Mexico in the 16th century to make hemp, which was used at the time in ropes, sails, and paper. The plant moseyed across the country, but was smoked by few. As Isaac Campos argues in Home Grown, his meticulous history of the plant in Mexico, marijuana slowly gained a negative connotation in the country when it became associated, misleadingly, with Indigenous people, and more justifiably but luridly, with prison inmates and the soldiers who fought the decade-long Mexican Revolution beginning in 1910. In 1920, the revolutionary federal republic banned marijuana. That law, which barred substances that could “degenerate the race,” has remained in place for over a century now.
Though the United States wouldn’t effectively outlaw marijuana until 1937, Mexico’s neighbor to the north always exerted an outsize influence on the country’s drug laws: Harry J. Anslinger, the head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, once told Congress that marijuana could lead to “homicidal mania,” and, according to journalist Nacho Lozano’s book, Mariguana a la Mexicana, blamed Mexicans for bringing it to the United States amid high rates of unemployment during the Great Depression. When Mexican health officials briefly tried to take over the sale of drugs to so-called addicts for a few months in 1940, Washington quashed the experiment by threatening sanctions. President Richard Nixon vowed to crush the drug trade in 1971 in a push that one of his closest advisers later admitted was driven by a desire to crack down on African Americans and Vietnam War protesters. “Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did,” John Ehrlichman told a Harper’s Magazine writer in 1994.
To this day, the vast majority of Mexicans insist they have never even tried the plant. But the war on drugs that Nixon launched, and that has been carried out with varying degrees of ferocity by every American president since, has nevertheless left deep scars on Mexican society. As early as the 1940s, the United States was pressuring Mexico’s military and police to carry out drug busts, as Mexican criminal groups sated US demand. After a drug trafficker killed a US agent in Mexico in 1985, the Mexican military began destroying thousands of hectares of marijuana and poppy crops each year, and for their part, the criminal networks began spending even more to convince authorities to permit their operations. When President Felipe Calderón came to office at the end of 2006, one of his first acts was to deploy the military to quell the drug trade. The unbridled violence that followed, spanning the past 15 years, has led to unimaginable levels of suffering:
Moreover, of the hundreds of thousands of people who have been detained as a result of this war on drugs—226,667 in the first three years of Calderon’s presidency alone—few have been leaders of illicit operations. Instead, farmers who made a pittance growing drugs, low-level couriers who’d been roped into the trade, or Indigenous people who were not given language interpreters to defend themselves were all swept up into Mexico’s ballooning detention system.
The current government, under President Andrés Manuel Lopéz Obrador, promises that the drug war is now over. In 2009, Mexico legalized possession of small amounts of marijuana and in recent years, urban cannabis businesses have popped up, offering everything from specialty distillates to artisanal edibles. Some dealers insist that they buy directly from growers—the farm-to-table model—to try to give consumers a cleaner conscience. But this alternative market is limited and easy to shut down, and cartels still control the cheapest stuff you can buy. That’s why legalization advocates held out hope for federal legislation that could break the cartels’ grip on the trade, get people out of prison, and bring some sanity back to the sale of the plant. But by now, they say, making one plant legal—even making all drugs legal—cannot undo the past damage.
In the mountains of Guerrero state, Omar Gonzalez used to be a farmer who sold poppy for heroin and tried his hand at growing cannabis. But he told me that as the prices of those crops have dropped, criminal groups have diversified their business into extortion and kidnappings. In 2018, he and half his town fled. Though Gonzalez has considered a farmers’ cooperative for cannabis, he doesn’t know if that’s a realistic hope: “The climate lends itself to growing, and the land, too, but drugs have led to a lot of conflict, which has led to displacement,” he said. “We could try to make people aware that there’s now a way to make a living, but the armed groups and their system will still exist.”
“Many people have left for the US, and have sought political asylum. Others are going now without papers,” he said. “Many people have refused to be displaced, and a bullet will kill them.”
In the early years of the drug war, activists slipped legislators proposals to change the cannabis ban. Analysts hosted forums and academics released studies to try to change views, but lawmakers didn’t budge. A group of lawyers thought that the only way to get the politicians and the public to listen was through the courts. The problem was not getting high, they’d tell the judges, but the state interfering with people’s constitutionally guaranteed freedoms.
Andrés Aguinaco, one of the lawyers who picked up the court battle for legalization, first saw marijuana in his grandmother’s garden. She was the wife of a former Supreme Court judge, the kind of upstanding citizen that defied the stereotypes about the plant. She would leave it in a bottle of alcohol or oil, then rub the ointment on rheumatic joints. The Catholic church had scorned the plant; television networks turned it into a bogey-man; even musicians vilified it in songs like “La Cucaracha,” a ballad to a traitorous and drunk general of the Mexican Revolution: “The cockroach / can’t walk anymore / because it doesn’t have marijuana to smoke.” To change public opinion, Aguinaco thought, they’d need to use people like his grandmother.
So Aguinaco, his university buddies, and the nonprofit think tank Mexico United Against Crime selected four members of Mexico’s elite to form the Mexican Society of Responsible and Tolerant Personal Consumption. Their argument was simple: That individuals should be able to grow marijuana at home, and then smoke it. The first plaintiffs, who were all part of the think tank, were the center of the strategy, and their acronym, SMART, was deliberately cheeky.
Naomi and Orlando working in the kitchen of the encampment. (Alejandra Rajal)
“The activists were so blacklisted,” said Aguinaco. “We could only [win with plaintiffs] from Mexico’s big legal firms, people with doctorates, political scientists: the kind of people who might sit down to eat with a judge from the Supreme Court, or run into one at a wedding.”
It worked. In 2015, to people’s shock, they won. The Supreme Court ruled that the federal ban on recreational cannabis was unconstitutional. Most of the public was opposed to the ruling, and that year, and at least a third of the over 13,000 people in state prisons for drug-related crimes were there for marijuana. Another case that year, of an epileptic girl whose parents sought to use cannabis extracts to control her seizures, helped change minds. Aguinaco and his colleagues would win four more cases before the Supreme Court over the next few years, making the court’s decision legally binding in 2018.
“Once the court ruled in the first case, it was only a question of time,” said Armando Santacruz, a founder and owner of industrial-materials company Grupo Pochteca and one of the plaintiffs. He had, by the point he went to court, been a smoker for nearly forty years, but when the newspaper El País asked him about it days before the first ruling, he said that he had just tried marijuana, “so did Obama and Al Gore.” He didn’t want to create too much scandal.
When he used to visit his grandmother’s ranch in Chihuahua as, at night he could see the glow from neighboring ranches where workers packaged dried marijuana. Back then, as a teen, he could hitch rides with friends there. Now, middle-aged, he was tired of the bloodshed. Santacruz’s own sister, a chef who had run high-end restaurants, would become another one of Aguinaco’s plaintiffs.
