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Books:
Sergio Aragones et al, Bat Lash: Guns and Roses, 2008.
Bill Finger et al, Catwoman: A Celebration of 75 Years, 2015.
Chris Hart, Drawing Crime Noir for Comics and Graphic Novels, 2006.
Paul Ortiz, An African American and Latinx History of the United States, 2018.
Frank Tieri et al, Batman: Gotham Underground, 2008.
Larry Tye, Superman: The High-Flying of America's Most Enduring Hero, 2013.
Daniel Wolff, Grown-Up Anger: The Connected Mysteries of Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and the Calumet Massacre of 1913, 2017.
Music:
Dead or Alive, That's the Way I Like It, 2010.
Dexys Midnight Runners, Too-Rye-Ay, 1982.
Dream Syndicate, These Times, 2019.
Eurythmics, Ultimate Collection, 2005.
Flaming Lips, King's Mouth: Music and Songs, 2019.
Long Ryders, Psychedelic Country Soul, 2019.
Manic Street Preachers, Forever Delayed: The Greatest Hits, 2002.
Naked Eyes, The Best of, 1991.
Gary Numan, Premier Hits, 1997.
Parquet Courts, Light Up Gold, 2012.
Rolling Stones, Aftermath, 1966.
Martin Solvieg, Smash, 2011.
Specials, Encore, 2019.
Muddy Waters, Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues: Muddy Waters, 2003.
Various, 200 Cigarettes: Music from the Motion Picture, 1999.
Various, VH1: The Big 80's, 1996.
"To say that the United States is not a democracy is correct if democracy is defined in a way that no government on Earth, past or present, qualifies as one. It is as useful to say, 'The Vietnam War wasn't a war, because Congress didn't declare war.' To people who believe their intelligence is miles wide but don't realize that it is only an inch deep, pointing out that the we elect people to make decisions for us may seem incisive. To anyone else, it sounds like what it is: someone with Morning Zoo Crew DJ politics trying, and failing, to sound smart while defending the indefensible."
Ed Burmila at The Baffler writes that "[i]n the end, invoking republicanism is little more than a way out for the many Americans who honestly think they support government Of, By, and For the People but are perfectly happy with undemocratic processes that produce the outcomes they want."
"Myth-making and politics as performance are now delivering the keys to high office across western democracies. If politics has long intersected with the world of showbusiness, the 21st century has so blurred the two that they often seem to be one and the same. The president of the United States of America, as you may have noticed, does not derive his popularity from any conventional notion of substantive achievement, but instead from a daily pantomime of boasting and nastiness that keeps his supporters in the required state of excitement. Italy and now Ukraine have seen the rise of politicians who actually used to be comedians; in the latter, the latest development is the launch of a new anti-establishment party led by a rock star."
John Harris at The Guardian writes that "the Brexit instinct is at least partly about outrage for outrage’s sake–the kind of sensibility whose most vivid cultural manifestation was in the brazen provocations of punk rock."
"With over 300 million people, today's United States is larger than any premodern empire, larger indeed than the entire world population for most of human history. To our ancestors, it would have seemed absurd to imagine that these 300 million could ever really be an 'us,' a community evoking real loyalty; anyone who's begun each school day standing for the Pledge of Allegiance can appreciate the amount of work that goes into maintaining it. For many of the most famous scholars of nationalism, from Elie Kedourie and Ernest Gellner to Benedict Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm, it must therefore be understood as an essentially modern phenomenon, one that revolves around creating nations rather than simply liberating them.
"The Virtue of Nationalism has little interest in such questions."
Daniel Luban at The New Republic reviews Yoram Hazony's The Virtue of Nationalism.
"The American working class' suffering at the hands of the super-rich is very real. As Polanyi has written, the body politic will respond to that suffering one way or another, with a descent into ethno-nationalist authoritarianism being one of the very real options. Matt Stoller noted that a lot of liberals' disdain for Hawley was driven by the belief that 'fascism is what lives in an individual soul.' But fascism is an aggregate social event more than an individual creed—it's human politics' equivalent to an ecological collapse once the material stresses become too great.
"What is needed in response is not so much cosmopolitan liberalism but cosmopolitan populism: a genuine and broad-reaching populism that can unite everyone, working- and upper-class both, against the capitalist elite."
Jeff Spross at The Week worries over when conservatives "claim the cultural power of the urban liberal upper class, as opposed to the economic power of the 0.01 percent, is the real problem."
