December 17-24, 2018, Issue

Cover art by: Doug Chayka

Feature

The Best News From the Midterms? Down-Ballot Democratic Triumphs.

These winners will be the big names of our future national politics.
John Nichols
Marijuana Comes to Coalinga

The weed business promised to save this struggling California town. So far, it’s been a bust.
Rozina Ali
9 Lessons From the 2018 Midterms

Progressives made significant gains, but now they need to organize bigger, better, and smarter.
D.D. Guttenplan
Democrats Are Finally Fighting for the States—and on Election Night, They Won Big

Democrats have won back a third of the nearly 1,000 state legislative seats they lost during Obama’s presidency. Can they keep the momentum going?
Joan Walsh

Editorial

Comix Nation

Peter Kuper
Just Write Families Checks

Senators Kamala Harris and Cory Booker have bold new plans to fight poverty, but they miss out on simpler strategy: a child allowance.
Bryce Covert
America’s Post-9/11 Wars Have Cost $5.9 Trillion

Not to mention 240,000 civilian deaths and 21 million displaced. And yet a congressional commission is urging yet more money for a bloated Pentagon.
William D. Hartung
The Fire This Time

California’s Camp Fire is a reckoning, an alarm shrieking that our leaders won’t save us from climate change—but perhaps we can.
Ben Ehrenreich
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Column

Trump’s Choice for Acting Attorney General

Calvin Trillin
What Was the Real Midterm Victory?

The Democratic Party is used to writing off much of the electorate. It can’t get away with that anymore.
Kai Wright
You Can’t Get Conservative White Women To Change Their Minds

The great electoral opportunity of 2020 is not in converting Trump voters. It’s motivating the large numbers of Americans who don’t vote at all.
Katha Pollitt

Books & the Arts

How Nell Painter Found Her Process

Old in Art School recounts the historian’s journey from Sunday painter to professional artist.
Jillian Steinhauer
The Long, Entwined History of America First and the American Dream

A new history shows that these expressions were originally used in ways that are significantly different from our current understanding of them.
Kevin M. Kruse
Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Cold War

A new biography of Jimmy Carter’s national-security adviser attempts to place him among the pantheon of master foreign-policy strategists, but was he?
Andrew J. Bacevich
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