newrepublic--2020-04-28--How Democrats Let the Right Win on Immigration

The epicenter of the nativist revolt that would subsequently consume the Republican Party and drag the Democrats rightward on immigration was California in the 1990s .
During his first insurgent bid for the Republican presidential primary , Pat Buchanan capitalized on claims that thousands of undocumented immigrants were arrested during the 1992 Los Angeles riots ( a figure publicized by then Attorney General William Barr ) .
“ Foreigners are coming into this country illegally and helping to burn down one of the greatest cities in America , ” Buchanan told reporters .
“ If I were President , I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Engineers build a double-barrier fence that would keep out 95 per cent of the illegal traffic .
I think it can be done.
” Similarly , the president of the Tanton organization Federation for American Immigration Reform ( FAIR ) wrote a letter to the California congressional delegation urging them to consider “ the role of illegal immigration in helping to deliver America ’ s second-largest city to the furnace of anarchy.
” Denvir describes the “ kaleidoscopic dynamic of immigrant threat and white victimhood ” behind the push several years later @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to prevent undocumented immigrants from accessing non-emergency health care , social services , and public schools .
The ballot measure was co-sponsored by the fanatical Barbara Coe , a one-time police analyst who was fired for using city police resources for her political crusade .
Coe said she was inspired to take action following a visit to a social service office with a disabled war veteran where undocumented immigrants allegedly received benefits that her friend did not .
Like Buchanan and FAIR , Coe tied immigration directly to crime .
“ You get @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , out of our schools , and you will reduce the violence , ” Coe told a reporter in 1994 .
“ They shoot , they beat , they stab and they spread their drugs around in our school system .
And we ’ re paying them to do it.
” The cause was picked up and amplified by Republican Governor Pete Wilson seeking his re-election , and in November 1994 , voters approved Proposition 187 by a nearly 18 point margin and Wilson won .
By the late 90s the law was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ would go on to speak at white supremacist events including a rally where former Klan members burned the Mexican and United Nations flags .
Denvir locates the Prop 187 fight as the beginning of the point of no return for the Republican Party and the start of the Democratic Party ’ s willingness to work on the terms set by nativists .
Denvir notes that during the Prop 187 debate Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein not only accepted the premise that undocumented immigrants were to blame for the state ’ s poor economy but @ @ @ @ @ @ @ afraid of speaking out on the topic .
By 1996 ( when Buchanan made another run giving life to nativists ) the Clinton administration was burnishing its tough-on-immigration credentials by sending armed forces to the border .
“ After years of neglect , we are finally restoring the rule of law , locking down the Southwest border , ” then–aide to the president Rahm Emanuel told the New York Times .
The demonization of “ illegal immigrants ” in order to protect legal immigration became the “ template for mainstream immigration politics ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 under President Bill Clinton .
This law joined the wars on immigrants and crime , and greatly and retroactively expanded the category of crimes that could lead to deportation , while also making deportation easier .
While the IIRIRA was originally a Republican bill , Clinton and the New Democrats were eager to co-opt the right ’ s message .
“ By incorporating the opposition ’ s rhetoric , you remove their policy claims , ” wrote Emanuel in a memo to the president , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and should “ claim and achieve record deportations of criminal aliens .
”

The epicenter of the nativist revolt that would subsequently consume the Republican Party and drag the Democrats rightward on immigration was California in the 1990s. During his first insurgent bid for the Republican presidential primary, Pat Buchanan capitalized on claims that thousands of undocumented immigrants were arrested during the 1992 Los Angeles riots (a figure publicized by then–Attorney General William Barr). “Foreigners are coming into this country illegally and helping to burn down one of the greatest cities in America,” Buchanan told reporters. “If I were President, I would have the (Army) Corps of Engineers build a double-barrier fence that would keep out 95 per cent of the illegal traffic. I think it can be done.” Similarly, the president of the Tanton organization Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, wrote a letter to the California congressional delegation urging it to consider “the role of illegal immigration in helping to deliver America’s second-largest city to the furnace of anarchy.”
Denvir describes the “kaleidoscopic dynamic of immigrant threat and white victimhood” behind the push several years later for California Proposition 187, which sought to prevent undocumented immigrants from accessing nonemergency health care, social services, and public schools. The ballot measure was co-sponsored by the fanatical Barbara Coe, a onetime police analyst who was fired for using city police resources for her political crusade. Coe said she was inspired to take action following a visit to a social service office with a disabled war veteran where undocumented immigrants allegedly received benefits that her friend did not. Like Buchanan and FAIR, Coe tied immigration directly to crime. “You get illegal alien children, Third World children, out of our schools, and you will reduce the violence,” Coe told a reporter in 1994. “They shoot, they beat, they stab, and they spread their drugs around in our school system. And we’re paying them to do it.” The cause was picked up and amplified by Republican Governor Pete Wilson seeking his reelection, and in November 1994, voters approved Proposition 187 by a nearly 18-point margin, and Wilson won. By the late ’90s, the law was gutted by federal courts, while Coe would go on to speak at white supremacist events, including a rally where former Klan members burned the Mexican and United Nations flags.
Denvir locates the Prop 187 fight as the beginning of the point of no return for the Republican Party and the start of the Democratic Party’s willingness to work on the terms set by nativists. Denvir notes that during the Prop 187 debate, Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein not only accepted the premise that undocumented immigrants were to blame for the state’s poor economy but also blamed political correctness for making others afraid of speaking out on the topic. By 1996 (when Buchanan made another run, giving life to nativists), the Clinton administration was burnishing its tough-on-immigration credentials by sending armed forces to the border. “After years of neglect, we are finally restoring the rule of law, locking down the Southwest border,” then–aide to the president Rahm Emanuel told The New York Times.


newrepublic--2020-04-28--From Black Power to Black Establishment

From Black Power to Black Establishment

June 16 , 1966 , isn ’ t on the commemorative calendar in black American politics , but it probably should be .
On that date , Willie Ricks , a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ( SNCC ) field secretary , and Stokely Carmichael , SNCC ’ s new national chair , electrified the crowd in Greenwood , Mississippi , on the March Against Fear from Memphis to Jackson , Mississippi , when they began chanting “ Black Power !
Black Power !
” The chant—and Carmichael ’ s speech before the gathering—sent shock waves through the news cycle .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ ; I was then a 19-year-old college student and felt a powerful rush from two snippets of the chant I heard in the press coverage of the moment when Black Power was born , as both a slogan and a movement .
It seemed to offer , or augur , an exciting new brand of radicalism , and revolutionary confrontation , in the movement ’ s next phase .
For all that initial excitement , however , Black Power was always a concept in search of its object .
It condensed a variety @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and concrete , and suggested , in adumbrated form , a path toward addressing them .
So the following year , when Carmichael and political scientist Charles V. Hamilton published the nascent movement ’ s much-anticipated manifesto , Black Power : The Politics of Liberation in America , the effort to tease out an agenda for Black Power was likely to disappoint nearly every interested party .
But the book was also underwhelming in a way that might have been instructive .
Even though it was sprinkled with radical-sounding references to domestic colonialism @ @ @ @ @ @ @ depth and overwhelming extent of American racism , the book alighted on a surprisingly conventional position .
At bottom , it advanced , under a radical nameplate , the familiar pursuit of ethnic interest-group politics , of the sort that had shaped pluralist debate over a supposed politics of assimilation since Horace Kallen invented cultural pluralism in the early twentieth century .
“ Black Power … is a call for black people in this country to unite , to recognize their heritage , to build a sense of community , ” the authors @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for black people to begin to define their own goals , to lead their own organizations and to support those organizations.
” But when they laid out the political strategy that followed from this declaration , it was little more than an affirmation of basic ethnic pluralism— “ Traditionally , each new ethnic group in this society has found the route to social and political viability through the organization of its own institutions with which to represent its needs within the larger society… .
Italians vote for Rubino over O ’ Brien ; @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” —jazzed up with a race-reductionist account of the history and sources of black inequality .
And their brief against American racism centered mostly on the psychological damage that they maintained it perpetrated on black people .
In other words , Carmichael and Hamilton based their purportedly revolutionary Black Power program on the two most problematic—historically inaccurate , racialist , and fundamentally conservative—frameworks that postwar American scholars and policymakers had adopted for interpreting inequality : ethnic succession theory and , with respect to blacks in particular , historian Daryl Michael Scott ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ discussion of the role of political economy in favor of airy , group-based claims about culture as the basis for economic mobility and inequality in American life .
The outlook conveyed in the particulars of the Black Power program stems in no small part from the political conditions that first gave rise to the movement .
Black Power emerged at the moment when the great civil rights victories had been won and the institutional spine of the white supremacist regime had been broken .
At that juncture , the broad movement for social @ @ @ @ @ @ @ best to build upon these foundational victories .
In early 1965 , longtime labor and civil rights activist Bayard Rustin laid out one vision .
He questioned whether it made sense to continue describing the struggle for black equality as “ the civil rights movement ” in light of its recent landmark achievements .
What had to happen after the successful battle for formal equality under the law , Rustin argued , was a move “ beyond race relations to economic relations.
” Progress toward substantive quality couldn ’ t happen , he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ radical programs for full employment , abolition of slums , the reconstruction of our educational system , new definitions of work and leisure .
Adding up the cost of such programs , we can only conclude that we are talking about a refashioning of our political economy .
”

