Abstract: Last summer in this space, I wrote that although Joe Biden was intermittently making noises about a new New Deal, he could just as likely end up a twenty-first-century Warren G. Harding, a caretaker president overseeing a dreary return to normalcy.How optimistic I was.What my analogy failed to account for was that Harding won 1920 in a walk. He carried 60.3 percent of the popular vote and every state outside the South. Republicans had majorities of eighty-five seats in the House and ten in the Senate, plus a friendly Supreme Court. The GOP, in short, could govern.Democrats can’t, and that’s just the start of their problems—and ours. Liberals who don’t want to face up to the disappointing results of four years ... Read More PubDate: 2021-01-08T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Illustration by Anna SorokinaIt’s the feeling of staring at a blank wall and wanting your brain to spark but not knowing how to make it happen. Or the feeling of trying to smile and knowing your eyes don’t match (a feeling made worse by going about masked, knowing you have even less ability to fake it). Or maybe it’s the endless stream of tasks that used to seem like checkpoints on a road to somewhere but now just feel like a perpetual, joyless game of whack-a-mole. It’s the gap between promise and reality, the feeling that your feelings themselves have gone on strike. It’s burnout.The word dates back at least to the 1970s, but it’s become something of a buzzword in recent years, and even more recently has been ... Read More PubDate: 2021-01-08T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In an episode of Norman Lear’s 1970s sitcom Good Times, the mother (Esther Rolle) and father (John Amos) raising their kids in the Chicago projects look for a movie to see on their date night, and the only thing showing that isn’t a blaxploitation outing is the 1974 romance Claudine. Twentieth Century Fox used that difference in order to sell the movie. In contrast to the badass poses struck in the ads for Shaft and Super Fly and Foxy Brown and Slaughter and Hell Up in Harlem and all the rest, the poster for Claudine showed a beaming extended family striding toward the camera above the tagline, “A heart and soul comedy. Can you dig it'” But far from the family-friendly sap that poster promised, Claudine, which has ... Read More PubDate: 2021-01-08T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: On Monday, November 9, Dissent co-editor Timothy Shenk moderated a roundtable on the 2020 U.S. elections with Sheri Berman, Adom Getachew, Michael Kazin, Aziz Rana, and Matthew Sitman. The following transcript of that discussion has been edited for clarity and length.I want to read a quotation from Virginia Congresswoman and former CIA operations officer Abigail Spanberger from a meeting of congressional Democrats after the election last week:Tuesday, from a congressional standpoint, it was a failure. . . . we lost members who shouldn’t have lost. . . . The number one thing that people brought to me . . . was defunding the police. . . . we need to get back to the basics that brought us across the finish line in ... Read More PubDate: 2021-01-08T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: A Sunrise Movement protester disrupts a Biden campaign event in October 2019. (Scott Eisen/Getty Images)Joe Biden touted an ambitious set of climate policies during his campaign, many developed via consultation with the Biden–Sanders task force on climate, and he has named climate change as one of his top four priorities on the website for his transition team. The Sunrise Movement and others are arguing that Biden’s victory represents a mandate to act on climate. Economic conditions are ideal for a program of massive public investment that could begin to make the ideas of the Green New Deal concrete and show that the government can work to improve people’s lives.But political conditions are not auspicious. Without ... Read More PubDate: 2021-01-08T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: This year marks Harold “Hal” Rogers’s twenty-first consecutive electoral victory in Kentucky’s Fifth Congressional District, making him the second-longest-serving Republican in Congress. He rode into office on the wave of the Reagan Revolution in 1980, and the governing style he’s employed in the Fifth District—which covers the rural, mountainous, Appalachian region of southeastern Kentucky—can mostly be described as Reaganite: pro–War on Drugs, pro–prison expansion, anti-regulation of extractive industries, and pro-family. The congressman has had to improvise a little over the years in response to changes in the economy and political system, but he’s well-positioned to do so: as a former chairman of the House ... Read More PubDate: 2021-01-08T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Much as he did twelve years ago, Joe Biden comes to the White House amid a punishing economic crisis. Yet the opposition he faces is entirely different, for Donald Trump has shattered the Republican Party’s old small-government pieties and ushered in a new working-class conservatism eager to use government to serve the common good.Just kidding: things will be almost exactly the same. Expect the GOP to offer up strong doses of deficit hysteria, a fierce push for austerity, and a congressional war of attrition aimed at bogging Biden down in an extended recession. For now, the most striking thing about Trump’s takeover will be how little it affects the basic dynamics of the right in opposition.To be sure, we’ll ... Read More PubDate: 2021-01-08T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: A solidarity march outside a detention center in New Hampshire on August 24, 2019 (Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images)In January, Joe Biden will inherit an immigration system that is significantly more broken than it was when he left the White House in 2017. His first challenge will be to stop the bleeding—to address the massive human rights violations at the border and restore protections that were revoked by the Trump White House. But his administration is not likely to resolve the structural injustice woven into the immigration enforcement apparatus: a system of