Innholdsfortegnelse for October 19-26, 2020 i The Nation

THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION IN OUR LIFETIMES—AND ONE OF THE MOST consequential in The Nation’s 155-year history. Accepting his party’s nomination in 2016, Donald Trump promised to “lead our country back to safety, prosperity, and peace…to add millions of new jobs and trillions in new wealth.” At his inauguration, he returned to that theme, vowing to rebuild “our country, with American hands and American labor.” All lies. He also claimed to be worth billions–and to have paid “millions” in taxes. That turned out to be a lie, too. Instead of leading us toward prosperity, Trump pushed through a tax bill that gave billions of dollars to his rich supporters (and cabinet members) and cut taxes on corporations by a whopping 40 percent while doling out crumbs to working…

THIS COLUMN IS ALMOST ALWAYS CRITICAL OF journalists and spotlights the many mistakes, malfeasances, and misunderstandings that characterize so much of our political coverage. But today I just want to offer my condolences. We have had presidential administrations run by criminals before. It would be fair to call certain past presidents con men. (See my new book, Lying in State, for details.) This administration is all that and more, but there’s a new problem: Donald Trump’s White House, the party it represents, and its most prominent supporters in the media are untethered from reality. How do you cover one of the two major parties—the one that controls the Oval Office, the Senate, and increasingly the courts—and the most popular (and most profitable) cable station in America when their arguments consist…

Despite his (alleged) nickname, “Middle-Class Joe” Biden doesn’t seem to understand the middle class. It’s become customary for Democratic presidential candidates to vow not to raise taxes on this particular group of voters. Hillary Clinton repeatedly made that pledge in 2015 and ’16—a tactic Barack Obama also used in 2008. It’s a commitment that sounds nice on the campaign trail, but it hamstrings policy-making. And now Biden, as the 2020 Democratic nominee, has made that bad promise even worse. Bill and Hillary Clinton and Obama used the same cutoff for middleclass tax protection: those who earn $250,000 a year or less. It’s a preposterous definition of the middle class. But Biden has seen their $250,000 bid and nearly doubled it. “Nobody making under 400,000 bucks would have their taxes raised,…

Prisons and cops survive only in tales for the younglike twin Atlantises or two drowned boogeymen.A cop’s as harmless a Halloween getup as anymonster, while a prisoner costume’s as taboo as a slave onenow that schools teach what makes them kin.A prison is the far-off past of a structureturned free housing, each cell wall knocked to sandcastleruin, halls reshaped and re-dyed in green paints,former floor plans carved out like shoresinto spacious homes, laundry and A/C a given in each.Though prisons and cops won’t be found anywhere,our youths still learn of them, and they know what they mean,how they look, how they function, what it will take to stop themif they return with new names.…

IN 2018, DESPITE MONTHS OF HYPE ABOUT A looming blue wave, election night was a dud. Cable commentators sagged, trying to find meaning in what seemed to be mixed results. Democrats appeared to have lost high-profile statewide races in Georgia, Texas, and Florida. And while the party seemed to win control of the House, at midevening it looked to be by the narrowest of margins. On Fox News, anchors mocked it as a mini-wave. CNN anchor Jake Tapper declared, “When you look at what’s going on here tonight, this is not a blue wave.” Donald Trump called the results “very close to complete victory” for Republicans the next morning. But a week later, CNN trumpeted a new rollout of election coverage: “Election Night in America Continued.” It was a belated…

BENJAMIN TILLMAN, THE SCION OF A RICH, SLAVEHOLDing South Carolina family, was elected governor of the state in 1890. Driven by his fury over Black emancipation and enfranchisement after the Civil War, he dedicated his political career to spreading what he dubbed “the gospel of white supremacy according to Tillman.” At every opportunity, he stoked anti-Black violence, once stating that “nothing but bloodshed and a good deal of it could answer the purpose of redeeming the state from negro and carpetbag rule” and boasting of having “shot negroes and stuffed ballot boxes” as a leader in the Red Shirts, a white terrorist group that executed six African American freedmen in the 1876 Hamburg Massacre. His appeals to white South Carolinians’ racial resentments got him elected to the US Senate in…

Kaveh Akbar has been appointed The Nation’s poetry editor. Taking over the storied section, Akbar said he believes “in poetry’s power to substantively contribute to The Nation’s mission of ‘raising up the promise of a radical tomorrow while agitating for meaningful change today.’” Born in Tehran, Akbar teaches at Purdue University and Randolph and Warren Wilson colleges. His poems have appeared in The Nation, The New Yorker, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. He is the author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf and the forthcoming Pilgrim Bell. “An accomplished poet and writer who writes with heart and dedication,” said literary editor David Marcus, “he is also a talented and ambitious editor, and we’re excited to see what he will do in the magazine’s pages.” The poetry editor position has two-to-three-year…

YAA GYASI ALWAYS INTENDED TO WRITE ABOUT MOTHers and daughters. In a 2016 profile, the now 31-year-old Ghanaian American writer said that after her sophomore year at Stanford, she traveled to Ghana to research a story about maternal bonds set in her mother’s home region. But after Gyasi visited Cape Coast Castle, a commercial fort that held enslaved people bound for the Americas, and learned more about the relationships between some Ghanaian women and British soldiers, her interests shifted, and she decided to write a novel about the “fullness of slavery, both as it was in the 18th century and what is left behind today.” The result was Homegoing, an ambitious debut that attempted to map more than 300 years of history. It spans continents, with the first two chapters…

LIFE WITH STEVE WAS NEVER BORING. HE was supremely independent, the true radical in our family, unfailingly going to the root of the problem. And as The Chronicle of Higher Education noted in 2017, he “was the most controversial Russia expert in America.” I first “met” Steve through his 1977 essay “Bolshevism and Stalinism.” His cogent, persuasive revisionist argument that there are always alternatives in history and politics influenced me deeply. And his seminal Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution, challenging prevailing interpretations of Soviet history, was to me, and to many, a model of how biography should be written: engaged and sympathetically critical. Steve’s work—and soon, Steve himself—challenged me to be critical-minded, to seek alternatives to the status quo, to stay true to my beliefs (even if they weren’t popular),…

“As any woman can tell you, the masks smear makeup. The president is afraid of makeup stains on his mask and unsightly smears on his photographed face.”—letter to The New York Times from Sarah Crichton So, could it be that what he’s fearingIs gobs of orange makeup smearing?Could that be why he takes the viewThat wearing masks is up to you?And why he mocks as sissies thoseWho cover up the mouth and nose,So even some not in his baseNow emulate his unmasked face?A shame so many die so heCan keep his visage blemish-free.…

ON A FRIDAY NIGHT IN JULY, TWO POLICE OFFICERS in Rollinsford, a small town in eastern New Hampshire, responded to a report of a domestic disturbance at the home of RJ and Sarah Letendre. RJ Letendre, who at the time worked as a police officer in the nearby city of Dover, told the responding officers that during a conversation about a divorce, she attacked him, scratching and biting him. The officers arrested Sarah Letendre, a stay-at-home mother of two young children, and charged her with domestic violence simple assault. Then they took her to a hospital for a psychiatric evaluation. In an affidavit, police said they “did not observe any obvious injuries on her,” though they noted that “she was complaining of pain in her left rib area.” Afterward, police…