The Democrats triumphed in Arizona this November, electing the governor and the secretary of state, and reelecting Senator Mark Kelley—in what used to be a red state. But then Senator Kyrsten Sinema quit the Democratic Party, and progressives moved toward a primary election to challenge her. On this week’s podcast, Steve Phillips explains how the victories happened, and what’s to be done about Sinema.

Also on this episode of Start Making Sense: The largest strike in the nation entered its fifth week. Thirty-six thousand grad student employees of the University of California—including teaching assistants—are not grading final exams. The union agreed to mediation—which seems unlikely to succeed. Nelson Lichtenstein has our update.

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On this episode of the Start Making Sense podcast, Nation national correspondent Joan Walsh comments on Democratic incumbent Senator Raphael Warnock’s beating Herschel Walker in the Georgia runoff, and what that means for the future of American politics.

Also on this episode, the largest strike in the country this year, and the largest in the history of higher education, entered its fourth week at the University of California. Historian Nelson Lichtenstein joins the show to discuss.

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We know a lot about the bad things J. Edgar Hoover did, but it it turns out there’s a lot we didn’t know. Historian Beverly Gage joins the podcast to explain. her new book is G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover & the Making of the American Century.

Also: Should the Supreme Court base its decision on what it can discern about the original intent of the framers? That’s what the “originalists” say—and they dominate today’s court. Erwin Chemerinsky comments. Chemerinsky is dean of the law school at UC Berkeley and author most recently of Worse Than Nothing: The Dangerous Fallacy of Originalism.

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Hundreds of thousands of young immigrants brought here by their undocumented parents since 2007 are not eligible for DACA. But now they may be eligible for jobs—at the University of California. UCLA law professor Ahilan Arulanantham explains.

Also: the fight against pollution in Los Angeles’s port communities, where 300,000 people, mostly Latino, live next door to oil refineries, chemical facilities, and one of the largest oilfields in the nation. For decades they’ve been fighting for basic rights and a cleaner environment. Eliza Moreno has that story.

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The Georgia Senate runoff campaign has begun–Joan Walsh has just returned from Atlanta, and explains why Trump’s candidate Herschel Walker seems likely to lose. Also: comment on what happened in Stacey Abrams’s tragic loss.

Plus: In Los Angeles, the terrible sheriff has lost his reelection campaign. Gustavo Arellano, the Los Angeles Times columnist, comments, and reports on how the billionaire developer running for mayor campaigned for the Latino vote.

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How can we save democracy from white nationalism and right-wing authoritarianism? Steve Phillips argues that we need to organize and turn out the millions of non-voters—people of color and young people—with a long-term, data-based strategy. Steve’s new book is How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good.

Also: a story about Black landownership, starting in Piney Woods, N.C., one of the oldest examples of uninterrupted land ownership by Black people in the US, going back to before the Civil War. Cameron Oglesby has that report.

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Stacey Abrams, running for governor in Georgia, is behind in the polls of likely voters, which the pollsters define as people who vote regularly, and especially those who voted in the last midterm races, four years ago. But her whole strategy is to organize and mobilize people who do not vote regularly – to expand the electorate with young people, people of color, and those the political scientists call “low-propensity voters.” She explains in this interview, from April 2019, after her first campaign for governor.

Also: Mike Davis, author and activist, radical hero and family man, died on Tuesday, October 25. After talking about his life and work, we play part of an interview with him on this podcast from November, 2016, one week after Trump was elected.

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What will Republicans do if they win control of the House in the midterms? Now they’ve said something about that, officially: They call it their “Commitment to America.” Chris Lehmann calls it “a grab bag of cultural resentments papering over an anemic policy wish list.”

Also: The Trump era is not the only time American democracy has been threatened; the World War I years, when Democrat Woodrow Wilson was president, were another. That’s what Adam Hochschild argues—his new book is American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis.

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Joe Biden just made marijuana reform a major 2022 Issue. Democrats should run with it, says John Nichols—and they are already, in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

Also: Greil Marcus talks about Bob Dylan, from “Blowin’ in the wind” in 1962 to“Murder Most Foul” in 2020. Marcus’s new book is Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in 7 Songs.

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The indictment of Julian Assange on espionage charges is an attack on freedom of the press—that’s what Daniel Ellsberg argues. Ellsberg too was indicted under the Espionage Act—and put on trial by the Nixon administration in 1972, because he leaked a top secret history of American involvement in Viet Nam to The New York Times and other publications. They called it the Pentagon Papers.

Also: Medicare for All—opponents say it would be impossibly expensive. Exactly how are we going to pay for it? Robert Pollin of U Mass Amherst explains; he’s one of 219 economists who just signed an open letter to Congress urging passage of Medicare for All.

