thenation--2020-12-28--Teetering on the Edge: A Postcard From London

If you believe the relentless cheerleading of the Murdoch press , Britain is in the final stages of a heroic drama that will finally see this island nation declare economic independence and stride boldly onto the global stage , its precious sovereignty regained .
Freed from the fetters of the European Union , Britons will once again become shopkeepers to the world , negotiating on advantageous terms with trade partners from Tokyo to Toronto .
Meanwhile , every day brings new developments in Prime Minister Boris Johnson ’ s Brexit brinkmanship : a disastrous dinner with European Commission President Ursula @ @ @ @ @ @ @ chief EU negotiator Michel Barnier , brave posturing from Johnson over an “ Australian-style deal ” —which means crashing out without a deal .
All very entertaining , but about as relevant as Trump ’ s musings on Covid-19 treatments .
On December 31 ( between when this issue goes to press and when it lands in your mailbox ) , Britain and the EU will either agree on terms for some kind of post-Brexit trade pact—or not .
While reporters can hardly be blamed for ramping up the drama , the markets @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of a deal .
The final hang-ups are fishing quotas in British waters ( always a favorite for TV stand-ups ) and the “ level playing field ” rules that bar EU countries from favoring or subsidizing domestic producers .
For a government determined ( as the Tories claimed to be in their last election manifesto ) to resurrect domestic manufacturing and , with it , the country ’ s long-abandoned industrial north , “ state aid ” was the whole ballgame .
But the only person in Johnson ’ s government really @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Dominic Cummings , the prime minister ’ s controversial adviser , whose flouting of lockdown rules in the spring rendered him politically toxic , and who was finally forced out in November .
Unlike his boss , Cummings was an unconvincing liar .
As for Boris , he ’ s remained committed throughout to his core belief : that when it comes to cake , he ’ s pro–having it and pro–eating it .
On Brexit , that probably means a last-minute bodge designed purely to save face ( and to serve the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ) .
On Covid , it has meant yet another fatal failure to take the action needed to control the pandemic .
With the UK ’ s R number ( the rate of transmission ) now above 1 and London already running out of ICU beds , and a new , more contagious strain spreading in the southeast , Johnson finally put the capital back into lockdown , just in time for Christmas .
Which sadly still makes a third national lockdown early in the new year—just as Brexit disrupts British ports and @ @ @ @ @

This article appears in the January 11/18, 2021 issue.
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If you believe the relentless cheerleading of the Murdoch press, Britain is in the final stages of a heroic drama that will finally see this island nation declare economic independence and stride boldly onto the global stage, its precious sovereignty regained. Freed from the fetters of the European Union, Britons will once again become shopkeepers to the world, negotiating on advantageous terms with trade partners from Tokyo to Toronto. Meanwhile, every day brings new developments in Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Brexit brinkmanship: a disastrous dinner with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, stern warnings from chief EU negotiator Michel Barnier, brave posturing from Johnson over an “Australian-style deal”—which means crashing out without a deal.
All very entertaining, but about as relevant as Trump’s musings on Covid-19 treatments. On December 31 (between when this issue goes to press and when it lands in your mailbox), Britain and the EU will either agree on terms for some kind of post-Brexit trade pact—or not. While reporters can hardly be blamed for ramping up the drama, the markets have long ago concluded—and priced in—the inevitability of a deal. The final hang-ups are fishing quotas in British waters (always a favorite for TV stand-ups) and the “level playing field” rules that bar EU countries from favoring or subsidizing domestic producers. For a government determined (as the Tories claimed to be in their last election manifesto) to resurrect domestic manufacturing and, with it, the country’s long-abandoned industrial north, “state aid” was the whole ballgame. But the only person in Johnson’s government really committed to that populist economic strategy was Dominic Cummings, the prime minister’s controversial adviser, whose flouting of lockdown rules in the spring rendered him politically toxic, and who was finally forced out in November. Related Article How Brexit Infected Britain’s Coronavirus Response Natasha Hakimi Zapata
Unlike his boss, Cummings was an unconvincing liar. As for Boris, he’s remained committed throughout to his core belief: that when it comes to cake, he’s pro–having it and pro–eating it. On Brexit, that probably means a last-minute bodge designed purely to save face (and to serve the interests of British bankers and German automakers). On Covid, it has meant yet another fatal failure to take the action needed to control the pandemic. With the UK’s R number (the rate of transmission) now above 1 and London already running out of ICU beds, and a new, more contagious strain spreading in the southeast, Johnson finally put the capital back into lockdown, just in time for Christmas. Which sadly still makes a third national lockdown early in the new year—just as Brexit disrupts British ports and food supply chains—almost inevitable.


thenation--2020-12-28--House Democrats’ Marijuana Decriminalization Vote Is Huge—and Not Enough

Early this December , the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives passed a bill to decriminalize marijuana at the federal level .
The Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement ( MORE ) Act would expunge low-level cannabis convictions , remove pot from the Controlled Substances Act , and impose a 5 percent tax on legal marijuana sales , directing some of that revenue into grants that help those the bill identifies as “ adversely impacted ” by racist drug prohibition laws take advantage of the legal pot marketplace .
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that from 2021 to 2030 , the law “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , among existing and future ” federal inmates .
It ’ s one significant ( though imperfect ) step toward undoing the “ legacy of racial and ethnic injustices…of 80 years of cannabis prohibition enforcement , ” according to the bill ’ s sponsors .
And yet the legislation was met with mockery and derision by congressional Republicans , who registered their opposition through statements dripping with disingenuous concern-trolling , unscientific fearmongering , and insincere indignation .
“ The House of Representatives is spending this week on pressing issues like marijuana .
You @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this national crisis , ” snarked Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell , who since April has obstructed every effort to produce a coronavirus relief package .
Perhaps indifferent to the fact that some 40,000 people remain incarcerated in the United States on pot-related offenses , per the Last Prisoner Project , Representative Pete Stauber of Minnesota waved off the legislation as unimportant to those who really count .
“ Americans deserve better , ” he tweeted .
“ The arguments we heard throughout the floor debate on the MORE Act , to me @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and offensive , ” said Maritza Perez , director of the Office of National Affairs at the Drug Policy Alliance .
“ We know that half a million people are arrested every year for simple marijuana possession .
Black and brown Americans have long deserved an end to the War on Drugs , and the MORE Act is one small step toward undoing the incalculable damage that war has wrought .
A criminal conviction can disallow someone from getting housing , from earning a higher education , from getting a job .
These @ @ @ @ @ @ @ during a pandemic , when people are feeling the economic crunch.
” From their inception , drug prohibition laws have targeted Black and brown folks with laser precision .
Harry Anslinger , appointed as the first director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in 1930 , publicly declared that “ reefer makes darkies think they ’ re as good as white men.
” Instead of using the standard term “ cannabis , ” Anslinger leaned into the Mexican word “ marihuana , ” exploiting the xenophobia that followed immigrant flows from the southern @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US , and most are Negroes , Hispanics , Filipinos , and entertainers , ” Anslinger warned the white citizens of America .
“ Their Satanic music , jazz and swing , results from marijuana use .
This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes , entertainers , and others.
” In 1937 , Anslinger took his case before Congress , where he testified about the need for a law that would criminalize the use , possession , and sale of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an article reporting that Mexican immigrants in Colorado were producing weed “ cigarettes which they sell at two for 25 cents , mostly to white school students.
” Anslinger succeeded in convincing Congress to pass the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 , which effectively made pot illegal at the federal level .
The Boggs Act and the Narcotic Control Act followed in the 1950s , setting mandatory minimums for sentencing and establishing increasingly greater penalties for weed crimes .
Trump ’ s Election Lies Failed , but the Damage Is Done The Trauma @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Us American History Is Getting Whitewashed , Again “ The Nixon campaign in 1968 , and the Nixon White House after that , had two enemies : the antiwar left and black people , ” President Richard Nixon ’ s domestic affairs adviser , John Ehrlichman , admitted to reporter Dan Baum in 1994 , nearly 25 years after the administration launched the War on Drugs .
“ We knew we couldn ’ t make it illegal to be either against the war or black , but by getting the public to associate @ @ @ @ @ @ @ heroin , and then criminalizing both heavily , we could disrupt those communities… .
Did we know we were lying about the drugs ?
Of course we did.
” In the following decades , Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton further criminalized cannabis use .
Finally , though , the tide is turning .
As of the November elections , 36 states and the District of Columbia have made medical marijuana legal , while 15 states have signed off on recreational pot use .
But Black folks continue to be disproportionately affected by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
An ACLU study found that , despite the fact that Black and white people use pot at the same rate , Black folks are nearly four times as likely to be arrested .
And people with felony convictions are disqualified from owning a marijuana dispensary in many states .
That means Black folks—who as of 2017 represented only 4.3 percent of top-level stakeholders in the legal marijuana industry—are locked out of the gold rush .
“ Historically , with alcohol during Prohibition and marijuana now , everything that Black people have gone @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to be able to get rich from , ” DeAnna Hoskins , president of JustLeadership-USA , told me .
