Katrina vanden Heuvel | The Nation
Wall Street Wins Again? Not So Fast.
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman co-chairs the Residential Mortgage Backed Securities working group. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster.)
Editor’s Note: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.
This week’s State of the Union marked a year since President Obama announced the formation of the Residential Mortgage Backed Securities working group, a task force created to investigate and prosecute fraud and criminal activity by Wall Street that led to the housing crisis.
The task force, co-chaired by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, was something I applauded last January along with many progressives, who view it as a path to justice and relief for homeowners. We support it because it is vital that the mortgage servicers, lenders and big banks that dragged millions of Americans into foreclosure be held accountable. That was true then, and it’s true today.
Many are frustrated that the cases brought so far by the task force, against Bear Stearns and Credit Suisse, were in civil court, not criminal, and we have yet to see a “perp walk.” As last month’s tremendous Frontline documentary “The Untouchables” reminded us, four years since the financial crisis, no Wall Street figures of consequence in jail are for financial crimes—an outrage that should boil the blood of anyone committed to the rule of law.
We should all be asking questions about who is to blame and why. The issue in front of us now, though, is, how can we push to get results?
Editor’s Note: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.
This Week: Obama Calls for Jobs Over Austerity
Barack Obama gives his 2013 State of the Union address. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak.)
During his State of the Union Address this week, President Obama put forth a bold call for jobs and growth, including a proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to nine dollars an hour. Although progressives should push for a living wage that exceeds the president’s proposal, his leadership on the issue offers a starting point for people to organize around in states and communities. On PBS’s NewsHour on Wednesday, I talked about why raising the minimum wage is so vital to those living in poverty in the United States—and how reducing inequality is the only way forward to get our economy on track. “We need to look at and understand that inequality is perhaps the greatest threat to economic recovery and democracy, and in that context we must take action,” I argue.
But aside from a clear rejection of austerity and a push to strengthen the middle class, the president also called on Congress to prioritize immigration reform and gun control.
“Obama’s determination to devote so substantial a portion of his State of the Union Address to the gun debate that is still in formation, and his willingness to make specific and repeated demands for House and Senate votes, provided another indication that he will not let this issue go,” writes Washington Correspondent John Nichols. The president spoke powerfully about Hadiya Pendleton, the 15-year-old who was shot and killed in Chicago just three weeks after singing at his inauguration. “Hadiya’s parents, Nate and Cleo, are in this chamber tonight, along with two dozen Americans whose lives have been torn apart by gun violence,” said the president. “They deserve a vote.” As Nichols writes, Obama’s emotional call signals his commitment to taking action on gun violence, and his repeated statement, “they deserve a vote,” forcefully condemns the obstructionism that dominates Congress.
While there’s much for progressives to applaud in the president’s address, Aura Bogado reports why Obama’s call for immigration reform is troubling—and why some undocumented immigrants expected more from him. The president emphasized the need for a pathway to citizenship, but only with restrictions like background checks, fees and fines, and English language requirements. “Some of those restrictions might stand in the way of undocumented immigrant workers who labor long days with little pay, and little access to time or educational opportunities that would allow them to learn English,” writes Bogado. And, as Bogado told Democracy Now! this week, with a record number of deportations under his administration, “what people were hoping to hear was a halt to deportations.”
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As for the Republican response, Marco Rubio’s rebuttal to the president was, if nothing else, “remarkable for being unremarkable,” as George Zornick observes. And the only substantive part of the speech was an attack that was riddled with lies about the Affordable Care Act. Zornick fact checks Rubio’s claims and reveals how he’s “explicitly trying to scare people into thinking they’re about to either lose their health insurance or get fired because of Obamacare. But none of this is true.” Take a look at Zornick’s full analysis of Rubio’s rebuttal—and how he failed to make the case that Obamacare is hurting middle-class Americans. Also, as I told ABC News’s The Note on Friday, while Rubio’s water moment dominated coverage of his speech, what we should really be focusing on is his opposition to the Violence Against Women Act.