Plus: the politics of climate change. We know the world is getting hotter and the storms are getting bigger and the seas are rising. What we need to know now is not what climate change will do, but rather what we should do—because, for us, climate change is a political problem. Alyssa Battistoni comments.

Bernie Sanders is back on Page 1 of The New York Times, but its report last weekend was not about his new plan to save public schools—the most progressive education program in modern American history—or his proposal to end all subsidies for oil and gas companies. Instead, it was about a trip he made to Nicaragua in 1985, more than 30 years ago. The paper didn’t like it. How do we explain the Times’ coverage of Sanders? Amy Wilentz comments.

Also: John Nichols talks about Justin Amash, the first Republican member of Congress to say that Donald Trump has committed impeachable offenses. Nichols also talks about The Nation’s new podcast, which he hosts, called Next Left; the premiere episode, out now, features Representative Ilhan Omar.

Plus: There are 1,000 redactions in the 448 pages of the Robert Mueller report—individual names and entire pages that we are not allowed to see. They are part of a larger problem of government secrecy that started long before Trump and is threatening to cripple our democracy. Karen Greenberg explains.

Joe Biden has one thing in common with Donald Trump: a campaign promising “restoration” of a lost past, rather than the kind of transformation we need to deal with our current problems—that’s what Harold Meyerson says. Of course, the past Biden wants to restore is not the white man’s 1950s, but rather the pre-Trump America of the Clintons and Obama. Harold is executive editor of The American Prospect and a regular contributor to the LA Times op-ed page.

Also: During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump often talked about an American soldier in Afghanistan who became the longest-held American POW since Vietnam. Trump said he was “a dirty rotten traitor” who should be shot or thrown from a plane. He was talking about Bowe Bergdahl. Michael Ames explains how the Bergdahl story reveals a lot about why the Afghan war has been a disaster. Ames is co-author of the new book American Cypher: Bowe Bergdahl and the U.S. Tragedy in Afghanistan.

And we’ll talk about immigrants with Nation columnist Laila Lalami—her new novel is The Other Americans, about the suspicious death of a Moroccan immigrant in a small town in California. It’s a family saga, a murder mystery, and a love story.

For the 2020 election, we’ve been focusing mostly on the candidates who want to challenge Trump—but we also need to consider the voters, and the changes in the electorate since 2016. Especially significant: young people of color. Steve Phillips explains—he’s a civil-rights lawyer and the founder of Democracy in Color, an organization dedicated to race, politics, and the new American majority, and also the author of the best-seller Brown Is the New White: How a Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority.

Also: climate change and living in the city, where the health effects of hydrocarbon production and global trade are felt most intensely. Ben Ehrenreich reports on local organizing in the city of Commerce, California, a transit point for the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

Plus: Paris isn’t the only place where a cathedral of Notre Dame is in ruins and awaiting rebuilding—there’s another Notre Dame in Haiti, destroyed in the earthquake of 2010. Amy Wilentz has a modest proposal about a source for the money: reparations—from France.

When Joe Biden finally declared his candidacy, he immediately pulled way out in front in the polls of Democratic candidates. The polls also show him as the one most likely to beat Trump. Joan Walsh points to some of the problems with Biden, and considers the alternatives.

Also: Should the House Democrats open impeachment hearings? The politics may be debatable, but Congress’s duty is clear. Joshua Holland says impunity always breeds more lawlessness, and there’s plenty of evidence that Trump plans to continue to act without regard for the law.

Plus: We take a trip back back to the darkest days of the Cold War, when muckraking journalists, independent Marxists, trade-union rebels, freedom riders, beatniks, and peace demonstrators all found a home at America’s Oldest Weekly, The Nation magazine. That was the work of a great editor, Carey McWilliams, who was also a great historian. Peter Richardson, the author of the new book American Prophet: The Life and Work of Carey McWilliams, explains.

What can we do to reduce the speed of climate change? Bill McKibben argues that we’re at a bleak moment in human history—and we’ll either confront that bleakness, or watch the civilization our forebears built slip away. Bill was one of the first people to warn of the dangers of global warming 30 years ago with his book The End of Nature. Then he founded the environmental organization 350.org, the first truly global citizens movement to combat climate change. Today it offers some possible ways out of the trap. His new book is FALTER: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?

Also: Eric Hobsbawm was everybody’s favorite Marxist historian. His books, especially The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, The Age of Empire, and The Age of Extremes, have been translated into 50 languages and sold millions of copies. He was also a lifelong member of the British Communist Party, and his fight against Stalinist orthodoxy in the party shaped his understanding of the past. Richard J. Evans explains—he’s the author of the new biography Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History.