The MORE Act doesn ’ t adequately address this issue , Hoskins added .
The bill would prohibit those with marijuana felonies from working in the legal pot marketplace .
It also restricts expungement and resentencing relief to “ nonviolent ” marijuana offenders , even though many “ violent ” crimes don ’ t actually involve the use of violence , and Black offenders are far more likely to have been charged with them @ @ @ @ @ @ @ modest bill has a snowball ’ s chance in hell of clearing the Senate .
“ Part of the political process is moving the needle , ” Perez said .
“ We were under no illusion that Mitch McConnell would bring this to the floor .
But once you go forward , it ’ s really hard to go back .
We got the bill through a chamber of Congress .
We made history.
” “ The federal government , law enforcement , the criminal justice system—it ’ s the only business I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ into what ’ s not working , because it ’ s a tool to keep Black and brown people marginalized and oppressed , ” Hoskins told me .
“ Is this a system of accountability or a system of punishment—but only for a certain segment of the population ?
Because for some reason , there ’ s a refusal to put political capital on the table and to undo this harm , not piecemeal but boldly .
”

This article appears in the January 11/18, 2021 issue.
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Early this December, the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives passed a bill to decriminalize marijuana at the federal level. The Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (MORE) Act would expunge low-level cannabis convictions, remove pot from the Controlled Substances Act, and impose a 5 percent tax on legal marijuana sales, directing some of that revenue into grants that help those the bill identifies as “adversely impacted” by racist drug prohibition laws take advantage of the legal pot marketplace. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that from 2021 to 2030, the law “would reduce time served by 73,000 person-years, among existing and future” federal inmates. It’s one significant (though imperfect) step toward undoing the “legacy of racial and ethnic injustices…of 80 years of cannabis prohibition enforcement,” according to the bill’s sponsors.
And yet the legislation was met with mockery and derision by congressional Republicans, who registered their opposition through statements dripping with disingenuous concern-trolling, unscientific fearmongering, and insincere indignation. “The House of Representatives is spending this week on pressing issues like marijuana. You know, serious and important legislation befitting this national crisis,” snarked Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, who since April has obstructed every effort to produce a coronavirus relief package. Perhaps indifferent to the fact that some 40,000 people remain incarcerated in the United States on pot-related offenses, per the Last Prisoner Project, Representative Pete Stauber of Minnesota waved off the legislation as unimportant to those who really count. “Americans deserve better,” he tweeted.
“The arguments we heard throughout the floor debate on the MORE Act, to me, were just really out of touch and offensive,” said Maritza Perez, director of the Office of National Affairs at the Drug Policy Alliance. “We know that half a million people are arrested every year for simple marijuana possession. Black and brown Americans have long deserved an end to the War on Drugs, and the MORE Act is one small step toward undoing the incalculable damage that war has wrought. A criminal conviction can disallow someone from getting housing, from earning a higher education, from getting a job. These are all things that are especially important during a pandemic, when people are feeling the economic crunch.”
From their inception, drug prohibition laws have targeted Black and brown folks with laser precision. Harry Anslinger, appointed as the first director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in 1930, publicly declared that “reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.” Instead of using the standard term “cannabis,” Anslinger leaned into the Mexican word “marihuana,” exploiting the xenophobia that followed immigrant flows from the southern border after the Mexican Civil War. “There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos, and entertainers,” Anslinger warned the white citizens of America. “Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, results from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers, and others.”
In 1937, Anslinger took his case before Congress, where he testified about the need for a law that would criminalize the use, possession, and sale of cannabis. Included in his evidence was an article reporting that Mexican immigrants in Colorado were producing weed “cigarettes which they sell at two for 25 cents, mostly to white school students.” Anslinger succeeded in convincing Congress to pass the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, which effectively made pot illegal at the federal level. The Boggs Act and the Narcotic Control Act followed in the 1950s, setting mandatory minimums for sentencing and establishing increasingly greater penalties for weed crimes. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. Manny Maung Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. Manny Maung More From Kali Holloway Inside the Cynical Campaign to Claim That Affirmative Action Hurts Asian Americans August 9, 2023 It’s Not Just Corporate Pride Boycotts—Right-Wingers Are Escalating Their Anti-LGBTQ Campaign June 23, 2023 Affirmative Action Is in the Supreme Court’s Crosshairs June 22, 2023
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” President Richard Nixon’s domestic affairs adviser, John Ehrlichman, admitted to reporter Dan Baum in 1994, nearly 25 years after the administration launched the War on Drugs. “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities…. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” In the following decades, Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton further criminalized cannabis use.
Finally, though, the tide is turning. As of the November elections, 36 states and the District of Columbia have made medical marijuana legal, while 15 states have signed off on recreational pot use. But Black folks continue to be disproportionately affected by the racially unequal application of marijuana laws. An ACLU study found that, despite the fact that Black and white people use pot at the same rate, Black folks are nearly four times as likely to be arrested. And people with felony convictions are disqualified from owning a marijuana dispensary in many states. That means Black folks—who as of 2017 represented only 4.3 percent of top-level stakeholders in the legal marijuana industry—are locked out of the gold rush. “Historically, with alcohol during Prohibition and marijuana now, everything that Black people have gone to prison for, white people seem to be able to get rich from,” DeAnna Hoskins, president of JustLeadership-USA, told me. Current Issue View our current issue
The MORE Act doesn’t adequately address this issue, Hoskins added. The bill would prohibit those with marijuana felonies from working in the legal pot marketplace. It also restricts expungement and resentencing relief to “nonviolent” marijuana offenders, even though many “violent” crimes don’t actually involve the use of violence, and Black offenders are far more likely to have been charged with them than white ones.
Yet even this modest bill has a snowball’s chance in hell of clearing the Senate. “Part of the political process is moving the needle,” Perez said. “We were under no illusion that Mitch McConnell would bring this to the floor. But once you go forward, it’s really hard to go back. We got the bill through a chamber of Congress. We made history.”
“The federal government, law enforcement, the criminal justice system—it’s the only business I know that continues to dig a ditch into what’s not working, because it’s a tool to keep Black and brown people marginalized and oppressed,” Hoskins told me. “Is this a system of accountability or a system of punishment—but only for a certain segment of the population? Because for some reason, there’s a refusal to put political capital on the table and to undo this harm, not piecemeal but boldly.”


thenation--2020-12-28--The Groundbreaking Honesty of Joe Sacco’s Comics Journalism

There ’ s a memorable scene near the end of Joe Sacco ’ s latest book , Paying the Land , that encapsulates his ethos as a comics journalist .
For the project , he made two trips to Canada ’ s remote Northwest Territories to interview members of the Dene Nation about their relationship to the land and resource extraction .
At the time of his visits , the gas and oil industries had been established in the region for years , but a global petroleum glut had paused operations .
Sacco and his guide , Shauna , visited @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Indigenous perspectives on drilling and fracking , which provide jobs and economic opportunity but also endanger the habitats and cohesion of communities .
What he found was that the complications surrounding resource extraction were inextricable from larger issues the Dene have been facing for generations .
Sacco couldn ’ t parse the conflicts over oil and gas without understanding the Canadian government ’ s ruthless program of colonization , enacted via unjust treaties and the residential school system .
He also couldn ’ t understand it without following the Dene ’ s resistance @ @ @ @ @ @ @ regain control of their land and maintain their independence and identity.1 In what has come to be his usual style , Sacco intersperses the voices of his subjects in Paying the Land with the history of the region and some of his own thoughts on what ’ s at stake .
Compared with his previous work , however , he remains relatively in the background .
He listens , narrates , and recurs as a familiar presence wearing a cable-knit sweater and his trademark round glasses , which stand in for his eyes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ frames since his first book ) .
But he doesn ’ t speak or comment often , which makes the scene near the end especially notable.2 In Yellowknife , the capital of the Northwest Territories , Sacco and Shauna travel to the defunct Giant Mine , a site of gold extraction for more than 50 years .
When ore processing stopped there in 1999 , it left behind 237,000 tons of a lethal byproduct—arsenic trioxide dust .
“ Where to put it ?
” Sacco wonders , before answering , “ Well , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ He explains that a remediation project rigged frozen storage chambers deep underground ; cascading , angled panels show the pair descending and touring one of them .
On the next page , Sacco walks alongside the massive machinery and muses about his journey to meet the Dene .
“ I will leave here with many unanswered questions about my indigenous hosts , ” he writes , “ but right now…my biggest query is about my race , about us.
” He asks in a series of text boxes laid across drawings of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ worldview of a people who mumble no thanks or prayers , who take what they want from the land , and pay it back with arsenic ?
” 3 It ’ s a remarkable moment , a swift and scathing indictment of the people Sacco represents—white , settler , Western .
This type of self-critique is rare in mainstream Anglo-American journalism , which adheres to the myth of the reporter ’ s neutrality or else revels in indulgent subjectivity .
But rigorous inward-facing critique is common in Sacco ’ s work .
For @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , relaying information , and uncovering truths , not only about one ’ s subjects but also about oneself .