For more analysis on the State of the Union Address and what this means for our economy, infrastructure and future, listen to my conversation with Brian Lehrer on WNYC this week. And check back to The Nation as we continue to assess the president’s priorities.
The only thing Marco Rubio proved with his rebuttal to the State of the Union was that he is not ready for prime time, Katrina vanden Heuvel tells ABC.
Rubio Is Not Ready for Prime Time
Editor’s Note: Katrina vanden Heuvel answered five questions for ABC News’s The Note, reposted here. You can read the original interview here.
1) What was your reaction to seeing Sen. Marco Rubio grab a bottle of water as he was giving the Republican response to the State of the Union? He must have known how that would appear, no?
What I saw on Tuesday night was yet another Republican “savior” who is not ready for prime time. Doing TV isn’t easy—in some ways you have to feel for him over the water bottle. But really he’s lucky, because what we all should have been talking about was Rubio’s vote Tuesday to oppose the Violence Against Women Act. The idea, in 2013, that anyone could vote against the Violence Against Women Act and still be considered a serious national political figure is ridiculous and should be the headline. Instead we’re talking about water bottles.
2) Should bipartisan legislation actually pass to overhaul the nation’s immigration system, does that help shift Latino votes away from Democrats and toward the GOP at the polls in 2014?
It could win some votes in the short term, but long-term the Republican Party will need to go much further, particularly on economic issues, to capture Latino voters long term. I’m more concerned about the legislation itself, and whether it goes far enough to meet the needs of guest workers and other groups whose fate is muddled in the current legislation. President Obama can also draw distinctions with the GOP by taking action by executive order on issues that would never pass congress, like ending the deportation of undocumented parents immediately.
3) What do you make of all the talk about Governor Chris Christie’s size? Is his weight a legitimate concern for voters if he decides to make a run for the White House in 2016?
Like Gail Collins, I welcome Chris Christie’s candidacy as a possible renaissance for William Howard Taft biographies. But seriously, Chris Christie should be far more concerned about the foreclosure rate in New Jersey and the impacts of his austerity cuts. His policies will prove far more damaging to his candidacy than his weight.
4) Former vice president and environmental activist Al Gore has received has received some flack for selling Current TV to Al-Jazeera. Does the sale bother you?
I think we need more good journalism and investigative reporting on our airwaves, period. Al Jazeera English has played host to some intelligent discussions, which we need more of. If they can use this as an opportunity to bring more investigative reporting, long-form journalism and informed debate to the airwaves, then we should all welcome them to the arena. (By the way, I thought Time-Warner cable showed political and journalistic cowardice by dropping Current because of the Al Jazeera deal.)
5) The last few years have been tough for many print publications. In December, Newsweek stopped producing a print edition. Do you expect that The Nation will reach a point when it will follow suit?
Never! The Nation turns 150 in 2015. We’ve survived I think, for 150 years by staying truly independent, and by filling our pages with unfiltered takes on politics and culture. Magazines of opinion like The Nation continue to matter because they are a critical counterforce against the tabloidization, consolidation, dumbing-down and fact-challenged “debate” that dominates our political culture.
Today The Nation is now available weekly on more than a dozen digital platforms with more than 1.1 million readers. We have more print subscribers today than we did a decade ago, and we firmly believe—as our readers do—that the printed word is an essential part of the mix.
Banks that are too big too fail are too big to exist, Katrina vanden Heuvel wrote in her last post.
America Isn't Broke. Its Priorities Are.
Barack Obama gives his State of the Union speech. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak.)
If the great debate in America in the years after the great recession has been between austerity and growth, on Tuesday night President Obama shifted it back to where it must be—to jobs and growth—if our fragile recovery is to be sustained.