"The notion that there are two main political parties in the US–one on the centre left, the other on the centre right–no longer holds. For the parties are increasingly defined by their racial politics. Democrats are multiracial multiculturalists. Republicans are the white party."
Nell Irvin Painter at The Guardian argues that "anti-racists must now act on a history of their own, one sufficiently powerful to defeat Trumpism, as it defeated slavery, segregation and disfranchisement."
"This principled decision of European solidarity and liberal economics contrasted with the approach of Germany and France, which was to impose temporary restrictions on free movement for the first few years. But it was a decision made by default, according to Ed Balls, who was then a Treasury adviser: 'We didn't see the extent to which low-wage people would move. Fundamentally, we didn't think they would.'"
John Rentoul at the Independent says that, regarding Tony Blair, "politics today is the opposite of what he and his supporters hoped for."
"He attributes this idea to an ideology that he calls 'left-modernism,' which can be thought of as a more precise term for what people mean when they say political correctness. Kaufmann traces the origins of left-modernism to the bohemian counterculture of early 20th-century New York, when WASP intellectuals like Randolph Bourne began to argue that 'white ethnics' like Jews and Catholics should remain distinct rather than assimilate to the American mainstream. At the same time, he called on WASPs to abandon their own stultifying culture and become cosmopolitan individualists—a view Kaufmann dubs 'asymmetrical multiculturalism,' since the dominant culture is not considered one of the multiple cultures worthy of being preserved. After the civil-rights movement, this framework was updated, with whites taking the place of the WASPs and blacks, Native Americans, and newer nonwhite immigrant groups taking the place of the old white ethnics. And as both left-modernism and anti-racism norms expanded via higher education and the mass media, Kaufmann argues that the two fused: 'racism' came to describe not only acts of overt prejudice, hostility, or discrimination, but any violation of the left-modernist expectation that whites eschew group attachments and become cosmopolitans.
"Kaufmann thinks this latter step was a mistake."
Park MacDougald at New York reviews Kaufamann's Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities.
"The black press questioned how the price tag could be justified when millions of African Americans were still mired in poverty. Testifying to the US Senate on race and urban poverty in 1966, King had observed 'in a few years we can be assured that we will set a man on the moon and with an adequate telescope he will be able to see the slums on Earth with their intensified congestion, decay and turbulence'."
David Smith at The Guardian describes protests in the 1960s over the space race.
"As a response to Rapinoe's actual argument, Lowry's history lesson is a non sequitur. Her complaint is with America's racial order, not its flag. But like Cooke, Lowry refuses to acknowledge a distinction between the two. On a surface level, both columnists assail the left for equating love of America with indifference to white supremacy; in actual fact, it is Cooke and Lowry who insist on that equation."
Eric Levitz at New York argues that Donald Trump's racist comments regarding four members of the House of Representatives have "made the color of conservative nationalism more plain to the naked eye.
"Historians of desegregation like Matthew Lassiter and Kevin Kruse have suggested that the fundamental conflict between exclusionary white suburbs and diverse cities helped define the whole course of American politics after the 1960s. Even half a century later, politicians and pundits see suburban borders as a firewall against racial integration. Many believe that any plan or policy that crosses the firewall risks once again mobilizing the silent majority lurking in the white hinterland. The perceived risk climbs higher when compulsory measures are invoked. Many school-diversity proposals circa 2019 are geographically siloed: Cities are welcome to improve their schools, and suburbs should not ignore questions of racial equality, but only a political naïf would try to integrate one into the other. And heaven help those who would bus a child across the boundary line.
"But there's a problem: While the trauma of the 1970s and '80s seems to have locked these ideas in the national memory, the country itself has not stopped changing."
Will Stancil at Slate writes that decades after the controversy over busing, "suburbia's uniform whiteness is disappearing."
"In their heyday, Christian bookstores were ubiquitous in strip malls and suburban Main Streets across the country. Largely an evangelical phenomenon, they sold Bibles, devotionals, music, fiction, and nonfiction, along with merch: figurines, Christmas ornaments, T-shirts with slogans like 'Body piercing saved my life.' (Get it?) Critics called the merchandise at Christian stores 'Jesus junk.'"
Ruth Graham at Slate writes that "Christian bookstores may not be long for this earth."
"For the sizable portion of the population not old enough to remember Perot's renegade campaign, it is hard to describe just how thoroughly he captivated media attention and the public imagination, but a single statistic makes the case: He won nearly 19 percent of the popular vote, the largest share for a third-party candidate since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. He split the white vote with Bush, who blamed him for handing the presidency to Clinton, whose winning plurality was just 43 percent. (Exit polling disagreed.) Arguably, American politics has never been quite the same."
