Innholdsfortegnelse for March 08/15, 2021 i The Nation

PRACTICE DOESN’T ALWAYS MAKE PERFECT, BUT IT CAN LEAD TO MARGINAL IMPROVEMENT. The second impeachment of Donald Trump yielded slightly better results than the first. In Impeachment 1.0, every Republican in the House of Representatives voted against it, while all but three Democrats voted in favor. The Senate was also divided along partisan lines, with Mitt Romney the only person to break ranks and become the first senator to vote to convict a president from his own party. Romney’s stance was a lonely one; this time he had more company. In Trump’s impeachment for incitement of insurrection, 10 House Republicans voted to impeach and seven Republican senators voted to convict. Trump’s hold on the GOP is slowly weakening. Still, both impeachments must be considered disheartening failures if seen in isolation.…

AT THE BEATING HEART OF THE BIG LIE—THE DERANGED fantasy that the 2020 election was stolen from its loser, Donald Trump—is the Republican belief that the votes of Black people shouldn’t count. In lawsuit after lawsuit after the election, Republicans asked the courts to throw away votes that had been cast in predominantly Black communities. In Michigan, they literally singled out Detroit and threatened to refuse to certify its votes. The GOP’s entire postelection strategy was to reinstitute race-based voter disenfranchisement all the way up to January 6, when 147 Republican lawmakers voted to straight-up overturn the results because Black people had overcome the white supremacy baked into the Electoral College. While the failed Capitol insurrection has stymied at least some of these efforts, the very serious work of preventing…

1 Number of major US cities that slashed their police budget by more than 15 percent for the year 2021 (Austin, Tex.) $150M Amount cut by the Austin City Council from the police department’s budget (about one-third) $6.7M Amount diverted from the police budget in January to purchase a hotel that will be converted into homes for the unhoused 60 Number of units of permanent housing that the converted hotel will maintain 26% Share of Austin’s city budget that will still be spent on the police in 2021 52% Share of the 50 largest cities that increased their police budget for 2021 50% Amount the Seattle City Council vowed to cut from the police budget—before reducing it by only 11 percent…

THE DOOR OF THE PLANNED PARENTHOOD CLINIC IN COLUMBUS WAS locked when Larada Lee arrived for the first of two appointments she needed to get an abortion under Ohio state law. About a dozen anti-choice protesters had gathered outside, without masks, calling Lee a baby killer as she approached the door. Lee felt nauseated from her pregnancy, at times unable to keep down even water. Her bones ached. She was missing her classes at Ohio State University. The fatal shootings of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor in recent weeks were weighing her down with a sense of hopelessness. Meanwhile, Ohio officials had sparked confusion by ordering a halt to “nonessential” abortions. “Being Black in the middle of trying to seek an abortion in the middle of a pandemic—it was really…

The Meaning of Masks As a disabled reader of The Nation, I read Gwen Florio’s portrait of Kalispell, Mont., with mounting dismay [“Montana, Unmasked,” Jan. 25/Feb. 1]. I’m a writer with cerebral palsy who is intimately familiar with the frustrations that come with the loss of control over my body. However, I would like to tell the antimask scofflaws that just because you’re not in total control doesn’t mean you are being actively oppressed. Control must be nearly as deadly an illusion as the power of whiteness. ERIKA D. JAHNEKE PHOENIX Post Officers? In regard to “Saving the Mail” by Jake Bittle [Jan. 25/Feb. 1], the US Postal Service is not truly an independent organization, although in many ways it tries to act like one. I believe it should be…

IN EARLY FEBRUARY, JOE BIDEN WENT TO THE STATE Department to give the first foreign policy address of his presidency. His key theme was the need to restore America’s global leadership by adopting a policy of diplomacy first and repairing the damage to US alliances inflicted by Donald Trump. In support of that pledge, Biden recounted a series of steps he has taken already, from extending the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia to rejoining the Paris climate accord and the World Health Organization. He has also promised to rejoin the Iran nuclear deal. These are all positive moves, but a more effective and progressive foreign policy requires more than just undoing the damage of the Trump years. It means putting the real risks to human security—from the…

WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO ABOUT THE 74 MILLION OF our fellow citizens who voted for Donald Trump? After he won the White House in 2016, Democrats were told we had to understand them. Reporters promptly descended on small-town diners, where old white men were happy to vent their resentment at being looked down on by liberals, professors, and city dwellers. In her much-discussed Strangers in Their Own Land, the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild urged liberals to cross the “empathy wall”and feel the Tea Party’s pain. “Economic anxiety” was the preferred left explanation—no matter how often one pointed out that Trump voters had a higher median income than Clinton voters or wondered out loud how come Black and Latino people’s economic anxieties didn’t make them cast ballots for a…

