Attention to the Unseen

Rep. Ilhan Omar writes: Throughout history, demagogues have used state power to target minority communities and political enemies, often culminating in state violence. Today, we face that threat in our own country, where the president of the United States is using the influence of our highest office to mount racist attacks on communities across the land. In recent weeks, he has lashed out unprompted against four freshman Democrats in the House of Representatives: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ayanna Pressley…

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Elizabeth Cuna writes: I was a young teenager when it first happened. My little brother and I were outside the bus stop on the way to school. We were laughing and talking about kid stuff. All of a sudden, a group of older teen boys rolled up on their bikes. They circled us, made fun of how we looked and our accents, then they yelled at us to go back to a country they assumed we were from. My little…

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Clara Long and and Nicole Austin-Hillery write: A 14-year old told us she was taking care of a 4-year old who had been placed in her cell with no relatives. “I take her to the bathroom, give her my extra food if she is hungry, and tell people to leave her alone if they are bothering her,” she said. She was just one of the children we talked with last week as part of a team of lawyers and doctors…

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George Packer writes: No novel of the past century has had more influence than George Orwell’s 1984. The title, the adjectival form of the author’s last name, the vocabulary of the all-powerful Party that rules the superstate Oceania with the ideology of Ingsoc—doublethink, memory hole, unperson, thoughtcrime, Newspeak, Thought Police, Room 101, Big Brother—they’ve all entered the English language as instantly recognizable signs of a nightmare future. It’s almost impossible to talk about propaganda, surveillance, authoritarian politics, or perversions of…

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A very moving symbol of modern Britain in Woking mosque. Thank you so much for the hospitality #greenfairunited #rorywalks pic.twitter.com/n2H218792D — Rory Stewart (@RoryStewartUK) May 31, 2019

The Washington Post reports: A new survey finds white Republicans are far more likely to be put off by foreign language speakers than their Democratic counterparts. According to Pew Research Center, 47 percent of such Republicans say it would bother them “some” or “a lot” to “hear people speak a language other than English in a public place.” Just 18 percent of white Democrats said they would be similarly bothered. Aside from politics, age and education are the major predictors…

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Eyck Freymann and Niall Ferguson write: As a liberal graduate student and a conservative professor, we rarely see eye to eye on politics. Yet we agree that the generation war is the best frame for understanding the ways that the Democratic and Republican parties are diverging. The Democrats are rapidly becoming the party of the young, specifically the Millennials (born between 1981 and 1996) and Gen Z (born after 1996). The Republicans are leaning ever more heavily on retirees, particularly…

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