With 20 million Americans in need of full-time work, the president was right to issue the Kennedy-esque call, “It is our generation’s task…to reignite the true engine of America’s economic growth—a rising, thriving middle class.” But, left unanswered was how this White House or Congress plans to create jobs at the scale demanded? With single women, minorities and the young faring the worst, with wages sinking and with the top 1 percent capturing fully 93 percent of the nation’s income growth coming out of the Great Recession in 2010, how do we reset our course and compass and find “the North Star” the president spoke of? There was talk of a twenty-first-century WPA—a “Fix-it-First” program to put people to work on urgent repairs, like the 70,000 structurally deficient bridges across America and the floating of a long-discussed idea of a private-public Development Bank. But while Obama was clear that “deficit reduction is not an economic plan,” he also showed an unwillingness to boldly ignore deficit hawks (see Simpson-Bowles).
But what captures our attention and imagination on the morning after are the president’s humane initiatives, the ones millions have organized for. There was Obama’s rousing call to raise the minimum wage and indexing it to rise automatically each year with the cost of living: “Tonight, let’s declare that In the wealthiest nation on Earth, no one who works full time should have to live in poverty.” (He mentioned the poor and poverty seven times.) His call for universal pre-school and pre-K and cost controls on higher education. His urging that Congress pass the Paycheck Fairness Act. His singling out of the overdue renewal of a strengthened Violence Against Women Act. His honoring of the 102-year-old Desilene Victor who waited six hours to vote last November, and with it a vow and a plan to fix our flawed voting systems. His determined, spirited, though oddly vague words about immigration reform.
And then for the first time in ten years in a SOTU speech there came the remarkably emotional mention of gun control. “They deserve a vote,” Obama called out to those assembled in the hall. The families of Newtown and Aurora, Gabby Giffords, the children of his hometown Chicago and Hadiya Pendleton, the 15-year-old majorette who marched in his inaugural parade and was gunned down last month. (Her parents of were seated next to the first lady.)
The refrain—“They deserve a vote”—was a powerfully effective way to box in Republicans (and Democrats) and frame the issue of the overt or silent filibuster—which the GOP has cynically abused. (Mark my words, the refrain of “they deserve a vote” will sometime soon make a powerful commercial in Kentucky when and if Mitch McConnell leads a filibuster on new gun laws.)
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And while the president spoke of winding down wars—he announced that 34,000 troops will be home from Afghanistan by this time next year, ahead of schedule (but still too slow)—the glossy veneer of words applied to the lethality of an escalating drone war on a widening global battefield was hard to stomach. The president still clings to a failed free trade policy, to an “all of the above” energy policy even as he embraces alternatives, and his foreign policy “vision” is still heavily trained on fighting terrorism (even the ballyhooed cyber-security program).
Tomorrow, Washington goes back to work. It confronts a manufactured crisis in the looming sequester and debt ceiling fight. What must be remembered the morning after is that America isn’t broke. It’s the priorities that are broken. And what’s too often missing from our media coverage is what matters—a recognition that the inside-the-Beltway crowd has a misplaced obsession with short-term deficits and debt rather than the real crisis of our time: joblessness, growing inequality and building a more sustainable, Main Street economy.
In his odd, water-lunge response to the SOTU, Senator Marco Rubio failed to rebrand, renew or reinvigorate his party. Instead, he sounded like he might have been giving the speech from the lobby of Havana’s Tropicana hotel, circa 1958. Offering the same stale platitudes—is giving the SOTU response a certain death wish for presidential contenders?—Rubio talked the talk of small business but planted himself firmly on the side of the wealthiest, the corporations and polluters who refuse to pay their fair share. He also revealed himself to be the champion of cruel and senseless cuts that will only undermine an already beleaguered middle class—and cast even more into poverty.