The chair of the House Ways and Means Committee formally requested six years of Trump’s personal and business tax returns earlier this month. Trump has said he won’t turn them over—and that the law is “100 percent” on his side. He’s 100 percent wrong about that. David Cay Johnston explains why the IRS director is required to hand over the returns—or face five years in jail—and also what we’re likely to find in Trump’s tax returns: his tax cheating and his money laundering for Russian oligarchs. David is a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter who is founder and editor of DCReport.org.

Also—plastics and pollution: The problem isn’t just all the plastic in the oceans; it’s also the manufacturing of plastics, a toxic petrochemical. The Nation’s Zoë Carpenter reports from the Texas and Louisiana gulf coasts on the current boom in the production of plastics, a consequence of fracking.

Plus: In Trump’s latest blowup over immigration, Stephen Miller has played the central role—goading him to close the border, warning him of the dangers of looking weak, and encouraging his sudden purge of his homeland security team. But who is this Stephen Miller? He grew up in liberal Santa Monica—what happened? What went wrong? Laurie Winer reports—she wrote about Stephen Miller for LA Magazine.

Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, and Elizabeth Warren are the women in the Senate who have announced campaigns for the Democratic nomination—and Gillibrand is running on Medicare for All and a Green New Deal. She started out in Congress as more of a centrist Democrat—how authentic has her transformation been? Joan Walsh reports.

Also: Reconstruction: America After the Civil War—that’s the new four-hour PBS documentary premiering this week. Produced and hosted by Henry Louis Gates Jr., the show explores the years after the Civil War, when the defeated South faced revolutionary social change—the world’s first interracial democracy. Eric Foner comments—he was chief historical adviser on the documentary.      

Plus: We’re still waiting for the text of the report of special counsel Robert Muller, but in the meantime we’ve been told he did not recommend bringing charges against Jared Kushner  in connection with Russian interference in the 2016 election. But that does not mean Jared is innocent of everything. Amy Wilentz explains.

When Stacey Abrams ran for governor of Georgia last November as the first African-American and the first woman candidate, she got more votes than any Democrat in Georgia history, including Obama and Hillary Clinton. She tripled Latino turnout; she increased the youth turnout by 139 per cent and black turnout by 40 percent. But because of Republican vote suppression she was not elected. In 2020 she could run for the Senate, or even for president. Her new book is Leading From Outside. In our interview, she talks about her campaign strategy and the centrality of the fight for the right to vote.

Also: The Trouble with Beto—he’s got a huge following, but what exactly does he stand for? And what does his narrow defeat in the Texas senate race last year tell us about what kind of campaign he would run if he won the Democratic nomination for president? Harold Meyerson comments—he’s executive editor of The American Prospect.
 

Nobody should be satisfied with Attorney General William Barr’s account of the Mueller report, says John Nichols. We had assumed that the independent counsel’s investigation into obstruction of justice would conclude one way or the other. Instead we have Barr making exactly the kind of political decision—by a Trump appointee no less—that the independent counsel’s office was created to prevent. There’s no substitute, Nichols concludes, for seeing the full Mueller report.

Also: In the wake of the Barr letter, Trump is calling his opponents “treasonous.” He’s vowing to pursue and punish those responsible for the Russia investigation. What would it be like if he got his way, if there were no way to restrain him? Historian Adam Hochschild says it would be like the three-year period of censorship, mass imprisonment, and deportations during World War I, under Woodrow Wilson. His new book is Lessons from a Dark Time.

Plus: Trump’s wall has become a powerful symbol of a radically new idea about what America stands for—replacing the myth of the frontier as a place of possibility, rebirth, and freedom. Historian Greg Grandin talks about the wall, the border, and the frontier—his new book is The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America.

Fifty people in six states were accused by the Justice Department last week of taking part in a major college-admissions scandal. They include Hollywood stars and business leaders, who paid bribes to elite-college coaches. But that’s not the way Jared Kushner got in to Harvard—his father just paid the university directly. Amy Wilentz comments on the legal, and the illegal, ways wealthy people get their unqualified children into elite schools.

Also: In 2017, the Trump administration announced that, for the first time in history, states could impose a work requirement on the low-income people who rely on Medicaid for health insurance. Arkansas was the first state to implement one, staring last June. A number of other states, including Arizona, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin, are chomping at the bit to follow suit. Bryce Covert reports on the impact of the work requirement in Arkansas.

Plus: Mississippi has only one place you can get an abortion—it’s in Jackson, and the state also has a wonderful organization based there called the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund. Rebecca Grant reports on the remarkable woman who founded and leads that organization: Laurie Bertram Roberts.

