"It may still be unclear which Democrat is best positioned to beat Donald Trump, but we know one thing: The answer is not Joe Biden."

"Biden and his backers need to face the facts. It may still be unclear which Democrat is best positioned to beat Donald Trump, but we know one thing: The answer is not Joe Biden."

You can also spare me the centrist Pete Buttigieg platform, which strikes me as capitulation from top to bottom. But that's another discussion for another time.

Joe Biden: An Anti-Endorsement at The Nation

His long record of poor judgment and cozying up to bankers makes him the wrong candidate to take on Donald Trump.

In recent weeks we at The Nation, like many other progressives, have come under increasing pressure to choose between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. We’re going to resist that pressure to endorse—for now. Not just because we find much to admire in both candidates’ programs and in the way both have conducted their campaigns (especially their rejection of corporate cash and wealthy funders in favor of small donors) but also because we continue to believe the presence of both candidates on the ballot widens the left lane in our politics, exposing the broadest possible public to Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and measures to rein in corporate power.

We also believe vigorous public debate is the best way for the strongest progressive platform to reach and be embraced by a majority of voters. Progressives may not agree with centrist Democrats like Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg, but engaging with and answering their criticisms now is essential—not merely to win in 2020 but also to build public pressure on a Congress whose members have proved reluctant to defy their corporate benefactors.

Yet that very debate has been stifled by the continuing candidacy of a man whose chief rationale for running—that he alone can defeat Donald Trump—has become increasingly threadbare. Like Hillary Clinton in 2016, Joe Biden offers the promise of picking up where the Obama administration left off: a restoration of business as usual for the K Street lobbyists and Wall Street speculators whose prosperity the 2008 financial crisis did little to disturb. Indeed, as Joseph N. DiStefano reports in this issue, the man posing as “middle-class Joe” has built his career and his family’s wealth on an eagerness to serve not the many Americans crushed by credit card debt but the very banks whose hands are around their throats.

The candidate who insists Medicare for All is too expensive for Americans is also the candidate who, like Clinton, endorsed NAFTA, China’s admission to the World Trade Organization, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership—all of which have savaged US manufacturing and workers. Clinton’s record cost her the industrial heartland (Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan) and, with it, the election ...

Local Democrats AWOL as The Nation asks: "What Is the Left Without Identity Politics?"

We interrupt the Floyd County Democratic Party's latest "Bowling for Dollars" soiree to offer these four examples of "collective soul-searching into what went so devastatingly wrong" on November 8. I'm told that just as soon as The Right Honorable Chairman finds a local "Democrat" who didn't vote for Donald Trump, the soul-searching will commence. 

At least the party can't lose again in 2017.

That's because there are no elections being held next year. 

---

What Is the Left Without Identity Politics? Four writers consider the question dividing the Democratic Party (The Nation)

... We asked four contributors to weigh in on this debate. Is the left too focused on “identity politics”—and what the hell does that term even mean? Their responses follow.

WALTER BENN MICHAELS
A Universe of Exploitation

The defensible heart of identity politics is its commitment to opposing forms of discrimination like racism, sexism, and homophobia. I share that commitment. But opposing discrimination today has no more to do with a left politics than do equally powerful ethical commitments against, say, violence or dishonesty. Why? Because the core of a left politics is its critique of and resistance to capitalism—its commitment to decommodifying education, health care, and housing, and creating a more economically equal society. Neither hostility to discrimination nor the accompanying enthusiasm for diversity makes the slightest contribution to accomplishing any of those goals. Just the opposite, in fact. They function instead to provide inequality with a meritocratic justification: If everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed, there’s no injustice when some people fail.

CHARLES W. MILLS
Whose Identity Politics?

The causes of Donald Trump’s stunning electoral victory will be debated for years: FBI director James Comey’s October 28 letter about Clinton’s e-mails, her “basket of deplorables” comment, the Democratic campaign’s neglect of the Rust Belt states, and so on. But the pernicious and enduring role of identity politics was crucial.

I refer, of course, to the white racial identity politics that has shaped the United States from its birth.