What’s needed now is bold citizen mobilization to make real the humane proposals launched at the State of the Union, while challenging the limits of the current economic debate. Toward the end of his remarks, President Obama spoke to the ideal of self-government: ‘…we were never sent here to be perfect. We were sent here to make what difference we can, to secure this nation, expand opportunity, and uphold our ideals through the hard, often frustrating, but absolutely necessary work of self-government.” It is time to make a difference, reclaim self-government and challenge the cruelty of austerity and its correlary—extreme and corrosive economic inequality.
Even as Obama hit home on gun control, immigration reform languished, Aura Bogado writes.
Stop Coddling the Big Banks
The administration should seize on the recent departure of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, above, as an opportunity get tougher on overgrown financial institutions. (AP Photos/Jonathan Ernst.)
Editor’s Note: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.
George Will and I don’t agree on much. We’ve shared many a spirited debate over the years on ABC’s This Week. But on one of the key issues of our time—how to save our economy and our democracy from the reign of the big banks—it’s time for the Obama administration to listen to George Will.
In his Sunday column, “A badly needed breakup,” Will makes the conservative case for a common-sense principle: financial institutions that are Too Big to Fail are also Too Big to Exist. Will’s full-throated call to arms is welcome, and his conclusion echoes that of countless occupiers, Tea Partiers and Americans of all stripes. Here’s hoping, for the sake of the republic, that Will can bring more of his fellow conservatives along with him.
As Will notes, over two-thirds of the banking industry’s assets are now in a dozen banks with between $250 billion and $2.3 trillion to their names. Just five institutions have fully half of the industry’s assets. “There is no convincing consensus about a correlation between a bank’s size and supposed efficiencies of scale,” writes Will, “and any efficiencies must be weighed against management inefficiencies associated with complexity and opacity.”
Editor’s Note: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.
This Week: Will Congress Save the Post Office?
While many media outlets have attributed the financial struggles of the United States Postal Service to inefficiency and a decline in mail volume in the digital age, The Nation has regularly reported on the real factors behind the USPS‘s decision to eliminate Saturday mail delivery—and why it’s bad for workers and bad for our democracy.
Washington correspondent John Nichols has covered the Postal Service since well before the default this past summer, writing how Congress manufactured a crisis where one didn’t exist. “In 2006, a Republican Congress—acting at the behest of the Bush-Cheney administration—enacted a law that required the postal service to ‘pre-fund’ retiree health benefits seventy-five years into the future,” writes Nichols. “No major private-sector corporation or public-sector agency could do that. It’s an untenable demand.”
This week Nichols called the postal cuts “austerity on steroids,” explaining why the decision to cut service should be seen as equivalent to a deep cut to Social Security. “The damage associated with the curtailing of Saturday delivery will be most severe in rural areas and inner cities, where small businesses and working families rely on post offices that are already targeted for shuttering,” he writes. “It will, as well, be particularly harmful to the elderly, the disabled and others who rely on regular delivery and the human connection provided by letter carriers and rural delivery drivers.”
With 20 percent of Americans now casting ballots by mail, this is about more than the convenience of Saturday delivery—it’s also about access to voting. “Taking Saturdays out of the rotation deals a serious blow to existing absentee and vote-by-mail operations, and reduces the likelihood that this voter-friendly approach will be expanded,” writes Nichols.
But Congress can stop these cuts. In fact, the USPS is prohibited from unilaterally suspending Saturday delivery. And members of Congress on both sides of the aisle have come out in opposition to the USPS’s decision. Republican Susan Collins called the move “inconsistent with current law” and said it “threatens to jeopardize its customer base.” Meanwhile, Senator Bernie Sanders released a statement calling on the GOP leadership in the House to work with the Senate and bring meaningful reform to the Postal Service.
Find out how you can take action and implore Congress to say “no” to the end of Saturday delivery. Sign this Nation petition calling on your representatives to act. Get educated on why these cuts threaten to undermine this vital public service. And check back as we continue to cover this story at The Nation.