The day of the last Supreme Court decision, a crowd gathered outside the courthouse. Nobody beyond the handful of people who had won their cases could plant seeds leftover from their joints at home—but the larger legal argument had been won.
“[Doing away with complete prohibition] was the lowest hanging fruit,” Aguinaco said. “Then you’re left with the question: now what?”
In some ways there is no precedent for what Mexico is undertaking. The push to legalize here does not look quite like that of other places, where either a president backed a law, or the public has voted in favor. It has a longer tradition of growing marijuana than Uruguay, which was the first country to legalize the plant’s use nationwide, in 2013, and to start selling it for recreational use, in 2017, with a state monopoly on production. Mexico is warmer than Canada, which was the second country to pass a federal law that allows the plant’s sale, in 2018, and so it’s expected it’ll be cheaper and easier to grow here legally.
Mexico’s cannabis market is projected to be worth $5 billion within a few years, according to the National Association of the Cannabis Industry. Canadian and US companies are ready to swoop in. Former Mexican president Vicente Fox has prepared his ranch for planting cannabis. Medical marijuana, which was legalized in 2017 but not allowed to be sold domestically until 2021, is its own pharmaceutical gold. Hemp and cosmetic products loom large in the minds of investors.
Drug reform is a global trend. Fifteen states across the United States have approved marijuana’s use for, recreational use, more for medicinal use. In Europe, psychedelics famous on the party circuit are being studied for psychiatric treatments. But in Mexico, where, for so long, people have been convinced cannabis is taboo, the bill still comes as a surprise. Some even say there’s no way it’ll pass, despite the Supreme Court’s rulings.
The bill that passed the Senate would allow the formation of an institute to issue licenses to cannabis clubs and businesses. Forty percent of growing licenses are destined for Indigenous people, communal-land farmers, or those deemed vulnerable, a nod to the reparations debate. But it also contains several clauses that fall far short of activists’ original intentions. “Years ago, consumers decided to take a step toward more responsible use, by only consuming marijuana that had not passed through the hands of organized crime groups—‘marijuana without blood.’ Today we are opening the door so that all of it is bloodless,” said senator Patricia Mercado. “But still, we’re falling short.”
Under the bill, if you have more than 28 grams, you could be fined. If you possess more than 200 grams, you could go to prison for up to six years. For other cannabis crimes, it’s up to ten. Having more than eight plants in your own home would be punishable with jail time. Authorities can go into your home to check. You cannot smoke anywhere within sight of kids, nor in a public space where they could theoretically walk by. A separate amnesty law that went into effect last year made people who were sentenced in the past for possessing small quantities pardonable, and yet so far nobody has been pardoned.
It’s not that having so many rules is hair-raising, so much that it’ll be easy for officials to continue to skim the public’s money, then skimp when it comes to rights, critics say. In the aftermath of November’s Senate vote, advocates took to Twitter. “They’ve given the whole cake to the industry, there will even be a market for junk food/sugary drinks with weed,” wrote one. “Total shame,” wrote another. “Our drug policy will continue to be, above all, an instrument of foreign interests,” wrote a third.
Those who had advocated on behalf of small farmers were irate that they’d have to meet the institute’s general requirements of tracking, packaging, and testing all their seeds and plants. Many of these farmers who had once dabbled in cannabis had no savings: When states across the country started to legalize recreational marijuana in 2012, demand fell for Mexico’s exports. For criminal groups, other drugs, such as fentanyl and methamphetamine, were far more lucrative. Plans to cut into traffickers’ proceeds had become almost moot. But the farmers were still poor.
Mexico isn’t alone: The idea that new, legalized markets should be engineered to assist people harmed by previous drug prohibition hasn’t gotten far elsewhere. In Colombia, the 2017 medical cannabis law carved out 10 percent of the market for smaller growers, but their partnerships with foreign companies have stagnated and many still operate illegally. In Canada, only 2 percent of companies’ leaders are Indigenous and 1 percent are Black Canadians, The New York Times reported.
Mexico’s lower house is supposed to vote on a version of the bill by the end of April. If it makes any changes to the bill, it will have to be sent back to the Senate, and then signed by the president. There are whispers that lawmakers might try to delay, but it’s expected to pass. Once signed by the president, the rollout of the law will be staggered: Within six months, the new regulatory institute should start granting some licenses. It’ll take a year and a half before the sale of weed that could get you high—”psychoactive cannabis,” the law calls it—will be able to be sold or grown at home.
The day after the debate over the bill, the Mexican Cannabis Movement activists blocked the intersection in front of the Senate. They livestreamed a march around the garden, insisting they’d fight the bill. “We’ve got a national movement and we want to see occupations in every state. So write to us, tell us where you are, and if there are people organizing in your state, we’ll put you in touch,” said Miguel, the garden’s top grower, in a live-stream in December. (He asked that we not include his last name out of fear of targeting by law enforcement.)
Miguel offered a tour of what they’d done throughout the year: the PVC pipes they’d set up to experiment with hydroponics; the hemp, which they’d crowded together so it turned out thin but tall; the marijuana, which under netting branched like a candelabra. He had warded off fungi, and sprouted new roots with lentils and aloe, to make a garden that he thought represented the future. But the legislators seemed unmoved. Some suggested people like him were asking for too much.
“I’m a second-generation cultivator. My father also grew marijuana, and he was a stoner. When I was born, he was in prison, and he spent more than 20 years of his life there, for crimes related to marijuana,” Miguel said in the online video in January. “I want the plant to be free, so that all the people who are now in prison for being a smoker or a grower are free, too.” | 0.660264 |
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Get The Nation’s Weekly Newsletter Fridays. A weekly digest of the best of our coverage. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Fridays. A weekly digest of the best of our coverage.
Thank you for signing up for The Nation’s weekly newsletter.
Join the Books & the Arts Newsletter Enter your email to get the best of The Nation’s Books & the Arts section in your inbox biweekly. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Enter your email to get the best of The Nation’s Books & the Arts section in your inbox biweekly.
Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Support Progressive Journalism The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.
Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?
On June 23, 2020, Ahmad Erekat, 26, was shot and killed by Israeli forces at the Container checkpoint in the central West Bank after he emerged unarmed from his car, which had crashed into the checkpoint. The Israeli authorities have consistently claimed that its personnel were acting in legitimate self-defense against a deliberate attack. As is their practice in such circumstances, they seized Ahmad’s body and have to this day refused to release it to his family for a proper burial. Ahmad’s family, as well as Palestinian, Israeli, and international human rights organizations, have called the Israeli version of events into question from the very outset, citing evidence that the crash was an accident, that Ahmad was unarmed and moving away from his killers before he was repeatedly shot, and pointing out that it made little sense for Ahmad to have carried out an attack on the day of his sister’s wedding.
