The Western Origins of the “Southern Strategy”
For many people, the so-called Southern strategy was the original sin that led directly to the many racial and political problems we face today. Richard Nixon, it is said, implemented this nefarious...
View ArticleThe Surprising Cross-Racial Saga of Modern Wealth Inequality
Lately, critics of the racialized maldistribution of wealth have seized on the notion of a “racial wealth gap” as a defining feature of the American political economy—and insisted that this gap has...
View ArticleIt Will Take Years to Undo the Damage from Trump’s Environmental Rollback
The Trump administration’s response to a pandemic that has killed more than 120,000 Americans and forced much of the country into a devastating economic slowdown has been a massive failure, leading to...
View ArticleThe “Women’s Vote” Never Existed
What, exactly, counts as a women’s issue? In 1972, the activist Johnnie Tillmon famously argued in Ms. magazine that welfare was a women’s issue because the overwhelming majority of recipients were...
View ArticleNew Orleans’ Underpaid, Overexposed Sanitation Workers
It’s common to hear the words of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in times of political unrest—particularly when this country’s destructive legacy of racism and white supremacy once again...
View ArticleStanding Their Ground in Well-Manicured Yards
The first time I glanced at the images, I thought, My God, the Naval Academy is under attack. It was the only way my brain could process what I’d seen: a middle-aged white man wielding a semiautomatic...
View ArticleJohn Roberts Chooses Precedent Over Ideology in Latest Abortion Fight
Monday’s ruling in June Medical Services v. Russo is a victory for the status quo. The 5–4 decision struck down a Louisiana law that would have closed all but one of the state’s abortion clinics if it...
View ArticleThe Fed Is Bailing Out Polluters While Cities Struggle
Ever since bailout talk began this spring, climate campaigners have worried funds would be funneled to Big Oil and other polluting giants. Now it seems that fear was more than justified. While economic...
View ArticleDemocrats Can’t Quit Their Addiction to Big-Money Donors
In an unexpected break from American politics as usual, several of the insurgent congressional candidates who scratched out surprise wins (or are on track to winning) in last Tuesday’s primary...
View ArticleThe Confederates Loved America, and They’re Still Defining What Patriotism Means
In a seeming paradox, it is often the most flamboyantly patriotic Americans who appoint themselves guardians of a discredited rebel flag. A century and a half after the Union and Confederate flags were...
View ArticleUighur Lives Matter
There is a “climate of terror around having children” among China’s oppressed Uighur Muslim minority, according to a horrifying Associated Press report published on Monday. Over the last four years,...
View ArticleBig Pharma’s Got a Brand New Coronavirus Grift
With each passing day, the federal government’s pathetic response to the coronavirus pandemic becomes more and more outlandish. We have never seriously tried to implement a federal testing and tracing...
View ArticleDefund the Sheriffs, Too
The Father’s Day demonstration started peacefully. Earlier this month, Andres Guardado’s family led thousands of marchers to the Compton sheriff’s station, where they called for an independent...
View ArticleThe Democrats’ New Climate Plan Is Weirdly Isolationist
There’s a lot to like in the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis’s 538-page climate plan. Put together by nine Democratic majority members of the committee through hearings and consultations,...
View ArticleThe True Story of the Freed Slave Kneeling at Lincoln’s Feet
We live in a moment of literally falling heroes. The Emancipation Memorial in Washington, D.C.—a statue erected in 1876, funded by money donated by former slaves, and designed and commissioned by...
View ArticleA Satire That Demolishes the Influencer Industry
Wellness influencers are the Romantics of our age. The toned women in leggings Instagramming their flowers and muscles and bowls of miraculous grains are mimicking Shelley or Wordsworth’s rapture. Like...
View ArticleThe Viral Impotency of the Lincoln Project
Individual political action committees are rarely the subject of attack ads. But on Tuesday, the conservative Club for Growth released a one-minute spot targeting the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump...
View ArticleSearching for Consolation in Max Weber’s Work Ethic
People worked hard long before there was a thing called the “work ethic,” much less a “Protestant work ethic.” The phrase itself emerged early in the twentieth century and has since congealed into a...
View ArticleHurricane Season Traps People on the Wrong Side of the Income Gap
I was in college when I lived through my first hurricane. I don’t even remember the name of the storm. What I do remember is that those who could afford to leave campus flew home to California, New...
View ArticleElena Kagan’s Fiery Defense of the Administrative State
Selia Law v. CFPB wasn’t among the highest-profile cases of this Supreme Court term, but it was far from insignificant. In a 5–4 decision along the usual partisan lines, the court struck down part of a...
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