| Reporting on the election last year, I kept thinking about a phrase I’d first heard from Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party: “Block and Build.” Though he said it long before the election, it seemed at the time—and even more after November 5—to summarize our task in this moment. Elections, as my late friend (and The Nation’s strikes correspondent) Jane McAlevey often said, are a structure test. And however we might describe ourselves—liberals, progressives, radicals, socialists, small-or-even-capital-d-democrats—this was a structure test we had just failed.
As Trump and his minions enter the White House and prepare to enact Project 2025—an agenda so repugnant to most Americans that Trump himself publicly disowned it during his campaign—we’re going to have to concentrate first on blocking. In Congress, that means holding the Democratic caucus together. In the wider world, that means using every lever we have, from writing letters, to taking to the streets, to halt assaults on our civil liberties, immigrant neighbors, and welfare state. And when those tactics fail, that means making sure Trump’s enablers pay a steep political price. That way, when we again have the chance to build, we can do so on firmer foundations.
In the meantime, we offer trenchant analyses of precisely why and where we came up short last year in our February 2025 issue—in the form of pieces by Jeet Heer, Elie Mystal, John Nichols, and Joan Walsh—while also pointing you towards music. We have a cover story about a jazz haven by Ethan Iverson, and a review of Jamie XX’s dance music by Bijan Stephen. Plus, a review of Olga Tokarczuk’s newest novel by Jess Cotton, Sam Adler-Bell on the Bob Dylan biopic, Hussein Omar on a book of poetry by Fady Joudah, and Daniel Bessner on why Noam Chomsky remains an essential thinker—even when he needs to be argued with.
So dig in, enjoy. Like you, we’re in it for the long haul.
-D.D. Guttenplan
Editor, The Nation |
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