incarceration and expulsion that saw more deportations under the Obama administration than any other in history.Biden has so far promised to undo at ... Read More PubDate: 2021-01-08T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Outside a burned Wendy's restaurant in Atlanta during protests over the killing of Rayshard Brooks on June 15, 2020 (Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images)On May 28, 2020, after three days of anger over the murder of George Floyd, the Minneapolis Police Department’s Third Precinct burned down. Protests that had already spread beyond Minnesota erupted nationwide, connecting Floyd’s death to the murders of Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery. These demonstrations responded to the routine criminalization of Black and Indigenous people, as well as other people of color, while at the same time white communities and protesters seemed to defy stay-at-home orders without penalty. The uprising was also linked to the failed ... Read More PubDate: 2021-01-08T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: During the 2016 presidential primary, Donald Trump distinguished himself from his opponents by stepping outside the boundaries of acceptable opinion on national security and foreign policy. “It’s one of the worst decisions in the history of the country,” he said of the Iraq War. “We have totally destabilized the Middle East.” (In typical family-first fashion, he credited the error to George W. Bush “being loyal to the father.”) The other Republican candidates clambered over one another to profess their outrage at Trump’s statement, but as was so often the case, he had read the room better than them. Large numbers of Republican voters had retreated from the confident jingoism of the 2000s into bitter laments for ... Read More PubDate: 2021-01-08T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Rudolph Giuliani conducts a news conference on lawsuits regarding the outcome of the 2020 presidential election on November 19, 2020. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images)During the 2020 election, liberal pundits and politicians repeatedly warned that democracy was “on the line,” “at stake,” “in peril,” and facing “an existential threat.” There was occasion for the hyperbolic language: Donald Trump and his Republican allies orchestrated an unprecedented assault on the integrity of U.S. elections by, to list just a few examples, promulgating ludicrous lies about voter fraud, obstructing early mail-in voting, encouraging vigilante voter intimidation, and constricting access to polls. But critics risk ... Read More PubDate: 2021-01-08T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Since election day, the manic performances by Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and Sidney Powell of the “indigenous American berserk” have surely been keeping Philip Roth in stitches in whatever part of the great beyond he dwells. Meanwhile, the leadership of the American labor movement has been its stolid self.Following the election, Richard Trumka, the president of the AFL-CIO, said that organized labor had done its part to defeat Trump because it “got out the vote.” Because of this election’s unusually high percentage of mail-in votes, exit polling may not be reliable, but it appears to more or less confirm Trumka’s statement: Joe Biden got 56 percent of the union household vote—just a shade below typical for recent ... Read More PubDate: 2021-01-08T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Bernie Sanders rally in Queens on October 19, 2019 (Michael Nigro/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)The American present regularly inspires the feeling that it is totally, horribly new. Just as often, it seems to give evidence that it is just the latest recrudescence of perennial American curses. In fact, our moment is deeply continuous with and shaped by something more specific: the collapse and revival of political possibility in roughly the last thirty years, from the end of the Cold War to today.In those decades, three modes of politics gathered the energies of discontent. All began as rejections of the default mode of those decades: consultant-heavy, marketing-driven, all-tactics politics that assumed ... Read More PubDate: 2021-01-08T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Waiting in line to file for unemployment benefits in Frankfort, Kentucky (Photo by John Sommers II/Getty Images)At the beginning of November, a million Americans filed new unemployment claims within a single week. Over 20 million were already receiving benefits. While the unemployment rate came down to 6.9 percent in October, that figure elides those who’ve dropped out of the labor force altogether. Indeed, many job losses considered “temporary” in the spring have been reclassified as “permanent.” At the time of writing, 13 million Americans stood to lose unemployment benefits they’d been receiving through the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) and the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation programs the ... Read More PubDate: 2021-01-08T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: A composite photograph of South Carolina's majority-black legislature created and circulated by opponents of Reconstruction. One version had the following caption: “Nineteen (19) are tax-payers to an aggregate amount of $146.10, the rest (44) pay no taxes, and the body levies on the white people of the State for $4,000.00.” (Library of Congress)From the Southern strategy of the 1960s to Donald Trump’s refusal to concede the presidential election, it is easy to trace the Republican Party’s decades-long descent into racial authoritarianism. Despite the president’s unhinged response to the election results, the real locus of power is the Senate, where Republican legislators have been striking sober-sounding notes ... Read More PubDate: 2021-01-08T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: President-elect John F. Kennedy with Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. on January 9, 1960 (Bettmann via Getty Images)If war is a force that gives us meaning, as Chris Hedges famously wrote, what purpose remains when the ultimate