On any particular policy, we can always hope President Trump will flip-flop. Expel the Dreamers; save the Dreamers. Maybe he’ll keep the US in the Paris climate accords after all. Threaten Kim Jong ...
Tag: The Big Picture
The Big Picture: Misinformation Society
Trump’s election laid bare structural flaws in our news and information systems. As mainstream news media sensationalized and trivialized what was at stake in the elections, social media amplified ...
The Big Picture: America’s Real Estate Developer in Chief
On a clear day, from his 68th-floor penthouse on Fifth Avenue, President Trump can survey America’s greatest metropolis. To the west is a glass-and-steel forest of luxury towers bordering Central ...
The Big Picture: Building a Climate Coalition
Donald J. Trump has given notice of US withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement of December 2015 and made clear that his administration is committed to dismantling the government-based scientific ...
The Big Picture: Violence and Free Speech
On August 11 and 12, white nationalists came to march in Charlottesville, Virginia, where I live and work. The rally exposed many things, among them some of the challenges that Trumpism poses for ...
The Big Picture: Black Women Activists and the FBI
According to a recently leaked FBI report, the agency is now watching a new group they have labeled “Black Identity Extremists.” These “BIE” groups, the Bureau asserts, are motivated by “perceptions ...
The Big Picture: The Promise of Sanctuary
In June 2015, during the early days of his candidacy during the Republican primaries, Donald Trump declared: “I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for ...
The Big Picture: Gun Culture
The day after the Las Vegas shooting, Mark Romano called me up to tell me that Donald Trump was bad for his business. “Don’t get me wrong, I love him,” Mark clarified, reiterating his earlier ...
The Big Picture: Working-Class Environmentalism
Trump can’t make sunlight expensive or slow the wind. He can’t make walking more polluting than driving, or energy efficiency more expensive than waste. For all the damage that Scott Pruitt and ...
The Big Picture: “The Parliament of Bodies”
Since the 1980s and the AIDS crisis, queer communities have fought back against homophobia and transphobia using art and camp cultural production, alongside more conventional forms of political ...
The Big Picture: Religion and the Republic
I still remember reading Tocqueville’s Democracy in America for the first time, as a freshman in college. I was astonished! How could this French aristocrat have understood us so well, I wondered ...
The Big Picture: Social Solidarity
Like mom and apple pie, football brings Americans together. It enables spectators to participate in collective life loudly and (sometimes) proudly, despite competing team loyalties. Because such ...
The Big Picture: Trump, Trade, and War
President Trump has proven to be a reckless leader. His refusal to denounce white supremacists, his repeated attacks on journalists and free speech, his courting of Vladimir Putin, his attempts to ...
The Big Picture: Jews and Trump
Exit polls conducted during the 2016 election yielded a fact about the political allegiances of American Jews that was at once totally unsurprising and potentially misleading: over 70 percent of ...
The Big Picture: Confederate Revisionist History
Donald Trump was elected on a wave of unrestrained white nationalism that promised to “take back our country,” and in so doing “make America great again.” His pandering to white racial resentment ...
The Big Picture: Criminalizing Immigrants
Peering out the windows of John F. Kennedy Airport in the early morning hours of January 29, 2017, I had hope for this country’s future on immigration policy. Hundreds of ordinary New Yorkers were ...
The Big Picture: Unholy Alliances
Andrew Jackson had good reason to believe that his first presidential election, of 1824, had been rigged. He had won the popular vote but not an Electoral College majority. Jackson was hated by elite ...
The Big Picture: Women Voters, Left and Right
Trump won the presidency despite being recorded saying “grab ‘em by the pussy,” and despite numerous accusations that he had sexually abused women over a period of decades. There is misogyny at the ...
The Big Picture: The Devastated House of Labor
American workers are heterogeneous politically, as well as racially, ethnically, and educationally. Unions are equally mixed. Some unions focus primarily on the narrow economic interests of their ...
The Big Picture: The Right Type of Citizenship
“The prime problem of our nation,” explained Teddy Roosevelt in his 1910 Osawatomie, Kansas, speech on economic nationalism, “is to get the right type of good citizenship.” It still is. Working ...