Author: TheGuardian

In the 158th year of the American Civil War, also known as 2018, the Confederacy continues its recent resurgence. Its victims include black people, of course, but also immigrants, Jews, Muslims, Latinos, trans people, gay people and women who want to exercise jurisdiction over their bodies. The Confederacy battles in favor of uncontrolled guns and poisons, including toxins in streams, mercury from coal plants, carbon emissions into the upper atmosphere, and oil exploitation in previously protected lands and waters. Its premise appears to be that protection of others limits the rights of white men, and those rights should be...

Some 53% of white women voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election – the real story of white women voters is both more grim and more complex than the figure reveals. For the past two years, the American left has been haunted by a number: 53. It is the percentage of white women who voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. In the sectors of the left where the figure and its implications have become a perennial theme, the number is treated both as disappointing and darkly unsurprising, a reflection of the conventional wisdom that...

The Republican party has harassed, obstructed, frustrated and purged American citizens from having a say in their own democracy for more than 150 years. It was a mystery worthy of crime novelist Raymond Chandler. On 8 November 2016, African Americans did not show up. It was like a day of absence. African Americans had virtually boycotted the election because they “simply saw no affirmative reason to vote for Hillary”, as one reporter explained, before adding, with a hint of an old refrain, that “some saw her as corrupt”. As proof of blacks’ coolness toward her, journalists pointed to the...

The American right is in the midst of a formidable project: installing permanent minority rule, guaranteeing control of the government even as the number of actual human beings who support their political program dwindles. Voter suppression is one, but only one, loathsome tactic in this effort, which goes far beyond just winning one election. Minority rule is the result of interlocking and mutually reinforcing strategies which must be understood together to understand the full picture of what the American right wants to achieve. Examples are everywhere. Take North Dakota. In 2012, Heidi Heitkamp, a Democrat, won a surprise victory...

Governor Scott Walker has undone Wisconsin’s progressive past and turned it into a lab for rightwing governance, but millennials have a different vision for the future. Outside the Chazen Art Museum on the campus of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, a shark, a banana, and Nada Elmikashfi are trying to corral students to the polls for the first day of voting. Madison, the liberal heart and state capital of Wisconsin, is in the final stages of a tight race to decide the political future of this once progressive state that is now deeply conservative, at least in terms of policy....

US officials at the United Nations are seeking to eliminate the word “gender” from UN human rights documents, most often replacing it with “woman”, apparently as part of the Trump administration’s campaign to define transgender people out of existence. At recent meetings of the UN’s Third Committee, which is concerned with “social, humanitarian and cultural” rights, US officials have been pushing for the rewriting of general assembly policy statements to remove what the administration argues is vague and politically correct language, reflecting what it sees as an “ideology” of treating gender as an individual choice rather than an unchangeable...