A Few Good (and Fair) Tax Hikes
Even Republicans will sometimes support progressive taxes. Representative Dave Camp is considering legislation that would increase taxes on the largest banks. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais.)
While the New Year’s deficit deal divided congressional Republicans, there’s one point on which they’re all reading from the same hymnal: No more tax talk! The revenues under the deal are relatively modest—they leave rich people’s taxes well short of Clinton era rates. But Republicans, while claiming to care deeply about the deficit, have locked arms to take further tax increases off the table. We can’t let them.
The truth is, we could do our economy a world of good with some smart and fair tax hikes. While the current deficit hysteria is unmoored from reality, the right tax hikes could improve economic incentives, reduce obscene inequality and fund much-needed programs. Rather than the usual dust-ups over competing flavors of austerity, our budget debate should have healthy tax hikes front and center.
To start with, Congress should listen to Sarah Anderson, who directs the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. As Anderson noted at The Huffington Post last week, while progressive taxation may appear an uphill battle, politics is fluid, and “Openings will come…. The even more important challenge is to push progressive reforms into the center of the debate so they get plucked when the stars are aligned.”
Anderson has a few good taxes in mind to start with. First: Close the carried-interest loophole, so that money made by managing private equity or hedge funds no longer gets preferential treatment over wages earned by teaching kids or mining coal (President Obama offered welcome support for this change in his Super Bowl Sunday interview). Second: Cap executive pay deductibility, so that calling obscene bonuses “performance-based” no longer lets them be easily exempted from taxation. Third: Tax financial transactions, so bad behavior can be discouraged, and the people who crashed the economy can be required to pay for the cost of recovery. And fourth: Shut down offshore tax haven loopholes, so our tax code stops seducing money away from America.
Each of these tax changes would be a victory for the 99 percent, and a step towards economy sanity. We have a long way to go. As Oxfam International wrote in a briefing published last month, the world’s 100 richest billionaires alone last year made four times as much money as it would have taken to end extreme poverty. While “great progress” has been made in the fight to improve the lives of the world’s poorest, Oxfam warns, “as we look to the next decade, and new development goals we need to define progress, we must demonstrate that we are also tackling inequality—and that means looking at not just the poorest but the richest…. In a world of finite resources, we cannot end poverty unless we reduce income inequality.”
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The Republican Party will pull out all the stops to avert any progress on taxes. But as House Ways and Means Committee Chair Dave Camp reminded us last month, even GOP congressmen know that taxing the wealthiest is politically popular. GOP sources told The Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim and Zach Carter that Camp is considering legislation that could transform the tax treatment of derivatives, discouraging extreme risk-taking and recouping little-taxed profit. Ironically, Grim and Carter’s sources suggested that the bill was motivated by payback: Camp resented top CEOs for supporting the (quite conservative) Fix the Debt in calling for a Grand Bargain, rather than taking the Grover Norquist line and refusing to entertain any tax increases at all. But if true, the story is telling: It shows that Republicans know that their CEO friends are depending on them to shield them from reasonable taxation, and that the top 1 percent are vulnerable to public outrage if a true tax debate breaks out.
That’s the debate we need now. It’s time for a few good tax hikes.
Newsweek may have gone under, but other print magazines aren’t just surviving, they’re thriving, including progressive titles, Katrina vanden Heuvel argues.
This Week: Movements Making Noise. Plus: Super Bowl XLVII
MOVEMENTS MAKING NOISE. “When historians look back at the decades of the transition to the twenty-first century, I think they will see a distinctive era of tumult and protest, in the United States and across the globe,” writes Frances Fox Piven in this week’s issue. Our issue focuses on the state of grassroots movements working toward change—and what activists are doing on the ground. Aura Bogado details how Dreamers are fighting deportations; while Washington debates a grand immigration resolution, some activists are putting their bodies on the line to free those in detention today. And Mark Herstgaard writes how environmentalists, awaiting the Keystone XL pipeline decision, have made an historic vow to engage in mass civil disobedience. Read more on the state of movements from Kristen Gwynne on drug reform, John Nichols on election reform, and Laura Flanders on the women’s movement .
