Innholdsfortegnelse for February 21/28, 2022 i The Nation

THE KINGS, GENERALS, AND PRIME MINISTERS WHO CONTROLLED EUROPE’S armies in the summer of 1914 didn’t think their aggressive behaviors—issuing ultimatums, calling up reserves, massing troops on one another’s borders—would result in war. Rather, they believed that conspicuous muscle flexing would impel their rivals to back down. But each show of force on one side prompted an even more extravagant riposte, until the march to war became unstoppable—and so tens of millions perished. It is hard not to see parallels with today’s precarious moment in Europe. As we go to press, Russia is adding even more troops to the 100,000 or so already deployed in areas adjoining Ukraine, while the United States and its allies are dispatching additional forces to the NATO countries closest to Russia and Ukraine. If this…

UKRAINE SHARES A BORDER WITH RUSSIA THE WAY Mexico and Canada do with the United States. Since 1823, we have claimed the right to defend our hemisphere in accordance with the Monroe Doctrine, and now Russia is putting into practice a similar policy against a militarized Ukraine. The parallels are close; the reasons for a defensive posture, obvious. Yet Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said the US no longer believes that there are spheres of influence. Or rather, there is just one sphere: the ever-expanding terrain of legitimate Western democracies approved by NATO. This worldview—an immediate, unexamined consequence of the fall of Soviet communism in 1991—cut a clear path through the Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama, and (for all the fuss) Trump administrations. But there were two bumps that…

DEMOCRATS ARE IN RETREAT AS THEY HEAD INTO this election year. In a stark display of the party’s lack of confidence in its prospects in November’s midterms, 29 House Democrats have announced that they won’t be running for reelection. Given the party’s razor-thin majorities, Joe Biden’s sinking popularity, and the fact that the party of the sitting president almost always suffers losses in midterm elections, it looks as though the Democrats are going to get eviscerated if they don’t quickly change course. Some prominent lawmakers, like Senator Bernie Sanders, have publicly called for a change in strategy, saying that the Democratic Party has “turned its back on the working class.” But the Biden administration remains deeply in denial about its failures, which range from the death of the Democrats’ signature…

DR. ALLISON BERRY SITS AT A TABLE AT THE Rainshadow Café in downtown Sequim (pronounced “Squim”), a 110-mile drive northwest of Seattle, describing the tsunami of hatred that has come her way during the pandemic. She’s young, smiles a lot, wears woolen sweaters and scarves, and has been the health officer for Clallam and Jefferson counties since 2018; before that, she was a doctor at a local clinic run by the Jamestown S’Klallam tribe. To be able to sit indoors at the café, customers have to show proof of vaccination. The mandate was pushed by Berry this past September following Washington state’s reopening. A subsequent Covid surge had swamped the two local hospitals, put all elective procedures on hold, and led to a fearsome wave of intubations and deaths. Until…

LAST FALL, I WAS IN THE ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE ON A research trip and decided to visit Blo’ Norton Hall, the moated, 16th-century manor house in Norfolk where a prince I was writing about had once lived. It was almost dusk when I arrived, but there were several people my age walking the grounds: guests, I assumed, of the bed-and-breakfast to which the house had been converted after the prince’s death. I tried to maintain a friendly distance. As I walked around the house’s rear, the four young men, holding glasses of beer, strolled directly past me, and I smiled at them—but none appeared to see me. Moments later, I realized that this was not, in fact, a bed-and-breakfast through which I was welcome to perambulate but a single, large holiday…

ON JANUARY 21, A MOTHER’S CALL FOR HELP LED TO the deaths of two New York Police Department officers and her son. The mother, Shirley Sourzes, had requested assistance from the police to resolve an argument she was having with her 47-year-old son, Lashawn McNeil. The officers, 22-year-old rookie Jason Rivera and his partner, Wilbert Mora, responded to the routine call and were fatally shot by McNeil before he was shot and fatally injured in turn by a third officer. As we think about what we can do in the future to prevent such tragedies, we often overlook this critical question: Did the officers have to be there at all? To be sure, once the 911 call came in, dispatching armed units was the default option under our current police-centric…

THERE WAS A SENSE, ON THE AFTERNOON OF THE CAPITOL insurrection, that violent white American Trumpism had reached its apex. But by the next morning, as Republican politicians and right-wing media figures began rewriting history in real time—claiming antifa actually did it, pretending the insurrectionists merely went on self-guided tours of the building and “took selfies,” portraying the white mobs as victims—it became clear that the previous day’s act of sedition hadn’t been the final spasm of white supremacist anti-democracy but the harbinger of white supremacist anti-democracy to come. And those who support and excuse it are attempting to give the anti-democratic violence of the insurrection a veneer of respectability by dressing it up in the language of election integrity. In the year since the Capitol siege, Republican lawmakers have…