The Democrats’ picking Milwaukee for their convention in 2020 indicates that Wisconsin is a key battleground the party must win in order to recapture the White House. John Nichols talks about what it is going to take for the Democrats to carry Wisconsin—and Michigan and Pennsylvania—and about the far-reaching tasks that will face the party after four years of Trump.

Also: Southern Democrats were an all-white party before the voting rights act of 1965; and then, as LBJ predicted, its members all became Republicans. And yet throughout the 20th century Southern Democrats in Congress supported progressive legislation—as long as it didn’t help black people. Historian Michael Kazin comments—and talks about the party in the South now, where Stacey Abrams and Beto O’Rourke are building something new.

Plus: Halfway through Trump’s term, and the week after International Women’s Day, it’s a good time to look at the big picture of where women stand in the United States and in the world—where the US ranks in terms of women’s political representation, legal equality, and recent reports of discrimination and violence. Katha Pollitt surveys the good news, and the bad news.

To replace coal and oil, do we need nuclear power? Is switching from coal-powered electric plants to natural gas a step in the right direction? And what lessons can we draw from the recent victories—and setbacks—for the climate movement in California? Bill McKibben comments—and talks how to get to a Green New Deal. Bill’s latest book—Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?—will be published on April 16.

Plus: The House Judiciary Committee is moving toward impeachment proceedings, and asking what kind of precedents—and what kind of lessons—can be found in the Republican effort to impeach Bill Clinton 20 years ago. Sean Wilentz comments—he’s an award-winning historian who teaches at Princeton. He writes for the New York Times, the New Republic, Rolling Stone, and The New York Review of Books, where he wrote recently about the Clinton impeachment.

Also: what can we do to reduce the death toll in the current epidemic of opioid overdoses? Maia Szalavitz suggests our focus should be on harm reduction, and especially on the creation of safe injection sites—Philadelphia may be the first US city to follow the example of Vancouver and many West European cities. Maia is the author of the New York Times best seller Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction.

Trump’s presidency is not the end of democracy, as some of our friends have suggested. Instead, we are seeing the end of a political cycle, the one that began in 1980 with Reagan. And now, it’s time for something new—and that could be a Green New Deal. New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg comments.

Also: For years Elizabeth Warren has been talking about how the political system is rigged by the rich and powerful. But suddenly her position seems almost mainstream among Democrats—almost every contender for the Democratic nomination is rejecting corporate PAC money. George Zornick has our report.

And we’ll talk about movement politics with Michael Walzer—about strategies and tactics and issues and candidates, about meetings and canvassing and demonstrating. His new book is Political Action: A Practical Guide to Movement Politics.

Naomi Klein says the Green New Deal needs to follow the example of the New Deal of the 1930s, when nothing would have happened without “massive pressure from social movements” that “changed the calculus of what was possible.” Klein is a contributing editor at The Nation and author of several number one bestsellers, including This Changes Everything.

Plus: Dahlia Lithwick talks about the national challenge to Trump’s “national emergency”—the constitutional issues, the political issues, and the dangers of treating as normal his rambling, fact-free, egomaniacal performance in the Rose Garden announcing his “emergency.” Dahlia writes about the courts and the law for Slate and hosts the podcast Amicus.

And we’ll also look at California’s resistance to Donald Trump: USC professor Manuel Pastor explains the past, the present, and the future of the fights over climate justice and immigration rights between the biggest state and the worst president. Manuel’s new book is State of Resistance: What California’s Dizzying Descent and Remarkable Resurgence Mean for America’s Future.

Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, free college tuition, a $15 minimum wage—and how about adding child care for all to the progressive agenda? That’s Katha Pollitt’s proposal—she argues it will help huge numbers of people.

Also: Bernie’s foreign policy: In 2016 he ran on domestic issues almost exclusively. This time around, if he runs—and it looks like he will—he’s going to say more about foreign policy—a lot more. David Klion explains; he’s profiled Bernie’s new foreign policy adviser, Matt Duss.

Plus: Peace in Afghanistan? Trump says it’s close—and Antony Loewenstein says it will bring massive corruption around mining the minerals of that country—and do nothing to help local communities.

John Nichols says that, although Trump’s State of the Union speech included a call to “embrace the boundless potential of cooperation, compromise and the common good,” his actual proposals were “cynical and crude.”

Also: Temporary Protected Status—TPS—has allowed immigrants and refugees from half a dozen countries to stay in the United States for decades—but now Trump is trying to get rid of all of them. Sasha Abramsky reports on the human toll of this cruel policy.

Plus: Elizabeth Kolbert of The New Yorker on Trump, climate change, and species extinction—she says “we need courage, not hope.” Her book The Sixth Extinction won the Pulitzer Prize.