In other words, Carmichael and Hamilton based their purportedly revolutionary Black Power program on the two most problematic—historically inaccurate, racialist, and fundamentally conservative—frameworks that postwar American scholars and policymakers had adopted for interpreting inequality: ethnic succession theory and, with respect to blacks in particular, historian Daryl Michael Scott’s “damage thesis.” Both frameworks eschewed discussion of the role of political economy in favor of airy, group-based claims about culture as the basis for economic mobility and inequality in American life. The outlook conveyed in the particulars of the Black Power program stems in no small part from the political conditions that first gave rise to the movement. Black Power emerged at the moment when the great civil rights victories had been won and the institutional spine of the white supremacist regime had been broken. At that juncture, the broad movement for social justice launched a crucial debate over how best to build upon these foundational victories. In early 1965, longtime labor and civil rights activist Bayard Rustin laid out one vision. He questioned whether it made sense to continue describing the struggle for black equality as “the civil rights movement” in light of its recent landmark achievements. What had to happen after the successful battle for formal equality under the law, Rustin argued, was a move “beyond race relations to economic relations.” Progress toward substantive quality couldn’t happen, he insisted, “in the absence of radical programs for full employment, abolition of slums, the reconstruction of our educational system, new definitions of work and leisure. Adding up the cost of such programs, we can only conclude that we are talking about a refashioning of our political economy.”
Just three months after the movement launched, Rustin directly criticized the priorities of Black Power. He flatly debunked the ethnic group succession narrative as a just-so story that had no bearing on black experience or, for that matter, any other in the United States. He also stressed that the union movement and New Deal redistributive policies had been the main engines of upward mobility for all Americans, black as well as white. He invoked the $100 billion program that A. Philip Randolph was about to publish in A “Freedom Budget” for All Americans. This approach would be “aimed at the reconstruction of American society in the interests of greater social justice,” Rustin argued—and then charged that “the advocates of ‘black power’ have no such programs in mind; what they are in fact arguing for (perhaps unconsciously) is the creation of a new black establishment.”


newrepublic--2020-04-28--How Normal People Captures a Hyper-Aware Romance

In the three years since her first novel was published , the 29-year-old Irish writer Sally Rooney has been called variously “ the Jane Austen of the precariat , ” “ Salinger for the Snapchat generation , ” the author of “ an Instagram status symbol.
” These effusions tend to emphasize that she is young , she understands being online , and she can write extremely well about being young and understanding being online .
As critics before me have noted , there is something diminishing in this assessment , an insinuation that because Rooney is not yet 30 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ her prowess beyond sentence-level mastery ; that she “ gets the internet ” and therefore has unlocked some hidden level of literary fame .
Rooney ’ s books are not really about email or social media , or anything so blatant as that .
What she evokes is a life in which those things are so commonplace that no one really talks about them anymore .
Her books—2017 ’ s Conversations With Friends , followed by 2019 ’ s Normal People—are more than anything about forging relationships in a world full of mediations @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not only hyperaware of your own responses to stimuli but immediately distrustful of them , anticipating the world ’ s reactions almost at the same time that you metabolize your own .
Her characters are overanalytical but succinct , able to condense an entire evening ’ s worth of emotional overload into a devastating text message .
They are also deeply horny , being mostly teenagers and young college students , thrust into a bleak and terrifying world but still determined to find affection there .
The opening of Normal People conveys the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ project .
Connell , a brawny , working-class high school senior living in the fictional town of Carricklea in Ireland , shows up after school at the tony home of Marianne , where his mother works as a housekeeper .
Connell is simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by Marianne , a mousy classmate who is hated by everyone at school , not because she is rich but because she is the loner intellectual , defiantly uninterested in the typical high school pecking order .
He stares at her as she licks a spoon @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and he thinks about the way his popular , athletic friends see her : She wears ugly thick-soled flat shoes and doesn ’ t put makeup on her face .
People have said she doesn ’ t shave her legs or anything .
Connell once heard that she spilled chocolate ice cream on herself in the school lunchroom , and she went to the girls ’ bathrooms and took her blouse off to wash it in the sink .
That ’ s a popular story about her , everyone has heard it .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ He dreads being left alone with her like this , ” Rooney writes , “ but he also finds himself fantasizing about things he could say to impress her.
” He finds himself in a maelstrom of peer pressure and reputation management , anticipating the potential outcomes of interacting with Marianne .
He knows how things spread , how rumors start .
But he is also beginning to attune himself to his own desires and trying to untangle them from the outside world .

Hulu’s adaptation of Normal People, one quickly learns, is very quiet television. It begins with a slow shot of Marianne (Daisy Edgar-Jones) walking through the halls of her high school, her long French braid behind her. She passes Connell (Paul Mescal) in the hall and briefly meets his eye. In the next scene, she stares silently out of the window during class, and her teacher chastises her for daydreaming. “I wasn’t aware my eyeline fell under the jurisdiction of school rules,” she says. When the teacher presses her, she tells him not to kid himself: “I have nothing to learn from you.” The retort deepens her reputation as a pariah and a snob, unable and unwilling to play by the same rules as her classmates. As such, she has to sit and stew, marinating in her own self-righteousness.
Only Connell seems to see this act as bold. The attraction between them is clear, and clearly confusing for both. For Connell, being with Marianne would be (at least in his perception) social suicide, but is thrilling in its transgressiveness. For Marianne, being with Connell would be a way to explore her sexuality, a distraction from her provincial boredom. She’s wealthy, but far from untroubled: Her mother, an uptight executive—complete with statement jewelry, dark suits, and taut, boardroom-appropriate hair—more or less ignores her except to make cruel jabs at her looks; her older brother is abusive, as was her late father. Connell is equally lonely, a jock who secretly prefers to read novels. With Marianne, Connell can be smart. With Connell, Marianne can feel desired. And so, at the end of the first episode, they strike a strange deal: They will begin a romance, but keep it entirely secret.
If this sounds like a wholly unsatisfying arrangement, well, that’s exactly what it turns out to be. Marianne grows weary of hiding and being snubbed. When Connell invites a more popular girl to “The Debs,” the Irish version of prom, despite the fact that he is sleeping with Marianne most afternoons, she hits a breaking point. As Marianne, Edgar-Jones holds herself at a stern remove, even from the camera; she often sits in profile, or with her back facing the frame. The moment Marianne stands up for herself, somewhere around episode three, is not loud or full of bombast. She simply stops replying to Connell’s texts, and that is that.


newrepublic--2020-04-28--Reagan, Gay Porn, and Family Secrets Star in Circus of Books

Some time in the mid-1980s , a kid named Micah Mason swiped a dirty VHS tape from the back seat of his parents ’ car .
He waited months to watch it in secret , only to find , at the fatal moment , that he ’ d stolen a Betamax—the wrong format .
One ’ s sex-starved adolescent years are made of such moments , when the longed-for apotheosis doesn ’ t happen .
Or at least they used to be , before the internet met all our needs so satisfactorily .
Circus of Books is a new Netflix @ @ @ @ @ @ @ time have destroyed .
That Beta tape ended up in his mom ’ s car in the ’ 80s because Micah ’ s family in fact owned a small franchise of bookstores-cum-hard-core-gay-sex-shops across Los Angeles .
If their kid had been a customer , his parents could have gotten him anything he wanted : They stocked all kinds of porn at the store , as well as magazines on topics from woodwork to literature .
“ The New York Review of Books never sold very well , ” Karen Mason recalls .
“ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , his brother , Joshua , and his sister , Rachel , knew nothing about their parents ’ enterprise .
To them , and to their social milieu , Karen and Barry Mason were a conventional , middle-class Jewish couple .
Rachel , the rebellious child who thought her parents were squares , grew up to be a filmmaker , and Circus of Books is her documentary .
At once intimate and ambitious , the film is as much an unraveling of family secrets as it is an excavation into forgotten seams of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Larry Flynt and the legendary retired porn star Jeff Stryker , who both affectionately reflect on doing business with her parents in the ’ 80s .
The Masons got into the adult magazine game in the late 1970s , after responding to one of Flynt ’ s newspaper ads looking for distributors .
In 1982 they expanded into bricks and mortar , when they took over a preexisting store named Books Circus .
Barry chopped the sign in half , switched it around , and only paid for the “ of .
”

Some time in the mid-1980s, a kid named Micah Mason swiped a dirty VHS tape from the back seat of his parents’ car. He waited months to watch it in secret, only to find, at the fatal moment, that he’d stolen a Betamax—the wrong format. One’s sex-starved adolescent years are made of such moments, when the longed-for apotheosis doesn’t happen. Or at least they used to be, before the internet met all our needs so satisfactorily.
Circus of Books is a new Netflix documentary celebrating things that the internet and time have destroyed. That Beta tape ended up in his mom’s car in the ’80s because Micah’s family in fact owned a small franchise of bookstores-cum-hard-core-gay-sex-shops across Los Angeles. If their kid had been a customer, his parents could have gotten him anything he wanted: They stocked all kinds of porn at the store, as well as magazines on topics from woodwork to literature. “The New York Review of Books never sold very well,” Karen Mason recalls. “What sold well was Hustler.”


newrepublic--2020-04-28--A Woman’s Worth in a Pandemic

A Woman’s Worth in a Pandemic

At recent protests demanding that states drop stay-home orders and other coronavirus prevention measures , events engineered for maximum viral potential on social media , a kind of paean to personal care emerged as a meme : Government overreach had denied protesters a haircut .
Or getting their roots done , as one woman told reporters .
These women had something like a collective demand , even if made in very bad faith : to be served .
The car-ins at which these women demonstrated , dubbed Operation Gridlock , were coordinated by a family of right-wing “ scammers , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos .
They were de facto Trump rallies , where you could see women with American flags on their signs hanging out of their car windows to scream abuse at nurses .
Alongside the more readily understood racial violence implied by Confederate flags and militia groups , these protests offered a more feminine , folksy face , doing what such faces long have in the service of white male dominion : looking like a victim .
The women at these protests don ’ t just want a haircut ; @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their hair to get back to work .
Doing her job may put her at risk of contracting a lethal virus , and not doing it may mean she can ’ t pay the rent—but then again , the work was never all that secure .
Whether intended or not , the protests have made service work ’ s precarious , feminine face more impossible to ignore , as the virus itself has .
A New York Times analysis of census data and federal guidelines on “ essential work ” found that one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this country “ has been designated as essential.
” Women of color were more likely to be doing these jobs than anyone else , the same analysis found .
In this way , the pandemic is a “ lightning flash , ” as Nancy Fraser , professor of philosophy and politics at the New School for Social Research and co-author of Feminism for the 99 % : A Manifesto , put it in an interview with Clio Chang at Vice , “ like coronavirus lights up the skies.
” Much of what ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ now is what socialist feminists have long termed social reproduction .
In health care , in childcare , in education , in eldercare , and domestic work , social reproduction is the work of “ life-making , ” Tithi Bhattacharya , professor of history and the director of global studies at Purdue University and also a co-author of Feminism for the 99 % , told Sarah Jaffe at Dissent .
This work is undervalued because mostly women do it , and it ’ s mostly women who do it because it ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Women also devalue it , even in a pandemic .