IMMIGRATION REFORM. With the so-called Gang of Eight releasing a comprehensive immigration proposal this week, is there finally hope for reform? George Zornick argues that the numbers just don’t add up—since House Republicans must cater to the far right in primary races in heavily gerrymandered districts, the GOP will likely kill the bill. And Aura Bogado reports on President Obama’s speech and why the pathway to citizenship remains uncertain. Find out more from Bogado on how immigrants are reacting to the national debate—and what should be done next.
SUPER BOWL XLVII. As our sports editor, Dave Zirin, details, the homophobic comments from 49ers player Chris Culliver have rocked the Super Bowl week in New Orleans. But the moment has been instructive. Read more from Zirin on football, manhood and the future of an LGBT-friendly culture in the NFL. Also this week, Mychal Denzel Smith addresses football and traumatic brain injury and how the lure of million-dollar contracts is like a “lottery” for economically disadvantaged players. “We talk about the culture of violent machismo as a driving motivator behind their choice to play,” writes Smith. “But it’s even more basic than that. It’s the economy, stupid.” Find out more from Smith on why it’s no coincidence that 67 percent of NFL players are black.
DIRTY WARS. Jeremy Scahill’s new film Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield made a big impression at Sundance—not only was it awarded the prize for best cinematography in a US documentary, but it was also picked up for distribution by IFC Films. Watch Scahill and director Richard Rowley talk about the film and US covert warfare abroad here. And take a look at Jeremy Scahill’s recent investigative work for The Nation.
WELCOME NONA WILLIS ARONOWITZ & MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH. We’re pleased to welcome two guest bloggers. Nona Willis Aronowitz will report on labor and the economy in the South, and Mychal Denzel Smith will cover race, politics and more. I hope you’ll take a look at some of their work from this week—read more from Aronowitz on the labor movement in New Orleans and from Smith on the routine criminalization of America’s black and brown youth. And check back for more!
To Magazines!
The conventional wisdom is that magazines are in decline. Newsweek’s print downfall was mourned as a death in the family (last week’s New Yorker described a gathering of ex-editors as an “Irish Wake”). Facing dwindling circulation, U.S. News and World Report has become more focused on its staple college and hospital rankings rather than on long-form journalism. Rolling Stone and Martha Stewart’s Omnimedia have seen layoffs, while old favorites like Gourmet and Life are long gone.
Last spring, the entrepreneurial and well-funded GOOD laid off virtually all of its editorial and writing staff. When The American Prospect, a haven for intelligent liberalism, was hit by a nearly fatal half-a-million-dollar deficit, The Nation spoke out urging people to help the magazine. The Prospect survived—barely—but journalism nearly lost an informed voice and essential training ground for many of America’s finest progressive journalists.
Given all the depressing news we should raise a glass to the redesign (in print) and relaunch (online) of The New Republic, The Nation’s sister fellow-liberal magazine of opinion for nearly 100 years. In rebooting the magazine, publisher Chris Hughes—co-founder of Facebook and steeped in online organizing—did something surprising: he doubled down on long-form, investigative journalism and political opinion. Hughes bought The New Republic, and could have done as he pleased: stripped it bare, sold it for parts or gone online only. But he invested instead in fact-checking, reporting and—as The New York Times reported—went to great pains to “include The New Republic’s rich history in a magazine designed for the modern media age.”
The Nation has invested in a similar type of journalism—intelligent, cutting-edge, bold writing and reporting that is embedded in our historical DNA—and we’ve embraced the digital age with passion and integrity.
In 2014, The New Republic will turn 100. A year later The Nation will turn 150. In 1948 we almost merged. Like many grand bargains between liberals, this one fell apart. (You’ll find the full story of the merger-that-almost-was in former editor Victor Navasky’s rollicking memoir, A Matter of Opinion.)