The battle between Democrats and Trump over a border wall was a disagreement about symbolism, not policy, Atossa Araxia Abrahamian argues; the borders of the future won’t be as easy to spot as the wall that Trump is proposing. And the new borders going up around us—digital ones—are already taking away our freedom. 

Also: how the progressives in the House will fight Trump: Joan Walsh reports on the Congressional Progressive Caucus and its co-chair Pramila Jayapal—and their plans for a Green New Deal and Medicare for All. Also: The strange case of the 12 Democrats who joined both the Progressive Caucus and the “centrist” New Democrat Coalition.

Trump’s throwing in the towel on the shutdown after the closure of LaGuardia airport opens a new era of challenge to the president, and also “evened the score” for the air traffic controllers, Harold Meyerson says. That came almost 40 years after Reagan fired striking air-traffic controllers, which began a devastating wave of attacks on unions. This time they beat a Republican president—and progressive Democrats are eager to expand the fight.  Harold is executive editor of The American Prospect.

What will 2019 be like for Trump? Will it be like Nixon in 1974—the Watergate year, which ended with his resignation? Or more like Clinton in 1998—the Monica year, which culminated with an impeachment trial in the Senate in 1999? He won that vote easily and came out more popular than before. John Nichols looks at the investigations coming up in the House, leading us to conclude that 2019 will be the worst year of Donald Trump’s life.

Also: The LA teachers’ strike is, among other things, a battle over the future of the Democratic party: will it embrace austerity and the steady erosion of social services, or will it fund the progressive agenda? Sarah Jaffe reports.

And Americans have always struggled over the place of black people in America, starting at the beginning, with the Constitution. Was the Constitution a pro-slavery document? Or, as Lincoln argued, did it point toward abolition? We ask Sean Wilentz—his new book is No Property in Man.

A political movement combining a left-wing economic program with anti-immigrant initiatives: It’s developing right now in Germany and France—could it happen here? David Adler explains—he’s the policy coordinator for the European Spring, Europe’s first transnational party, led by Yanis Varoufakis. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, The Guardian, and Jacobin—and now he has the cover story in the new issue of The Nation.

Also: 31,000 teachers are on strike right now in Los Angeles—it’s the biggest strike in a long time in the second biggest school district in the country, with more than half a million students, mostly poor and Latino. And it’s not just about salaries and benefits; the teachers say they want smaller classes, which means more teachers. Pedro Noguera reports.

Plus: Like everybody else on the left, we’re excited about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her proposal for a Green New Deal, but “the left needs more than good ideas”—that’s what Kate Aronoff says. We need to change the economic and political consensus shaped by the right and build a political and intellectual infrastructure that can match theirs.

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.

Seymour Hersh, one of our heroes, says “don’t underestimate Trump.” He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for his expose of the My Lai massacre—he was a 33-year-old freelancer at the time. Since then, he’s won pretty much every other journalism award. He’s worked as a staff writer for The New York Times and The New Yorker. He’s also written a dozen books, most recently Reporter: A Memoir.

Also: Barbara Ehrenreich is another hero of ours—the author of more than a dozen books, including the unforgettable Nickel and Dimed. Now she has a new book out, a best seller, and it’s terrific: it’s called Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainly of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer.

Finally, Amos Oz died on Dec 28—He was an Israeli novelist and unyielding critic of the occupation of the West Bank and a campaigner for a two state solution. His novels were translated into dozens of languages, and he also wrote for The Nation.  Here we revisit an interview we did with him in 2004, about Middle East politics.

For our year-in-review show, we open with a Russiagate update with David Klion—he says it’s basically a corruption scandal whose basic facts have been obvious for a long time—and one that should bring down Trump’s presidency.

In a lot of ways, Trump himself was the biggest story in 2018—we ask Amy Wilentz the key question: “Is Trump crazy?” She discusses the mental and emotional status of the president, as analyzed by 27 psychiatrists in The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, a book edited by Bandy X. Lee. The book was number four on the New York Times best-seller list.

And the biggest story of the year, for all of humanity, has been catastrophic climate change—Bill McKibben says “it’s not just an environmental issue.”

John Nichols presents the highlights of The Nation’s annual Progressive Honor Roll—our heroes in Congress, in state politics, and in leading protests at the border.

Also: Is Obamacare unconstitutional? A federal judge ruled last week that all of Obamacare violates the constitution. If he’s upheld by the Supreme Court, 20 million people will lose their insurance coverage. The case has the potent name Texas v. the United States. Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at UC Berkeley, explains why that ruling is likely to be rejected at the Supreme Court—by a vote of 9-0.