Social reproduction, even if it’s made invisible or systematically excluded from the formal labor market, is the work that makes all work possible. This was one of the major insights of the Wages for Housework campaign, formed in 1972 by the International Feminist Collective—including Selma James and Silvia Federici—whose work reemerged in the years after the last major global financial crisis and again in our current crisis. The campaign and its vision wasn’t only about housework. James recounted, this March, that she wrote six original demands: “the right to work less; the right to have or not to have children (rather than just abortion); equal pay for all; free community-controlled nurseries and childcare (rather than 24/7 state childcare); an end to price rises; and the right to a guaranteed income, for women and men, and to wages for housework.”
These demands only feel more necessary in a crisis, and the crisis has certainly been made worse in the United States because these demands remain unrealized. For the women whose living remains dependent on showing up to perform this kind of intimate work for others, they could more easily stay home. They would not have to choose between safety and income. Even now, without such protections in place, those women workers are likely among those still staying home. People who are most burdened economically by the quarantine, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll released last week, support stay-at-home orders as much as those who were mostly unaffected.
The haircut demand, however in bad faith it has been made, hinges on something else: not whether that work is essential, but who gets to demand someone else’s work, and at what cost to those workers. Tressie McMillan Cottom, associate professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University and the author of Thick, speaks to the women workers of the hustle economy, work that has long sustained women while also at times being seen as frivolous, or vain, or unnecessary. “On the one hand, women workers are concentrated in jobs deemed essential (e.g., health care and retail),” she writes. “On the other hand, the hustles that many women rely on for economic survival are deemed non-essential (e.g., beauty services, personal care work).” The coronavirus weakened the hustle economy—where women were already working with fewer protections than those in traditionally waged work, as McMillan Cottom also points out. Beauty, massage, nail care, barre classes: The question isn’t who deserves these services in a pandemic but how to care for the workers who provide these services, who are no less owed safety and a living.


newrepublic--2020-04-28--Chuck Schumer Is Allergic to Politics

Chuck Schumer Is Allergic to Politics

The law would , in effect , force the president to operate under the same constraints that Democrats impose on themselves .
As last year came to an end , I recalled the story of Barack Obama ’ s invisible tax cut .
Early in his first term , Democrats passed one of the broadest tax cuts in years , cutting payroll taxes for the overwhelming majority of working Americans .
They also intentionally kept this a secret , because the administration ’ s economists told them that would be better—savvier—than simply cutting everyone a check , as George W. @ @ @ @ @ @ @ earlier .
The end result was that most people who received a tax cut didn ’ t know they had received one and didn ’ t credit Barack Obama and the Democratic Party for giving it to them .
In October 2010 , The New York Times reported that “ fewer than one in 10 respondents knew that the Obama administration had lowered taxes for most Americans.
” This was , strictly from an economic policy perspective , an overwhelming success .
And we all remember how much that success was rewarded the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ handed a crushing defeat in the 2010 midterms .
That brings us to Senator Schumer ’ s proposal .
Its underlying logic seems to be that since it ’ s not fair that Republicans get to ignore the terrible advice of behavioral economists , the very act of taking credit for good things should be outlawed .
Democrats like Schumer believe that attempting to make political hay out of doing something that benefits a lot of people is a form of cheating .
It ’ s a violation of the unwritten rules of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ things and then attach your name to those things .
But politicians only come to see this as “ playing dirty ” if they spend a lot of time explaining why they can ’ t do things their base actually wants .

The end result was that most people who received a tax cut didn’t know they had received one and didn’t credit Barack Obama and the Democratic Party for giving it to them. In October 2010, The New York Times reported that “fewer than one in 10 respondents knew that the Obama administration had lowered taxes for most Americans.” This was, strictly from an economic policy perspective, an overwhelming success. And we all remember how much that success was rewarded the following month, when the Democrats were handed a crushing defeat in the 2010 midterms.
That brings us to Senator Schumer’s proposal. Its underlying logic seems to be that since it’s not fair that Republicans get to ignore the terrible advice of behavioral economists, the very act of taking credit for good things should be outlawed.
Democrats like Schumer believe that attempting to make political hay out of doing something that benefits a lot of people is a form of cheating. It’s a violation of the unwritten rules of the game to do beneficial and popular things and then attach your name to those things. But politicians only come to see this as “playing dirty” if they spend a lot of time explaining why they can’t do things their base actually wants.


newrepublic--2020-04-28--The Supreme Court Eyes an Escape Hatch From Trump’s Corruption

The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments next month in perhaps its highest-profile set of cases this term : whether the House Judiciary Committee and Manhattan ’ s district attorney can lawfully subpoena President Donald Trump ’ s financial records .
The two cases , Trump v. Mazars and Trump v. Vance , could be a watershed moment for how the executive branch—and whosoever oversees it—defends itself against future scrutiny from congressional committees and state grand juries alike .
Some of the justices , however , may be looking for a way out .
In its Monday batch of orders @ @ @ @ @ @ @ both cases to file supplemental briefs “ addressing whether the political question doctrine or related justiciability principles bear on the Court ’ s adjudication of these cases.
” The request came without prompting from any of the litigants .
It suggests that some of the justices might be willing to rule that the Supreme Court should let the dispute be resolved by the elected branches of government instead .
Such an outcome may bode poorly for Trump himself .
House lawmakers and the Manhattan district attorney ’ s office subpoenaed records from multiple @ @ @ @ @ @ @ direct control , including Deutsche Bank , with which he has a long-standing financial relationship , and Mazars , which provides accounting services for the Trump Organization .
They and other third parties may be willing to comply with subpoenas even without judicial intervention .
At the same time , finding that congressional subpoenas are nonjusticiable would be a major long-term boon for future presidents who might chafe at oversight .
The bland-sounding political question doctrine cuts to the core of the federal judiciary ’ s power : whether it can hear ( @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The Constitution outlines certain types of cases that the federal courts must ( or must not ) hear ; it also gives Congress the power to define what categories of cases the courts can ( or can not ) hear .
When the Supreme Court invokes the political question doctrine , however , the court itself decides what types of cases it should ( or should not ) hear—or , in the court ’ s parlance , whether a matter is justiciable or nonjusticiable .

Not everything that falls under the doctrine is remarkable or surprising. The courts are rarely eager to second-guess the president on military or foreign policy matters, for instance, and the Supreme Court has resisted overstepping Congress when it comes to ratifying constitutional amendments or holding impeachment trials. But some abstentions can be controversial. The justices generally refused to involve themselves with legislative redistricting until the 1963 decision in Baker v. Carr, one of the most consequential rulings of the Warren court era. Last year, a sharply divided court ruled in Rucho v. Common Cause that federal courts could not hear challenges to partisan gerrymandering because they fell “outside the courts’ competence and therefore beyond the courts’ jurisdiction.”
It’s not clear why the justices asked for supplemental briefs on the matter in this case. None of the parties, including Trump himself or the Justice Department, had suggested that the dispute might be nonjusticiable in their briefs for the court. The only assertion before it, instead, came from a friend-of-the-court brief filed by the Eagle Forum Education and Legal Defense Fund, which is part of the political organization founded by conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly. Its brief largely adopts Trump’s framing of the subpoenas, noting that the “opposition political party” has “pursued him with all imaginable means short of formally declaring war.”
In its filing, Eagle Forum focused less on the legal and constitutional questions involved than on securing its preferred outcome, which is one that would be politically beneficial to the president. “Given the divisive nature of the Committees’ vendettas against President Trump, amicus EFELDF respectfully submits that a unanimous decision on a narrow procedural ground would be better for the Nation than a close decision on substantive authority,” the organization told the court. While this approach isn’t unheard of among groups that file friend-of-the-court briefs in major cases, the Eagle Forum is remarkably free of guile or subtlety about it.


newrepublic--2020-04-29--There Is No Hiding Trump

There Is No Hiding Trump

Over the weekend , Donald Trump ’ s critics and his advisers were , possibly for the first time , on the same page : The president ’ s daily coronavirus briefings , which stretch on longer than Grateful Dead sets , were causing more harm than good .
All it took for everyone to reach that conclusion was the president suggesting , in front of millions of viewers , that injecting bleach could cure Covid-19 .
These briefings were both public health and political disasters , damaging the president ’ s already thin credibility and harming his reelection chances @ @ @ @ @ @ @ up with new briefings , now with reduced Trump .
On Sunday , officials told Axios ’ s Jonathan Swan that the briefings would transition away from discussions of public health and instead highlight economic “ success stories.
” New White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany teased that the briefings might not always feature the president , though they would always “ showcase ” his “ great entrepreneurship.
” Trump appeared to have finally learned a lesson that had eluded him for more than seven decades : More is not always better .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ t actually with the program .
On Monday , he appeared in the Rose Garden , as opposed to the White House Press Room .
Otherwise , it was the same old Trump , this time denying he had suggested administering bleach with an “ injection inside .
”