96 Number of media workers killed in Pakistan between 1992 and 2022 35 Number of journalists whose phones were infected with spyware by El Salvador’s government from 2020 to 2021 19 Number of journalists detained by the Taliban after protests over a press crackdown 9 Number of journalists, activists, and critics who have been imprisoned in Morocco for “offending” public institutions or the king since November 2019 8 Number of journalists in India criminally charged for their coverage of farmers’ protests 4 Number of journalists assassinated in Mexico since January 1 1 Number of journalists that Missouri Governor Mike Parson has threatened to sue for “hacking” for viewing a state website’s public source code…

WITH A MOBILIZED PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT AT HIS BACK, Joe Biden launched a clear break with the conservative consensus that has dominated our politics since Ronald Reagan. However, while this career centrist politician embraced what he called his “Roosevelt moment,” he enjoyed nothing like FDR’s majority in Congress or his connection with voters. The fate of Biden’s presidency will likely depend not just on whether he can produce—but on whether the progressive movement that helped bring him into office will be roused once more. Despite a divided Senate and implacable Republican obstruction, the administration has passed two major investment bills. The American Rescue Plan, hailed by Bernie Sanders as the “single most significant piece of legislation for working-class people that has been passed since the 1960s,” put money in people’s pockets,…

IN ONE OF ITS MANY EXHAUSTING MOMENTS OF META commentary, The Matrix Resurrections addresses Hollywood’s relentless harvesting of existing intellectual property: “We can’t see it, but we’re all trapped inside these strange, repeating loops.” The line, uttered by a new Morpheus (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II; previously Laurence Fishburne) who lives inside a video game version of The Matrix that’s inside the Matrix, is meant to be uncanny. In today’s ecosystem of shareholder-friendly adaptations and reboots, The Matrix and its eccentric fusion of cyberpunk, anime, philosophy, film noir, and Hong Kong cinema would probably never get made. But as a reboot: Why not? Matrix co-creator Lana Wachowski directs the latest sequel without her sister Lilly, but the Wachowskis have long been critics of Hollywood’s ingrained risk aversion. “We work in an industry…

EVEN BEFORE THE COVID PANDEMIC SUPER charged economic inequality, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders announced as a 2020 presidential candidate that “billionaires should not exist.” That was a perfectly reasonable argument from a contender to lead a country that in the 1950s maintained a top marginal tax rate of 92 percent. But, as with so many of the senator’s proposals, the notion of taxing the rich down to size proved to be a bit too bold for both parties—and for the pundit class that polices the political discourse to ensure that things don’t get too interesting. So let me offer a more modest proposal: Let’s tax billionaires—and übermillionaires—back to where they stood when the pandemic surged in March 2020. With authorization from Congress, Internal Revenue Service auditors can calculate the excess…

JULLIANA ESSENGUE ARRIVED IN TAPACHULA, MEXICO, FROM SÃO PAULO, Brazil, in March 2020. She was broke but determined to reach the United States. After nearly two months traversing rain forests, borders, and rivers by bus, car, boat, and foot, she needed money. At first, Essengue and her travel companions squatted. “We slept on the floor for two weeks in a hallway,” she told me. “There were Africans, Haitians—everybody was sleeping on the floor.” In Tapachula, near the Guatemala border, the United States operates what is effectively an open-air immigration prison by forcing migrants to wait to be granted refugee status in Mexico. When Essengue presented her documents to Mexican immigration officials, the conditions were grim. “Some people, they were sleeping in front of the immigration [building] in tents,” she said,…

IN JANUARY 2020, JUST DAYS BEFORE THE first case of Covid-19 was identified in the United States, Bryan Alexander, a scholar at Georgetown University known as a “futurist,” published a new book, Academia Next: The Futures of Higher Education. Alexander made no claim to clairvoyance, only to “trend analysis and scenario creation.” But one of his scenarios showed startling foresight: Imagine a future academy after a major pandemic has struck the world…. Would distance learning grow rapidly as people fear face-to-face learning because of perceived contagion risk?… How would we take conferences and other forms of professional development online?… Would athletes refrain from practice and play for fear of contagion, or would both institutions and the general public demand more college sports as an inspirational sign of bodily vigor in…

One revelation of the Covid-19 crisis is how ill-prepared the United States turned out to be for an unexpected national medical emergency. There are deep historical reasons for why our welfare state proved incapable of dealing with the challenges of the pandemic. As is so often the case, the consequences of this fell disproportionately on Black Americans and other minorities whose health and finances were most affected by the pandemic. The research of George Aumoithe, a historian of global health at Stony Brook University, shows that a lack of ICU beds in low-income communities is the result of spending cuts dating back to the 1970s. At that time, Aumoithe argues, an inflationary crisis, combined with urban flight to the suburbs, compelled politicians and health care experts to cut costs by…