On February 23 Forensic Architecture, a British research organization based at the University of London and led by British-Israeli professor Eyal Weizman, together with the award-winning Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq, released the results of a detailed investigation of the circumstances of Ahmad Erekat’s killing. (A video outlining the investigation and narrated by Angela Davis can be watched in full, below.)
Watch Forensic Architecture's detailed investigation of the circumstances of Ahmad Erekat’s killing.
Contrary to persistent Israeli claims, the report concluded that the available evidence indicates that the incident was an accident, and Ahmad’s death a case of “extrajudicial execution.” Mouin Rabbani, co-editor of Jadaliyya and an expert on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, interviewed Noura Erakat, an assistant professor at Rutgers University–New Brunswick and a cousin of Ahmad Erekat, to get a better understanding of the case and the recent investigation.
M ouin R abbani: What is the Israeli claim regarding the circumstances of Ahmad Erekat’s killing? What evidence have the Israeli authorities produced to substantiate their claim, and what additional actions have they taken since his killing? This interview was commissioned by Jadaliyya as part of its Quick Thoughts series.
N oura E rakat: The Israeli state, its media, and its military apparatus immediately declared Ahmad a “terrorist” and declared the June 23, 2020, incident an attempted car ramming with the intent to kill the soldiers at the checkpoint. Upon releasing one video of the incident, Israeli police included a statement that read: “Yesterday at 16:00 an attack took place and the terrorist was shot and killed. In the footage, the terrorist drives his vehicle towards the security crossing, slowly and then drove in the direction towards the female border guard at an angle and the female officer was injured lightly and taken to hospital.”
It is noteworthy that the Israeli authorities have refused to conduct a proper investigation. They did not interview witnesses, did not conduct an autopsy of Ahmad’s body, did not investigate the car for mechanical malfunction, and did not review the available video tapes. Rather, they simply proclaimed that Ahmad was a “terrorist” engaged in an attack and that has been the end of their story. Since then, the state has held onto Ahmad’s body and refused to release it to the family for a proper burial. It is being held along with the bodies of 72 other slain Palestinians as both a form of collective punishment and as bargaining chips for the return of two Israeli soldiers’ bodies currently held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Even after the release of the video and report by Forensic Architecture and Al-Haq, Israel responded, “Erekat carried out a deliberate ramming attack.” And sadly, in an environment of silencing tactics, malicious dehumanization of Palestinians, a desensitization to their deaths, and propaganda, there has not been much, if any, pressure on Israel to be held accountable for its actions or to release Ahmad’s body which has now been in captivity for eight months and counting. Current Issue View our current issue
MR: What was the rationale behind the investigation by Forensic Architecture and Al-Haq, whose results have now been publicly released?
NE: Since Ahmad’s murder, the family has worked tirelessly to achieve at least a modicum of accountability and, if nothing else, retrieve his body for a proper burial. The family has been in a state of suspended disbelief since Ahmad’s murder on June 23, 2020. His mother still cannot accept that he is dead because she has not been able to see his corpse. Our efforts have included a submission, drafted in collaboration with Al-Haq, to the United Nations Human Rights Council, as well as to five UN special rapporteurs, which was endorsed by 83 organizations; an Avaaz petition calling for a boycott of Tel Aviv University, home to the Greenberg Institute where Ahmad’s corpse is being held; a legal effort within the Israeli judicial system in collaboration with the human rights organization Adalah; a report by Human Rights Watch; a video appeal featuring celebrities, activists, and scholars; and a congressional effort where we mobilized Ahmad’s extended family in the United States to specifically appeal to the six senators from California, Maryland, and Virginia (where Ahmad’s relatives live and vote), urging them to intervene to help retrieve Ahmad’s body. All six senators responded in some way and supported our effort.
These multifaceted efforts seemed to hit a dead end as Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz responded that Israel would escalate its cruel policy of withholding bodies by holding onto all corpses, and not just those affiliated with Hamas, until Hamas releases the bodies of two Israeli soldiers. The Israeli cabinet approved this policy and the Israeli high court sanctioned it as legal. Aside from being illegal and inhumane, this policy obscures any distinction between Palestinian civilians and militants. It amounts to saying there are no Palestinian civilians and criminalizes all Palestinians so as to justify their killing.
In this context we were also working with Forensic Architecture, which specializes in these kinds of investigations, to help reconstruct what actually happened during the incident in which Ahmad was killed.
MR: What was the nature of this investigation? What are its main findings, and what evidence did it use to substantiate its conclusions?
NE: Forensic Architecture, together with Al-Haq, used 3D imaging, shadow analysis, and open-source materials to reproduce the incident in which Ahmad was killed. It found that Ahmad was shot a total of six times, above the waist, by two soldiers within a space of two seconds; that Ahmad was unarmed with his hands up, and retreating from the soldiers; that he was refused medical treatment; and that his body was left out on the pavement, stripped naked, for hours. Perhaps most significantly, they found that Ahmad was not accelerating his car at the time of impact, refuting all claims that this was an alleged car ramming. In essence, the investigation shows that this was an extrajudicial execution, just as the family has been insisting from day one. The video, 18 minutes long, is narrated by Dr. Angela Davis and is incredibly powerful and equally difficult to watch.
MR: What do you hope to achieve with the publication of this investigation, and what further efforts are planned? The Story of Ahmad Erekat I Lost My Son in a Hail of Bullets at an Israeli Checkpoint Najah Erekat
NE: Our hopes are that this video will strengthen our ongoing campaign to retrieve Ahmad’s body for a proper burial, and for accountability for his murder. The truth is, the video demonstrates much of what we already believed to be plainly obvious. Ahmad was on his way to decorate a car with ribbons and flowers on his sister’s wedding day. He was himself set to be married later in the summer. Even if he wanted to conduct an operation targeting the checkpoint, as is claimed, why would he do it on his sister’s wedding day? At the heart of such logic is the idea that Palestinians hate Israelis more than they love themselves and one another. Nothing could be further from the truth or more outrightly racist.
We hope that this video definitively stifles accusations that Ahmad was a “terrorist” and revamps advocacy efforts on his behalf and on behalf of all withheld Palestinians. The video is being covered by international media outlets, and we are sending these findings to the Senate offices and other relevant interlocutors to press them to continue their efforts on our behalf. | 0.907409 |
Follow The Nation
Get Email Updates
Sign up for our free daily newsletter, along with occasional offers for programs that support our journalism. By signing up to receive emails, you agree to receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation's journalism. You may unsubscribe or adjust your preferences at any time. You can read our Privacy Policy here. | 0.838725 |
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Get The Nation’s Weekly Newsletter Fridays. A weekly digest of the best of our coverage. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Fridays. A weekly digest of the best of our coverage.