Throughout his books he exposes the mechanics of his process in such a way that the reader can never forget that their narrator is a biased , privileged outsider .
He sees it as a matter of ethics .
“ The important thing for me isn ’ t so much objectivity , it ’ s—I want the journalists to admit their contexts , their prejudices somehow , ” he has said .
“ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ than honesty.
” 4 That honesty is a crucial part of Sacco ’ s decades-long project .
Whether covering the lives of Palestinians in the occupied territories , Bosniaks and Serbs in the former Yugoslavia , or the Dene , he seeks out difficult and painful stories and tells tales of war and oppression that many people may not want to hear .
Sacco ’ s oeuvre is built on using words , images , and a potent combination of the two to make visceral the realities of historical trauma .
As Hillary @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Disaster Drawn , his work “ is about an ethics of attention , not about producing the news.
” And as a white Western man , he ’ s keenly aware of the power his attention holds.5 Comics have flourished as a genre for memoir and nonfiction stories since the 1970s , but the use of the form for journalism has been much slower to catch on .
It has gained traction over the past decade or so with the release of books like Josh Neufeld ’ s A.D. , about Hurricane Katrina @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s Rolling Blackouts , about the effects of the Iraq War in the Middle East , in 2016 , as well as with digital publications like Symbolia ( now defunct ) and The Nib .
In recent years , The New York Times has also begun to run drawn reported pieces in its opinion section , bestowing mainstream visibility on the field .
But when Sacco started out , this kind of work barely existed .
According to Chute , in fact , he coined the term “ comics journalism ” himself.6 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in Australia before his family moved to the United States in 1972 , Sacco began drawing comics as a child .
His interest in journalism took hold during high school in Portland , Ore. , where he worked on the student newspaper , and he went on to study the subject at the University of Oregon.7 After college , Sacco returned to visual storytelling while leading a peripatetic life .
He moved to Malta in 1983 and published a series of romance comics , then back to Portland , where he cofounded a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Press , which folded , after a year , in 1988 .
Next he moved to Los Angeles , where he worked for the comics publisher Fantagraphics and founded a satirical magazine called Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy .
In 1988 , he left the United States for a four-year stint that included touring Europe with a rock band and living in Berlin.8 Sacco ’ s work during these years was often satirical and autobiographical , drawn in what ’ s known as “ bigfoot ” style , which features expressive characters with exaggerated bodies inspired @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pioneers .
Still , politics and military conflicts weren ’ t far from his mind .
In one piece from the period , he captures his mother ’ s memories of the violence of World War II in Malta ; another focuses on his obsessive following of the Persian Gulf war of 1991 while going through a breakup .
These early comics , which are collected in the 2003 book Notes From a Defeatist , indicate the direction that Sacco ’ s work was moving in , but it was one trip in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ career.9 Between 1991 and 1992 , Sacco spent two months in Palestine and Israel .
It was the waning days of the first intifada , when Palestinians rose up against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and were met by a military response .
Over a thousand people died , the majority of them Palestinians , while images of Palestinian boys and men throwing stones and Molotov cocktails at Israeli soldiers abounded .
Sacco was , he later explained , “ furious at ” the American news media @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the reality of the situation and the power imbalances between the two countries .
“ There are two ways in which Palestinians are portrayed—as terrorist and as victim , ” he told an interviewer for Al Jazeera .
“ There may be truth in certain situations for both descriptions , but Palestinians are also people going to school , who have families , have lives , invite you into their home , and think about their food.
” He wanted to see what was happening for himself and hear from Palestinians in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Sacco spent time in Palestinians ’ homes , where he shared meals and interviewed them about their lives .
He turned his notes into a series of comic books published between 1993 and 1995 .
They weren ’ t commercially successful , but they were a rarity in the American media : Unflinchingly honest about the Palestinian plight , they depicted an open , hospitable people describing the horrific yet quotidian nature of their suffering .
The following year , Fantagraphics released Palestine in two volumes , and Sacco won an American Book @ @ @ @ @ @ @ collected in one book . )
“ There is nothing else quite like this in alternative comics , ” wrote a reviewer for Publishers Weekly—which , as if to drive the point home , miscategorized the work as fiction.11 Given the milieu in which Sacco had been working , Palestine is firmly grounded in the traditions of underground comix and New Journalism .
Its style is cartoonish—in fact , he heard complaints that his depictions of people in the first issue were stereotypical and offensive , and he tried to adjust accordingly—and the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Sacco plays a starring role as the self-conscious protagonist in search of some kind of truth .
It ’ s not his most sophisticated work , but it is a crucial document for tracking the inception of long-form comics journalism.12 The basics of Sacco ’ s methodology are already evident in Palestine .
From the start , he doesn ’ t shy away from depicting violence , but he also uses art to bring the setting to life : the muddy refugee camps , bare-bones dwellings , and bustling cities .
“ To @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Sacco has said of his work , and indeed , it ’ s part of how the reader comes to understand Gaza and the West Bank in this book .
It helps Sacco do something that ’ s harder to pull off in prose and reportage alone : He creates a sense of the everyday life that forms the backdrop for , and is disrupted by , acts of brutality.13 In terms of its storytelling , Palestine foregrounds ordinary people ’ s voices and places them in context—often in contrast—with official narratives @ @ @ @ @ @ @ devotes a spread to the 1917 Balfour Declaration , in which Britain announced its support for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine .
“ We do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country , ” Sacco quotes the United Kingdom ’ s foreign secretary , Arthur Balfour , saying as he sits in an armchair in a book-lined study and delicately holds aloft a cup of tea .
Two pages later , a Palestinian man sits on the floor @ @ @ @ @ @ @ camp and explains that he lost his home in 1948 during the Nakba .
When he took his family back to the site many years later , his entire village was gone .
“ There is no sign that we ever lived there , ” he says .
His words float atop a drawing of the family looking out on a stretch of bare land with a lone truck driving through it.14 Juxtaposition—the whiplash produced by placing contrasting perspectives and timelines alongside each other—is central to Sacco ’ s project .
It serves @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and declarations don ’ t account for the reality of lived experiences .
It also helps him put into practice a credo laid out in the preface to Journalism , a 2012 collection of his short-form work : “ The powerful should be quoted , yes , but to measure their pronouncements against the truth , not to obscure it.
” If , as the expression goes , history is written by the victors , then Sacco has given himself the job of revising it on behalf of the victims.15 Nowhere in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ than Footnotes in Gaza , a hefty and meticulous book that uncovers the circumstances of two Israeli massacres of Palestinians during the 1956 Suez crisis .
As part of the operation , Israeli forces invaded the Gaza Strip on their way to Sinai , in an effort to root out Palestinian armed militants who were supported by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser ’ s government .
In the process , they rounded up and killed hundreds of civilians .
Israeli leaders downplayed and tried to justify the massacre , claiming that the Palestinians @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” that some had been armed and rioted , and that there had been Egyptian instigators among them.16 Sacco finds otherwise .
He first learned about the episodes not quite from a footnote , but in passing in a Noam Chomsky book , which cites a United Nations report stating that 275 Palestinians had been killed in the town of Khan Younis and its adjacent refugee camp and 111 others in the Rafah camp .
While reporting from Gaza , Sacco became curious about the two massacres , eventually returning to focus on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ He went to the UN archives and read the original report , as well as others he could find , and enlisted the help of Israeli researchers .
But little had been written about either incident.17 Footnotes in Gaza is a remarkable work of comics journalism and history that arranges dozens of voices and past and present events into a horrifying yet deeply empathetic assemblage .
As in Palestine and Safe Area Goražde , his 2000 book about the siege of the titular town during the Bosnian War , Sacco ’ s primary @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pair the texts of people ’ s recollections with drawn reenactments .
He often re-creates the interview process by showing his subjects looking straight ahead as they speak , so the reader assumes Sacco ’ s listening position .
And whereas the characters and scenes in Palestine are highly stylized , sometimes to the point of looking grotesque , by 2009 , when Footnotes was published , he had shifted more toward realism .
Most of the speakers in the book are old men , and he draws their creased and weary faces @ @ @ @ @ @ @ accounts can be unreliable , and he acknowledges it by sometimes placing disparate versions of events side by side and highlighting the discrepancies .
This is particularly true of his treatment of the Rafah episode , in which , after being violently rounded up , Palestinian men were put through a long screening process .
Sacco is forthright about the fallibility of memory and the psychic toll of trauma here .
“ While anyone would remember a two-second flurry of clubs rising and falling onto skulls and flesh…and the continuous gunfire as the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , “ what about the next eight- or ten-hour stretch when the gear shifted down to the slow , bitter , but relatively systematic sifting of men ?
” 19 Even with the inconsistencies and conflicts , the collection of remembrances in Footnotes doesn ’ t throw the whole story into doubt ; instead , it builds up a bulwark that reinforces the common truth : The mass killings did happen , despite the Israeli government ’ s attempts to minimize them .
The art bolsters that conclusion , as with the growing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Their multiplicity , the space they take up on the page , seems to challenge their erasure from official records .
