Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2025 i The Nation

DEMOCRATS SEE THEMSELVES AS A LIGHTHOUSE—steady, guiding, a safeguard against chaos. But a lighthouse only works if people look to it. And more and more, they don’t. The problem isn’t just that the light is dimming; it’s that voters have stopped navigating by it altogether. Beneath the surface, something deeper is stirring: economic frustration, cultural disillusionment, and a growing sense that the party isn’t attuned to the struggles of working people. The question isn’t whether Democrats can keep the light shining. It’s whether they understand what’s rising in the darkness, and whether they can adapt before it overtakes them. The Democratic Party isn’t in inevitable decline. It’s in crisis—one facing center-left parties everywhere—resulting from two fundamental failures. The first failure is the party’s fraying connection to the working class—not just…

A MID THE CHAOS AND RUBBLE OF PRESIDENT TRUMP’S assault on the US government, one telling development has received minimal attention. After Trump, under the dimwitted ideological tutelage of Elon Musk, leveled the US Agency for International Development, the lead administrator left standing over the smoldering wreckage was a hard-right federal bureaucrat named Pete Marocco. A former assistant to a chief administrator at the agency, Marocco was ousted from no less than three different executive departments—State, Commerce, and Defense—during Trump’s first term for creating toxic working conditions and visiting retribution on rival staffers. If Marocco were just another glorified brigand placed atop a government agency, that would make him a standard-issue appointee in this administration. But he brings another crucial selling point to the Trumpian table: He appears to have…

Come Gather ’Round, People Thank you for Daniel Bessner’s thoughtful review of Noam Chomsky and Nathan Robinson’s The Myth of American Idealism [“Empire’s Critic,” February 2025]. Bessner’s main criticism is not analytical but strategic: “The left needs to spend less time disabusing people of myths they no longer believe or organizing mass protests that go nowhere. Instead, we must formulate a more effective strategy for shaping state behavior.” But is it premature to write off mass action as a dead end? The abolitionists, Populists, Socialists, early union organizers, suffragists, and civil rights activists were hardly unqualified failures. It’s understandable that one would be tempted to give up on mass action just after the masses allowed themselves to be bamboozled into voting for a charlatan. But ultimately there’s no alternative to…

MUCH OF THE VAST LANDSCAPE OF URUguay remains true to its historical image—down to the lone gaucho roaming the pampas. But there have been some notable additions. Towering white wind turbines and glistening solar panels are now as much a part of the iconography of Uruguay as the grass itself, though they began to pop up across the country only in recent years, and seemingly all at once. Not exactly tourist attractions, they are the most visible evidence of a green energy transformation that continues to turn heads the world over: Despite having far fewer resources than the United States, Germany, and other wealthy nations that have been painfully slow to reduce their consumption of fossil fuels amid the deepening climate crisis—as of 2023, only 21.4 percent of the US…

IF THE ONLY THING ONE KNEW ABOUT Stephen Miller was that he was a white man, it might be sufficient to explain his alignment with Donald Trump—after all, 60 percent of that demographic supported Trump against Kamala Harris last fall. But identity is complicated, and every other aspect of Miller’s points to the opposite conclusion. At 39, Miller is a millennial (51 percent of voters age 30 to 44 voted for Harris); he was raised Jewish in a Reform congregation (84 percent of Reform Jews voted for Harris) and grew up in Santa Monica, California (Santa Monica’s precincts ranged from 71 to 86 percent for Harris); he has parents with advanced degrees and himself graduated from top-ranked Duke University (56 percent of college graduates and a likely 75 percent of…

When morning comes, whenever I can, I lie for a great while in dread.I don’t know how much more of it I can take, yet I confess I lure dread with baits of what-if: if I make a decision that kills a man; if I become allergicto skin; if I lose the use, but not the memory, of my tongue. To endure dread, create bait, then bait, then abate. But what if there is no there there?What if you, my extraterrestrial darling, don’t exist? I need you to cure dread. It’s not fair, I know, but the truth is, like many of us, I live partially in my fantasyof it: how, after decades, I find a trace of you in a bend of light; how your dread never rises; how,…