Thank you for signing up for The Nation’s weekly newsletter.
Join the Books & the Arts Newsletter Enter your email to get the best of The Nation’s Books & the Arts section in your inbox biweekly. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Enter your email to get the best of The Nation’s Books & the Arts section in your inbox biweekly.
Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Support Progressive Journalism The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.
Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?
Why does the Democratic Party want the Cold War back? Senator Mark Warner and Representative Adam Schiff tell us that Russia is the destroyer of democracy at home and abroad. Vladimir Putin, in their view, is seeking more than reasonable elbow room in Eastern Europe. He aims to subvert and conquer America. In a podcast conversation with Nancy Pelosi after the January 6 Capitol riot, Hillary Clinton said she would “love to see” Trump’s phone records from that day to find out if he was consulting with Putin. This fantastical supposition was greeted by Pelosi with instant credulity: “All roads lead to Putin.”
Where would they be without an enemy? These Democrats have already formed an implicit alliance with Republicans Liz Cheney, Tom Cotton, and Nikki Haley, as well as assorted media friends of the war party dating back to Iraq, such as Max Boot and Jennifer Rubin. There are reasons to hope that Joe Biden’s foreign policy team will have a sounder balance, but the dramatis personae thus far leave an uneasy impression. Susan Rice, a careerist of the foreign policy elite who stopped just short of the highest rung under Barack Obama—having been denied promotion to secretary of state, owing to her association with the Benghazi disaster—has been put in charge of domestic policy. Yet she is hardly likely to stay away from the discussions that interest her more. Antony Blinken at the State Department, Jake Sullivan at the National Security Council, and Samantha Power as head of the US Agency for International Development will administer democracy-promotion initiatives that in the past have been known to include shipments of “armed doctrine.”
None of these people ever recognized that the eastward expansion of NATO after the collapse of the Soviet empire—whose existence alone justified NATO—was a provocation felt by many Russians besides Putin. Further signs of a lesson not learned may be found in the first volume of Obama’s presidential memoir, which deplores (in passing) the weak Russia policy of his predecessors, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney: “Beyond suspending diplomatic contacts, the Bush administration had done next to nothing to punish Russia for its aggression.” By “aggression,” he means the Russian retaliation against Georgia after Georgia’s attack on South Ossetia. Throughout Obama’s two terms in office, his attitude toward Putin was all in the same vein: lofty, cool, and swanking.
Of their first meeting, in 2009, Obama now says that Putin “did remind me of the sorts of men who had once run the Chicago machine or Tammany Hall—tough, street-smart, unsentimental characters who knew what they knew, who never moved outside their narrow experiences.” Obama canceled a second meeting in 2013 over Russia’s granting of asylum to Edward Snowden. But that is an episode that plays more than one way. Obama indicted Snowden under the Espionage Act of 1917, which potentially carries the death penalty. Snowden had followed too faithfully the hint of Obama’s antisurveillance stance in the 2008 primaries and disclosed abuses of civil liberties by the National Security Agency. It was Russia, of all places, and Putin, of all people, who offered Snowden asylum. Who is the small man in this picture? MORE FROM David Bromwich We Balk at ‘Law and Order,’ but Democracy Needs the Rule of Law January 25, 2021 Will the World End in Nuclear—or Climate—Catastrophe? June 12, 2019 Donald Trump’s Ruling Passions January 12, 2018 Author page
Allowing exceptions for the Iran nuclear deal and the short-lived rapprochement with Cuba, US foreign policy since 9/11 has meant a unified government under the war party. The Trump presidency was a kind of interregnum. The most immoral and personally vicious of American presidents was, strange to say, not particularly fond of wars, and Trump (unlike his five predecessors) found no new war to fight. He may have had no higher motive than that wars are bad for the hotel business. Nevertheless, the lack of a significant enemy on the horizon has been a deep disappointment to the war party.
Historically, the Democrats have been obedient to instruction by the masters of war. Schiff voted for the Iraq War. Warner voted against ending it. Chuck Schumer did them one better and followed his vote to bomb, invade, and occupy Iraq with a vote against the Iran nuclear deal. In late February, we were told the Biden administration was preparing fresh sanctions to penalize Russia for the two-and-a-half-year jail sentence of Aleksei Navalny. But sanctions, whether the target is Russia or Iran, hurt people more than governments. Nor do they lead people to love the country that inflicts the pain. The left-liberal side in America is now preoccupied with race, but in the 21st century, our most shocking acts of racism have been committed abroad, in places like Fallujah, Sanaa, and Gaza City, where US weapons were deployed, even when US soldiers were not.
It would be interesting to learn how the racially enlightened New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, PBS, and MSNBC align their rigorous reporting on the sufferings of nonwhite US residents at the hands of police with their largely uncritical treatment of US wars of aggression, which since 2001 have killed not thousands but hundreds of thousands of nameless foreigners. The two pictures hardly seem compatible, unless, guided by corporate pledges to diversify, we are meant to assume the contradiction will be overcome and the relevant suffering at an end when Black people constitute 13 percent of the corporate boards of DynCorp, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon. Related Article Biden Ran on Ending Forever Wars. He’s Already Undermining That Promise. Katrina vanden Heuvel
Meanwhile, the Democrats’ understanding of militarism—always the friend of censorship—is being tested on another front. On February 11, the Biden Justice Department followed William Barr’s precedent and refiled an appeal to extradite Julian Assange from Britain to stand trial in the United States. The order was submitted by the acting attorney general, but it is doubtful he would have done so without consulting Biden’s attorney general nominee, Merrick Garland. The British judge who initially rejected the US request did so on the ground that Assange was unlikely to survive in a US prison.
Publishers are afforded protection by the First Amendment, while sources are not. Perversely, Assange is being treated as a source, but it is not clear that he broke any laws that are not regularly broken by the leading US newspapers, networks, cable stations, and online news outlets. As with Snowden eight years ago, the reason for the indictment is that US security and intelligence chiefs want Assange’s head. And how can the Democrats say no? Their indifference to such abuse signals their alliance with the unaccountable bureaus and agencies in question, while the corporate liberal media look on approvingly. | 0.496575 |
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Get The Nation’s Weekly Newsletter Fridays. A weekly digest of the best of our coverage. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Fridays. A weekly digest of the best of our coverage.
Thank you for signing up for The Nation’s weekly newsletter.
Join the Books & the Arts Newsletter Enter your email to get the best of The Nation’s Books & the Arts section in your inbox biweekly. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Enter your email to get the best of The Nation’s Books & the Arts section in your inbox biweekly.
Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Support Progressive Journalism The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.
Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?
When I was diagnosed with systemic lupus back in 1996, I experienced it as a shrinking and a rising all at once. My ability narrowed: My joints creaked, my skin erupted, my muscles ached, my lungs screamed. I couldn’t physically do all the things I once did, like hard weight-lifting sessions or dancing all night. But as the disease progressed, my spirit seemed to lift; I began to witness myself as existing in ways much more significant than performance. Over the following years, I learned to take care of a body that announced every imbalance.1
There was a trigger early in the pandemic that returned me to my first days of living with lupus, when it was at its most terrifying and debilitating. But this time, it wasn’t a solitary experience. We were all shrunken—me, my family, my friends, my students. Removed from our ability to connect physically, so many of us skulked away from one another. Students of mine who had been active participants in class grew quiet in our virtual communities. My children were stunned into silence. I’ve been a college professor for 18 years, but it was hard for me to “profess” to any of them. I just didn’t know.2
I slept an absurd amount. Then I grew sleepless. I wavered between wanting to ensure meaningful intellectual engagement and personal growth for all the young people around me—my children and students alike—and wanting to make space for all of us to worry and grieve without concern for metrics and outcomes. In a residential college, the student services are the in loco parentis branch, but as a female faculty member of color, that line often blurs. Students entrust us with their feelings, sometimes because of shared identities, sometimes because of shared vulnerabilities, sometimes because we are the ones who teach about power and difference. Late adolescence is a time of reckoning with one’s place in the world.3
Blurring has deepened in the pandemic. The ages of my children and my students are converging—my oldest child is one year younger than many of the people I teach. My students’ rooms, which I can now see, look like rooms in my home; their references are the ones shared here—to music, to history, to politics, to TikTok videos. I am distant from them and closer than I’ve ever been. I witness a generation on-screen and in my home at once. The sadness in those myriad twin eyes breaks my heart.4
I imagine the same is true for the teachers who teach my children. They deal with an even more turbulent stage of adolescence, many with children of their own as well, and they are managing minutiae and oceans of grief. And teachers in underserved districts even more, where logging on to virtual school has been impossible for a large number of their students. We all were and are layered in our caring, teaching, and fragility and responsible for this incessant, inconvenient task of evaluating one another in what is, collectively, our weakest moment. I admit, I have always disliked the idea of grading, although it is part of my job. I would much rather assess what skills have been gained, what growth took place, than rank people. But in the pandemic, where nothing is fair, where death and hunger and houselessness are ever more unfairly distributed, I have felt that grading is a masquerade, and I am a guilty participant. Meanwhile, I witness growing hunger, illness, and crisis outside, via screens, behind a locked front door.5
A student sends an e-mail about a delayed assignment because someone they love has died of Covid-19, and a dam breaks. I wouldn’t have thought, after so many months of crying, I had so many tears left.6 Parenting as a Radical Act of Love Across Prison Walls, I Felt My Parents’ Love Chesa Boudin Meet the Climate Kids Who Are Mobilizing a Generation of Parents Angely Mercado
One way of looking at the pandemic is that it lays bare all the ways injustice in our society is refracted through public health, labor, and our eviscerated welfare state. It is a cruel lesson about the history of fend-for-yourself neoliberal politics, but one that we as educators and parents must teach as we are living it. We don’t want this replicated. So our failures must become the source of our children’s political possibilities.7
Another way of looking at the pandemic is that it exposes the greatest human virtue: the capacity to love. This is the longest I have been separated from my mother, and the longest I have gone without crossing the threshold of my family home in Birmingham, Ala. I feel a terrible ache in my chest, an unmooring. The past year also marks the most time I have been able to spend with my children since they were small. That is an extraordinary bounty; that expands my heart. People I know keep dying; people I love keep having their hearts broken. The preciousness of love is undeniable when we are so vulnerable.8
I am brought back to my awakening to lupus, when I began to understand that physical vulnerability was no weakness when it came to my emotional landscape. Love is in sharp relief now, as it was then. We are all brought to the very core of what it means to be human. There is no evasion of tragedy, and yet there is enormous capacity. I think we can use it. I think we can attach our hearts to human history. I think we can learn to care deeply about every imbalance, including those far beyond our immediate surroundings. In fact, I know it.9 | 2.772979 |
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Get The Nation’s Weekly Newsletter Fridays. A weekly digest of the best of our coverage. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Fridays. A weekly digest of the best of our coverage.
Thank you for signing up for The Nation’s weekly newsletter.
Join the Books & the Arts Newsletter Enter your email to get the best of The Nation’s Books & the Arts section in your inbox biweekly. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Enter your email to get the best of The Nation’s Books & the Arts section in your inbox biweekly.
Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Support Progressive Journalism The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.
Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?
On June 23, 2020, Ahmad Erekat, 26, was shot and killed by Israeli forces at the Container checkpoint in the central West Bank after he emerged unarmed from his car, which had crashed into the checkpoint. The Israeli authorities have consistently claimed that its personnel were acting in legitimate self-defense against a deliberate attack. As is their practice in such circumstances, they seized Ahmad’s body and have to this day refused to release it to his family for a proper burial. Ahmad’s family, as well as Palestinian, Israeli, and international human rights organizations, have called the Israeli version of events into question from the very outset, citing evidence that the crash was an accident, that Ahmad was unarmed and moving away from his killers before he was repeatedly shot, and pointing out that it made little sense for Ahmad to have carried out an attack on the day of his sister’s wedding.
On February 23 Forensic Architecture, a British research organization based at the University of London and led by British-Israeli professor Eyal Weizman, together with the award-winning Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq, released the results of a detailed investigation of the circumstances of Ahmad Erekat’s killing. (A video outlining the investigation and narrated by Angela Davis can be watched in full, below.)
Watch Forensic Architecture's detailed investigation of the circumstances of Ahmad Erekat’s killing.
Contrary to persistent Israeli claims, the report concluded that the available evidence indicates that the incident was an accident, and Ahmad’s death a case of “extrajudicial execution.” Mouin Rabbani, co-editor of Jadaliyya and an expert on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, interviewed Noura Erakat, an assistant professor at Rutgers University–New Brunswick and a cousin of Ahmad Erekat, to get a better understanding of the case and the recent investigation.
M ouin R abbani: What is the Israeli claim regarding the circumstances of Ahmad Erekat’s killing? What evidence have the Israeli authorities produced to substantiate their claim, and what additional actions have they taken since his killing? This interview was commissioned by Jadaliyya as part of its Quick Thoughts series.
