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The Issues Republicans Are Afraid to Touch

Harold Meyerson on politics, Aaron Maté on Russiagate, and Alex Press on Amazon workers.

Start Making Sense and Jon Wiener

January 10, 2019

Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell speaks to reporters on September 25, 2018.(Bill Clark / CQ Roll Call via AP)

Now that the Democrats are in charge in the House of Representatives, Harold Meyerson says, we can learn a lot about progressive political opportunities by studying “the Republican dogs that didn’t bark in the night”—the political issues Republicans didn’t attack in the recent elections—because they have widespread public support. Harold is executive editor of The American Prospect and a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times op-ed page.

Also: Aaron Maté says new studies show that Russian social-media involvement in US politics in the recent election was small, amateurish, and mostly unrelated to the candidates—and that pundits have exaggerated the effects of Russian trolls posting on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.

Plus: Now that the holidays are over, it’s time to talk about the hundreds of thousands of workers who were Christmas temporaries at Amazon warehouses—Amazon calls them “seasonal associates” and describes the places they work as “fulfillment centers.” Alex Press explains—she’s an assistant editor at Jacobin.

 

Start Making SenseTwitterStart Making Sense is The Nation’s podcast, hosted by Jon Wiener and coproduced by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes each Thursday.  


Jon WienerTwitterJon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and co-author (with Mike Davis) of Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.


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