In the account of the Rafah incident , especially , images of fearful men holding their hands above their heads and being beaten and shot recur like an oppressive and inescapable refrain.20 That cumulative effect is arguably one of the most important qualities of Sacco ’ s work .
Traditional long-form journalism is character-driven : Writers tell the story of a place and time through one or two representative protagonists .
Sacco @ @ @ @ @ @ @ like oral history .
Using the form of comics , he ’ s able to build a picture of an event or issue through a diversity of voices , images , and experiences , always working from the bottom up .
In doing so , he pushes against a colonial mindset that sees world events through the lens of heroes and leaders.21 A key element of Sacco ’ s work is the fluidity with which he moves between registers of time : He always keeps one foot anchored in the present while delving @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to Paying the Land .
What Sacco finds when he visits the Northwest Territories is not a general Dene consensus about how to handle oil and gas , or even two opposing camps , but a fractured environment in which everyone seems to have their own opinion .
Some say resource extraction comes at too high a cost ; others argue that the tribes should control it so that they can regulate it and make money.22 This disagreement reflects how different communities have taken their own approaches to settling land claims with the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ thoughts on living in the bush , which was traditionally a defining aspect of Dene existence : Some remember it proudly as a time of self-reliance , while others remember nearly starving in subzero temperatures .
Sacco has never shirked complexity , but it ’ s an impressive feat that he manages to hold space for all these issues and voices to comfortably coexist.23 There is , however , one unifying factor , a trauma at the heart of the Dene ’ s estrangement from the land they ’ ve long revered and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ which Canada ’ s Truth and Reconciliation Commission labeled “ cultural genocide ” in a 2015 report .
For nearly 150 years , the government took First Nations children away from their parents and communities and placed them in religious schools , where they were forced to speak English , subjected to strict rules , and often abused.24 Sacco tells the tale of the residential school system largely through the first-person stories of those who attended it .
Renderings of them as adults , speaking to Sacco , appear amid drawings of their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ describing .
The work becomes an actualization of their memories , in the process visualizing the haunting grip of historical trauma .
In one passage , interviewee Paul Andrew recounts the physical brutality : “ In residential school you got hit and you never know why you got hit , ” he says , as images of his 8- or 9-year-old self being slapped ricochet across the middle of the page .
Below , Sacco places portraits of the boy , as he ’ s being yelled at by a nun and a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ adult Andrew , their faces set in a similarly pained expression .
Boxes of words hover in the space between them , as Andrew recalls how the abuse was also emotional and spiritual : “ You ’ re not good enough .
That ’ s why we got to remake you .
Because you ’ re not good enough.
” 25 Unlike the structure of Sacco ’ s previous books , in which the core conflict is woven throughout the story , the narrative of the residential schools is concentrated in one section @ @ @ @ @ @ @ doesn ’ t appear until halfway through the text .
That decision reflects a crucial difference in this new work : Although , like other Sacco titles , it involves him visiting and reporting on an oppressed community as an outsider , the subject isn ’ t war or an uprising .
There are fewer specific events to chronicle and more sentiments and arguments to convey , which at times makes for a less cohesive story .
But the shift allows him to move away from mostly depicting misery to rendering a more @ @ @ @ @ @ @ through in the richly detailed art and the formal experiments that open up new depths in his work.26 The clearest example of this is the book ’ s opening , a 19-page recollection of growing up on the land , narrated by Andrew .
“ You learn about relationships and connections with the land and the animals , ” he says .
“ You learn how important they are to you , how important the world is , essentially.
” As Andrew describes his people ’ s traditions—building a boat every year , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by dog sleigh—Sacco fills the pages with a proliferation of images .
Scenes of bush life flow into one another without panels or borders , creating the feeling of a dreamscape informed by the aesthetic of a scrapbook .
The effect is immersive , and the only interruption is Andrew ’ s face , which appears in a black rectangle , like a narrator from another time.27 At one point , Andrew explains the Dene ’ s holistic approach to life .
When you arrive at a camp , you generally aren ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ you look at what needs to be done and you do it , ” he says .
“ So you find yourself in the circle .
You work yourself in [ to ] the circle of that community.
” Amid these words , the young Andrew stands alone in the center of the page with buckets of water in both hands .
He ’ s surrounded by a ring of white space , beyond which others in the camp form a larger circle as they attend to their tasks.28 This image—of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the book , when a young man named Eugene Boulanger tells a story of going out to hunt caribou .
The trip was part of a reality TV show about younger Dene connecting with their heritage , but for Boulanger it became a spiritual experience .
He explains that while he was alone in the mountains , “ I had the omniscient moment where I saw myself in the continuum of my ancestry , the ancestors a long time ago doing exactly what I was doing exactly where I was doing it.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the page , standing over the body of the caribou with a knife in his hand .
Around him there is that same ring of white space , and then several images of his Dene forebears carrying out the same task .
“ I felt that this 22-year circle had been closed , ” Boulanger says.29 Using these two moments as bookends , Sacco turns the theme of the circle into a visual motif as well as a formal structuring device .
It works beautifully , not just because of the power @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it affirms what he ’ s been saying all along in his work : that people and events are interconnected , and time doesn ’ t only move in one direction .
Sacco went to the Northwest Territories in search of stories about what ’ s buried underground .
He returned with something deeper.30

This article appears in the January 11/18, 2021 issue.
There’s a memorable scene near the end of Joe Sacco’s latest book, Paying the Land, that encapsulates his ethos as a comics journalist. For the project, he made two trips to Canada’s remote Northwest Territories to interview members of the Dene Nation about their relationship to the land and resource extraction. At the time of his visits, the gas and oil industries had been established in the region for years, but a global petroleum glut had paused operations. Sacco and his guide, Shauna, visited several towns and heard a range of Indigenous perspectives on drilling and fracking, which provide jobs and economic opportunity but also endanger the habitats and cohesion of communities. What he found was that the complications surrounding resource extraction were inextricable from larger issues the Dene have been facing for generations. Sacco couldn’t parse the conflicts over oil and gas without understanding the Canadian government’s ruthless program of colonization, enacted via unjust treaties and the residential school system. He also couldn’t understand it without following the Dene’s resistance to the government and their fight to regain control of their land and maintain their independence and identity.1 Books in Review Paying the Land By Joe Sacco Buy this book
In what has come to be his usual style, Sacco intersperses the voices of his subjects in Paying the Land with the history of the region and some of his own thoughts on what’s at stake. Compared with his previous work, however, he remains relatively in the background. He listens, narrates, and recurs as a familiar presence wearing a cable-knit sweater and his trademark round glasses, which stand in for his eyes (Sacco has drawn himself with blank frames since his first book). But he doesn’t speak or comment often, which makes the scene near the end especially notable.2
In Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories, Sacco and Shauna travel to the defunct Giant Mine, a site of gold extraction for more than 50 years. When ore processing stopped there in 1999, it left behind 237,000 tons of a lethal byproduct—arsenic trioxide dust. “Where to put it?” Sacco wonders, before answering, “Well, down the mine of course!” He explains that a remediation project rigged frozen storage chambers deep underground; cascading, angled panels show the pair descending and touring one of them. On the next page, Sacco walks alongside the massive machinery and muses about his journey to meet the Dene. “I will leave here with many unanswered questions about my indigenous hosts,” he writes, “but right now…my biggest query is about my race, about us.” He asks in a series of text boxes laid across drawings of the dark mine, “What is the worldview of a people who mumble no thanks or prayers, who take what they want from the land, and pay it back with arsenic?”3
It’s a remarkable moment, a swift and scathing indictment of the people Sacco represents—white, settler, Western. This type of self-critique is rare in mainstream Anglo-American journalism, which adheres to the myth of the reporter’s neutrality or else revels in indulgent subjectivity. But rigorous inward-facing critique is common in Sacco’s work. For him, journalism is about asking questions, relaying information, and uncovering truths, not only about one’s subjects but also about oneself. Throughout his books he exposes the mechanics of his process in such a way that the reader can never forget that their narrator is a biased, privileged outsider. He sees it as a matter of ethics. “The important thing for me isn’t so much objectivity, it’s—I want the journalists to admit their contexts, their prejudices somehow,” he has said. “Objectivity to me is a different word than honesty.”4 Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. Manny Maung Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. Manny Maung
That honesty is a crucial part of Sacco’s decades-long project. Whether covering the lives of Palestinians in the occupied territories, Bosniaks and Serbs in the former Yugoslavia, or the Dene, he seeks out difficult and painful stories and tells tales of war and oppression that many people may not want to hear. Sacco’s oeuvre is built on using words, images, and a potent combination of the two to make visceral the realities of historical trauma. As Hillary Chute wrote in her 2016 book, Disaster Drawn, his work “is about an ethics of attention, not about producing the news.” And as a white Western man, he’s keenly aware of the power his attention holds.5