N oura E rakat: The Israeli state, its media, and its military apparatus immediately declared Ahmad a “terrorist” and declared the June 23, 2020, incident an attempted car ramming with the intent to kill the soldiers at the checkpoint. Upon releasing one video of the incident, Israeli police included a statement that read: “Yesterday at 16:00 an attack took place and the terrorist was shot and killed. In the footage, the terrorist drives his vehicle towards the security crossing, slowly and then drove in the direction towards the female border guard at an angle and the female officer was injured lightly and taken to hospital.”
It is noteworthy that the Israeli authorities have refused to conduct a proper investigation. They did not interview witnesses, did not conduct an autopsy of Ahmad’s body, did not investigate the car for mechanical malfunction, and did not review the available video tapes. Rather, they simply proclaimed that Ahmad was a “terrorist” engaged in an attack and that has been the end of their story. Since then, the state has held onto Ahmad’s body and refused to release it to the family for a proper burial. It is being held along with the bodies of 72 other slain Palestinians as both a form of collective punishment and as bargaining chips for the return of two Israeli soldiers’ bodies currently held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Even after the release of the video and report by Forensic Architecture and Al-Haq, Israel responded, “Erekat carried out a deliberate ramming attack.” And sadly, in an environment of silencing tactics, malicious dehumanization of Palestinians, a desensitization to their deaths, and propaganda, there has not been much, if any, pressure on Israel to be held accountable for its actions or to release Ahmad’s body which has now been in captivity for eight months and counting. Current Issue View our current issue
MR: What was the rationale behind the investigation by Forensic Architecture and Al-Haq, whose results have now been publicly released?
NE: Since Ahmad’s murder, the family has worked tirelessly to achieve at least a modicum of accountability and, if nothing else, retrieve his body for a proper burial. The family has been in a state of suspended disbelief since Ahmad’s murder on June 23, 2020. His mother still cannot accept that he is dead because she has not been able to see his corpse. Our efforts have included a submission, drafted in collaboration with Al-Haq, to the United Nations Human Rights Council, as well as to five UN special rapporteurs, which was endorsed by 83 organizations; an Avaaz petition calling for a boycott of Tel Aviv University, home to the Greenberg Institute where Ahmad’s corpse is being held; a legal effort within the Israeli judicial system in collaboration with the human rights organization Adalah; a report by Human Rights Watch; a video appeal featuring celebrities, activists, and scholars; and a congressional effort where we mobilized Ahmad’s extended family in the United States to specifically appeal to the six senators from California, Maryland, and Virginia (where Ahmad’s relatives live and vote), urging them to intervene to help retrieve Ahmad’s body. All six senators responded in some way and supported our effort.
These multifaceted efforts seemed to hit a dead end as Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz responded that Israel would escalate its cruel policy of withholding bodies by holding onto all corpses, and not just those affiliated with Hamas, until Hamas releases the bodies of two Israeli soldiers. The Israeli cabinet approved this policy and the Israeli high court sanctioned it as legal. Aside from being illegal and inhumane, this policy obscures any distinction between Palestinian civilians and militants. It amounts to saying there are no Palestinian civilians and criminalizes all Palestinians so as to justify their killing.
In this context we were also working with Forensic Architecture, which specializes in these kinds of investigations, to help reconstruct what actually happened during the incident in which Ahmad was killed.
MR: What was the nature of this investigation? What are its main findings, and what evidence did it use to substantiate its conclusions?
NE: Forensic Architecture, together with Al-Haq, used 3D imaging, shadow analysis, and open-source materials to reproduce the incident in which Ahmad was killed. It found that Ahmad was shot a total of six times, above the waist, by two soldiers within a space of two seconds; that Ahmad was unarmed with his hands up, and retreating from the soldiers; that he was refused medical treatment; and that his body was left out on the pavement, stripped naked, for hours. Perhaps most significantly, they found that Ahmad was not accelerating his car at the time of impact, refuting all claims that this was an alleged car ramming. In essence, the investigation shows that this was an extrajudicial execution, just as the family has been insisting from day one. The video, 18 minutes long, is narrated by Dr. Angela Davis and is incredibly powerful and equally difficult to watch.
MR: What do you hope to achieve with the publication of this investigation, and what further efforts are planned? The Story of Ahmad Erekat I Lost My Son in a Hail of Bullets at an Israeli Checkpoint Najah Erekat
NE: Our hopes are that this video will strengthen our ongoing campaign to retrieve Ahmad’s body for a proper burial, and for accountability for his murder. The truth is, the video demonstrates much of what we already believed to be plainly obvious. Ahmad was on his way to decorate a car with ribbons and flowers on his sister’s wedding day. He was himself set to be married later in the summer. Even if he wanted to conduct an operation targeting the checkpoint, as is claimed, why would he do it on his sister’s wedding day? At the heart of such logic is the idea that Palestinians hate Israelis more than they love themselves and one another. Nothing could be further from the truth or more outrightly racist.
We hope that this video definitively stifles accusations that Ahmad was a “terrorist” and revamps advocacy efforts on his behalf and on behalf of all withheld Palestinians. The video is being covered by international media outlets, and we are sending these findings to the Senate offices and other relevant interlocutors to press them to continue their efforts on our behalf. | 0.417321 |
The best Zoom holiday party is happening Saturday and we want you to join us! As 2020 comes to a close, join Dorian Warren and Melissa Harris-Perry, co-hosts of the System Check podcast from The Nation, for a very special, live event: The System Check Book Club. Beginning at 5 pm Eastern on Saturday, December 19, Dorian and Melissa sit down with the authors of some of their favorite books from 2020, including Maria Hinojosa, Rumaan Alam, John Nichols, Jeanne Theoharis, and Scott Farris, and preview terrific titles coming in 2021. This has been a difficult year, but there is plenty to salvage for the fight ahead, so tune in to the System Check Book Club for a holiday feast of words and wisdom. Remember, the most important system we have is the system of ideas. So join Melissa, Dorian and the authors who are reshaping the world of ideas for the better.
If you like the show, subscribe to System Check on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes every Friday, and follow us on Twitter and Facebook for regular updates.
The System Check Book Club is produced in partnership with Community Change Action, Anna Julia Cooper Center, and the New York Public Library. | -0.691233 |
Our country is experiencing a moment of honest reckoning, one that has been a long time building. To understand the enormity of this moment, one needs only to turn to the American South for the living, breathing memory of the struggle for civil rights.
I’m a documentary film maker by trade, and the first time I led a tour of sites from the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, I drove the bus. It was filled with 10 junior high school students and three adult chaperones. Our agenda was created by a former teacher of the school the students attended and my presence was requested to serve as a male chaperone. With little idea of what to expect, I could not have anticipated that the experience would change my life.