Todd S. Purdum at The Atlantic writes that Ross Perot showed that "[t]here is a big chunk of voters who feel disaffected, harmed by free trade, threatened by demographic change, and attracted to an eccentric outsider who promises to upend the status quo."
"Of course, some skepticism toward official information—including information from the intermeshed corporate, scientific, and governmental establishments that regulate public health—is worthwhile. Neither the drug companies that produce vaccines nor the public-health officials who regulate them are infallible. Even during the campaign against polio, one of America's great public-health triumphs, a laboratory in California manufactured defective batches of the vaccine, which ended up paralyzing 164 people and killing 10. And some Americans have legitimate concerns about the influence that drug companies wield today over the regulators who are tasked with keeping their vaccines safe. But there's a crucial difference between wanting to insulate America's regulators from corporate influence and believing that the CDC, the FDA, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Pediatrics are perpetrating a massive conspiracy to maim children."
Peter Beinart at The Atlantic explores the origins of the 2019 measles outbreak.
"Democratic leaders like Pelosi, Joe Biden, Steny Hoyer and Chuck Schumer were shaped by their traumatic political coming-of-age during the breakup of the New Deal coalition and the rise of Ronald Reagan—and the backlash that swept Democrats so thoroughly from power nearly 40 years ago. They've spent the rest of their lives flinching at the sight of voters. When these leaders plead for their party to stay in the middle, they're crouching into the defensive posture they've been used to since November 1980, afraid that if they come across as harebrained liberals, voters will turn them out again.
"The Ocasio-Cortezes of the world have witnessed the opposite: The way they see it, Democratic attempts to moderate and compromise have led to nothing but ruin. Republicans aren't the ones to be afraid of. 'The greatest threat to mankind is the cowardice of the Democratic Party,' Trent told me."
Ryan Grim at The Washington Post writes that "[t]he way the older and younger House members think about and engage with the Republican Party may be the starkest divide between them."
Alex Shephard at The New Republic adds to the discussion.
"Not only that, for Frost, identitarian divisions based on gender, race and sexuality are 'a distraction at best, an active detriment at worst'. 'The biggest divide in American society is class and that's it. I'm a class-first person', she tells me. 'You're hearing in the election how much we need to elect a woman or we need to elect a woman of colour. But the most left-wing candidate is an old, white, heterosexual man [Bernie Sanders] and I want him to win… I'm a Bernie bro. I was a Bernie bro in 2016 and I am now.'"
Fraser Myers at Spiked talks with Amber A'Lee Frost and Anna Khachiyan.
"A little over a decade later, however, African Americans like Douglass began making the glorious anniversary their own. After the end of the Civil War in 1865, the nation's four million newly emancipated citizens transformed Independence Day into a celebration of black freedom. The Fourth became an almost exclusively African American holiday in the states of the former Confederacy—until white Southerners, after violently reasserting their dominance of the region, snuffed these black commemorations out."
In a 2018 Atlantic article, Ethan J. Kytle and Brian write about "When the Fourth of July Was a Black Holiday."
"Conspiracism surfaces in sync with the ups and downs of a nation, taking root in its excesses and its crises, and flourishing particularly among groups who feel economically or politically marginalized. People end up susceptible to outlandish ideas not because they're inordinately foolish or ill-intentioned, but because they're living in times of enormous socioeconomic instability and political discord. Put another way, conspiracy theories aren't eroding democracy so much as they signal that a democracy is already decaying. Combating them effectively has less to do with sounding the alarm than with taking up a broader fight for economic equality and for robust, democratic social institutions."
J.C. Pan at The New Republic reviews Anna Merlan's Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power and Thomas Milan Konda's Conspiracies of Conspiracies: How Delusions Have Overrun America.
"'Most of the folks here are going to be very friendly and nice, but very apolitical,' he said. 'They just want to survive and hang out with their family and drink some beers and make some carne asada. Chicanismo is, like, for other places.'
"Even Border Patrol agents on bicycles from the El Centro station zipped around the fiesta with smiles. No one booed or made a fuss about it.
"'People are going to know where we're at now,' said Adrian Guillermo-Barrera, who set up lawn chairs for his family three hours before the start of the parade and rally. 'We're not just between San Diego and Arizona.'"
In the Los Angeles Times, Gustavo Arellano visits the Imperial Valley.