Comics have flourished as a genre for memoir and nonfiction stories since the 1970s, but the use of the form for journalism has been much slower to catch on. It has gained traction over the past decade or so with the release of books like Josh Neufeld’s A.D., about Hurricane Katrina, in 2009, and Sarah Glidden’s Rolling Blackouts, about the effects of the Iraq War in the Middle East, in 2016, as well as with digital publications like Symbolia (now defunct) and The Nib. In recent years, The New York Times has also begun to run drawn reported pieces in its opinion section, bestowing mainstream visibility on the field. But when Sacco started out, this kind of work barely existed. According to Chute, in fact, he coined the term “comics journalism” himself.6
Born in Malta in 1960 and raised in Australia before his family moved to the United States in 1972, Sacco began drawing comics as a child. His interest in journalism took hold during high school in Portland, Ore., where he worked on the student newspaper, and he went on to study the subject at the University of Oregon.7
After college, Sacco returned to visual storytelling while leading a peripatetic life. He moved to Malta in 1983 and published a series of romance comics, then back to Portland, where he cofounded a monthly comics newspaper called the Portland Permanent Press, which folded, after a year, in 1988. Next he moved to Los Angeles, where he worked for the comics publisher Fantagraphics and founded a satirical magazine called Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy. In 1988, he left the United States for a four-year stint that included touring Europe with a rock band and living in Berlin.8
Sacco’s work during these years was often satirical and autobiographical, drawn in what’s known as “bigfoot” style, which features expressive characters with exaggerated bodies inspired by Robert Crumb and other underground comix pioneers. Still, politics and military conflicts weren’t far from his mind. In one piece from the period, he captures his mother’s memories of the violence of World War II in Malta; another focuses on his obsessive following of the Persian Gulf war of 1991 while going through a breakup. These early comics, which are collected in the 2003 book Notes From a Defeatist, indicate the direction that Sacco’s work was moving in, but it was one trip in particular that set the course of his career.9
Between 1991 and 1992, Sacco spent two months in Palestine and Israel. It was the waning days of the first intifada, when Palestinians rose up against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and were met by a military response. Over a thousand people died, the majority of them Palestinians, while images of Palestinian boys and men throwing stones and Molotov cocktails at Israeli soldiers abounded. Sacco was, he later explained, “furious at” the American news media, which he thought mischaracterized and misrepresented the reality of the situation and the power imbalances between the two countries. “There are two ways in which Palestinians are portrayed—as terrorist and as victim,” he told an interviewer for Al Jazeera. “There may be truth in certain situations for both descriptions, but Palestinians are also people going to school, who have families, have lives, invite you into their home, and think about their food.” He wanted to see what was happening for himself and hear from Palestinians in the occupied territories directly.10
On his trip, Sacco spent time in Palestinians’ homes, where he shared meals and interviewed them about their lives. He turned his notes into a series of comic books published between 1993 and 1995. They weren’t commercially successful, but they were a rarity in the American media: Unflinchingly honest about the Palestinian plight, they depicted an open, hospitable people describing the horrific yet quotidian nature of their suffering. The following year, Fantagraphics released Palestine in two volumes, and Sacco won an American Book Award. (It has since been collected in one book.) “There is nothing else quite like this in alternative comics,” wrote a reviewer for Publishers Weekly—which, as if to drive the point home, miscategorized the work as fiction.11
Given the milieu in which Sacco had been working, Palestine is firmly grounded in the traditions of underground comix and New Journalism. Its style is cartoonish—in fact, he heard complaints that his depictions of people in the first issue were stereotypical and offensive, and he tried to adjust accordingly—and the tone is often sarcastic and outlandish. Sacco plays a starring role as the self-conscious protagonist in search of some kind of truth. It’s not his most sophisticated work, but it is a crucial document for tracking the inception of long-form comics journalism.12
The basics of Sacco’s methodology are already evident in Palestine. From the start, he doesn’t shy away from depicting violence, but he also uses art to bring the setting to life: the muddy refugee camps, bare-bones dwellings, and bustling cities. “To me landscape is a character somehow,” Sacco has said of his work, and indeed, it’s part of how the reader comes to understand Gaza and the West Bank in this book. It helps Sacco do something that’s harder to pull off in prose and reportage alone: He creates a sense of the everyday life that forms the backdrop for, and is disrupted by, acts of brutality.13
In terms of its storytelling, Palestine foregrounds ordinary people’s voices and places them in context—often in contrast—with official narratives. In the first chapter, Sacco devotes a spread to the 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which Britain announced its support for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. “We do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country,” Sacco quotes the United Kingdom’s foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, saying as he sits in an armchair in a book-lined study and delicately holds aloft a cup of tea. Two pages later, a Palestinian man sits on the floor in a dwelling in the Jabalia refugee camp and explains that he lost his home in 1948 during the Nakba. When he took his family back to the site many years later, his entire village was gone. “There is no sign that we ever lived there,” he says. His words float atop a drawing of the family looking out on a stretch of bare land with a lone truck driving through it.14
Juxtaposition—the whiplash produced by placing contrasting perspectives and timelines alongside each other—is central to Sacco’s project. It serves as a reminder that dates, documents, and declarations don’t account for the reality of lived experiences. It also helps him put into practice a credo laid out in the preface to Journalism, a 2012 collection of his short-form work: “The powerful should be quoted, yes, but to measure their pronouncements against the truth, not to obscure it.” If, as the expression goes, history is written by the victors, then Sacco has given himself the job of revising it on behalf of the victims.15
Nowhere in his body of work is this truer than Footnotes in Gaza, a hefty and meticulous book that uncovers the circumstances of two Israeli massacres of Palestinians during the 1956 Suez crisis. As part of the operation, Israeli forces invaded the Gaza Strip on their way to Sinai, in an effort to root out Palestinian armed militants who were supported by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s government. In the process, they rounded up and killed hundreds of civilians. Israeli leaders downplayed and tried to justify the massacre, claiming that the Palestinians had been noncompliant and “unruly,” that some had been armed and rioted, and that there had been Egyptian instigators among them.16
Sacco finds otherwise. He first learned about the episodes not quite from a footnote, but in passing in a Noam Chomsky book, which cites a United Nations report stating that 275 Palestinians had been killed in the town of Khan Younis and its adjacent refugee camp and 111 others in the Rafah camp. While reporting from Gaza, Sacco became curious about the two massacres, eventually returning to focus on them and to speak to survivors. He went to the UN archives and read the original report, as well as others he could find, and enlisted the help of Israeli researchers. But little had been written about either incident.17
Footnotes in Gaza is a remarkable work of comics journalism and history that arranges dozens of voices and past and present events into a horrifying yet deeply empathetic assemblage. As in Palestine and Safe Area Goražde, his 2000 book about the siege of the titular town during the Bosnian War, Sacco’s primary method for narrating the massacres is to pair the texts of people’s recollections with drawn reenactments. He often re-creates the interview process by showing his subjects looking straight ahead as they speak, so the reader assumes Sacco’s listening position. And whereas the characters and scenes in Palestine are highly stylized, sometimes to the point of looking grotesque, by 2009, when Footnotes was published, he had shifted more toward realism. Most of the speakers in the book are old men, and he draws their creased and weary faces in careful detail.18
Sacco knows that eyewitness accounts can be unreliable, and he acknowledges it by sometimes placing disparate versions of events side by side and highlighting the discrepancies. This is particularly true of his treatment of the Rafah episode, in which, after being violently rounded up, Palestinian men were put through a long screening process. Sacco is forthright about the fallibility of memory and the psychic toll of trauma here. “While anyone would remember a two-second flurry of clubs rising and falling onto skulls and flesh…and the continuous gunfire as the schoolyard filled up,” he writes, “what about the next eight- or ten-hour stretch when the gear shifted down to the slow, bitter, but relatively systematic sifting of men?”19
Even with the inconsistencies and conflicts, the collection of remembrances in Footnotes doesn’t throw the whole story into doubt; instead, it builds up a bulwark that reinforces the common truth: The mass killings did happen, despite the Israeli government’s attempts to minimize them. The art bolsters that conclusion, as with the growing number of images of the dead. Their multiplicity, the space they take up on the page, seems to challenge their erasure from official records. In the account of the Rafah incident, especially, images of fearful men holding their hands above their heads and being beaten and shot recur like an oppressive and inescapable refrain.20
That cumulative effect is arguably one of the most important qualities of Sacco’s work. Traditional long-form journalism is character-driven: Writers tell the story of a place and time through one or two representative protagonists. Sacco’s approach is more populist, like oral history. Using the form of comics, he’s able to build a picture of an event or issue through a diversity of voices, images, and experiences, always working from the bottom up. In doing so, he pushes against a colonial mindset that sees world events through the lens of heroes and leaders.21
A key element of Sacco’s work is the fluidity with which he moves between registers of time: He always keeps one foot anchored in the present while delving into the past. This is central to Paying the Land. What Sacco finds when he visits the Northwest Territories is not a general Dene consensus about how to handle oil and gas, or even two opposing camps, but a fractured environment in which everyone seems to have their own opinion. Some say resource extraction comes at too high a cost; others argue that the tribes should control it so that they can regulate it and make money.22
