Recommended Reading: Democracy’s Survival Demands Attention
This Week's Recommended Reading on Substack: Steven Beschloss, Lyz Lenz, Joshua Hill, Jill Filipovic, Noah Berlatsky, and Diana Butler Bass
This Week's Recommended Reading on Substack:
writes that “on the American side of the ocean, where the threat of fascism by an aggrieved minority is rising—as the memory of the Nazi horrors is fading—let’s pay attention to that billboard noting that democracy must be renewed every day. Let’s also acknowledge the sign those first responders sent: There is an emergency and we need to be prepared.”
writes that “whether you call it Quiverfull or being fruitful and multiplying, the idea of having children to colonize a land or take over an ideology is always eugenics. Eugenics is making an ideological comeback, not that it ever really left us. This month, Elon Musk, who has decided the world needs more of his genes and has thus far fathered 11 children, tweeted that it should be considered a national emergency to have children1. Far-right activist Chaiya Raichik replied that she believed conservatives should ‘outbreed the left.’”
writes that “a society where the most accessible and helpful public space is a church, where the place to get the food you need or the clothing you need or the human interaction you need is a conservative religious institution, will grow more conservative. A country where you have to spend money to exist in public, but can show up to church for free, will grow towards that church.”
writes that “the growing conservative hostility to IVF is part of a decades-long rightward shift among Evangelicals and Republicans on reproductive rights more broadly. The SBC came to oppose abortion just as its support for segregation was becoming culturally untenable. By the 1970s and 80s, more Americans were seeing racial segregation as the scourge it is, and support for SBC-supported things like segregated schools and anti-miscegenation laws had plummeted. The Civil Rights Acts gave the government new enforcement mechanisms to promote broader racial equality and cut into the ability of conservative states to discriminate against and disenfranchise African Americans.”
writes that “the only way out of the spiral of hate, demagoguery, and misery is to earnestly make a case that immigration is a positive good, a gift rather than a danger. We are fortunate that so many talented, ambitious people want to come to the US to live, work, raise families, and create a stronger country. Biden’s program to help undocumented spouses is a step forward. But Democrats should do much more.”
writes that “Appomattox is only one of the many memorials removed in recent years from public spaces in Virginia. The fight to take down the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville resulted in neo-Nazis and white supremacists invading the university town and ended in murder. Weeks of dramatic protests in Richmond, Virginia’s capital and once the capital of the Confederacy itself, led to the dismantling of the many statues that once constituted Monument Avenue, a wide boulevard of multiple circles with memorials dedicated to the leaders of the defeated southern army.”