We’ve survived, I think, for 150 years by staying truly independent, and by filling our pages with unfiltered takes on politics and culture. As Navasky has noted, journals of opinion like The Nation continue to matter because they are a critical counterforce against the tabloidization, consolidation, dumbing-down and fact-challenged “debate” that dominates our political culture. Intelligent readers increasingly are looking to these magazines to set the standard for serious public discussion and debate. Sticking to that standard has won us dozens of honors, from National Magazine Awards to the George Polk, James Aronson and Sidney Hillman Awards for investigative reporting and social justice journalism. And The Nation has launched the careers of myriad young writers, from Hunter S. Thompson in the early 1960s to Jeremy Scahill today, and driven bold ideas into the national conversation.
Like The New Republic, we believe in covering culture, both high and low—one of our most-read stories this week is a smart piece by a rising cultural critic on what we can learn from the TV shows Girls and Shameless about being broke, down and out. And we feature one of America’s finest sports writers in Dave Zirin and boast the inimitable JoAnn Wypijewski as our sex columnist. It’s a mix that’s good for journalism and good for the public debate. But while The New Republic appears intent on competing with New York magazine, investing in glossy paper and highly designed pages and ramping up its lifestyle coverage, we’re keeping our gritty newsprint—and more radical-edged politics.
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The Nation and The New Republic’s political paths have diverged over the years, at times dramatically. The Nation has been a bigger tent when it comes to political views, welcoming radicals, liberals, progressives, anarchists and even a few big-hearted conservatives to our pages over the years. The New Republic has been more centrist, with a neoconservative streak and dark period post-9/11, which it revisited (almost) in a special issue apologizing for the magazine’s editorial march to war in Iraq.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, magazines are surviving—even thriving. The Nation is now available weekly on more than a dozen digital platforms with more than 1.1 million readers. We have more print subscribers today than we did a decade ago, because we firmly believe that the printed word is an essential part of the mix. At Mother Jones, print subscriptions jumped dramatically after they broke the “47 percent” story in September. AtGarden and Gun, one of publishing’s unlikeliest success stories, subscriptions continue to rise on the back of top-flight writing. And as the Times reported, The New Republic, whose circulation dipped to dangerous lows last spring, is slowly making its way back in print.
I was intrigued earlier this month to read that The American Prospect, still struggling to make ends meet, had decided to sublet part of its office to The American Conservative, founded in 2002 by Pat Buchanan. “We can only benefit from sharing ideas,” Maisie Allison, web editor at the Conservative, told the Times.
Cynics might scoff at strange print bedfellows huddling together for warmth in an economic chill. But I see something different in their collaboration. A mutual and shared commitment to the vital role of the independent journal of opinion in our American democracy.
Besides just progressive magazines, progressive politics in general are resurgent, Katrina vanden Heuvel writes. Will we finally get serious about fixing economic inequality in this country?
Can the Rising Progressive Tide Lift All Ships?
Barack Obama campaigns in 2012. (AP Photo/Tony Dejak.)
Editor’s Note: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.
The growing progressive coalition that helped elect President Obama has emerged at the end of a failed and exhausted conservative era. The media now chronicle the flailings of Republican leaders slowly awakening to the weaknesses of a stale, pale and predominantly male party in today’s America.
But the central challenge to this progressive coalition is not dispatching the old but rather defining what comes next. Will it be able to address the central challenge facing America at this time and reclaim the American Dream from an extreme and corrosive economic inequality?
In his inaugural address, President Obama spoke powerfully to this rising American electorate—single women, minorities, the young—by summarizing the progressive contribution to building a more perfect union from “Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall.” He reminded all that greater social equality in America has been driven by independent movements, willing to confront the lies and limits of the conventional consensus.
Editor’s Note: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.
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