This disagreement reflects how different communities have taken their own approaches to settling land claims with the Canadian government. People even have varying thoughts on living in the bush, which was traditionally a defining aspect of Dene existence: Some remember it proudly as a time of self-reliance, while others remember nearly starving in subzero temperatures. Sacco has never shirked complexity, but it’s an impressive feat that he manages to hold space for all these issues and voices to comfortably coexist.23
There is, however, one unifying factor, a trauma at the heart of the Dene’s estrangement from the land they’ve long revered and respected: the residential school system, which Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission labeled “cultural genocide” in a 2015 report. For nearly 150 years, the government took First Nations children away from their parents and communities and placed them in religious schools, where they were forced to speak English, subjected to strict rules, and often abused.24
Sacco tells the tale of the residential school system largely through the first-person stories of those who attended it. Renderings of them as adults, speaking to Sacco, appear amid drawings of their younger selves experiencing what they’re describing. The work becomes an actualization of their memories, in the process visualizing the haunting grip of historical trauma. In one passage, interviewee Paul Andrew recounts the physical brutality: “In residential school you got hit and you never know why you got hit,” he says, as images of his 8- or 9-year-old self being slapped ricochet across the middle of the page. Below, Sacco places portraits of the boy, as he’s being yelled at by a nun and a priest, side by side with the adult Andrew, their faces set in a similarly pained expression. Boxes of words hover in the space between them, as Andrew recalls how the abuse was also emotional and spiritual: “You’re not good enough. That’s why we got to remake you. Because you’re not good enough.”25
Unlike the structure of Sacco’s previous books, in which the core conflict is woven throughout the story, the narrative of the residential schools is concentrated in one section in Paying the Land, and it doesn’t appear until halfway through the text. That decision reflects a crucial difference in this new work: Although, like other Sacco titles, it involves him visiting and reporting on an oppressed community as an outsider, the subject isn’t war or an uprising. There are fewer specific events to chronicle and more sentiments and arguments to convey, which at times makes for a less cohesive story. But the shift allows him to move away from mostly depicting misery to rendering a more complex, affirmative world. This comes through in the richly detailed art and the formal experiments that open up new depths in his work.26
The clearest example of this is the book’s opening, a 19-page recollection of growing up on the land, narrated by Andrew. “You learn about relationships and connections with the land and the animals,” he says. “You learn how important they are to you, how important the world is, essentially.” As Andrew describes his people’s traditions—building a boat every year, for instance, and traveling long distances by dog sleigh—Sacco fills the pages with a proliferation of images. Scenes of bush life flow into one another without panels or borders, creating the feeling of a dreamscape informed by the aesthetic of a scrapbook. The effect is immersive, and the only interruption is Andrew’s face, which appears in a black rectangle, like a narrator from another time.27
At one point, Andrew explains the Dene’s holistic approach to life. When you arrive at a camp, you generally aren’t given specific instructions. Instead, “you look at what needs to be done and you do it,” he says. “So you find yourself in the circle. You work yourself in[to] the circle of that community.” Amid these words, the young Andrew stands alone in the center of the page with buckets of water in both hands. He’s surrounded by a ring of white space, beyond which others in the camp form a larger circle as they attend to their tasks.28
This image—of the individual within the group—recurs at the end of the book, when a young man named Eugene Boulanger tells a story of going out to hunt caribou. The trip was part of a reality TV show about younger Dene connecting with their heritage, but for Boulanger it became a spiritual experience. He explains that while he was alone in the mountains, “I had the omniscient moment where I saw myself in the continuum of my ancestry, the ancestors a long time ago doing exactly what I was doing exactly where I was doing it.” Sacco draws him near the center of the page, standing over the body of the caribou with a knife in his hand. Around him there is that same ring of white space, and then several images of his Dene forebears carrying out the same task. “I felt that this 22-year circle had been closed,” Boulanger says.29
Using these two moments as bookends, Sacco turns the theme of the circle into a visual motif as well as a formal structuring device. It works beautifully, not just because of the power of his artistry, but also because it affirms what he’s been saying all along in his work: that people and events are interconnected, and time doesn’t only move in one direction. Sacco went to the Northwest Territories in search of stories about what’s buried underground. He returned with something deeper.30


thenation--2020-12-28--How the Fight Over Spain’s Anti-Fascist Legacy Involves a Former ‘Nation’ Editor

On November 30 , the Spanish government announced that it would step in to save the tomb of a longtime Nation journalist , Julio Álvarez del Vayo , who worked as one of the magazine ’ s editors from the early 1940s to the mid-1950s .
Vayo , as he was generally known , was a socialist politician and diplomat who served as Spain ’ s foreign minister during the Spanish Civil War ( 1936–39 ) .
After Francisco Franco ’ s victory , he lived in exile in France , the United States—where he became a close friend of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he ’ d traveled during the war years as well , trying to rally support in the League of Nations for the beleaguered Spanish Republic .
He was buried in Geneva .
As the rent on his tomb was running out , his remains were set to be exhumed and moved to an ossuary .
The decision of Spain ’ s progressive coalition government to protect Vayo ’ s tomb from destruction comes at a time when the country ’ s anti-fascist legacy is once more under dispute .
In September , Prime @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a “ Law of Democratic Memory , ” meant to meet the long-standing demands for justice and recognition of thousands of victims of the Franco dictatorship .
The new law would provide material and symbolic reparations for victims of state violence and expropriation ; annul judicial sentences from Franco ’ s sham courts that were designed to eliminate political dissidents ; reform public history education ; limit freedom of speech for antidemocratic ideologies ; and remove or prohibit public tributes to the dictatorship .
The proposal has incensed the Spanish right , which @ @ @ @ @ @ @ breaking the pact that enabled the country ’ s transition to democracy .
Following the example of their European and US counterparts , Spain ’ s right-wing leaders hope to spin electoral wool by demonizing anti-fascism , which in Spain means questioning the legitimacy of the historical struggle against the dictatorship .
One deputy from the conservative Partido Popular ( PP ) recently wrote that it ’ s a “ fallacy to identify anti-Francoism with democracy.
” In October , the city government of Madrid—ruled by the right with the support of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ plaque to Francisco Largo Caballero , a longtime socialist union leader and Republican prime minister during the civil war , who was later arrested by the Gestapo , interrogated by Klaus Barbie , and deported to a Nazi concentration camp .
( He survived the war but died soon after . )
More on the Spanish Civil War Spaniards Confront the Legacy of Civil War and Dictatorship The Untold Story of the Texaco Oil Tycoon Who Loved Fascism In a perverse bit of irony , the city government defended the removal by invoking @ @ @ @ @ @ @ which was adopted in 2007 and prohibits extolling individuals who participated in the failed military coup that unleashed the civil war or in the Francoist repression .
The city ’ s defense revived old Francoist myths , claiming that it was the radicalism of leftist leaders like Largo Caballero that stoked much of the political violence in the first place .
Right-wing myth-making has since only grown .
The Spanish right now paints all those who participated in armed struggle against the dictator , including the guerrilla units that fought both Nazism and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ terrorists.
” Among them was Julio Álvarez del Vayo , who in 1963 galvanized remaining guerrilla units into the Spanish Front for National Liberation .
In fact , it was the association of former guerrilla fighters in France that first sounded the alarm about Vayo ’ s impending exhumation .
In the Spanish government , it was Pablo Iglesias , the leader of junior coalition partner Podemos and Sánchez ’ s second in command , who took the lead in saving the former minister ’ s tomb .
Vayo started writing for The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the board of editors under Freda Kirchwey ’ s editorship from 1941 until 1955 , he shaped much of the magazine ’ s editorial line on US foreign policy during World War II and the early Cold War .
Identified with the left wing of the Spanish Socialist Party , he was sympathetic to the Soviet Union and reviled by the anti-Stalinist and liberal left , from Dwight Macdonald to Arthur Schlesinger , and , eventually , by his own party , which expelled him in 1946 along with some three dozen @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Juan Negrín—who also wrote for The Nation .
( They were posthumously reinstated in 2009 . )
Vayo ’ s ubiquitous presence at The Nation , where he had Kirchwey ’ s unconditional support , fueled complaints about undue Communist influence and rumors that Vayo was a Stalinist agent .
When , in 1951 , The New Leader printed a letter from former Nation art critic Clement Greenberg that claimed Vayo had turned the magazine into a Soviet mouthpiece , Kirchwey sued Greenberg for libel .
According to Kirchwey biographer Sara Alpern , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Vayo , who , as a political émigré , faced possible deportation if the authorities believed the serious charges directed against him.
” The controversy led contributing editor Robert Bendiner and staff contributor Reinhold Niebuhr to resign from the masthead .
According to historian David Jorge , Vayo was never more than a fellow traveler .
The rumors against him , Jorge told us , were first circulated by his former party colleagues and later picked up by the Congress for Cultural Freedom , which , alongside The New Leader , Encounter , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by the CIA .
In early 1952 , Vayo and his wife , returning to the United States after a trip to Europe , were arrested under the McCarran Act and detained for several days .
In his decade and a half at the magazine , Vayo wrote more than 400 articles .
Among his most personal pieces is a hair-raising 4,000-word dispatch he filed in August 1949 describing a clandestine trip to Franco ’ s Spain .