But the president was actually digging in. He spent Sunday tweeting a barrage of lies, claiming that he was being “sarcastic” when he suggested that scientists test the efficacy of injecting disinfectant and sunlight. He then sent a succession of tweets admonishing journalists for seeking a prize that doesn’t exist (the “Noble Prize” in journalism), then claimed the gaffe was a punning critique. On a day when the White House was trying to reset, the chyrons and headlines were, once again, about the president doing something idiotic.
It was abundantly clear that it just wasn’t possible to get Trump out of his own way. It’s a whack-a-mole problem. Even if Trump sidelines himself, he appears somewhere else, spouting the same paranoid, moronic near-gibberish that he would if he were “briefing” reporters. It took days for his advisers to convince Trump to change his approach, and the returns were marginal. Trump’s briefing on Monday was, by his standards, only slightly unhinged; there is every indication that he will be foaming at the mouth within a day or two.
The idea that Trump can be somehow hidden from the public is foolish. There is no hiding Trump. “He is the only one who thinks he can do his message the best, and that’s just the reality,” former adviser Sam Nunberg told Politico. “That’s how he works.” The White House can try to marginalize him, but he’ll always find a way to grab a megaphone.


newrepublic--2020-04-29--Confessions of a PPE Smuggler

Confessions of a PPE Smuggler

Behind the wheel of my duct-taped generation two Prius , navigating the apocalyptic streets spangled with the bouncing white dots of the occasional joggers ’ or delivery workers ’ masks , I got on the highway and sped to Queens and Manhattan through the night .
It seemed darker than normal somehow because of all the missing signs of life—traffic , pedestrians , and bicyclists—that usually filled the frame of my windshield .
I stopped outside the hospital where Irfan worked the night shifts .
In my rearview mirror , I saw the rotating glass doors of the hospital spit @ @ @ @ @ @ @ idled at the curb .
We greeted one another through an open window , our faces obscured by clammy masks , as I popped the trunk where his stash was waiting .
In addition to the shields I had ordered , donors threw in goggles , gloves , gowns , masks , and disinfectant wipes .
They sat in bags , waiting for Irfan to smuggle them into his unit for distribution to his critical care staff .
I made him promise that he would actually wear the face shields we had gotten @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to the other nurses and physicians in the ICU .
As I drove all over the city , making these pickups and drop-offs , it started to feel like I was engaged in illicit activity , like I was a Triad courier moving contraband .
Dropping the masks off directly to Irfan at his hospitals made him complicit in this collective unreality .
The truth was far bleaker : I was foraging piecemeal supplies from individuals who risked contagion by going mask-less because they were horrified by the headlines : “ ‘ We @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Nurses Demand Protective Gear After Their Colleagues Succumb To COVID-19.
” Private citizens function as a de facto government to fill in the supply gap ; the physicians who use black market PPE must hide this fact from hospitals , which seem more concerned with bad optics than the safety of human lives .
Alexander Nagel , who had asked his friends to contribute to our shield fund , later thanked me on the phone for allowing him and his friends the opportunity to help , to be able to do something for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ risking their lives not only to be abandoned but also humiliated and punished by the authorities .

“We can’t mutual-aid our way out of systemic failure,” Simon-Alexander said in an NPR piece on the U.S. crowdsourcing of PPE. Responding to this immediate need, she co-founded Mask Crusaders, a platform for essential workers to find PPE listed by donors. She amplified my call for materials and volunteers. Soon, more than 40 people had signed up to make face shields. They had to wait: No one had materials. Plastic was scarce, and shipments from manufacturers in China were delayed, if not canceled altogether.
In my call for help, I had also given friends the option to donate money for purchasing ready-made face shields. The effort quickly yielded results. A designer, Mary Ping, and artist, Oren Pinhassi, each ordered large quantities of shields to be delivered directly to Irfan’s apartment from a warehouse in New York. My phone kept chirping—You’ve got money—as people sent cash donations to my various accounts. My friends James Yeh and Adam Kleinman, both writers, forwarded my call to their contacts. Anne Wyman, a friend of Yeh’s, stepped up to order a large shipment of shields directly from a manufacturer in California. Professor Alexander Nagel solicited donations from his friends. In five days, we raised nearly $6,500, all without a social media or crowdfunding platform, and purchased over 1,000 face shields.
When the shields I ordered arrived, there was only one small box, busted at the seams. I tore it open and texted Simon-Alexander: “Got the first shipment of shields. They’re not assembled. FML.” She quickly reminded me that over 40 volunteers had signed up to make shields through Mask Crusaders. Two volunteers in Brooklyn, Justin Hinh and Corinne Blalock, split the shield assembly and rushed to finish the task that weekend. I was contacted by two other shieldmakers who had materials on hand. Suetwan Chan produced 60 and mailed them to me from Utah, where she lives. Seldon Yuan made 50 using clear plastic from a disused artwork, with elastic that I bought from a fabric store in Midtown that was open for curbside pickup, which I delivered to his studio in Bushwick.


newrepublic--2020-04-29--Afghanistan
May Soon Have Peace. And the Cost Is Democracy.

As the two rivals dig in their heels , dormant threats are poised to rise anew .
Agitators on either side of the rift “ were talking to each other not long ago with guns , ” Fazel Fazly , President Ghani ’ s chief advisor , told me .
During the Afghan civil war from 1992 to 1996 , mujahideen armies waged such fierce and destructive assaults on one another that the rise of the Taliban was initially welcomed as a relief from the carnage .
During that time , the offending warlords convened “ five major peace talks @ @ @ @ @ @ @ came back to Kabul and initiated a bloodshed , ” Fazly said .
The animosity ran too deep ; alliances were built and broken within days .
Yet in the wake of 9/11 , many of these same rivals came together to establish the post-Taliban state , which has tentatively survived to present day .
A key to its cohesion has been the abiding presence of a strong guarantor—the coalition of U.S. and international troops—able to compel adherence to shared terms .
The one big change , Fazly said , was that the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and warlords now had to “ obey the rules of the game.
” What happens , then , when you remove the guarantor ?
The question has dogged Afghanistan ’ s democratic endeavor since the beginning .
In a recent statement , the Taliban scorned the “ arrogant Americans ” and recalled a proverb : “ You may have the watches , but we have the time.
” Every democracy has growing pains but not all get the chance to outlive them .
Shaharzad Akbar had helped found Afghanistan 1400 , a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ nearly a decade ago .
She recently told me , “ Afghanistan is still a battleground between democratic values and radicalization.
” After coming of age in Kabul , Akbar was accepted at Smith College in Massachusetts , where she graduated in 2009 and delivered the commencement address for her class .
Living and studying in the U.S. had taught her “ that it was okay to be a woman , ” she said at the ceremony , “ and that to feel and act like a woman in public was a strength @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Akbar began to work for the Afghan government .
Last July , she was appointed to the historic delegation that traveled to Doha to initiate talks with the Taliban .
A new mother at the time , she prepared her briefings while her two-month-old sat on the conference hall sidelines , tended to by her husband .
At one point during the first day ’ s session , the baby boy stirred , as if wishing to add his voice to the discussions over his country ’ s future .
In some @ @ @ @ @ @ @ newborn ’ s name was even published as a participant .
Observers delighted in the symbolism , but the inclusion was an error .

As the two rivals dig in their heels, dormant threats are poised to rise anew. Agitators on either side of the rift “were talking to each other not long ago with guns,” Fazel Fazly, President Ghani’s chief adviser, told me. During the Afghan civil war from 1992 to 1996, mujahedin armies waged such fierce and destructive assaults on one another that the rise of the Taliban was initially welcomed as a relief from the carnage. During that time, the offending warlords convened “five major peace talks, and after each negotiation, they came back to Kabul and initiated a bloodshed,” Fazly said. The animosity ran too deep; alliances were built and broken within days. Yet in the wake of 9/11, many of these same rivals came together to establish the post-Taliban state, which has tentatively survived to the present day. A key to its cohesion has been the abiding presence of a strong guarantor—the coalition of U.S. and international troops—able to compel adherence to shared terms. The one big change, Fazly said, was that the country’s strongmen, power brokers, and warlords now had to “obey the rules of the game.”
What happens, then, when you remove the guarantor? The question has dogged Afghanistan’s democratic endeavor since the beginning. In a recent statement, the Taliban scorned the “arrogant Americans” and recalled a proverb: “You may have the watches, but we have the time.”
Every democracy has growing pains, but not all get the chance to outlive them. Shaharzad Akbar helped found Afghanistan 1400, a youth-led movement devoted to liberal principles, nearly a decade ago. She recently told me, “Afghanistan is still a battleground between democratic values and radicalization.” After coming of age in Kabul, Akbar was accepted at Smith College in Massachusetts, where she graduated in 2009 and delivered the commencement address for her class. Living and studying in the U.S. had taught her “that it was OK to be a woman,” she said at the ceremony, “and that to feel and act like a woman in public was a strength, not a weakness.” In 2017, Akbar began to work for the Afghan government. Last July, she was appointed to the historic delegation that traveled to Doha to initiate talks with the Taliban. A new mother at the time, she prepared her briefings while her two-month-old sat on the conference hall sidelines, tended to by her husband.