LINDA HIRSHMAN
Expanding the Circle

The call for the left to abandon its appeals to not-white-men violates the very premises of the American project. The Declaration of Independence describes a world in which “all men are created equal,” where “they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” and that “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Even the slaveholders’ Constitution prefaced its enterprise with the purpose of “secur[ing] the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” At the hearings for her confirmation to the Supreme Court in 1993, Ruth Bader Ginsburg stated it precisely. The American project started with white men’s freedom and equality, and has been, for more than two centuries, all about expanding the circle to include more and more people in that blessed plot. It has almost always been the left that forces such expansions.

One argument for disregarding identity politics seems to be that it would free the left to focus solely on reducing economic inequality. But in the United States, where so many issues are entangled with race, such a turn to the material would still have a powerful racial element. (That explains at least in part why confronting inequality has been so much harder to do here than in the mostly white states of Western Europe.) The future of identity politics, and thus the moral and political mission of the left, is predicated on its capacity to organize people who are not white men.

CARLA MURPHY
Beyond the Distraction

These past weeks the dominant post-election debate among liberals and progressives has centered on “identity politics.” The term is a Rorschach test. Everyone sees something different depending on their cynicism towards diversity or experience with Others. More telling than its highly subjective content, however, is its origins. “Identity politics” is an internal argument by and for the white academic-media-donor-managerial class, about how they incorporate people of color into their institutions. I’ve heard this cultural squabble every year since I was a black kid at prep school and Charles Murray and Richard Hernstein published The Bell Curve. It imagines people of color as problems for white people to solve. I am profoundly uninterested in legitimizing such a discussion.

In The Nation: "Working-class women who voted for Trump tell us a lot about feminism’s relationship to class politics."

Know The Nation:

The Nation is the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States, and the most widely read weekly journal of progressive political and cultural news, opinion and analysis. It was founded on July 6, 1865, as a successor to William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator, with the stated mission to "make an earnest effort to bring to the discussion of political and social questions a really critical spirit, and to wage war upon the vices of violence, exaggeration, and misrepresentation by which so much of the political writing of the day is marred."

A message earlier this week from Katrina vanden Heuvel, Editor and Publisher of The Nation.

Today, we rededicate ourselves to our role as journalists of principle and conscience. Today, we recommit to mobilizing against hatred, bigotry, misogyny, and economic pain. And as we have at other times of crisis in our nation, we will move forward in solidarity and in the belief that stronger communities arise in times of crisis. We rededicate ourselves to thinking anew, to putting forth a compelling vision of fundamental change.

We stand for an inclusive and progressive populism—one that addresses inequality and economic insecurity. We stand with women and with Muslim, African-American, and immigrant communities who have been threatened by the blatantly racist, sexist, and bigoted campaign Trump ran.

As Nation writer Ian Haney-López reminded us just a few weeks ago, “Remaking our politics and economy will depend on a broad coalition that must include substantial numbers of racially anxious whites. Ignoring their fears, or worse, pandering to them, further impoverishes all of us. Instead, we must have a unified message for whites as well as people of color. Fearful of one another, we too easily hand over power to moneyed interests, but working together, we can rebuild the American dream.”

The answer to what some have called Trump’s “whitelash” is not to retreat on social liberalism, ever; it is to double down on an economics that speaks to working and poor people.

The immediate response to Trump’s election is one of opposition—we commit to obstructing, delaying, and halting any attacks on people of color, women, or working people that may come from a Trump administration. But we must also understand why millions are angry and anxious, and why they voted for the cruel hoax that is Trumpism.

We knew this was an election about change and a revolt against political elites. Yet it is also a revolt against what elites in both parties have done or accepted—global trade and tax deals of, by, and for the corporations; Wall Street bailouts; big-money politics and crony capitalism; decades of promises not kept. It is a time for great reflection and an even greater reformation—of the Democratic Party, of our politics, of our society. The Nation's work will continue—as it has in good, not-so-good, and bad times—to offer alternative visions and ideas, to deepen our journalistic mission of truth-telling and deep reporting, and to further the work of the political revolution in a nation divided.

