Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal

Most of us still want our democracy. This is one lesson from the nightmare we’ve been through. We learned how fragile it all is—how many things that had always seemed engraved in monumental stone or written on parchment in permanent ink turn out to depend on flimsy traditions and disposable norms, and how much these depend on public opinion. One un

What is the narrative of Just America? It sees American society not as mixed and fluid, ever more so through time, but as a fixed hierarchy, like a caste system. (Caste is the title of one of the most popular books of Just America; two others are The New Jim Crow and Stamped from the Beginning.) In the words of William Faulkner, for Just America, “

Freedom sealed a deal between elected officials and business executives: campaign contributions in exchange for tax cuts and corporate welfare. The numerous scandals of the 1980s exposed the crony capitalism that lay at the heart of Free America.

An essential worker was a worker who would be fired for staying home with symptoms of the virus. Think about it enough and you realize that the miraculous price and speed of a delivery of organic microgreens from Amazon Fresh to your doorstep depends on the fact that the people who grow, sort, pack, and deliver it have to work while sick. Think som

What do we see in the mirror now? An unstable country, political institutions that might not be perpetuated, a people divided into warring tribes and prone to violence—the kind of country we used to think we could save. No one is going to save us. We are our last best hope.

One way to give labor more power is to make it easier to organize workers by passing labor law reform bills—the perennial campaign promises of Democratic candidates that go perennially unfulfilled. Another is to direct large-scale government investments into key national sectors—clean energy, manufacturing, education, and caregiving—to create jobs,

A writer can still write while hiding from the thought police. But a writer who carries the thought police around in his head, who always feels compelled to ask: Can I say this? Do I have a right? Is my terminology correct? Will my allies get angry? Will it help my enemies? Will it get me ratioed on Twitter?—that writer’s work will soon become life

Before vacating his office, Trump left behind one last lie, bigger than all the others, a tale of the worst betrayal of democracy in American history: the presidential election had been stolen. Hundreds of Republican officials broke their oaths in order to advance the lie, and 70 percent of Republican voters believed it, and this belief brought the

By some accounts the stimulus payments and unemployment relief put more money in the hands of desperate people than the New Deal had done. It staved off widespread hunger and homelessness. Another chunk of money saved tens of thousands of small businesses from destruction. But by the end of summer most of the money was gone, while the virus was sti

At the heart of our divisions is almost half a century of rising inequality and declining social mobility. Americans tolerate more economic inequality than citizens of other modern democracies: if anyone can become anything, today’s unequal results are fair and might well change tomorrow. That was never completely true, but now it’s plainly false.