Author: TheGuardian

Photo by Gage Skidmore and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 The 2010s was the decade that forced American politicians and commentators to confront the limits of the country’s own mythology. Political elites in both parties had long shared the same conventional wisdom about the United States, grounded in ideas of exceptionalism and institutional perfection. But with the rise of Donald Trump and the return of a virulent politics of xenophobia and exclusion, it became increasingly difficult, even for many in the political establishment, to reproduce these past homilies. Today the US is truly at a crossroads. Are Americans willing...

Shootings a day apart at two high schools in Wisconsin have shaken the state and sparked a renewed debate over how to combat violence in American schools. An Oshkosh police department resource officer shot a 16-year-old student on December 3 after the boy stabbed him in the officer’s office at Oshkosh West high school. A day earlier, a resource officer at Waukesha South high school helped clear students out of a classroom after a 17-year-old student pointed a pellet gun at another student’s head. Another police officer entered the room and shot the student. Neither of the students who...

A gun is fired on a school campus in America nearly twice a week. Suicide, homicides, a police shooting, attacks on students by other students: more than once a month this past year, gunfire on American school and university campuses has turned deadly, according to a database of school gunfire incidents compiled by advocates. Schools are one of the safest places for kids in the United States, and shootings in and around schools represent only a tiny fraction of the violence that children face here on a daily basis. But even the small amount of gun violence that occurs...

Data indicates that 100% of Americans who belong to the lowest income group are either ‘very’ or ‘quite’ proud of their country. To be poor anywhere in the world is hard, but being poor in America is especially difficult. While the income of wealthier Americans has grown significantly in the recent decades, the wages of the country’s worst-off have stagnated. The available social benefits (for unemployment, illness or old age, for instance) pale in comparison with those enjoyed by poor people in other advanced countries. America’s poor also work longer hours than their counterparts elsewhere, while their children have...

Private social media companies must regulate the content on their platforms – in part because the alternative, empowering the state to restrict speech, is so dangerous. Propaganda is often employed by those unable to maintain control without resorting to falsehoods and the demonization of their opponents. Certainly Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and various recent rightwing populist movements across the world have relied, at least in part, on alarming and false characterizations of “The Other” to gain the emotional allegiance of voters. Again and again, the far right has proven itself ready and able to disrupt democracy with...

The last time director Jacqueline Olive visited Milwaukee, her film “Always in Season” was still in production. Recently she returned to show the finished work at the Milwaukee Film Festival. The devastating documentary shares a history of lynching tied to the mysterious death of a black teen, who was found hanging from a swing in 2014. In the summer of 2014, Jacqueline Olive was preparing to wrap up her documentary film on America’s gruesome history of racial lynching, having devoted five years to chronicling its corrosive impact in the south and across the country. Just as she was about...