Most of us do not have access to all the intricacies of American history. We can learn a tremendous deal about the evolution of civil rights in this country from books, films, and lectures. But to walk the streets where courage and fear so famously clashed—to break bread with and learn from the living foot soldiers, marchers, and participants of the movement both past and present—that is to bear witness. That is to see history come alive.
Today, I travel across the South with groups of Nation magazine readers several times each year. We started our first program in 2018 (the magazine’s adult tours are a mission-aligned way to help support their journalism). Founded in 1865 by abolitionists, The Nation has a long history of covering civil rights, including an annual report on the struggle by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from 1961 to 1966. To date, several hundred people have joined us on the program, and as we travel we spend time with locals: We are present in the streets, the churches, and the rooms that define history. Travelers are transformed by what they witness. In this video, we meet Sylvester, a man born and raised in the same town where Emmett Till was tortured and lynched. His story, his connection to the land and the people, and his recollection of that fateful event compels us to bear witness.
We offer this piece as a chance to witness our uncovered history and as a plea to sustain our moment of reckoning into a movement that propels us forward, defined by progress. A longer version of the documentary will be shared in the fall. Stay tuned. | 0.101231 |
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Nation believes that helping readers stay informed about the impact of the coronavirus crisis is a form of public service. For that reason, this article, and all of our coronavirus coverage, is now free. Please subscribe to support our writers and staff, and stay healthy.
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Get The Nation’s Weekly Newsletter Fridays. A weekly digest of the best of our coverage. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Fridays. A weekly digest of the best of our coverage.
Thank you for signing up for The Nation’s weekly newsletter.
Join the Books & the Arts Newsletter Enter your email to get the best of The Nation’s Books & the Arts section in your inbox biweekly. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Enter your email to get the best of The Nation’s Books & the Arts section in your inbox biweekly.
Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Support Progressive Journalism The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.
Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?
Havana—As the novel coronavirus encircled the globe, tearing through health care systems, heavily affected countries sent out pleas for doctors. One small, downtrodden island answered the call.
Cuba has sent more than 2,000 doctors and nurses to 23 countries since the crisis broke.
Emergency medical response teams from the island have touched down in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and—for the first time—Europe. In March, the first batch of 51 Cuban doctors and nurses arrived in Lombardy, Italy, at the time the epicenter of the pandemic, to cheering crowds.
They join the 28,000 Cuban health professionals who were working in 59 countries prior to Covid-19. Covid-19 You Can’t Mask Stupid Elie Mystal
No other country has sent large numbers of doctors abroad during the pandemic. The radical intellectual Noam Chomsky last month described the island as the only country to have shown “genuine internationalism” during the crisis, and the women-led anti-war organization Code Pink is now leading calls for the island’s emergency medical response teams to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. But these medical brigades have received little media attention in the United States. When they are commented on at all, coverage is usually negative.
In fact, for the last three years, the Trump administration has described doctors participating in these missions as “slaves” and has accused the Cuban government of “human trafficking.” At the same time, Trump officials have suggested that tens of thousands of those “on mission” are not doctors at all but regime henchmen deployed to “sow political discord” and spread the virus of communism. Cast in this light, Cuban doctors are at once victims and oppressors.
Stories in major media outlets paint a similar picture. Cuba’s medical collaboration is portrayed as Machiavellian, reduced to a PR ruse to deflect attention from Cuba’s internal human rights violations, a means of projecting soft power, or a way of meddling in other countries’ affairs. Current Issue View our current issue
And while it is sometimes granted that the medics themselves improve health outcomes in poor countries, the Cuban government is alleged to exploit these doctors by “pocketing” most of their earnings.
Such depictions never include the voice of the Cuban doctors who work in these missions. Over the last couple of months, I’ve spoken to dozens of doctors before their departure. Their words cut sharply against this picture.
“How can I be a slave if I receive a free education from my country?” asked Dr. Leonardo Fernández, who has served in Nicaragua, Pakistan, East Timor, Liberia, and Mozambique. “How can I be a slave when my family receives my full salary while I’m abroad? How can I be a slave when I have constitutional rights?”
Dr. Gracilliano Díaz, a veteran of the campaign against Ebola in Sierra Leone in 2014, dismissed with Caribbean cool the idea that he is a victim of trafficking. “We do this voluntarily,” he said with a lilt. “It doesn’t matter to us that other countries brand us as slaves. What matters to us is that we contribute to the world.”
Next to a memorial to Cuban health professionals who have died abroad, I asked Nurse Carlos Armanda why he was risking his life to treat people in Italy. Looking me in the eye, he told me, “If you live here, you know why.”
I did.
Reporting from Havana for the last seven years, I have gotten to know a lot of doctors. It’s hard to avoid them: Cuba has by far the highest doctor-to-patient ratio in the world. I’ve had check-ups from family doctors in local clinics and CAT scans by neurosurgeons. I’ve chatted to doctors while waiting in line to buy chicken, cooked for them, played dominoes with them, and gotten drunk with them. Last year I helped make a documentary about a friend who, fed up scraping by on his $55-per-month salary, left medicine to become a cabbie.
As doctors have shared their stories with me, I’ve built up a sense of why they go on the missions. Alex Carreras spent years working in an AIDS clinic in Botswana. Treating diseases eradicated in Cuba that he had previously only read about in textbooks was, he said, a major motivation for going: “Doctors want to prove themselves in different environments.”
While in rural Venezuela in 2008, geneticist Greicy Rodríguez worked with populations that had never previously seen a doctor. She once revived a baby close to death from dehydration. “Her family ended up naming her after me,” she said. “It was a beautiful experience.”
During his time in Northern Brazil, Javier López, a specialist in traditional Chinese medicine, worked closely with indigenous communities, helping them revive plant-based remedies that had been stamped out. “I’ve always had the impetus to help,” he said.
Some go for the money. Yanet Rosales, a 36-year-old family doctor, earned $900 a month in the small city of Poços de Caldas in Brazil—much less than her Brazilian colleagues, but more than 10 times her salary at home. “You earn much more than what you get in Cuba,” she told me after she’d come back from a mission. “I always wanted to travel and meet people in other countries. This was my chance.”
Yanet was paid around 25 percent of the revenue the Cuban government received for her services. She thought a 50/50 division would have been fairer, but denied that she was a “modern slave,” as revenue from the missions pays for free health care in Cuba. “When some patients said we were being robbed, we told them this wasn’t the case,” she said. “Here in Cuba nobody gets charged for a hip replacement or an MRI scan—but these things are expensive.”
More than 1,000 Cuban doctors and nurses working on the Mais Médicos (More Doctors) program in Brazil from 2013 to 2018 decided to “desert” Cuba—some for economic reasons, some because they fell in love. Yanet decided to return and use her savings to buy a four-bedroom apartment in Havana. After I first interviewed her, she gave me a tour of her home, showing me the electric coffee grinder and giant plasma TV she brought back from Brazil.
