Letters From the November 14/21, 2022, Issue

Letters From the November 14/21, 2022, Issue

Letters From the November 14/21, 2022, Issue

The real labor revival… The platform is the message…

Copy Link
Facebook
X (Twitter)
Bluesky
Pocket
Email

The Real Labor Revival

Re John Nichols’s interview with Vice President Kamala Harris [“Q&A,” October 3/10]: Kamala Harris may be part of the most pro-labor Democratic administration since at least the 1960s, but this is barely a beginning. The expulsion during the McCarthy era of leftist unions from the Congress of Industrial Organizations removed many of the most activist, energetic, and committed leaders from the American labor movement. Under George Meany, the AFL-CIO became a passive arm of the Democratic Party, supporting the Vietnam War; even supposedly liberal unions such as the United Auto Workers refused to back protests against the war. To this day, the AFL-CIO barely utters a word against national Democratic policies, whatever they are. Why hasn’t it organized massive demonstrations in support of the PRO Act and a $15 minimum wage? The answer is that it is embedded in the neoliberal Democratic web, and institutional Democratic victories mean more to its leaders than labor progress. The real revival of the American labor movement that is occurring now is taking place at the grassroots level: on the streets, in Amazon warehouses, and among Starbucks baristas.
Caleb Melamed

The Platform Is the Message

The problems that Patricia J. Williams describes in her important analysis of social media—lack of privacy, decontextualization, narcissism, data mining and exploitation, harassment, and political polarization—are features, not bugs, of cyberspace [“The Public Eye,” October 3/10]. Social media platforms exist solely to attract and keep human eyeballs. Their algorithms are designed to emphasize and disseminate outrage, disinformation, and conspiracy theories.

The discipline of media ecology, which grew largely out of the work of Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman, shows us that every communication technology creates its own environment. In their book The Paradox of Democracy, authors Sean Illing and Zac Gershberg bring this idea into the political arena, noting that the communication environment we inhabit often determines how we conduct our politics. Policy arguments and factual analysis fall by the wayside of what was once called the “information highway,” while even the most innocent posts trigger torrents of vitriol and abuse. As Williams puts it, we are ensnared in “an eternal reality show that rewrites the notion of an open society into a tyranny of voyeurs and pornographers.” The more toxic the content, especially if it’s related to race, the more likely it is to be shared.
Gary Kenton
greensboro, n.c.

Correction

Due to an editing error, the Food & Environment Reporting Network, which coproduced “The Great Herring Row,” by Brett Simpson [September 5/12], was misnamed.

Be part of 160 years of confronting power 


Every day,
The Nation exposes the administration’s unchecked and reckless abuses of power through clear-eyed, uncompromising independent journalism—the kind of journalism that holds the powerful to account and helps build alternatives to the world we live in now. 

We have just the right people to confront this moment. Speaking on Democracy Now!, Nation DC Bureau chief Chris Lehmann translated the complex terms of the budget bill into the plain truth, describing it as “the single largest upward redistribution of wealth effectuated by any piece of legislation in our history.” In the pages of the June print issue and on The Nation Podcast, Jacob Silverman dove deep into how crypto has captured American campaign finance, revealing that it was the top donor in the 2024 elections as an industry and won nearly every race it supported.

This is all in addition to The Nation’s exceptional coverage of matters of war and peace, the courts, reproductive justice, climate, immigration, healthcare, and much more.

Our 160-year history of sounding the alarm on presidential overreach and the persecution of dissent has prepared us for this moment. 2025 marks a new chapter in this history, and we need you to be part of it.

We’re aiming to raise $20,000 during our June Fundraising Campaign to fund our change-making reporting and analysis. Stand for bold, independent journalism and donate to support The Nation today.

Onward, 

Katrina vanden Heuvel 
Publisher, The Nation

Ad Policy
x