newrepublic--2020-04-29--The Democrats’ Very Revealing Angst About Justin Amash

The news on Tuesday that Representative Justin Amash , the independent congressman from Michigan , had formed a committee to explore running for president as a Libertarian was , if nothing else , impeccably timed .
Just as the presidential race enters that dead zone between becoming and being , as the incumbent threatens public health through his death-by-a-thousand-cuts briefings , and as his challenger sequesters himself from public scrutiny and personal controversies , a new player has swanned onto the stage to make things interesting for a moment .
Every homebound consumer of the 2020 election must welcome this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ needn ’ t belabor the prognostication : Amash will not be elected president .
But the man who melodramatically declared his independence from the Republican Party on July 4 , 2019 , is likely to cause grievous psychological consternation throughout Washington .
As with previous third party candidates who were alleged to have helped “ spoil ” a major-party candidate ’ s electoral hopes—Ross Perot in 1992 , Ralph Nader in 2000 , Jill Stein in 2016—the untold story will be that candidate ’ s failure to offer the American people a truly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ And in 2020 , that applies to both of the leading candidates for president .
With Donald Trump and Joe Biden hell bent on keeping policy ideas of any kind out of the discussion , Amash isn ’ t so much entering a presidential race as he is leaping into a primate dominance ritual .
His most immediate role , however , is that of Beltway Democrat bedeviler .
Amash is from Michigan , a state that Hillary Clinton lost by just shy of 11,000 votes .
That year ’ s Libertarian candidate @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 170,000 votes in the Great Lakes State en route to the most successful Libertarian Party campaign in its four-decade history .
Psychologically , the failure to secure Michigan ’ s electoral votes in 2016 looms large for Democrats , so much so that its popular Democratic governor , Gretchen Whitmer , finds herself deeply embedded on speculative shortlists for Biden ’ s running mate .
There has been scant polling in Michigan accounting for the possibility of an Amash candidacy , but what little there is likely sends a shiver through the heart @ @ @ @ @ @ @ supporters .
As The Washington Post ’ s Dave Weigel reports , “ In 2019 , a Detroit News poll found Biden leading Trump in Michigan , a state that has grown more uncertain for the president , by 12 points .
With Amash as an option , Biden ’ s lead shrunk to six points , with some independents and Republicans moving away from the Democrat .
”

On the whole, Walsh’s essay and Wilson and Kristol’s reactions to it serve as a tacit admission that they don’t have any actual influence over conservative voters who might have buyer’s remorse over Trump, even though this troika’s overexposure in mainstream opinion pages is premised on the idea that they represent such a constituency (to the extent that it even exists as a consequential force). The larger problem, though, is that this particular subset of voters plays an outsize role in the Democratic Party’s imagination, too.
The tidy consensus among the pundit class as the field narrowed to Biden and Bernie Sanders was that Biden was the clearly superior and electable candidate because he didn’t offer anything that might spook those fabled Republicans who either didn’t vote for Trump or who have come to regret doing so. It is impossible to imagine, however, that Amash might attract the support of any other type of voter. Trump doesn’t care about courting them, as the Republican base has proven to be fanatically devoted to him. Democratic voters, meanwhile, should not have any difficulty understanding that Amash’s ideological project offers few points of intersection with their own. That Amash’s announcement prompted the immediate fear that Biden might lose only demonstrates the extent to which Democrats fetishize obtaining the support of Amash’s base.
Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
"According to the poll, Biden beat Trump by 12 percentage points head-to-head, but when Amash was added to the field, his lead dropped to 6 percentage points."https://t.co/6zDvN7JWy1
Third-party candidates help Trump. Sadly, they just do. https://t.co/x222fdsLS3 — Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) April 29, 2020
The simplest way to allay these fears would be to field a candidate with a clear and unrelenting commitment to the liberal project. Such a candidate might be able to expand the size of the Democratic base on the strength of their ideas. Alas, the 2020 general election is shaping up as a battle of competing visions for just the Republican Party. Trump will advocate for the continuation of the party’s slide into nativist authoritarianism; Biden will run on a platform of restoring the Republican Party to a place for respectable statesmen to compromise in ways that primarily benefit industry. Into this mix, Amash will assert a third vision of a conservative party: uncompromising in its ideological commitments but free of corruption.


newrepublic--2020-04-29--Give Me Meat and Give Them Death

Give Me Meat and Give Them Death

Invoking the Korean War–era Defense Production Act , Donald Trump signed an executive order Tuesday mandating that American meat production keep running at all costs—workers and grave threats to public health be damned .
According to the United Food and Commercial Workers , 20 industry employees—many working shoulder to shoulder at a rapid clip , without proper protection , in what was already one of the country ’ s most dangerous jobs—have already died .
In dramatic full-page ads in The Washington Post , The New York Times , and Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on Sunday , Tyson Foods warned that the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ breaking .
A Tyson facility in Waterloo , Iowa , had to be shut down last weekend after being linked to 200 cases of Covid-19 .
Many workers have been walking off their meatpacking jobs in protest at pitiful conditions .
As of Monday , 44 percent of the Waterloo plant ’ s workforce had tested positive for coronavirus ; 90 percent of cases in surrounding Black Hawk County can be traced back to the plant .
At least 4,400 meatpacking workers across 80 plants in 26 states had tested positive as of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ replicated around the country as shuttered meatpacking facilities limp back to life , including in some parts of the United States already proving to be coronavirus hot spots .
Trump ’ s executive order could give the plants further license to ignore guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration , which is voluntary anyway .
These facilities were already a danger to public health .
The increasingly consolidated industrial meat-raising and meatpacking operations run by Tyson , Smithfield , and the other companies now @ @ @ @ @ @ @ veritable petri dishes for zoonotic pathogens .
Their business models rely on what author Mike Davis has called “ vast excremental hells , containing tens of thousands of animals with weakened immune systems suffocating in heat and manure while exchanging pathogens at blinding velocity with their fellow inmates.
” As it infects workers with the coronavirus , industrial animal agriculture may well be brewing the next deadly , world-stopping pandemic .
Meanwhile , the factories ’ rampant air and water pollution , and the health conditions they provoke , make the inordinately poor @ @ @ @ @ @ @ them more vulnerable to Covid-19 and other diseases .
That ’ s not even to mention factory farming ’ s gargantuan contributions to global warming , which itself increases the likelihood of future zoonotic epidemics .
The best way to invoke the Defense Production Act today , then , would be to shut down industrial meatpacking operations until we can figure out whether there ’ s a more sustainable , equitable , and safe way of running them .
For all the xenophobic talk about Wuhan ’ s “ wet markets ” —one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pandemic—the Chinese government closed them down when they were seen to pose a risk .
The U.S. would be wise to follow suit with its own disease-spreading facilities .

As it infects workers with the coronavirus, industrial animal agriculture may well be brewing the next deadly, world-stopping pandemic.
The best way to invoke the Defense Production Act today, then, would be to shut down industrial meatpacking operations until we can figure out whether there’s a more sustainable, equitable, and safe way of running them. For all the xenophobic talk about Wuhan’s “wet markets”—one of many possible origins of the current pandemic—the Chinese government closed them down when they were seen to pose a risk. The U.S. would be wise to follow suit with its own disease-spreading facilities.
There are plenty of other things for people to eat. Meat-heavy diets are a relative novelty in the course of human history, and in some alternate universe we might imagine the U.S. government embarking on an ambitious advertising campaign instructing people how to prepare nutritious vegetarian meals. It might even, as part of a green recovery package, invest in research and development toward healthier and more humane meat alternatives, sales of which were up 265 percent in the first weeks of the shutdown. It wasn’t so long ago, after all, that meat was rationed nationwide, and the Department of Agriculture encouraged patriotic Americans to use animal products sparingly and take up canning and gardening for the sake of saving lives. But times have changed. Tyson and Smithfield executives have shareholders hungry for dividends, and the current governmental position seems to be that if a few thousand workers and their family members have to die for those dividends, so be it.


newrepublic--2020-04-29--The Bipartisan Appeal of “Yellow Peril” Politics

Kaiser Wilhelm II did not originate the term “ Yellow Peril , ” but after his “ Hun speech ” of 1900 , he became forever synonymous with it .
The German monarch was addressing soldiers who were shipping off to China to help put down the Boxer Rebellion , and what he said was so crass—even for the notoriously half-witted , insecure , and capricious heir—that the Prussian foreign office ’ s official transcript of the speech omitted its most “ diplomatically embarrassing ” paragraph .
“ Just as a thousand years ago the Huns under their King Attila @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that even today makes them seem mighty in history and legend , ” the kaiser had said , “ may the name German be affirmed by you in such a way in China that no Chinese will ever again dare to look cross-eyed at a German.
” One hundred and twenty years later , partisans of Donald Trump—like the kaiser , a “ bad-tempered , distractable doofus ” who inherited an increasingly precipitous empire—are turning to Yellow Peril rhetoric to rally support for their regime as it faces an existential crisis .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ excuse everyone has been looking for to start a conflict with China—a trend that ’ s disturbingly spreading beyond Republican politics .
The strategy , such as it is , began early , with Trump congratulating himself for a late-January ban on travel to the United States from China—long after the virus had already arrived stateside , probably from Europe—and his subsequent insistence on calling the contagion “ the Chinese virus ” or “ Wuhan virus , ” a telling emphasis on the crisis ’ s origins over any White House actions against @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Republican Party hawks have taken the racist football and run with it .
Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton , another folksy war addict cut from nineteenth-century Prussian cloth , has pivoted from his perennial demands for a U.S.-Iran confrontation to issue new demands for a U.S.-China confrontation , citing what he calls Beijing ’ s “ malign , deliberate actions to send the virus around the world.
” He was referring to the theory , increasingly popular on the right , that a government-run laboratory in Wuhan developed the deadly virus as a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ evidence that the virus was released from a lab there , intentionally or otherwise .
But Cotton ’ s rampage continued this week , when he proposed a law to bar Chinese students from obtaining visas to study science in America .
“ If Chinese students want to come here and study Shakespeare and the Federalist Papers , that ’ s what they need to learn from America , ” Cotton said Sunday , apparently forgetting that Stratford-upon-Avon is not in the United States .
“ They don ’ t need to learn @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
”