battle has been won' This question plagued many American intellectuals after the end of the Cold War, when the United States assumed an unrivaled geopolitical position.For some who had been in the ideological trenches far too long, it was impossible to let go. They were skeptical of the notion that challenges to the United States could be resolved through technocratic adjustments, and found it hard to believe that all would now be safe and well. For three decades, these figures have remained ready ... Read More PubDate: 2021-01-08T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: “The State cannot cease to be a class State so long as its public finances remain class-bound at every level,” declared Rudolf Goldscheid, an Austrian novelist, economist, and socialist, in his 1925 essay “A Sociological Approach to Problems of Public Finance.” For Goldscheid, this binding took the form of the state’s fiscal dependence on taxes drawn from the incomes and profits of the wealthy. While liberals and social democrats waxed rhapsodic over the social programs that could be funded via progressive taxation, Goldscheid cautioned that this arrangement provided their opponents with the fiscal leverage needed to veto those very policies.Goldscheid’s critique of what he called the “Tax State” has had a recent ... Read More PubDate: 2021-01-08T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Container ships anchored in San Francisco Bay waiting for a berth at the Port of Oakland terminals (Michael Macor/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)A few years before the global financial crisis of 2008, future Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke popularized the notion that the world was divided into trade surplus countries like China and trade deficit countries like the United States. Echoing John Maynard Keynes’s trade destabilization theory, Bernanke argued that this imbalance was a significant cause of global instability. But whereas Keynes saw instability as a normal product of global trade, the effects of which would be mitigated by international financial agreements putting limits on surpluses and ... Read More PubDate: 2021-01-08T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The gilets jaunes protests haunt global climate politics. The weeks of demonstrations and clashes with police that began in France in November 2018 were triggered by the announcement of steep increases in gas prices, at a time when President Emmanuel Macron’s government was slashing taxes on wealth. It was an egregious political misstep, which has put the question of “just transition” at the top of the climate agenda. If a rapid energy transition is to be possible in affluent but highly unequal democracies, the gilets jaunes protesters served notice that distributional questions could not be ignored.The protests were all the more striking because environmental equity had been a hot topic in France from the moment ... Read More PubDate: 2021-01-08T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: When a young Chuck Schumer arrived at Harvard in 1967 as a freshman, he joined the great political stirring of those years— who could resist it' But Abbie Hoffman he was not. “I was faced with what Alexander Hamilton called mobocracy,” Schumer recalled in his coauthored 2007 book Positively American. He became a College Democrat, canvassed for Eugene McCarthy, and eschewed the radicals. Campus members of the New Left’s Progressive Labor faction horrified him, and he felt “sickened” seeing protesters scream at cops. “The police weren’t pigs. They were the people I’d grown up with. They were my neighbors. My friends. They were the Baileys [imaginary Irish-American Long Islanders with whom Schumer consults on ... Read More PubDate: 2021-01-08T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In a letter written to W.E.B. Du Bois in 1946, B.R. Ambedkar, the Dalit scholar, activist, and statesman, expressed a keen interest in the plight of black Americans. “I have been a student of the Negro problem and have read your writings throughout,” he wrote. “There is so much similarity between the position of the Untouchables in India and of the position of the Negroes in America that the study of the latter is not only natural but necessary.” This was not empty sentiment. At roughly the same time that he wrote to Du Bois, Ambedkar was in the process of outlining several constitutional provisions on behalf of his political party, the All-India Scheduled Castes Federation. That document, which contained language ... Read More PubDate: 2021-01-08T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In Hong Kong in Revolt, labor organizer Au Loong-Yu analyzes the protests that rocked the city in 2019. The participants were pushing back against the politically motivated disqualification of pro-democracy legislators, the imprisonment of non-violent activists on trumped-up charges, and other oppressive moves by the Hong Kong authorities, who represent local moneyed interests and take their cues from Beijing leaders who increasingly act like heads of an empire. Au sees both anti-capitalist and anti-colonial dimensions to the 2019 protests, although he argues that activists should have been less focused on what sets Hong Kong residents apart from those living in mainland urban centers and more interested in using ... Read More PubDate: 2021-01-08T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesWe are in the midst of the first service-sector-led recession in U.S. history, a symptom of both the changing shape of the economy and of the nature of the coronavirus itself. The impact of this downturn has been sharply unequal. Those at the top have mostly recovered, while those at the bottom struggle in depression-like conditions that will only worsen as state and federal aid continues to stall. New unemployment is concentrated in low-paid jobs, which are overwhelmingly held by women and people of color.Because of these facts, you have to dig below the official numbers to grasp the economic devastation. In November the official unemployment rate was 6.7 percent, or 10.7 million ... Read More PubDate: 2021-01-08T00:00:00-05:00
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