Over the last decade, the leasing of medical professionals has emerged as Cuba’s most lucrative export activity. It generated $6.4 billion in 2018, bringing in more money than rum, sugar, and cigars combined.
This revenue pays for free health care and education through the university level, and to sustain art, music, and culture, and there’s no evidence the money is being siphoned off by a corrupt elite. Corruption at the higher echelons of the Cuban government is low compared to other countries in the region: The NGO Transparency International ranks Cuba as one of the least corrupt countries in Latin America. And as petroleum shipments from Venezuela, the island’s main ally, decrease, this money is increasingly needed just to keep the lights on.
Some of the revenue subsidizes missions to countries that can’t afford to pay for them. While Cuba charges oil-rich states like Angola for “professional services,” it provides thousands of doctors and nurses to low-income Latin American and sub-Saharan countries at cost or for free. And though it’s unknown whether Cuba is charging for the coronavirus-focused missions, the island has never previously charged for emergency medical response to earthquakes, hurricanes, or epidemics.
The money also helps the Latin American School of Medicine, which has graduated 29,000 doctors from more than 100 countries over the last 20 years. Medical education is provided for free to people from communities with poor access to health care on condition that upon graduation they return to serve their communities. Some of these doctors are now dealing with Covid-19 in the United States.
There’s also the fact that doctors that go on mission come back rich, compared to most Cubans. They live in nicer houses, have flashy amenities, and eat more meat. Today’s internacionalistas are Cuba’s middle class. In seven years of conversing with medics in Cuba, I’ve never met a doctor or a nurse who said they were forced to work abroad. Waiting lists are oversubscribed. And some doctors even pay to cut in line.
John Kirk, an academic at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, who has spent over a decade studying Cuban medical internationalism, says Cuba sends medical staff abroad for many reasons. “It generates funding to maintain Cuba’s excellent health care system—in many ways on par with those in the Global North. But there is also a strong element of altruism, of the need to collaborate and share Cuba’s impressive human capital—something which is clearly stated in the preamble to the national constitution.”
“We in the Global North are not used to seeing altruism to this degree,” he added. “But it is in the Cuban DNA.”
The Trump administration has intensified the US government’s decades-long economic war against Cuba, targeting the island’s energy supply and tourism industry. But more recently, both in rhetoric and action, it has weaponized health care, pressuring allies to cancel accords with Cuba.
In Ecuador last year, President Lenin Moreno expelled 382 Cuban doctors, ending nearly three decades of medical cooperation. The announcement came soon after Ecuador was granted a $4.2 billion loan by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The United States is the IMF’s main shareholder and substantially controls its bureaucracy. Mauricio Claver-Carone, the Trump administration’s point man on Cuba, was acting executive director of the IMF, representing US interests there, when loan negotiations began.
After a US-orchestrated civil-military coup six months ago, one of the first acts of the new regime in Bolivia was to kick out 725 Cuban medical professionals. A vehicle with US diplomatic plates was photographed outside one of the locations where Cuban doctors were interrogated prior to their expulsion.
Brazil’s government needed little convincing. Throughout the country’s 2018 presidential campaign, right-wing firebrand Jair Bolsonaro threatened to cancel medical collaboration with Cuba, calling Cuban doctors “slaves” and “terrorists.” Following his inauguration as president, Cuba withdrew its 8,517 Cuban doctors.
With Covid-19 halting tourism, Cuba is more reliant than ever on its international medical program to stay afloat. Cuban-American hard-liners who run Trump’s Latin America policy have sensed their moment and ratcheted up their attacks; choking off revenue from the medical programs could cripple the Cuban economy, paving the way to regime change. As the coronavirus crisis has pushed more countries to request Cuban medical assistance, Florida Senator Marco Rubio and New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez this month began lobbying for US embassies around the world to “inform” governments hosting Cuban doctors about the “Cuban regime’s forced labor practices.”
Though US sanctions blocked a shipment of masks, gloves, and ventilators from reaching the island in April, they have not substantially undermined Cuba’s domestic response to Covid-19. Through vigorous contact tracing and enforced isolation of suspected cases, Cuba has successfully corralled the virus, registering fewer than 2,000 cases, more than 50 times fewer per capita than in the United States.
Those who pay the highest price when the Trump administration wins are people in small towns, indigenous villages, and urban slums. The withdrawal of Cuban doctors from Brazil, for instance, sharply cut back access to health care for 28 million people. As a result, according to the Pan American Health Organization (which is linked to the World Health Organization), 37,000 young Brazilian children may die in the next decade.
For Kirk, right-wing regimes like the Trump administration, Bolsonaro’s Brazil, and the post-coup government in Bolivia have an ulterior motive. “Cuban doctors represented the threat of a good example of what public health could be—and that’s why they had to be stopped.”
“As the Cubans pull out, the people who are being screwed are the people who have had health care for the first time and will now no longer have it. It’s criminal to play politics with people’s lives.” | -1.402783 |
Bernie’s out: Senator Sanders suspended his campaign last week, ending many progressives’ hopes of having a standard-bearer for our issues in the presidential election. But that doesn’t mean the fight is over.
Tonight at 6 ET, join historian Matt Karp, political scientist Daniel Schlozman, journalist Kate Aronoff, and moderator Waleed Shahid, spokesperson for Justice Dems, as they discuss the history and future of movement and electoral organizing. | -0.451174 |
Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders? Plenty of progressives like both candidates, but it’s time to choose. Watch The Nation’s Sanders or Warren debate featuring Zephyr Teachout and Bhaskar Sunkara debating Brad Lander and Maurice Mitchell over which candidate can best defeat Donald Trump and deliver fundamental progressive change.
Monday, February 24 | 6:30 pm
Moderated by D.D. Guttenplan, Editor, The Nation
Cosponsored by the Milano School of Policy, Management and Environment. | 0.249933 |
On May 9, Nation strikes correspondent Jane McAlevey delivered the keynote address at the Winnipeg 1919 General Strike Centenary Conference, in Manitoba, Canada. The four-day conference lifted up the history of Canada’s largest general strike, and examined strategies for worker power. In her speech McAlevey lays out a plan to build towards a new round of general strikes, and weaves together the urgent need to address radical income and power inequality with the climate crisis. She discusses key aspects of the recent Los Angeles teachers strike as evidence that strikes where 100 percent of workers walk out, with deep community engagement, are crucial in this era of highly skewed politics.
Watch the full speech from the Winnipeg General Strike Centenary Conference here. | -0.626292 |
Subsets and Splits