The White House has loaded up its agenda with plenty more anti-Chinese paranoia. In fealty to Cotton’s Fox-friendly conspiracy theory about the virus’s origins, the National Institutes of Health this week halted funding to a half-decade-old program that had studied how coronaviruses can spread from bats to humans. The rationale was that some of the funding might have filtered to a Wuhan virus lab. This has led some Republicans to recalibrate their racist attacks in an absurd about-face: In March, Texas’s John Cornyn blamed “the culture where people eat bats and snakes and dogs and things like that … that’s why China has been the source.” This month, Cornyn shifted from that Yellow Peril thesis to more narrowly suggesting that the Chinese government “unleashed a weapon on the world.”
If all this racism feels orchestrated, that’s because it is. Last Friday, Politico revealed that Senate Republicans were working from a 57-page internal memo guiding them to evade questions about Trump’s mismanagement of the coronavirus crisis by blaming China. “Coronavirus was a Chinese hit-and-run followed by a cover-up that cost thousands of lives,” the talking points state. “Don’t defend Trump, other than the China Travel Ban—attack China.”
All of this is proceeding according to the Steve Bannon playbook. Bannon, the former Breitbart chairman and Trump-whisperer who went largely forgotten by the U.S. electorate after he was bounced out of the White House in 2017, always viewed himself as a Bolshevik, someone willing to use a great emergency to build a technocratic dictatorship that operated on behalf of the agitated, propagandized masses. The populist linchpin of this Bannonism-Trumpism has always been xenophobia, and its key object—even more than brown Americans, or global Islam—has been the specter of Chinese dominance, an obsession for Bannon since his youth as a Navy officer.


newrepublic--2020-04-29--It’s Time to Build a Better Political Culture

Andrew Cuomo isn ’ t a man with a bold , system-level vision for dramatically expanding health care in New York or in America .
But he is , now and possibly forever , a hero thanks to the perception that he ’ s competently managed this specific situation .
For years in Congress , Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi have similarly earned praise for managing their power in the Senate and House well enough to push legislation forward and keep their respective caucuses together .
But unlike Cuomo , a sense has taken hold—among progressives , liberals , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to meet this political moment .
“ Just two weeks after the largest economic relief bill in U.S. history failed to arrest the economic collapse , Trump needs another rescue package far more than Democrats do , ” Politico ’ s Michael Grunwald wrote earlier this month .
“ That gives congressional Democrats extraordinary leverage to dictate the terms .
So far , though , they don ’ t seem inclined to use that leverage to take on Trump.
” Many liberals have been urging Democrats to use that leverage to push vote @ @ @ @ @ @ @ protect November ’ s election .
“ However badly Trump bungles the coronavirus response , his ineptitude may cause a level of social disintegration that voter turnout plummets to a level he might conceivably win even in the face of mass discontent , ” New York Magazine ’ s Jonathan Chait wrote .
“ The previous round of economic relief was the Democrats ’ best chance to ensure a real election takes place in November .
The next round will be their last chance.
” That chance to force concessions on the election @ @ @ @ @ @ @ t the last , was given up just days ago in the latest relief bill , which also didn ’ t include funding for the Postal Service or more crisis funds for states and localities .
In a broader strategic critique last week , The New York Times ’ David Leonhardt compared congressional Democrats under Trump unfavorably to the House Republican majority during the Obama administration .
“ When Barack Obama was president , congressional Republicans recognized that the president ’ s party would take much of the blame for problems in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ As a result , they often adopted a tough ( and sometimes cynical ) negotiating stance .
During the Trump presidency , Democrats have not been willing to be so tough , even in the service of policies many nonpartisan observers believe would help the country.
” The responses to these criticisms throughout the Trump years have been variations on what Schumer said this week : “ Of the four major things we pushed for , ” he insisted , “ we got three , over Republican resistance.
” In short , We @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the circumstances .
To Schumer ’ s credit , Senate Democrats have negotiated more aggressively these past few weeks than at perhaps any other point in the Trump presidency , blocking two of the coronavirus packages brought forward .
But their critics are right to argue they should continue to demand much more than they ’ ve been willing to accept .
The trouble , as the left has screamed for years and as many liberals were loath to admit before this crisis hit , is that Democratic lawmakers are congenitally inclined toward @ @ @ @ @ @ @ done expeditiously and denying the right the opportunity to call them partisans and ideologues , which the right unfailingly does anyway .
That habit of mind remains strong now , even amid an unprecedented crisis and despite the fact that the Democrats have more power to throw around than they have had in some time .

Joe Biden’s victory over Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary, a victory handed him by an electorate convinced the policies they ardently support cannot prevail in an election or in Congress, is an obvious enough example of this that not much more needs to be said about it. We can turn instead to a recent package of columns from The New York Times that, like Andreessen’s essay, focused on rebuilding America after the pandemic. A stirring and expansive opening piece from the editorial board framed our shoddy response thus far as another episode in our long-running crises of wealth and racial inequality. “Our society was especially vulnerable to this pandemic,” they wrote, “because so many Americans lack the essential liberty to protect their own lives and the lives of their families.” The piece, which tidily summarized how segregation, attacks on labor organizing, fiscal austerity, and other factors have eroded that liberty, begins by invoking the legacies of Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.
Between May and July 1862, even as Confederate victories in Virginia raised doubts about the future of the Union, Congress and President Abraham Lincoln kept their eyes on the horizon, enacting three landmark laws that shaped the nation’s next chapter: The Homestead Act allowed Western settlers to claim 160 acres of public land apiece; the Morrill Act provided land grants for states to fund universities; and the Pacific Railway Act underwrote the transcontinental railroad. Nearly 75 years later, in the depths of the Great Depression, with jobs in short supply and many Americans reduced to waiting in bread lines, President Franklin Roosevelt proved similarly farsighted. He concluded the best way to revive and sustain prosperity was not merely to pump money into the economy but to rewrite the rules of the marketplace.
All told, it’s inspiring stuff from an editorial board that was so apprehensive about offering Elizabeth Warren its outright endorsement for the Democratic nomination that it also endorsed Amy Klobuchar—a break from established tradition, it said, to give both “the radical and the realist models” for change their due. It hardly needed to be said which candidate was the putative realist. And as much as the editorial board tried to talk up the progressivism of her platform, Klobuchar was plainly among the candidates least likely to underwrite whatever the twenty-first-century equivalent of the transcontinental railroad might be. Like many of her fellow candidates and some of the loudest voices in the press, Klobuchar spent most of the campaign casting doubt on the plausibility of the largest ideas in the race and urging progressives to trade massive promises for smaller goals.
But the double endorsement and its suggestion that progressive energy should be balanced with centrist sobriety and restraint were what seriousness looked like three months ago. And it’s likely the model of seriousness we’ll return to whenever the pandemic ends—Klobuchar will remain a key figure and a potential presidential contender to watch in the eyes of those in political media who decide such things.


newrepublic--2020-04-30--The Era of the Endless Rent Strike

The Era of the Endless Rent Strike

According to the National Multifamily Housing Council , 11 percent of tenants across the United States didn ’ t pay rent in April—a 4 percent jump from the same time period the previous year .
While a widely circulated version of the survey conducted at the start of the month found that nearly a third of all renters hadn ’ t paid by April 1 , more made either full or partial payments as the weeks stretched on .
The data still tells us something important , though : Millions of people can ’ t pay their rent every month @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the other side of that : Even as millions of people lost jobs and income due to the Covid-19 crisis , and even as many cities enacted eviction moratoriums , people found a way to pay .
It ’ s scary not to , after all .
Rent is the “ bill that people are most socialized to feel the responsibility to pay , ” Tara Raghuveer , the director of KC Tenants , told me .
“ Unraveling that responsibility is a really complicated project.
” She compared the pandemic to the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ whole new class of people have come to politicize themselves around issues of health care and housing—but said that mass collective action around rent strikes remains a heavy lift .
“ I wish I could paint a really rosy picture for you , ” Raghuveer said .
“ There is a way forward , but in the absence of that ability to gather together in a meaningful , regular way , I just think that it ’ s all the more difficult to politicize people around their experience.
” But as material conditions @ @ @ @ @ @ @ looms , more and more people will find themselves unable to pay—whether or not they experience that as a political problem .
And so much as with student debt , millions of people in this country have effectively been forced into a rent strike already .
The challenge is in building a sense of solidarity across these de facto strikes of one and removing the shame and sense of isolation that hangs over rent payments in this country .
Early efforts to string together a nationwide rent strike are still getting off the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is you have to keep paying .
It ’ s a constantly renewing opportunity to organize more people , push for legislative relief , and politicize the conditions under which we live .
As Hannah Appel , a co-founder of the Debt Collective , told me in February when discussing how common it is to default on student loan payments , “ We are already a collectivity ; we just haven ’ t seen one another yet .
”

But these are difficult campaigns to pull off in general—and especially in a time of social distancing. The lack of physical presence, not just of the organizers themselves, but of potential members, has affected the entire operation. Stripped of the ability to gather in person, KC Tenants has moved all of its meetings online, including a weekly two-hour tenant meeting every Saturday. Raghuveer said that many of the new attendees are finding the group through social media, where KC Tenants stays active by updating followers about changes to local housing policies and calling out landlords trying to take advantage of vulnerable renters. Those posts in particular have resulted in high engagement for the group, which Raghuveer feels has been “drawing people into our organizing space, which is great.”
But even as its numbers have grown, it’s difficult to ignore the lack of face-to-face interaction that’s foundational to the daily work of an organizer. Thinking about the current housing movement in relation to Occupy, Raghuveer lamented the lack of a communal space for people to join together and see one another as part of a wider struggle. The Zoom meetings and social media work have been successful, but nothing compares to being able to gather with members and their families on a weekend. There’s also the matter of people who aren’t reached in these online spaces. Tenant organizing is built on the simple interactions of neighbors. That changes when you can’t go around knocking on doors in your building or neighborhood.
“There is so much opportunity, and so many people are being radicalized, but our venue for expressing that rage collectively is so limited,” she said. “Many organizations, including ours, are getting really creative and figuring out ways to take direct action and build solidarity during times like these.”