FOR AMERICANS DESPERATE TO RECLAIM OUR DEMOCRACY FROM THE PLUTOCRATIC vandalism of the second Trump administration, our challenge is simple: We have to unify and fight back. Defeating authoritarianism depends on a persistent, courageous, broad-based opposition. We side with the two-thirds of Democrats who want their congresspeople to oppose Trump at every turn. As an organizing matter, this is a winning strategy. Trump is overreaching. Voters wanted lower prices; instead, they’re being served techno-dystopian fascism with a side of egg shortages. Neither Trump nor Elon Musk has a mandate for this brazen assault on democracy. Congressional Democrats should be leading this charge, but their response has been sluggish, ineffective, and boring. Many House Democrats have professed their powerlessness. Senate Democrats have provided votes for almost all of Trump’s nominees. Strategic…

ON FEBRUARY 13, 2020, THE CENTERS FOR DISEASE Control and Prevention confirmed the 15th case of Covid-19 in the United States, an early sign that the pandemic was a spark on the verge of becoming a wildfire. Exactly five years later, the Senate confirmed Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a virulent foe of mainstream science, as secretary of health and human services. Twelve days after that, RFK Jr., in keeping with his deep-seated anti-vaccination agenda, paused a Biden administration program to test a new Covid vaccine. At roughly the same time, his colleague Elon Musk, in his capacity as de facto head of Donald Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, gutted government funding for Ebola prevention in Africa. RFK Jr. might be cavalier about the need to continue fighting Covid, but…

IN THE WAKE OF THE CATASTROPHIC PLANE AND helicopter collision over the Potomac in January, Donald Trump spoke to the nation—not to offer words of consolation or comfort, but to blame diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs for the tragedy. By turning instantly to racism, Trump skirted some difficult issues about America’s worst commercial aviation disaster in 16 years. Like the fact that just nine days earlier, Federal Aviation Administration chief Michael Whitaker had resigned after months of public pressure by Trump’s deputy president, Elon Musk. Or that Trump had issued a federal employee hiring freeze that failed to include an explicit carve-out for air traffic controllers, a profession that’s been understaffed since the pandemic. Or that 24 hours after the crash, FAA employees were sent an e-mail containing buyout…

Yes! NATASHA LENNARD LENNARD WHY DO WE CONTINUE TO DEBATE THE acceptability of political violence on the left? It is a well-rehearsed and often tired debate, with familiar arguments on both sides. Yet it is evidently not something we will settle easily. But what’s important is that we are still debating it on terrains in which violence is ubiquitous, structural, and consistently accepted—if not lauded. I will not rehash the most well-worn arguments in defense of political violence here, but they fall into a few broad categories: historical—we defenders of political violence point to instances wherein some violent actions were central to success, from slave revolts to anti-colonial uprisings to the civil rights movement; taxonomical—we reject categorizations of violence as determined by the violence-monopolizing state and its sovereign, capital, wherein…

A century ago, on April 10, 1925, The Great Gatsby was published by Scribner. One month later, Carl Van Vechten, a novelist, photographer, and Zelig-like impresario, reviewed the novel for The Nation. Van Vechten was a friend of Gatsby’s author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom he’d met several years earlier at a party that ended in a scene that could have been taken from the novel: As Van Vechten played the piano, the publisher Horace Liveright drunkenly yanked him from his seat, fracturing the writer’s shoulder. In his review, Van Vechten called Gatsby “a fine yarn, exhilaratingly spun,” and Fitzgerald “a born story-teller” whose “work is imbued with that rare and beneficent essence we hail as charm.” In Gatsby, he wrote, Fitzgerald had moved beyond his earlier fascination with “the flapper”…

I HAD MY FIRST CIGARETTE ON AN AIRPLANE. MY father was smoking, in the smoking section, and I asked to try one. He said no, because I was 9, but two tiny bottles of Scotch later, he got up to go to the bathroom and I snuck a puff of his still-lit cigarette lying in the ashtray they used to have in the armrests. I coughed a lot. I asked the flight attendant for water, and she came by, intuited what I had done, and said, “I won’t tell your dad but don’t do that; it’s bad for you.” A lot of things about that 1987 flight from New York to Indiana would be unrecognizable to a person under 40. My meal was free (my dad did have to pay…

THROUGHOUT THE COURSE OF READING MY COUNTRY, Africa: Autobiography of the Black Pasionaria, I found myself stopping every so often to look at the picture on the cover. It’s the picture of a striking woman who is looking toward the camera with an expression that seems to indicate she’s been caught in the middle of a sentence. That woman also happens to be the book’s author, Andrée Blouin, and I found myself returning to the picture and wondering what that sentence might have been. What was Blouin in the midst of saying? Born in a region of what was then the French Congo and is today part of the Central African Republic, Blouin emerged from a childhood of abuse to become a young, nomadic romantic and ultimately a well-respected Pan-African nationalist…