Plus: Right-wing authoritarians have been coordinating political campaigns and disrupting elections across national boundaries—a project masterminded by Donald Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon. It’s time now for the left, especially the American left, to go on the offensive and reclaim its tradition of internationalism. Atossa Araxia Abrahamian reports on the project of Yanis Varoufakis—and Bernie Sanders—to organize a Progressive International.

Trump’s nominee for attorney general, William Barr, is more qualified to do the job than Matt Whitaker—but so are thousands of others. His record, however, show’s he as bad as Jeff Sessions—if not worse. David Cole, national legal director of the ACLU and The Nation’s legal affairs correspondent, explains.

Also: a report on The Nation’s investigation of massive accounting fraud at the Pentagon—Dave Lindorff found that $21 trillion cannot be accounted for. For decades, he says, the Pentagon has been “deliberately cooking the books to mislead Congress.”

Plus: the Armenian Revolution offers “a small light of hope and progressive democratic change in a Europe increasingly shadowed by authoritarian and dictatorial forces, especially in most of the former Soviet-bloc states of Eastern Europe.” That’s what Marc Cooper says—he’s spent months in Yerevan, where elections on Sunday confirmed the victory of the revolutionaries.

George H. W. Bush paved the way for today’s Republican party with his racist Willy Horton campaign ad. He nominated Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, and he pardoned the Iran-Contra conspirator whose trial would have exposed his own abuse of power. Harold Meyerson explains—he’s executive editor of The American Prospect.

Also: Katha Pollitt finds lessons from the midterms about white women who support Trump—she argues that they are unlikely to change their minds, and that we’d do better following the example of Stacey Abrams and mobilizing the nonvoters.

Plus: Frederick Douglass, the black abolitionist, was the most famous black American of the nineteenth century. Historian Eric Foner says Douglass’s political ideas can help us in our struggles today.

Michelle Obama declares in her new memoir, “I am not a political person, so I’m not going to attempt to offer an analysis” of Trump’s victory. That’s her stance in the rest of the book as well. It seems strange for the person The New York Times called “The most outspoken first lady in modern history.” What’s going on here? Amy Wilentz comments.

Plus: The Democrats won the midterms by the largest popular vote margin for either party in the history of midterm elections—larger than the Watergate midterm after Nixon resigned in 1974, 44 years ago. But there was a deeper and more significant victory hidden behind those numbers, Kai Wright argues: the political mobilization of millions of people of color in the South.

Also: Last week the White House—that is, the Trump White House—released a major scientific report on climate change, with the darkest warnings to date about the consequences of rising temperatures for the United States. Tom Athanasiou explains.

Orange County, California, was the political starting point for Nixon, for the Barry Goldwater presidential campaign, and for Reagan—as Republican as any place in America. But starting in January, not a single Republican will represent Orange County in the House. It’s solid blue. Gustavo Arellano will explain how it happened—he’s a weekly columnist for the Los Angeles Times, and wrote the legendary column “Ask a Mexican.”

Also: Mass demonstrations in America, from the 1963 March on Washington to the 2017 Women’s March. What protests do when they work, and why: L.A. Kauffman explains. Her new book is How to Read a Protest: The Art of Organizing and Resistance.

Plus: Cities providing sanctuary for people the federal government is trying to arrest and return to the oppression they had escaped— today’s battles over Trump’s attacks on undocumented immigrants have some striking parallels with the battles over fugitive slaves in the decade before the Civil War. Andrew Delbanco comments—his new book is The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul, from the Revolution to the Civil War.

Frank Rich finds lessons for Democrats in the midterms: seeking “the political center,” as recommended by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff, running on “clean-government themes and promises of incremental improvement to the health-care system rather than transformational social change,” is “ridiculous.” Frank writes about politics for New York magazine and is executive producer of Veep on HBO.

Also: Is Trump’s appointment of a new acting attorney general, Matt Whitaker, legal? He hasn’t been confirmed by the Senate—or even nominated. Erwin Chemerinsky comments—he’s dean of the law school at UC Berkeley, and his new book is We the People: A Progressive Reading of the Constitution for the 21st Century.

And a report on the motives and goals of the people on that caravan from Central America headed across Mexico toward Tijuana, from Laura Carlsen, who has been with the caravan. Trump has stopped talking about it, now that the midterms are over and his fearmongering failed to win key House seats.

Tuesday night was a good night for progressive Democrats, John Nichols argues—and Democratic control of the House will bring an epic change to Washington politics—starting with a return to Constitutional principles and an insistence that the president is subject to the rule of law.