newrepublic--2020-04-30--The Morbid Ideology Behind the Drive to Reopen America

Photos of the small “ reopen America ” protests , which have made the rounds on social media over the past week , have revealed a spectacle as cartoonish as it is macabre : a rogue ’ s gallery of right-wing groups coming together to share in the spirit of defiance and , presumably , tiny droplets of mucous and saliva .
The protests ( and their backing by deep-pocketed funders ) invited many comparisons to the Tea Party movement of a decade ago .
Unlike that movement , these small protests are likely to die out soon .
Nevertheless @ @ @ @ @ @ @ about how the right is responding to this fraught moment in our recent history .
As jobless claims have soared past an astonishing 26 million with no end in sight , the Covid-19 pandemic may well push the United States into a profound and long-lasting economic crisis .
The countless indices of human misery will put enormous pressure on political institutions that are ill-equipped to adequately respond .
The onset of this immiseration has begun to propel bold ideas and movements from the left to demand a reorganization of the economy and a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the right is swiftly establishing its own morbid template for how to interpret and respond to both the pandemic and its economic effects .
Republican politicians and right-wing pundits endlessly echo a central claim : “ The cure is worse than the disease.
” In other words , you can either risk dying from the virus or face certain economic ruin , as if there are no other choices .
Their hope is that people already conditioned by an ideology centered on the marketplace , the individual , and the nation will be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and livelihoods are under greater threat from state-ordered economic shutdowns and coercive social measures than they are from the disease .
For them , the idea that Covid-19 could ultimately be overcome–even if at great human cost–by working and shopping is more appealing , and even more imaginable , than a new politics of mutuality that might redistribute power and resources in an egalitarian way .
The Covid-19 pandemic amplifies political feelings around healthcare , race , and class that have been growing on the right over the last decade .
Recall the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Great Recession .
The movement emerged and quickly grew first in response to the election of a black president and then that president ’ s proposed healthcare plan , as protesters mobbed townhalls across the summer of 2009 , loudly declaiming against any form of socialized medical coverage .
Those two animating features of the movement—antiblack racism and opposition to the Affordable Care Act—defined a movement that in essence chose investments in whiteness over the assurance of at least some semblance of healthcare .

The rhetorical oppositions of work to welfare, self-reliance to dependence, individual to state, citizen to foreigner—oppositions animated by race, gender, and class—run deep in American political culture. All are reflected in the politics of the pandemic right now, making for a grim political vision of American freedom.
In a basic way, this vision of freedom is conveyed by the defiance of guidelines to stop the spread of the virus. It isn’t just the protesters. The dozen or so Republicans in the House of Representatives refusing to wear masks when called to vote on the latest coronavirus relief bill performed precisely that kind of political theater for their constituents. It is meant as a tough-guy taunt, to show their own robustness and the weakness of their opponents. But it also reveals something more pathological. The risky behavior demonstrates vitality precisely because it tempts fate, suggestive of Freud’s death drive, which he described as a force “whose function is to assure that the organism shall follow its own path to death.”
There is now a well-documented relationship between whiteness, status, and morbidity. As Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton have demonstrated in their research over the last few years, there have been long-term increases in “deaths of despair”—overdoses, suicides, alcohol-related fatalities—among middle-aged whites without college degrees. There is much yet to be understood about reasons for this phenomenon, but a sense of the declining status of whiteness appears tightly connected to collective self-harm. It is difficult not to think about this while watching mostly middle-aged white protesters demand the right to sacrifice their lives instead of joining others to demand greater protections for frontline workers, increased payments to keep workers at home, rent and mortgage moratoria, debt cancellation, federal money for states and municipalities, and more.


newrepublic--2020-04-30--Cooking While the World Falls Apart

Cooking While the World Falls Apart

Remember restaurants ?
I do , but dimly : candlelight , cloth napkins , a basket of warm bread .
Food delivered in courses , by a smiling stranger ’ s hand .
Food prepared offstage , invisibly , materializing at the table as if by magic .
I miss the whole rigmarole : the cold cocktail after a hard week ’ s work ; the clamor of other people , other lives ; the hand raised to scribble the air for the check .
This scene has the watery quality of a distant recollection , belonging to a little @ @ @ @ @ @ @ swam snugly together—a universe that , unbelievably , is now gone .
The restaurant industry is decimated .
Thousands of waiters and chefs line up for unemployment .
We have to do the cooking ourselves .
This endeavor—three meals a day , week in and week out—consumes my waking hours .
( Delivery is an option , though in the fraught ethical equation between supporting the restaurant business and minimizing another person ’ s potential for contagion , I have leaned heavily toward the latter . )
Breakfast , lunch , dinner : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as I get up .
And don ’ t forget the snacks .
Not 30 minutes can go by without my stomach grumbling for something : tortilla chips dipped in guacamole usually , or sometimes a bite of the not-too-sweet cake that has become a near-permanent fixture on my kitchen counter .
For those of us who are lucky enough to be healthy and employed , with few concerns except staving off a prevailing sense of dread , all this cooking is not without its own magic .
When there is literally nothing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and a furtive walk in the park ( and , off in the hazy distance , wine o ’ clock ) , it brings fresh rigor to one ’ s efforts in the kitchen .
Canned beans ?
Never again !
Polenta that hasn ’ t bubbled on the stove for at least three hours ?
Trash !
The recipe calls for stock ?
The stock will not only be homemade , it will be simmered to within an inch of its life !
In these dire times , when so many are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ am ashamed to admit that I am cooking and eating better than I did in the past .
I ’ m not alone : My Instagram and Twitter feeds are overrun with images of sourdough starters and lavishly braised meats and Alison Roman ’ s lemon turmeric cake—with people who are excited about and proud of their cooking .
As a former colleague noted , The New York Times has done a great service by making its coronavirus coverage free , but what the people really want is access to its cooking app @

Dirt is the long-gestating sequel to Heat, Buford’s 2006 book about leaving his prestigious job at The New Yorker to become a lowly apprentice in the kitchen of the (now-disgraced) chef Mario Batali. Though Buford is in his fifties when he embarks on this adventure, Heat reads like a coming-of-age story: Our protagonist discovers not only that he can cook but also something like his life’s calling. He begins a hopeless greenhorn, showing up at Batali’s (now-shuttered) restaurant Babbo on his first day with no idea how to chop a carrot. By the end, he knows how to butcher a whole pig the proper way, taught by a taciturn Tuscan—known as Il Maestro—who resembles a kung-fu legend in a remote monastery, bearing ancient secrets.
That is not to say that Buford becomes a chef. He describes himself as an “amateur,” and at different stages he embodies the different senses of the word. At first, he is a total incompetent. Later he becomes a slightly more competent nonprofessional (an unpaid intern, essentially). And throughout, he exudes the spirit of the amateur-as-aficionado, driven not by money but love, passion, obsession. It is a wonderful introduction to Italian cooking because we the readers are in the same position: outsiders looking in, eager to learn but unsure where to start. Buford is not a maestro bequeathing the culinary wisdom he has amassed over many long years; he is a humble grub who learns the hard way, through humiliation and suffering.
DIRT: ADVENTURES IN LYON AS A CHEF IN TRAINING, FATHER, AND SLEUTH LOOKING FOR THE SECRET OF FRENCH COOKING by Bill Buford Knopf, 432 pp., $28.95
We are quickly shown the professional kitchen’s vast reservoirs of both. At Babbo, Buford cuts himself many times. Hot oil races up his fingers, leaving behind a chain of gleaming blisters. (“These globes were rather beautiful,” he writes, “not unlike small shiny jewels.”) The other cooks resent the presence of this aging novice, and they bully him accordingly. (“Later,” he concedes, “it slipped out that, when I wasn’t there, I was known as the ‘kitchen bitch.’”) He is clumsy. He is slow. He has trouble following the confounding logic of a fancy restaurant. For example, certain dishes get chopped parsley on top; others get whole leaves. “Why?” he asks. “I didn’t know why. I still don’t know why. To fuck with my head—that’s why.”


newrepublic--2020-04-30--Turns Out Andrew Cuomo Isn’t America’s Governor After All

Andrew Cuomo has been cast as the anti-Trump in the coronavirus crisis .
The governor of New York was widely praised in the national media for doing all the things that the president could or would not do .
In contrast to the president , he has been focused , informative .
He has shown his emotions , making it clear he understands the human cost of the pandemic .
While Trump uses his daily press conferences to spread conspiracy theories , Cuomo has alternated between delivering hard truths and offering a shoulder to cry on .
But in recent @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lot like Trump .
Faced with mounting criticism of his handling of the coronavirus—and unfavorable comparisons with his West Coast counterparts , who appear to have been more successful in containing the outbreak—Cuomo has lashed out in an attempt to deflect blame .
“ Governors don ’ t do global pandemics , ” Cuomo said at his press briefing on Tuesday .
“ Where were all the experts ?
” He also targeted the media , asking , “ Where was The New York Times ?
Where was The Wall Street Journal ?
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ media ’ s foil to Trump , as I argued last month , always had more to do with aesthetic differences than the governor ’ s actual performance .
With Joe Biden sidelined and West Coast Governors Gavin Newsom and Jay Inslee ceding the spotlight to public health experts , Cuomo was left to play a starring role .
But the spotlight has its drawbacks as well ; in this case , highlighting Cuomo ’ s spotty record on the coronavirus and reminding many people why they didn ’ t like him in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ some responsibility for New York ’ s slow response to stop the spread of the coronavirus—a response that has made New York , by far , the hardest-hit state in the country .
“ I wish someone stood up and blew the bugle , ” Cuomo said in an interview with Axios ’ s Jonathan Swan that aired on HBO on Monday .
“ And if no one was going to blow the bugle , I would feel much better if I was a bugle blower last December and January .
Even though @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I would feel better .
”

