Dan Crenshaw’s Eye

As he recovers from sight-saving surgery, will the second-term Texas congressman reflect on the health insurance that other Americans don’t have?

_____ Last week, Representative Dan Crenshaw (R, TX-2) sent out a quietly heartbreaking press release. It notified constituents and colleagues that Crenshaw would be temporarily out of commission as doctors work to save his one partially-functioning eye. OK, you may not like Crenshaw very much: I don’t. He is a Trump baby, elected ...
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Dan Crenshaw’s Eye

Is Joe Biden a Socialist?

No, but conservatives forget that some “socialist” programs have worked pretty well

The Chicago Daily Tribune urged Republicans to vote against a Democratic presidential candidate in order to end “costly experiments in state socialism.” Democrats, the writer wailed, sought to “clothe the federal government with paramount power over every kind of enterprise.” A Republican slur against the $1.9 trillion economic rescue package that President-Elect ...
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Is Joe Biden a Socialist?

Remembering and Resisting the Age of Reagan

An activist historian advises his students that the choices they make now will shape their future

______ It was November 1980, two months after my girlfriend and I moved to New York City from Boston, where we had met a year before. I had just started in the M.F.A. program at Columbia and she had just started a job at a small press, managing the production of ...
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Remembering and Resisting the Age of Reagan

The GOP Reshaped America to Hold Onto Power—Can the Dems Do the Same Thing to Save It?

Mitch McConnell understands holding minority power requires ruthless brutality

In the power grab to fill the Supreme Court seat announced the same evening as the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Mitch McConnell didn’t do anything new. The GOP has a long history of playing hardball power politics. In the late nineteenth century, Republicans added four states (Nevada, Colorado, North ...
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The GOP Reshaped America to Hold Onto Power—Can the Dems Do the Same Thing to Save It?

Will the US Pandemic Response Strengthen Workers?

Worker protections and collective bargaining must be part of any economic recovery plan

But this rare moment of bipartisanship will turn out to have been a missed opportunity if it does not also reverse the long decline of worker protections and collective-bargaining power in the United States. As Lawrence H. Summers of Harvard University and many others have shown, this trend has contributed significantly to the ...
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Will the US Pandemic Response Strengthen Workers?

The Disability Paradox

Further thoughts on inequality, disability, and the imaginal

Do you have a disability? Do you want to work? This seemingly innocent pairing of questions should immediately raise a red flag, for it is technically oxymoronic: in the United States, the disabled, by definition, are those who cannot work, at least in any significant sense. Granted, ...

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