A current excerpt of relevance:

Inequality Between Women Is Crucial to Understanding Hillary’s Loss, by By Kathleen Geier (The Nation)

Working-class women who voted for Trump tell us a lot about feminism’s relationship to class politics.

... Class differences among women are an all but taboo subject. But scholars such as Leslie McCall have found that economic inequality among women is just as large, and has been growing just as fast, as economic inequality among men. This economic divide among women has created one of the most significant fault lines in contemporary feminism. That’s because professional-class women, who have reaped a disproportionate share of feminism’s gains, have dominated the feminist movement, and the social distance between them and their less privileged sisters is wide and growing wider. In the decades since the dawn of the second wave, educated women gained access to status jobs, but working-class women experienced declining wages and (because of the rise of divorce and single parenthood among the working class) shouldered an increasingly heavy burden of care. Yet mainstream feminist groups and pundits have consistently stressed the social and cultural issues that are most important to affluent women, while marginalizing the economic concerns of the female masses.

I agree with The Nation: "Bernie Sanders for President."

The 1% wouldn't vote for him,anyway.

The Nation offers an endorsement. See also: Democratic presidential primary gets real, by Mark Weisbrot (Al Jazeera).

Bernie Sanders for President at The Nation

A year ago, concerned that ordinary citizens would be locked out of the presidential nominating process, The Nation argued that a vigorously contested primary would be good for the candidates, for the Democratic Party, and for democracy. Two months later, Senator Bernie Sanders formally launched a campaign that has already transformed the politics of the 2016 presidential race. Galvanized by his demands for economic and social justice, hundreds of thousands of Americans have packed his rallies, and over 1 million small donors have helped his campaign shatter fund-raising records while breaking the stranglehold of corporate money.

Sanders’s clarion call for fundamental reform—single-payer healthcare, tuition-free college, a $15-an-hour minimum wage, the breaking up of the big banks, ensuring that the rich pay their fair share of taxes—have inspired working people across the country. His bold response to the climate crisis has attracted legions of young voters, and his foreign policy, which emphasizes diplomacy over regime change, speaks powerfully to war-weary citizens.

Most important, Sanders has used his insurgent campaign to tell Americans the truth about the challenges that confront us. He has summoned the people to a “political revolution,” arguing that the changes our country so desperately needs can only happen when we wrest our democracy from the corrupt grip of Wall Street bankers and billionaires.

We believe such a revolution is not only possible but necessary—and that’s why we’re endorsing Bernie Sanders for president. This magazine rarely makes endorsements in the Democratic primary (we’ve done so only twice: for Jesse Jackson in 1988, and for Barack Obama in 2008). We do so now impelled by the awareness that our rigged system works for the few and not for the many. Americans are waking up to this reality, and they are demanding change. This understanding animates both the Republican and Democratic primaries, though it has taken those two contests in fundamentally different directions.

At the core of this crisis is inequality, both economic and political.

CLICK THROUGH AND READ ALL OF THE ENDORSEMENT

"He probably never wore a top hat or a frock coat; he had no pomp or manner."

The full article is worth more than a glance.

Naturally, we interpret a 91-year-old essay by reading into it all we know about the events unfolding since. It is a useful exercise to try to suspend those judgments and look fresh at items like Bertrand Russell's depiction of Lenin as a high priest of the "Marxian gospel," or that "compromise was another of his strange virtues."

The USSR came into being an unprecedented experiment in "economic revolution," against the express wishes (and active intervention) of world capitalism. From the vantage point of 2015, we know how it worked out there, but it's hard not to feel a tremor of recognition now, in the age of the Kochs and their 1% plutocracy, when reading this:

"Political democracy without economic liberation is a farce."

