Who Gets Included in “the American People”?
It’s one of the most lumbering clichés of American politics. “The American people,” politicians intone, are hurting, tired, angry, or “bitterly divided.” Yet when this election is finished, they will...
View ArticleThe Quiet Suppression of Trans Voters
Voter intimidation is not always easy to identify or to document, something voting rights advocates have emphasized this year. “It is often subtle or context-dependent,” as a fact sheet from Georgetown...
View ArticleTen Moves, Two Tents, and Five Months of a Housing Reckoning in Minneapolis
Nadine Little needed to charge her phone. The afternoon sun was high and bright in South Minneapolis as she headed west, past the rubble and ash of the buildings that had burned just days earlier,...
View ArticleA Republican Oilman Is Running for Texas’s Top Oil-Regulation Seat
In recent weeks, Texas—long considered reliably red—has become a toss-up in the presidential race. That has interesting implications for one of the most important and under-covered climate races in the...
View ArticleGlenn Greenwald Throws a Fit
It takes a special kind of gall to quit a six-figure media job in the doomed year of 2020. But that’s just what Glenn Greenwald has done, following in the martyred footsteps of erstwhile New York Times...
View ArticleThe Elusive Dream of a Functioning Native Caucus
Rudy Soto, a Shosone-Bannock citizen running for a House seat for Idaho’s First District, had to remind me of something that can be surprisingly easy to forget: There is, technically, already a Native...
View ArticleThe Pandemic Case for the Two-Day Workweek
It’s not like you really need data to confirm that things are bad right now—being alive and awake should take care of that—but the latest reports do support the general thesis: Coronavirus infections...
View ArticleIs Biden Ready for a Helter-Skelter Presidential Transition?
God willing, we will know who our next president is sometime late Tuesday night and it will be Joe Biden. It’s of course possible that Donald Trump may refuse to concede and try to get the 6–3...
View ArticleLibertarian vs. Bear
In the early 2000s, a group of libertarians moved to a small town in New Hampshire, where they set about slashing the municipal budget. The newcomers wanted to be free from taxes and government...
View ArticleIs Fox News Ready for Former President Trump?
Rupert Murdoch may be “resigned” to a Trump loss, according to a recent Washington Post report, but he needn’t fret about the future of his media empire. No matter who emerges victorious on Tuesday,...
View ArticleA Groundbreaking New History of Gay Sex and Capitalism
In the earliest phase of European capitalism, Marx’s old story goes, a significant number of laborers renounced agrarian communities for towns and cities, dissolving the family unit and moving from one...
View ArticleWhy Ohio Is the State to Watch on Election Night
Veteran Ohio Democratic strategist Greg Haas has a vision. “At 11:05 on election night, the returns are going to show Ohio going for Joe Biden,” he said. “And all across the country, people are going...
View ArticleThe Libertarian Moment That Never Comes
Nearly four years removed from its best electoral performance in history, libertarianism finds itself on familiar terrain: tantalizingly close to a breakout moment that remains forever out of reach....
View ArticleThe Fate of American Democracy Is in the Hands of Cable News
The 2020 presidential election could very well be messy, complex, and slow, defined by an unprecedented number of mail-in ballots, legal challenges, and possibly recounts reminiscent of the fiasco in...
View ArticleIt’s Already Happening Here
Fascism is the outcome of a collective incapacity to think. This is how, in 1939, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges explained the success of Adolf Hitler. From his marginal observation post in Buenos...
View ArticleThe Violence and Hope in Texas Is Our Future
In 2020 in Texas, depending on which county they live in, a voter can head to the polls at 3 a.m. Or they can drive for several hours to drop their ballot off at the one box in their county of...
View ArticleWhat Do We Do About All These Trump Supporters?
Hockey icon Bobby Orr broke the hearts of millions last week when he declared his support for Donald Trump in a campaign ad in New Hampshire. Not because he exercised his free-speech rights. Not...
View ArticleThe Crushing Anxiety of the Worst Election of Our Lifetimes
I’ve always had trouble watching the countdown to Election Day. Even in a cycle that passes for normal, issues get reduced to talking points trotted out for their appeal to marginal polling...
View ArticleThis Was Always Going to Become Normal
The warnings started early: Just weeks before the 2016 election, after the leak of the Access Hollywood tapes that captured Donald Trump bragging about sexual assault, Michelle Obama told a crowd at a...
View ArticleEven the Pandemic Couldn’t Kill Trumpism
The promise at the heart of Joe Biden’s campaign wasn’t simply that he would beat Donald Trump, although his entire candidacy was premised on the idea that he could do that better than any of the...
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