Reporting from the Times’ J. David Goodman in April revealed that delays caused by Cuomo and other leaders, most prominently New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, contributed to the staggering rise of cases in New York. “Excuse our arrogance as New Yorkers,” Cuomo said on March 2. “We have the best health care system on the planet right here in New York.” He added, “We don’t even think it’s going to be as bad as it was in other countries.” Cuomo, like Trump, downplayed the risk of the coronavirus and resisted shutting down nonessential businesses, ultimately doing so three days after California, on March 22.
The decision to wait proved to be costly. At least 18,015 New Yorkers have died from Covid-19, compared to at least 1,887 deaths in California and 800 in Washington state. “You have to move really fast. Hours and days. Not weeks. Once it gets a head of steam, there is no way to stop it,” Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, a former commissioner of New York City’s Health Department, told the Times. Frieden estimated that New York’s death toll would have been 50 to 80 percent lower if social distancing measures had been adopted just one or two weeks earlier—around the time that Cuomo was thumping his chest and touting “the best health care system on the planet.”
Cuomo’s public messages were a big part of the problem. Like Trump, Cuomo spent much of late February and early March downplaying the pandemic. “The city’s epidemiologists were horrified by the comforting messages that de Blasio and Cuomo kept giving,” reported The New Yorker’s Charles Duhigg. Cuomo’s long-standing feud with de Blasio further hobbled the effectiveness of both executives and occasionally led to miscommunication and confusion.


newrepublic--2020-04-30--Joe Biden’s Tired Feminist Shield

Joe Biden’s Tired Feminist Shield

Tara Reade , an aide to Joe Biden in 1993 , says that while working for him , Biden sexually assaulted her .
Joe Biden himself has said nothing ; his campaign ’ s position is that this never happened .
It ’ s a strategy that , reportedly , Biden ’ s people think is working out for them , believing voters ’ support will not be swayed , nor will they find Reade ’ s allegations to be credible .
( History considered , these are safe enough bets . )
So the presumptive Democratic nominee for president @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has been made the story—but one that has little to do with her .
Since Reade first went public In March , reporters have been able to find multiple people who back up her allegations against Biden .
What seemed to make the difference was a Business Insider story with accounts from several people who say Reade told them about Biden ’ s mistreatment at the time—and it was by Rich McHugh , who previously worked with Ronan Farrow to investigate sexual assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein .
Shortly after this was published @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The Cut , expressed profound disappointment in what this story meant for the presidential race .
“ Especially in light of McHugh ’ s recent persuasive reporting on Reade ’ s assault claim , Democrats and feminists are in a terrible bind , and that includes those of us who never thought Biden should be the nominee.
” It ’ s a sentiment that very accurately captures this moment .
It ’ s one with a depressingly familiar feel .
This is hardly the first time in my lifetime , or in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , that a Democrat has made things difficult for the movement because women have accused them of what is too-politely called “ sexual misconduct.
” Some feminists were introduced to Hillary Rodham Clinton as the woman whose job it was , in part , to remain by the side of her husband , the president , as he defended himself from sexual harassment allegations .
That these things recur is also part of this story .
When Senator Al Franken was accused of groping and forcibly kissing multiple women , many recalled his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Saturday Night Live version of Clarence Thomas ’ s Supreme Court confirmation hearings .
With him is Kevin Nealon ’ s Joe Biden , and compared to Biden ’ s real-life questioning of Anita Hill at the 1991 hearings , the show gives him a toned-down pass .
While feminists are trying to make meaning of Reade ’ s allegations relative to Biden ’ s presidential campaign , the campaign has been leaning into feminism to protect the candidate .
In a set of talking points obtained by Ruby Cramer and Rosie @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has advised Biden supporters to state that “ the truth ” is “ this incident did not happen.
” Look to Biden ’ s record , the talking points continue .
“ He has spent his life fighting to end abuses of power against women and using his voice to advocate for women across the country and around the world .
”

The Biden campaign, in response to Reade, specifically highlighted his role in passing the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). This was part of the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which poured billions of dollars into state and local law enforcement, including policing and prosecuting rape and domestic violence. The community-based anti-violence programs it funded in the name of “crime prevention” had their roots in a feminist anti-rape movement, which saw law enforcement as part of the problem, for disbelieving victims, for criminalizing victims who fought back in self-defense, and for being perpetrators themselves. They understood violence against women as an expression of male dominion—that confronting it wasn’t about fighting crime, but fighting patriarchy and (for some) white supremacy. Victoria Law systematically laid out how VAWA was part of a larger turn in the women’s movement, towards a carceral feminism which pressed police and prosecutors to be tougher, to make more arrests, to lock up more people.
Being “tough on crime,” for Biden, was a way for Democrats to appear more palatable to Republicans. As Naomi Murakawa, associate professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, recounts in her book The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America, during debate over the 1994 crime bill, when Republican Senator Orrin Hatch accused Democrats of “bowing to the liberal wing of the Democratic Party,” Biden responded in defense, “Let me define the Liberal Wing of the Democratic Party. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is now for 60 new death penalties. That is what is in this bill.” He went on: “The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is for 100,000 cops.” For “125,000 new state prison cells.”
Today, VAWA remains the most unimpeachable element of that legislation, even among liberals now disenchanted with the larger crime bill. “Biden engineered it so a vote against the crime bill was a vote against women,” as Diana Moskovitz observed at Jezebel. Biden wasn’t just proud of the crime bill; he took pride in what it helped him to do to his party. This is who was running for president before Tara Reade came forward. Biden has used women and causes feminists support as a defensive measure long before this current campaign.


newrepublic--2020-04-30--The Intolerable Fragility of American Hospitals

The goal of single-payer is not , and should not be , just to change the way we pay for health care .
Single-payer should be seen , as Health Justice Now author Tim Faust has written , as “ a ladder we can climb , all together , into a better world ” —not the better world itself .
We should dream of a world where your race or your income don ’ t determine whether you get treated well at the hospital—or treated at all .
We should imagine an America where a rich patient in the Washington @ @ @ @ @ @ @ geography to prefer Inova Fairfax to United Medical Center in Anacostia .
Just giving everyone insurance is not enough : We must ensure that everyone can access the same high-quality care .
Unfortunately , one of the most persistent barriers to health care reform has been the simple fact that some people have it pretty good in America , and it ’ s easy to demonize change by pretending that a greater share of equanimity will lead to a lower standard of living for the lucky ducks who are winning the perverse health @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lie , of course : Even people who think they have it good are likely to discover how that belief is built on a frail foundation if they have an accident or actually have to use their insurance to save their lives .
It ’ s certainly not a good situation compared to that of their better-off peers in other countries , who never have to call an insurance company to beg for drug coverage or get their wallet out at the hospital .
But the lie , and the threat , is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ situation is actually very lovely and privileged .
You certainly wouldn ’ t like it if we made it worse , would you ?
This sort of politics , of simultaneously reassuring and frightening the middle and upper-middle class , is so ingrained in America that it ’ s hard to overcome .
Still , we won ’ t get anywhere if we don ’ t recognize that ’ s what ’ s at work here , and it ’ s just as true of hospitals as it is of insurance .
They @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to go to nice hospitals with private rooms and expensive artwork or use concierge primary care with lemon water in the waiting room , and they don ’ t care if that means poor people keep going to ramshackle hospitals under the constant threat of closure .
Safety-net and rural hospitals already exist mostly on public insurance reimbursements ; the real threat isn ’ t that they ’ ll go out of business under Medicare for All but that the hospitals who pay their CEOs tens of millions might have to reassess their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the pandemic that is ripping through our communities and devastating businesses has clearly been insufficient to the point of malice .
This has been true of hospitals , too .
But no amount of bailout money would fix the fundamental stupidity and cruelty of having a system in which a hospital can simply go out of business .
The entire system , of hidden costs and constant gambles , resembles a strange kind of three-card-monte street hustle—one where the mark never wins , but the scammer somehow loses , too .
Still , @ @ @ @ @ @

As Kaiser Health News wrote this week, the coronavirus pandemic has exposed the disparity in hospitals’ wealth. While safety-net hospitals are perpetually days away from total financial insolvency, many of the richest hospital systems have millions or billions of investment income tucked away for a rainy day. The wealthier hospitals “face sacrifices that other hospitals might envy, such as having to postpone ambitious building projects or adding to their already large investment portfolios.” The University of Virginia’s endowment is $9.6 billion. If the hospital is losing $3 million a day, it would take 3,200 days to work through the entire endowment.
The goal of single-payer is not, and should not be, just to change the way we pay for health care. Single-payer should be seen, as Health Justice Now author Tim Faust has written, as “a ladder we can climb, all together, into a better world”—not the better world itself. We should dream of a world where your race or your income don’t determine whether you get treated well at the hospital—or treated at all. We should imagine an America where a rich patient in the Washington suburbs would have no reason other than geography to prefer Inova Fairfax to United Medical Center in Anacostia. Just giving everyone insurance is not enough: We must ensure that everyone can access the same high-quality care.
Even people who think they have it good are likely to discover how that belief is built on a frail foundation.
Unfortunately, one of the most persistent barriers to health care reform has been the simple fact that some people have it pretty good in America, and it’s easy to demonize change by pretending that a greater share of equanimity will lead to a lower standard of living for the lucky ducks who are winning the perverse health care lottery. It’s a lie, of course: Even people who think they have it good are likely to discover how that belief is built on a frail foundation if they have an accident or actually have to use their insurance to save their lives. It’s certainly not a good situation compared to that of their better-off peers in other countries, who never have to call an insurance company to beg for drug coverage or get their wallet out at the hospital. But the lie, and the threat, is designed to convince these people that their situation is actually very lovely and privileged. You certainly wouldn’t like it if we made it worse, would you?