Also: women won unprecedented victories in the midterms. Joan Walsh analyzes the feminist insurgency that will bring almost a hundred women to the House of Representatives in January—including the first two Muslim women (Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib and Minnesota’s Ilhan Omar); the first Native American women (New Mexico’s Deb Haaland and Kansas’s Sharice Davids), Texas’s first two Latina congresswomen (Veronica Escobar and Sylvia Garcia); plus three young black women (Massachusetts’s Ayanna Pressley, Connecticut’s Jahana Hayes, and Illinois’s Lauren Underwood).

Plus: Brazil last week elected Jair Bolsonaro. Our man in Rio, Andy Robinson, says he is “worse than Donald Trump,” and “as close to fascism as you will get in the world today, despite a growing number of contenders.”

Women voters—and candidates—are mobilized as never before for next week’s midterms: Joan Walsh and Cecile Richards report from across the country—at a Nation event introduced by editor and publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel. Walsh is the magazine’s national-affairs correspondent and Richards recently stepped down as head of Planned Parenthood after leading the organization since 2006.

Also: While Democrats are focusing now on voter mobilization and turnout, Republicans are at work on voter suppression. How significant will the Republican effort be in this election—and where is it likely to have the biggest impact? Ari Berman reports—he wrote about vote suppression for the New York Times opinion pages.

Plus Gary Younge, The Nation columnist, talks about politics in the Midwest, the heartland, the Rust Belt—he’s covering the midterms from Racine, Wisconsin, an old Democratic factory town on Lake Michigan. After so many defeats in the state, Democrats there told him they “can’t afford the luxury of hope.”

Sixty-two percent of white men voted for Trump, 31 percent for Clinton. Kai Wright has our analysis—he’s host of WNYC’s podcast The United States of Anxiety, and he’s also a columnist for The Nation. It’s easy to get confused by the crosscurrents of misogyny and racism and xenophobia, he argues; they are not discrete issues but rather “the interlocking tools of white men’s minority rule.”

Also: Trump’s place in American history. Jill Lepore of the Harvard history department and The New Yorker talks about her new book These Truths, which starts in 1492 with Christopher Columbus and ends in 2016 with Donald Trump.

And we’ll recall the 1968 presidential election, when Richard Nixon won, and many of our current problems began. The man who almost defeated Nixon was Hubert Humphrey, the onetime Minnesota senator who had become LBJ’s vice president. Anti-war activists hated Hubert Humphrey in 1968—Michael Kazin explains.

Have the Democrats learned the lessons of the disaster of 2016?  Jeff Cohen talks about the progressives’ fight to win the party away from dependence on corporate contributions—and instead to mobilize the grassroots.  Jeff is one of the co-authors of “Democratic Autopsy—One Year Later.”

Also: Arizona has been a red state, ground zero for Trump’s anti-immigrant politics, but it’s changing.  Sasha Abramsky has returned from Tucson, with a report on how and why the Democrats seem likely to flip a key House seat there.

Plus: A historic challenge to Republicans is underway in Georgia, where Stacey Abrams is campaigning to become the state’s first black governor, and first female.  The polls have her tied with her opponent, a far-right figure endorsed by Trump. Joan Walsh just got back from Georgia with a report.

ebecca Traister sees in the Kavanaugh hearings a typical case where women’s anger was marginalized or made to sound hysterical or infantile or threatening—but men’s anger was taken to be valid and righteous. But that is changing, she argues: women’s anger increasingly is “in the beating heart of many political and social movements.” Her new book is Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger.

Also: David Cay Johnston talks about the “Mountain of Tax Cheating” by Donald Trump, as exposed in the massive New York Times report on where Trump’s money came from, and the violations of tax laws in his past. David is a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter who has written for The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times and is now editor of DCReport.org.

Plus: What the Democrats can do about newly confirmed Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh when they win the House in November and take control of the House Judiciary Committee in January: John Nichols talks about investigations that could lead to the filing of articles of impeachment.

Joan Walsh explains why we should not have too much confidence in the re-opened FBI background check into Kavanaugh’s past, and talks about the activists who are fighting the nomination, and the senators who need to be told “do not vote for this man.”

Plus: D.D. Guttenplan talks about some alternatives to those old white Republican men who shouted and pouted at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last week—his new book is The Next Republic: the Rise of a New Radical Majority.

And while the eyes of the nation search for news on the FBI investigation of Brett Kavanaugh, the hard work of fighting for social change goes on—for example in St. Paul, where a campaign for a $15 minimum wage is being fought right now. Michelle Chen reports.

The Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh have been an outrage, even before the recent “allegations of sexual misconduct.” John Nichols comments.

Also: Florida will vote in November on restoring voting rights for felons, and polls show the measure is likely to pass. Sasha Abramsky reports on the campaign and its significance.