Triumphantly titled “ I Got into Spain , ” Vayo ’ s article narrates how @ @ @ @ @ @ @ enter Spain before being detained by the Spanish police , who let him go after being fooled by his fake American accent and the American-made items he had on him .
By the time Vayo was informally deported back across the border to France , he had managed to report on the lives of everyday people under the Franco regime .
He paints a bleak picture .
“ People who go to France return to Spain talking about how much there is to eat in France , ” he explained .
“ To @ @ @ @ @ @ @ much are often arrested .
French bread is a luxury article to be smuggled over the border.
” Yet the trip left Vayo hopeful .
He reported that the anti-Franco resistance had been encouraged by the US refusal , the month before , to grant Franco a $ 50 million loan .
“ I can assure Americans today , ” he wrote , “ that the Spanish people are as worthy of American sympathy and support in their present magnificent struggle against the last heir of Hitler as they were during the active @ @ @ @ @ @ @ included the story in his memoir , The Last Optimist , which came out the following year .
Vayo would never see his anti-Francoist wishes fulfilled .
His editorship at The Nation ended shortly after Kirchwey ’ s retirement in 1955 .
By the end of that year , Franco ’ s Spain was admitted to the United Nations .
Vayo , who lived out his exile in Switzerland , died in May 1975 , age 84 , six months before Franco ’ s death that November .

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On November 30, the Spanish government announced that it would step in to save the tomb of a longtime Nation journalist, Julio Álvarez del Vayo, who worked as one of the magazine’s editors from the early 1940s to the mid-1950s.
Vayo, as he was generally known, was a socialist politician and diplomat who served as Spain’s foreign minister during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). After Francisco Franco’s victory, he lived in exile in France, the United States—where he became a close friend of Nation editor Freda Kirchwey—and Switzerland, where he’d traveled during the war years as well, trying to rally support in the League of Nations for the beleaguered Spanish Republic. He was buried in Geneva. As the rent on his tomb was running out, his remains were set to be exhumed and moved to an ossuary.
The decision of Spain’s progressive coalition government to protect Vayo’s tomb from destruction comes at a time when the country’s anti-fascist legacy is once more under dispute. In September, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s cabinet approved a “Law of Democratic Memory,” meant to meet the long-standing demands for justice and recognition of thousands of victims of the Franco dictatorship. The new law would provide material and symbolic reparations for victims of state violence and expropriation; annul judicial sentences from Franco’s sham courts that were designed to eliminate political dissidents; reform public history education; limit freedom of speech for antidemocratic ideologies; and remove or prohibit public tributes to the dictatorship.
The proposal has incensed the Spanish right, which accuses Spain’s progressive government of breaking the pact that enabled the country’s transition to democracy. Following the example of their European and US counterparts, Spain’s right-wing leaders hope to spin electoral wool by demonizing anti-fascism, which in Spain means questioning the legitimacy of the historical struggle against the dictatorship. One deputy from the conservative Partido Popular (PP) recently wrote that it’s a “fallacy to identify anti-Francoism with democracy.” In October, the city government of Madrid—ruled by the right with the support of the far-right party Vox—proceeded to remove a memorial plaque to Francisco Largo Caballero, a longtime socialist union leader and Republican prime minister during the civil war, who was later arrested by the Gestapo, interrogated by Klaus Barbie, and deported to a Nazi concentration camp. (He survived the war but died soon after.) Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. Manny Maung Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. Manny Maung More on the Spanish Civil War Spaniards Confront the Legacy of Civil War and Dictatorship Sebastiaan Faber and Bécquer Seguín The Untold Story of the Texaco Oil Tycoon Who Loved Fascism Adam Hochschild A Secret Archive: On the Mexican Suitcase Dan Kaufman Memory Politics: On ‘Franco’s Crypt’ Jonathan Blitzer
In a perverse bit of irony, the city government defended the removal by invoking Spain’s current memory law, which was adopted in 2007 and prohibits extolling individuals who participated in the failed military coup that unleashed the civil war or in the Francoist repression. The city’s defense revived old Francoist myths, claiming that it was the radicalism of leftist leaders like Largo Caballero that stoked much of the political violence in the first place. Right-wing myth-making has since only grown. The Spanish right now paints all those who participated in armed struggle against the dictator, including the guerrilla units that fought both Nazism and Francoism from southern France, as “terrorists.” Among them was Julio Álvarez del Vayo, who in 1963 galvanized remaining guerrilla units into the Spanish Front for National Liberation. In fact, it was the association of former guerrilla fighters in France that first sounded the alarm about Vayo’s impending exhumation. In the Spanish government, it was Pablo Iglesias, the leader of junior coalition partner Podemos and Sánchez’s second in command, who took the lead in saving the former minister’s tomb.
Vayo started writing for The Nation in 1939. As a member of the board of editors under Freda Kirchwey’s editorship from 1941 until 1955, he shaped much of the magazine’s editorial line on US foreign policy during World War II and the early Cold War. Identified with the left wing of the Spanish Socialist Party, he was sympathetic to the Soviet Union and reviled by the anti-Stalinist and liberal left, from Dwight Macdonald to Arthur Schlesinger, and, eventually, by his own party, which expelled him in 1946 along with some three dozen other left-wingers, including former prime minister Juan Negrín—who also wrote for The Nation. (They were posthumously reinstated in 2009.)
Vayo’s ubiquitous presence at The Nation, where he had Kirchwey’s unconditional support, fueled complaints about undue Communist influence and rumors that Vayo was a Stalinist agent. When, in 1951, The New Leader printed a letter from former Nation art critic Clement Greenberg that claimed Vayo had turned the magazine into a Soviet mouthpiece, Kirchwey sued Greenberg for libel. According to Kirchwey biographer Sara Alpern, the editor “wanted to protect Del Vayo, who, as a political émigré, faced possible deportation if the authorities believed the serious charges directed against him.” The controversy led contributing editor Robert Bendiner and staff contributor Reinhold Niebuhr to resign from the masthead. According to historian David Jorge, Vayo was never more than a fellow traveler. The rumors against him, Jorge told us, were first circulated by his former party colleagues and later picked up by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which, alongside The New Leader, Encounter, and other magazines, was secretly funded by the CIA. In early 1952, Vayo and his wife, returning to the United States after a trip to Europe, were arrested under the McCarran Act and detained for several days.
In his decade and a half at the magazine, Vayo wrote more than 400 articles. Among his most personal pieces is a hair-raising 4,000-word dispatch he filed in August 1949 describing a clandestine trip to Franco’s Spain. Triumphantly titled “I Got into Spain,” Vayo’s article narrates how he disguised himself as a tourist to enter Spain before being detained by the Spanish police, who let him go after being fooled by his fake American accent and the American-made items he had on him. By the time Vayo was informally deported back across the border to France, he had managed to report on the lives of everyday people under the Franco regime. He paints a bleak picture. “People who go to France return to Spain talking about how much there is to eat in France,” he explained. “To stop these reports travelers who say too much are often arrested. French bread is a luxury article to be smuggled over the border.” Yet the trip left Vayo hopeful. He reported that the anti-Franco resistance had been encouraged by the US refusal, the month before, to grant Franco a $50 million loan. “I can assure Americans today,” he wrote, “that the Spanish people are as worthy of American sympathy and support in their present magnificent struggle against the last heir of Hitler as they were during the active period of the civil war.” Vayo included the story in his memoir, The Last Optimist, which came out the following year.
Vayo would never see his anti-Francoist wishes fulfilled. His editorship at The Nation ended shortly after Kirchwey’s retirement in 1955. By the end of that year, Franco’s Spain was admitted to the United Nations. Vayo, who lived out his exile in Switzerland, died in May 1975, age 84, six months before Franco’s death that November.


thenation--2020-12-28--Even as a Weak President, Trump Has Undermined Democracy

On Sunday , Donald Trump backed down from his previous threat to veto a measure that secured $ 900 billion in pandemic relief while also funding the federal government until next September .
With his delayed signing of the measure , Trump once again showed himself to be a blowhard who is quick to make loud claims but seldom acts on them .
In a statement , Trump said , “ I will sign the omnibus and Covid package with a strong message that makes clear to Congress that wasteful items need to be removed.
” But this “ strong @ @ @ @ @ @ @ air , since Congress has 25 days to consider his request , by which time Joe Biden will be president .
The only thing Trump has achieved is delaying the additional unemployment payments that the package secured .
This will make the lives of countless Americans more anxious and miserable , but hardly amounts to a win for the president .
Trump ’ s pathetic performance supports the theory held by some critics that he has been a singularly weak president , with a thin legislative legacy and a record of failed negotiations @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Matt Glassman , a senior fellow at the Government Affairs Institute at Georgetown University , noted that “ Trump ’ s veto bargaining strategy on the Omnibus/COVID bill is both a masterclass in how not to use the powers of the POTUS to influence public policy [ and ] exemplary of his entire debacle of a legislative presidency.
