Attention to the Unseen

Jason Johnson writes: Trump is a racist. That doesn’t hinge on whether he uttered one particular epithet, no matter how ugly it is. It’s about the totality of his presidency, and after only 18 months in office you can see the roots of his racial animus throughout his policy initiatives whether you hear it on tape or not. Over the course of his career, well before he took office, Trump’s antipathy toward people of color has been plainly evident. In…

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Martin Kettle writes: Let’s assume … that Britain decides to hold a second referendum. This is nowhere close to being an end to the matter. In fact there is both an underlying problem – and a whole heap of practical ones. The underlying problem is that Britain has never satisfactorily sorted out whether or how referendums can coexist with our system of representative democracy. The last two years have been an object lesson in the seriousness of this. Last month…

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David S Glosser writes: Let me tell you a story about Stephen Miller and chain migration. It begins at the turn of the 20th century, in a dirt-floor shack in the village of Antopol, a shtetl of subsistence farmers in what is now Belarus. Beset by violent anti-Jewish pogroms and forced childhood conscription in the Czar’s army, the patriarch of the shack, Wolf-Leib Glosser, fled a village where his forebears had lived for centuries and took his chances in America….

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Shadi Hamid writes: The election of Trump—and the populist upsurge he helped encourage—has confirmed that politics is no longer the art of the possible, but the improbable. If Trump can win the highest office in the land, then why can’t the rest of us run for something, too? Why shouldn’t a 33-year old Egyptian-American named Abdul run for Michigan governor? Why shouldn’t a 28-year old, who was only a bartender a year ago, defeat a Democratic establishment stalwart? And why…

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Rev. William J. Barber II tells Politico: A year after Charlottesville, America’s conscience has been stirred, but we have yet to reach a true moral awakening. The same politicians who quickly denounced the violence and murder in Charlottesville as an act of hate and racism remain complicit in passing racist public policy. Denouncing acts of racism is good public relations, but dismantling the works of racism is the true challenge facing our leaders. When 23 states pass voter suppression laws,…

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Gary Younge writes: For quite some time during the primary season for the 2016 presidential race, Democratic party leaders were delighted that Donald Trump was leading the Republican pack. They assumed the brash reality TV star would expose the bigotry of the Republican base before flaming out and leaving a more plausible candidate beholden to an energised mob, and consequently unelectable. After Trump insulted Heidi Cruz (a Goldman Sachs executive and wife of fellow Republican presidential hopeful Ted Cruz) for…

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