BUY FROM: BUY FROM SIMON & SCHUSTER: Pre Order The Fall of a Great American City New York and the Urban Crisis of Affluence By Kevin Baker Foreword by James Howard Kunstler The Fall of a Great American City is the story of what is happening today in New York City and in many other cities across America. It is about how the crisis of affluence is now driving out everything we love most about cities: small shops, decent restaurants, public space, street life, affordable apartments, responsive government, beauty, idiosyncrasy, each other. This is the story of how we came Read More
Wasting Time Grand Jury Duty and the Fractured Narrative of New York City
The summons arrived in August: I was to serve on one of the first two grand juries convened in Manhattan during what now looks to have been the Covid “hiatus,” that brief lull in the summer of 2020 between the worst waves of contagion and death. What my fellow jurors and I would get in return was $40 a day—and a look inside a criminal justice machine that kept cranking on imperturbably, through pandemic, riot, and economic collapse, just as it always has. Grand Jury No. 2 was assembled the day after Labor Day, in a big, musty room at Read More
The Crisis of Our Constitution
Lost in this past electoral season, one of the most vicious and frightening in American history, is how shaky the very foundation of our democracy is. Throughout Trump’s deformation of the American presidency, we have been told by one commentator after another that our institutions would save us, that not only the customs of democracy but also the legal infrastructure of our republic would see us through. Nothing could be further from the truth. The United States remains mired in what is now a nearly twenty-year-long constitutional crisis, one that began with the infamous 2000 Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore and has Read More
The Ghosts of Versailles
A hundred years ago this month, the First World War shuddered to a close. The end came when the armistice took effect on the Western Front at 11 am on November 11, 1918—the famous eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, a phrase that seems like an obscenity now, a romantic gesture to cap a war that long before should have buried any possible remaining romance of war. The armistice had been coming since at least August 8, 1918, the “black day of the German Army,” when some 15,000 German men surrendered on the first day of Read More
POLITICAL FOOTBALL
With the fall and another election season upon us, the one thing we can count on is a renewal of Donald Trump’s war on football. This has become an annual tradition for the president, one that showcases his true political talent—that is, his almost uncanny ability to align his own resentments and fantasies with those of his followers. “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out. He’s fired. He’s fired!’” Trump asked a crowd in Huntsville, Alabama, seemingly out Read More
Nothing In All Creation Is Hidden
Why America Needs Truth and Reconciliation After Trump To escape from any dire situation requires that you accept two truths: the truth of how you got there and the truth of how you can get out. And the sad truth is that, in less than a year and a half in office, Donald J. Trump and the squalling far-right movement he has dragged into the White House like a mischievous dog have already changed the parameters of the American presidency and the nation’s politics beyond recognition. The time has come to think seriously about whether, at some safer, wiser moment Read More
THE MYTH OF NORMAL AMERICA
There are no good old days to return to in U.S. politics. The truth about a post-Trump era. BY KEVIN BAKER February 15, 2018 The remaining hope for all Americans of good sense, more than a year into Donald J. Trump’s already interminable spin in office, was that the president and his brand of politics would turn out to be a passing aberration. That somehow, once Trump lost his reelection bid, or was impeached or otherwise run out of the White House, or plastered shut his last remaining artery with one Filet-O-Fish too many, we could put back Read More
TRAIL OF FEARS
Forget Nixon. Trump is more like Andrew Jackson than Tricky Dick—and the consequences of his crimes will be for more devasting. Donald Trump’s stunning decision to fire FBI Director James Comey brought inevitable comparisons to the “Saturday Night Massacre,” that evening in October 1973 when President Richard Nixon, enmeshed in the throes of Watergate, ordered independent special prosecutor Archibald Cox fired, and then accepted the resignations of both Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus when they refused to carry out his instructions. With Nixon (and future Trump) henchman Roger Stone unavailable, Solicitor General Robert Bork was Read More
The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless White Mind
Bernie Sanders’s town hall in “Trump Country” revealed a longing for a past that never was. For MSNBC viewers who had the chance to watch Chris Hayes’s townhall special Bernie Sanders in Trump Country on March 13, nothing could have been more instructive in revealing why Red State America remains so committed to Donald Trump. I’m not talking about the more fanatical, right-wing cadres that worked so hard to bring this president to power, all of those Tea Partiers and dittoheads, the alt-right acolytes and the Bannonites, the usual drunken hooligans wearing shirts that read, “Trump That C—!” I mean Read More
BLUEXIT A MODEST PROPOSAL FOR SEPARATING BLUE STATES FROM RED
Dear Red-State Trump Voter, Let’s face it, guys: We’re done. For more than 80 years now, we—the residents of what some people like to call Blue America, but which I prefer to think of as the United States of We Pay Our Own Damn Way—have shelled out far more in federal tax monies than we took in. We have funded massive infrastructure projects in your rural counties, subsidized your schools and your power plants and your nursing homes, sent you entire industries, and simultaneously absorbed the most destitute, unskilled, and oppressed portions of your populations, white and black alike. All Read More