January 21, 1924: Vladimir Lenin Dies (The Nation)

... Lenin is dead. His country has had to make many painful compromises since his ragged crew took power, but it is running the railroads and marketing the wealth of Russia today. The Communist Government preaching and, to the best of its ability, practicing the gospel of economic revolution, still fills the breast of [Secretary of State Charles Evans] Hughes with alarm. Whatever may come of it in Russia that doctrine—that political democracy without economic liberation is a farce—has swept the Western world, and the Western world will never again be quite the same. The French Revolution was crushed, but it molded the history of nineteenth-century Europe. The Russian Revolution is compromising; Lenin is dead and Trotzky is ill, but they will long continue to make history.

More World War I links. Why? Because they interest me.

100 years ago today, it remained the calm before the approaching storm. It had been less than three weeks since the Archduke was assassinated. Within two weeks, the Austro-Hungarian bombardment of Belgrade became the "official" beginning of the Great War.

What the wars years looked like:

World War I in Photos, A 10-Part Series By Alan Taylor (The Atlantic)

One hundred years ago, in the summer of 1914, a series of events set off an unprecedented global conflict that ultimately claimed the lives of more than 16 million people, dramatically redrew the maps of Europe, and set the stage for the 20th Century.

How they changed things:

The War to End All Wars? Hardly. But It Did Change Them Forever, by Steven Erlanger (New York Times)

The war destroyed kings, kaisers, czars and sultans; it demolished empires; it introduced chemical weapons, tanks and airborne bombing; it brought millions of women into the work force, hastening their legal right to vote. It gave independence to nations like Ukraine, Poland and the Baltic countries and created new nations in the Middle East with often arbitrary borders; it brought about major cultural changes, including a new understanding of the psychology of war, of “shell shock” and post-traumatic stress.

It also featured the initial step of the United States as a global power. President Woodrow Wilson ultimately failed in his ambitions for a new world order and a credible League of Nations, setting off much chaos with his insistence on an armistice and his support for undefined “self-determination.” And the rapid retreat of the United States from Europe helped sow the ground for World War II.

And, a milestone in the development of one of my favorite periodicals:

Great War: The Climate of June 1914, by Richard Kreitner (The Nation)

The first modern war, then, created the modern Nation.

Today we inaugurate here at Back Issues what will become a recurring feature of the blog: “Great War” will follow—in real time, one hundred years later—the political and military maneuvering both before the outbreak of fighting and once the war got under way.

"Free Abortions on Demand Without Apology," in The Nation.

The Nation is a wonderful corrective to right-wing claptrap.

Free Abortions on Demand Without Apology, by Jessica Valenti (The Nation)

When did so many feminists get polite on abortion? I cannot take hearing another pundit insist that only a small percentage of Planned Parenthood’s work is providing abortions or that some women need birth control for “medical” reasons. Tiptoeing around the issue is exhausting, and it’s certainly not doing women any favors.

It’s time resuscitate the old rallying cry for “free abortions on demand without apology.” It may not be a popular message but it’s absolutely necessary. After all, the opposition doesn’t have nearly as many caveats. They’re fighting for earlier and earlier bans on abortions, pushing for no exceptions for rape and incest, fighting against birth control coverage—even insisting that they have the right to threaten abortion providers. The all-out strategy is working; since 2010, more than fifty abortion clinics have stopped providing services.

The anti-choice movement isn’t pulling any punches—why should we?

Eleven progressives we lost in 2012.

And an eleventh, as noted in The Economist: Oscar Niemeyer.

The rich and famous gave him work, so he refused to be embarrassed by his palace-and-casino-building. But he was prouder of the 300 schools he designed in Brazil, all different, to surprise and inspire the poor with beauty.

The Nation's ten remembrances share a unifying theme of progressivism.

Remembering Ten We Lost in 2012, by Peter Rothberg (The Nation)

Lived History is designed to honor, remember and pay tribute to the dearly departed who have made significant contributions to bettering our world. Each week we feature a remembrance of a member of the progressive community, either prominent or obscure, whose remarkable accomplishments demand recognition. In the process, we hope to highlight and recover some of the more important but often un-noted periods of our history that demonstrate the progressive tradition in American life. Here are a few of the notable individuals we lost in 2012.