A bee caught in the raintries to sting its way through the glass window. On the other side of the road,a man erases murals from the brick wall. Outside a king’s palace, women in matching bubagathered around bottle gourds, placed inside buckets of water. I watched the women recite nameswritten on the throne, I didn’t hear my name. When my body has the right amount of sugar,my heart pulsates only to love songs. I have ruled over cities that are not on maps,I have ruled over a kingdom of crickets How noble that I can still spin yards of threadsinto a gift basket. I fixed my gaze on the giant glass wall until the barrier thinned out. I sanitized my palmsand raised them in praise of the black stone in…

THE NATION’S CAPITAL IS TEEMING WITH PEOPLE who serve the interests of sadists who have converted seemingly every crevice of our economy into a sopranos plotline. But unlike tens of millions of Americans in every state of the union, virtually none of these people has ever personally known the peculiar hell of having had their employer annexed by a private-equity firm. That changed quite dramatically a few days after Donald Trump’s second inauguration, when the DOGE raid on the administrative state began. Scammy-looking generic e-mails began appearing in the inboxes of federal employees, and very young men in hoodies began showing up in federal buildings and demanding access to computer systems. Most of the first batch of e-mails claimed to be just “tests,” though a dozen or so informed the…

THE NUMBERS COMING OUT OF LOS ANGELES COUNty are staggering: more than 16,000 buildings destroyed, some 2,000 structures damaged, and over 150,000 people ordered to evacuate. Whole swaths of Pacific Palisades and Altadena have been wiped off the map. Obliterated along with them: basic shelter; countless families’ primary source of wealth; and the incalculable loss of memories, sensations, routines, possessions, and a sense of normalcy. Whenever something like this happens, the vultures of displacement and development start circling. Mike Davis put it succinctly during the Woolsey Fire of 2018 when he was asked what he expected to see after the flames died down: “Bigger mansions.… What tends to disappear is rental properties, trailer parks, people who don’t have adequate insurance.” In other words, the poor and working classes suffer first—and…

40% Portion of contracts canceled by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that are expected to produce no savings 0.9% Total savings claimed by DOGE, as a percentage of the federal budget 0.12% Amount of savings DOGE has been able to itemize 2M Number of federal workers who were asked by DOGE to “justify their work or lose their jobs” 5k Number of Forest Service employees who were laid off 11 Number of lawsuits filed against DOGE for violating the Privacy Act of 1974 $21b Amount the US government has awarded or promised Elon Musk’s companies since 2008…

ON NOVEMBER 21, 2024, RICHARD V. REEVES STOOD IN A GREENROOM AT THE WASHINGton Post’s third annual Global Women’s Summit. Reeves, the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men (AIBM), was the only man in a lineup that included former Democratic Party House leader Nancy Pelosi, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, and actress Kerry Washington. Leaning against a wall, he made small talk with his copanelist Grace Bastidas, the editor in chief of Parents.com. The target audience for his 2022 book, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It, Reeves told her, is a liberal mom worried about her son. At one point, Reeves himself would have been skeptical of his book’s premise. He’s described feminism as perhaps…

SOMETIMES IT CAN BE MOSTLY HARMLESS WHEN THE powerful lose their minds. For no discernible purpose, the Roman emperor Caligula ordered a floating bridge of ships stretched across the Bay of Naples and reportedly planned to appoint his horse as consul. King George III of England issued orders to people who were dead, shook hands with an oak tree, and believed he could see Germany through a telescope. He planted beef in his garden, it was said, in hopes of growing a herd of cattle. He had to be tied to his bed at night and put in a straitjacket by day. told friends, “They’re after me.” When a fire engine’s siren sounded, Forrestal rushed out of his house screaming, “The In the nuclear age, however, madness can be dangerous.…

DO INNIES HAVE RIGHTS? BY “INNIES,” OF COURSE, I MEAN the severed employees of Lumon Industries, relegated to the severed floor of the company’s offices, who work on a project whose true nature is hidden even from them. The medical procedure of severance permanently splits a person into two beings: one who exists outside of Lumon and another whose consciousness exists entirely on that office floor from 9 to 5. Essentially, the “outies” rent out their bodies, but the process of severance creates a whole other person with their own memories and feelings and opinions, whose entire existence belongs to Lumon. Scout, who exists outside the company and is consumed by the death of his wife (who, it turns out, might not be dead after This is the premise of…