Biden Must Not Bail on Four Million Older Americans

The President is quietly betraying a generation of indebted students

The fact that representatives referred only to “students” and “young people” suggests that they didn’t yet know it is older Americans who are being abruptly left behind. We were never warned that we could soon be treated as “a separate and unequal class.”...

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Biden Must Not Bail on Four Million Older Americans

The Elusive Latino Voter

History reconsidered

One place to understand how Republicans have stumbled when it comes to Latino voters is the attempt by the Reagan administration to simultaneously declare an end to racism in 1980—mission accomplished!—and woo Latinos as a racial group because they presented as religious and more socially conservative. Yet, as White House ...
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The Elusive Latino Voter

The Moderates Have to Catch Up

In the fight over his agenda, Biden is making liberals the center

I continue to think regime change is a useful way of understanding politics. That’s the idea that American political history turns in cycles. For 40 or 50 years, one party and its ideas prevails over the other with a majority of voters. From the 1930s to the 1970s, it was ...
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The Moderates Have to Catch Up

Infrastructure Is the Gift That Keeps on Giving

But the GOP will oppose this important jobs bill and the taxes one billionaires that could redistribute wealth to millions of Americans

_____ This week, President Joe Biden unveiled a new $2 trillion infrastructure proposal titled The American Jobs Plan. The statement introducing the plan notes that the United States currently ranks 13th in the world for the quality of our infrastructure, and that our public domestic investment as a share of the ...
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Infrastructure Is the Gift That Keeps on Giving

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene

Past Present Podcast, Episode 266

Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has been stripped of her committee assignments due to her outspoken support of outlandish theories, from QAnon to school shootings to “space lasers” causing forest fires. Niki referred to Michelle Goldberg’s New York Times opinion ...
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Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene

The Showdown Between Democracy and Autocracy

Why the broad anti-Trump coalition must prepare for a post-election crisis

Could democracy in the United States die? A number of troubling signs, such as Donald Trump’s refusal to endorse a peaceful transfer of power and his refusal to condemn white supremacists, lead many to worry about what has, until recently, been unthinkable. As a historian of Nazi Germany, I share this ...
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The Showdown Between Democracy and Autocracy