Plus: universal basic income—government payments to help keep people out of poverty: Is that a better idea than a government job guarantee? Bryce Covert explains the current debate on the left.

Support for this week’s episode of Start Making Sense is provided by Audible.

Katha Pollitt considers the arguments made by Brett Kavanaugh’s defenders in response to the charges that he sexually assaulted a 15-year-old when he was 17, and the evidence supporting Christine Blasey Ford, his accuser.

Also: On the 10th anniversary of the financial crisis, Harold Meyerson argues that the recovery was a disaster all over again—and that we are still suffering from its political consequences. Harold is Executive Editor of The American Prospect.

Plus: 25 years ago, President Bill Clinton presided over a handshake on the White House grounds between PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, agreeing to the Oslo Accords, which, we were told, laid the foundation for peace between Israel and a Palestinian state. Mouin Rabbani comments—he’s a fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies and a contributor to the London Review of Books and The Nation.

As world leaders (except for Trump) gather in San Francisco this week for the Global Climate Action Summit, Bill McKibben comments on California’s new law mandating 100 percent clean electricity by 2045—and on the next task: keeping oil and gas in the ground.

Also: Should Democratic strategy focus on winning the votes of moderate Republicans? Steve Phillips points to one key factor: there aren’t that many of them. Steve is the author of the New York Times best seller, Brown Is the New White: How a Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority.

Plus: the inequality industry: Atossa Araxia Abrahamian examines the new focus on inequality at the IMF, the Ford Foundation, and other elite institutions, and argues that there’s a big political difference between seeking to reduce inequality, and fighting for a world of equality.

In Oklahoma and West Virgina and Missouri, teachers have led amazingly successful battles against Republican budget cutting and tax breaks for the wealthy. Although the Supreme Court’s Janus decision sought to cripple the ability of public-sector unions to engage in politics, recent polls show that unions are more popular than ever. Randi Weingarten comments on the big picture of unions and politics—she’s president of the American Federation of Teachers, with 1.7 million members in more than 3,000 local affiliates nationwide.

Also, at the California Global Climate Action Summit, in San Francisco next week, all the world’s major nations will be represented, except for our own government. Mark Hertsgaard reports on how California, under Governor Jerry Brown, has taken the lead in fighting climate change—and how climate activists have organized at the upcoming summit to demand that the governor end oil and gas drilling and phase out oil and gas production. Mark wrote the cover story for The Nation’s special issue on climate politics.

Plus: Some questions for Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, from David Cole. The legal director of the ACLU and legal-affairs correspondent for The Nation says some questions—about current cases—are inappropriate for Democrats to ask in the upcoming confirmation hearings; but there are others—on Kavanaugh’s legal philosophy, and on his past statements and decisions—that he should be required to answer.

Amy Wilentz takes up the vital question, is Melania Trump a hero of the resistance—or an accomplice of evil? Is she edging “ever closer to open contempt for him,” as New York Times columnist Frank Bruni argues, and finding “increasingly clever ways to show it”? Or is she sticking with her role as wife to a racist tyrant with a clear history of infidelity—and lots of cash?

Also: Mothers and pregnant women are discriminated against, devalued, and punished—here at home, and around the world. Katha Pollitt talks about how that has happened—and why.

And as Labor Day approaches, we talk labor unions and politics with Lee Saunders, president of AFSCME. His union was the target of the Janus v. AFSCME decision by the Supreme Court in June, when it ruled, 5-4, that government workers who choose not to join unions may not be required to help pay for collective bargaining. Saunders explains what unions are doing to fight back—in the November election, and in the long run.

Centrism lost for the Democrats in 2016, and it will lose again in 2018, Gary Younge argues: The party needs not just to oppose Trump, but also to put forward an alternative vision that can earn the support of working-class Americans. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has shown how to do it, running on a program of tuition-free higher education, Medicare for all, and a federal jobs guarantee.

Plus: Trump’s 1968—and ours. In August 1968, 50 years ago this week, young anti-war demonstrators fought the police outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, while the whole world was watching. It was the culmination of an overwhelming year for the anti-war movement. But where was young Donald Trump? Todd Gitlin explains—he’s an activist, a sociologist, and author of The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage.

Also: Aretha Franklin, who died last week, was a musical genius who seems unique; but she came out of a specific place and time: Detroit in the 1950s and 1960s. Farah Griffin, professor of English and Comparative Literature and African American Studies at Columbia University, comments—and explains the central role Aretha played in Angela Davis’s fight for freedom after facing capital charges in California in 1970. Also: Aretha and Obama—at the beginning of his presidency, at his inauguration, and at the Kennedy Center concert at the end.