” According to Glassman , Trump followed the following steps : This description of Trump as “ weak ” is accurate but is jarring , considering how often Trump has been denounced as an authoritarian @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a coup .
On the left , there has been a small but significant group of dissenters who have used evidence of Trump ’ s weakness as grounds to challenge the idea that Trump is an authoritarian threat .
The CIA Is Running Death Squads in Afghanistan Corey Robin , a political scientist who teaches at the City University of New York Graduate Center , has been the most cogent and forceful critic of the idea that Trump should be seen as an authoritarian menace .
In an interview that ran in Jewish @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that the power Trump and the GOP have in current American politics is almost entirely dependent on the undemocratic but legal features of the constitutional order : the Electoral College , the Senate and the courts .
“ In that regard , it ’ s almost the complete opposite of fascism , ” Robin argues .
Robin goes on to stack up Trump ’ s threadbare legacy with the successes of his predecessors : Compared to the Republican presidencies of Nixon , Reagan , and George W. Bush , Trump ’ s was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is far less assured .
Next to “ law and order ” and “ the silent majority ” ( which Nixon made part of our political grammar ) , next to “ the era of big government is over ” ( which Reagan bequeathed to Clinton as the ruling doctrine of the age ) , next to Bush ’ s war on terror and the Department of Homeland Security and the Patriot Act , none of Trump ’ s attempts to permanently transform the political climate—not of the Republican Party but of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ With the exception of the tax cuts , Trump was hardly able to get much legislation through Congress ; many of his executive orders will be undone by Biden ; the only custodian of his legacy , ironically , will be the courts , which many had seen as the antidote to Trumpism and caretaker of the rule of law .
Robin ’ s analysis is bracing .
It ’ s a necessary corrective to flabby liberal and leftist chatter about incipient fascism .
On its own terms , it is correct .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ his focus on legislative achievement , Robin gives short shrift to the rhetorical side of the presidency .
An American president is both head of government ( like a prime minister in other regimes ) and head of state ( like a monarch ) .
In his capacity as quasi-monarch , Trump has acted in deeply unsettling ways .
He ’ s denounced the press as “ the enemy of the people ” and incited violence against reporters and political foes .
He ’ s mainstreamed racism and given his stamp of approval @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
He ’ s nurtured the QAnon conspiracy theory .
He ’ s refused to accept the legitimacy of his clear electoral defeat and has egged on outlandish moves to overturn the results .
Trump ’ s legislative weakness and his unhinged demagoguery are connected .
It ’ s precisely because Trump can ’ t win victories on the field of legislative battle that he ’ s welcomed the creation of a fictional alternative reality where he is constantly victorious .
And to judge by polls , he ’ s dragged millions of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reasonable response to these facts would be “ What does it matter if Trump and his followers can ’ t accept reality ?
” The proper rejoinder is that Trumpian demagoguery deepens the crisis of American democracy that long predates Trump : political paralysis due to polarization .
Robin himself is astute on this problem .
“ What we ’ ve learned over the last decade—and what Trump ’ s bombast allowed many liberals and the left to avoid—is how much our political institutions constrain action , ” Robin points out in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Democrats don ’ t win the Senate seats in Georgia , we are going to reach the end of 2022 having endured 12 years of political immobility .
That is , from Obama ’ s time in office after the midterms of 2010 to Biden ’ s time after the midterms of 2022 , we ’ ll have had virtually no legislation dealing with any of the challenges of the day and a lot of executive orders that temporarily change things and then get undone by the next president.
” But Trump ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of this gridlock and a contributor to even more paralysis .
Trump rose to power partly on the claim that as an outsider he could shake up Washington and make deals across party lines .
He failed to do that and quickly retreated to paranoia and scapegoating ( which already characterized his style of politics ) .
By poisoning political discourse with his racism and conspiracy theories , he ’ s making it impossible for his successor to escape the trap of immobility .
It ’ s going to be very hard for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ if a large number of Republican voters think he stole the election .
The longer paralysis persists , the shakier American democracy will become .
A nation unable to deal with even basic issues like infrastructure and stimulus is likely to turn to a Trump-style demagogue again and again .
Even without a fascist coup , American democracy is in bad shape .
Trump ’ s supposed weakness has only made things worse .

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On Sunday, Donald Trump backed down from his previous threat to veto a measure that secured $900 billion in pandemic relief while also funding the federal government until next September. With his delayed signing of the measure, Trump once again showed himself to be a blowhard who is quick to make loud claims but seldom acts on them. In a statement, Trump said, “I will sign the omnibus and Covid package with a strong message that makes clear to Congress that wasteful items need to be removed.” But this “strong message” is nothing more than hot air, since Congress has 25 days to consider his request, by which time Joe Biden will be president. The only thing Trump has achieved is delaying the additional unemployment payments that the package secured. This will make the lives of countless Americans more anxious and miserable, but hardly amounts to a win for the president.
Trump’s pathetic performance supports the theory held by some critics that he has been a singularly weak president, with a thin legislative legacy and a record of failed negotiations and retreats. Surveying the wreckage, Matt Glassman, a senior fellow at the Government Affairs Institute at Georgetown University, noted that “Trump’s veto bargaining strategy on the Omnibus/COVID bill is both a masterclass in how not to use the powers of the POTUS to influence public policy [and] exemplary of his entire debacle of a legislative presidency.” According to Glassman, Trump followed the following steps:
Step 1: refuse to engage publicly for months.
Step 2: watch a supermajority pass a bill.
Step 3: forcefully threaten to veto it unless demands met.
Step 4: back down and sign it; look weak.
This description of Trump as “weak” is accurate but is jarring, considering how often Trump has been denounced as an authoritarian, an aspiring fascist who is plotting a coup. On the left, there has been a small but significant group of dissenters who have used evidence of Trump’s weakness as grounds to challenge the idea that Trump is an authoritarian threat. More From Jeet Heer The Indigenous Roots of Robbie Robertson’s Rock and Roll Revolution August 14, 2023 Why Does This Racist Keep Getting Silicon Valley Money? August 11, 2023 When Phallocrats Go Limp August 4, 2023
Corey Robin, a political scientist who teaches at the City University of New York Graduate Center, has been the most cogent and forceful critic of the idea that Trump should be seen as an authoritarian menace. In an interview that ran in Jewish Currents in early December, Robin observed that the power Trump and the GOP have in current American politics is almost entirely dependent on the undemocratic but legal features of the constitutional order: the Electoral College, the Senate and the courts. “In that regard, it’s almost the complete opposite of fascism,” Robin argues.
Robin goes on to stack up Trump’s threadbare legacy with the successes of his predecessors:
Robin’s analysis is bracing. It’s a necessary corrective to flabby liberal and leftist chatter about incipient fascism. On its own terms, it is correct. But it is also incomplete. With his focus on legislative achievement, Robin gives short shrift to the rhetorical side of the presidency.
An American president is both head of government (like a prime minister in other regimes) and head of state (like a monarch). In his capacity as quasi-monarch, Trump has acted in deeply unsettling ways. He’s denounced the press as “the enemy of the people” and incited violence against reporters and political foes. He’s mainstreamed racism and given his stamp of approval to violent groups like the Proud Boys. He’s nurtured the QAnon conspiracy theory. He’s refused to accept the legitimacy of his clear electoral defeat and has egged on outlandish moves to overturn the results.
Trump’s legislative weakness and his unhinged demagoguery are connected. It’s precisely because Trump can’t win victories on the field of legislative battle that he’s welcomed the creation of a fictional alternative reality where he is constantly victorious. And to judge by polls, he’s dragged millions of Republicans into this alternative reality.
One reasonable response to these facts would be “What does it matter if Trump and his followers can’t accept reality?” The proper rejoinder is that Trumpian demagoguery deepens the crisis of American democracy that long predates Trump: political paralysis due to polarization.
Robin himself is astute on this problem. “What we’ve learned over the last decade—and what Trump’s bombast allowed many liberals and the left to avoid—is how much our political institutions constrain action,” Robin points out in the Jewish Currents interview. “Assuming the Democrats don’t win the Senate seats in Georgia, we are going to reach the end of 2022 having endured 12 years of political immobility. That is, from Obama’s time in office after the midterms of 2010 to Biden’s time after the midterms of 2022, we’ll have had virtually no legislation dealing with any of the challenges of the day and a lot of executive orders that temporarily change things and then get undone by the next president.”
But Trump’s demagoguery is itself both a product of this gridlock and a contributor to even more paralysis. Trump rose to power partly on the claim that as an outsider he could shake up Washington and make deals across party lines. He failed to do that and quickly retreated to paranoia and scapegoating (which already characterized his style of politics). By poisoning political discourse with his racism and conspiracy theories, he’s making it impossible for his successor to escape the trap of immobility. It’s going to be very hard for any Republican lawmaker to work with Biden if a large number of Republican voters think he stole the election.
The longer paralysis persists, the shakier American democracy will become. A nation unable to deal with even basic issues like infrastructure and stimulus is likely to turn to a Trump-style demagogue again and again. Even without a fascist coup, American democracy is in bad shape. Trump’s supposed weakness has only made things worse.