LET’S BEGIN WITH TWO BOOKCASES. Both are made of simple, sturdy pine, expediently joined together. One will likely be familiar: It’s the primary unit of the Ivar shelving system, which has been manufactured by the Swedish megabrand IKEA since the late 1960s. Its name rhymes with that of the company’s founder, Ingvar Kamprad, who died in 2018. It retails for $69. The other shelf, distinguished by its diagonal braces, is part of the Autoprogettazione furniture system developed by the Italian designer Enzo Mari. It’s a word difficult to translate (“self project,” while not particularly grammatical, comes close) but easy to explain. Mari wanted to put the means of production back where he thought they belonged: in the hands of the people. He therefore conceived a family of forms that could…

IN THE MIDDLE OF 1856, THE SOON-TO-BE-CELEBRATED poet Walt Whitman visited an impounded slave ship in Brooklyn. The taking of the ship was an unusual occurrence, as it was one of the few illegal slavers seized by an otherwise lethargic Washington, D.C., and Whitman wanted to give his readers a tour of the vessel, which had been designed to add even more enslaved laborers to the millions already ensnared in this system of iniquity, including of its hold, where those victimized were to be “laid together spoon-fashion.” Whitman’s keen journalistic interest was a response to the feverish political climate in his homeland, featuring ever more overwrought cries demanding the relegalization and reopening of the Atlantic slave trade. Officially, this branch of flesh peddling had been rendered illegal by Britain in…

To say that the earth is in crisis is an understatement. “Atmospheric warming, ocean warming, ocean acidification, sea-level rise, deglaciation, desertification, eutrophication—these are just some of the by-products of our species’s success,” Elizabeth Kolbert warns readers in her new book, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future. Kolbert has been studying the consequences of humankind’s impact on the planet for decades as a contributor to The New Yorker and as the author of 2015’s Pulitzer Prize–winning The Sixth Extinction. Now she examines an emerging pattern that she attributes to “the recursive logic of the Anthropocene”: human interventions that attempt to correct past interventions in the environment. “The issue, at this point, is not whether we’re going to alter nature,” Kolbert writes, “but to what end?” —Naomi Elias NE:…

Yes CHASE IRON EYES THE RECENT #FORCETHEVOTE CAMPAIGN which urged progressive members of Congress to withhold their support for Nancy Pelosi’s reelection as House speaker until she pledged to bring Representative Pramila Jayapal’s Medicare for All bill to a floor vote, was more than theoretical. I believe that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, her squadmates, and our historic contingent of lefty representatives should have forced the vote. Not for the Twitter, Twitch, and Instagram thrills or as an act of political theater, but as proof that the working class will not let any elected officials—whether Trumpers or liberal Democrats—deprive us of our human right to health care. Make no doubt about it: Medicare for All is coming to the United States. No one can block it—not Big Pharma, not the insurance industry, not…

NATALIE WYNN KNOWS THAT PEOPLE CAN CHANGE. AFTER ALL, SHE sometimes jokes, she was a “male alcoholic” until 2017. A 32-year-old trans woman, she’s now a wildly popular political YouTuber. Her channel, ContraPoints, was a cultural bright spot of the Trump era, and she may be one of the few people in the left media who can credibly claim to persuade her opponents on occasion. Her videos are also—in a left-media ecosystem of scolds and ascetics—a lavish pleasure to watch. I met Wynn over Zoom just after the Capitol riot and before Joe Biden’s inauguration. In her videos, Wynn’s aesthetic is elaborate and campy, her speech theatrical and well-performed, her look one of high glamour. But like most iconic performers, in person her beauty was simpler. Her makeup was precise…

Each morning I sit in silence, time slides, changesin my heart, a moss covered cavern where its firewakes me to a camaraderie of light, my wife waking upstairs to walk to her window to pray, to gazeoutward at the pasture where Wappinger people eyedwhite men making laws to own people and the land. Art rules this old house, its rough rafters set in earthas the colony became a state, and Poughkeepsie forgotits own wonder, a gathering of reeds on banks of a river Hudson believed would take him to China, his breathunnoticed these days by the hummingbirds that visitour door, sounds of their wings like my fingers tapping my mother’s empty Tupperware bowl, with cake battera thin film she let me lick only when I was good, the tastesomething I…

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