Nothing to See Here
One of the hallmarks of an autocracy is to go after the teachers. Teachers. Seriously, the people who get crappy pay for trying to put information in your childâs head. I donât know if youâve met your kid, but heâs an idiot. I canât even get him to stop kicking the back of my seat on an airplane. And yet some teacher takes that idiot child of yours and gets him to understand the themes in
Huckleberry Finn. If I had to do that job, Iâd search for a quiet spot to commit suicide.
Reversing one Trump policy, Biden has allowed many asylum seekers to enter the United States. By not reversing another, however, many thousands are still being expelled.
Minority Rule
Given the Republican ferocity in trying to destroy basic rights, the road back to democracy is not civic but political.
MEG KINNARD/AP PHOTO
A statue of pro-slavery South Carolina Sen. John C. Calhoun is lifted out of Charleston in June 2020.
As Republicans have increasingly become a permanent minority in America, they have resorted to ever cruder schemes to cling to power. This destruction of democracy has been intertwined with the effort to maintain white supremacy as nonwhites became a growing share of the population. The filibuster is both the emblem and the instrument of this minority rule, as well as the connection between slavery, Jim Crow, and todayâs strategically racist Republican Party.
Wrestling With the New Deal
The programs Roosevelt put together may not have met a Platonic ideal of modern progress, but they saved American democracy itself.
AP Photo
When we fight over the New Deal, we are really arguing about the very meaning of America.
In 2014, an up-and-coming writer named Ta-Nehisi Coates made a landmark case for reparations in
The Atlantic, which took aim at, among other targets, one of the most revered figures in the liberal pantheon: Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Detailing the failures of New Deal housing policy for Black America, Coates told readers that âRooseveltâs New Deal, much like the democracy that produced it, rested on the foundation of Jim Crow.â