Tag: Local leaders
What America Could Look Like in 2050
“I feel like it is a race, and I do not have the crystal ball to see the outcome,” one reader argues.
Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Last week I asked readers, what will America be like
What the Outcome of Wisconsin’s Supreme-Court Election Will Reveal for 2024
The most important election of 2023 may also offer crucial insights into the most important election of 2024.
Next Tuesday’s vote for an open seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court has been justifiably described as the most consequential election in the nation this year, because it will determine whether liberals or conservatives control a majority of the body. The election’s outcome will likely decide whether abortion in the state is completely banned and whether the severely gerrymandered state legislative maps
What Overturning Roe Did to the Anti-abortion Movement
In a normal year, the March for Life would begin somewhere along the National Mall. The cavalcade of anti-abortion activists in Washington, D.C., would wind around museums and past monuments, concluding at the foot of the Supreme Court, a physical representation of the movement’s objective: to overturn Roe v. Wade. The march happens in January of each year to coincide with the anniversary of the Roe decision.
But this is not a normal year. Tomorrow’s march will be
How J. Edgar Hoover Took Down the KKK
In 1964, during a phone call with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover about setting up the new FBI office in Mississippi, President Lyndon B. Johnson broached the idea of really doing something about the Klan. He had been up late reading the bureau’s reports on the Communist Party, with their jaw-dropping inside details. What if the Bureau, seizing on the momentum provided by the Civil Rights Act, could do the same thing to the Klan? he wondered aloud to
New COVID Vaccines Will be Ready This Fall. America Won’t.
Not so long ago, America’s next COVID fall looked almost tidy. Sure, cases might rise as the weather chills and dries, and people flock indoors. But Pfizer and Moderna were already cooking up America’s very first retooled COVID vaccines, better matched to Omicron and its offshoots, and a new inoculation campaign was brewing. Instead of needing to dose up three, four, even five times within short order, perhaps Americans could get just one COVID shot each year, matched roughly to
How the Last Establishment Republican Survived Trump
On the afternoon of March 3, 2020, Governor Mike DeWine stepped to a lectern inside the Ohio statehouse to announce his most difficult pandemic decision. Ohio, the governor announced, would bar most spectators from the upcoming Arnold Classic, a bodybuilding and fitness festival hosted annually by Arnold Schwarzenegger that draws a quarter of a million people from 80 countries to Ohio’s capital city. “Everything in life is a risk,” DeWine said. “We all make calculated decisions. We don’t eliminate
What Controlling COVID Actually Means
And just like that, the national attitude on COVID is flipping like a light switch. As the United States descends the bumpy back end of the Omicron wave, governors and mayors up and down the coasts are extinguishing indoor mask mandates and pulling back proof-of-vaccination protocols. In many parts of the country, restaurants, bars, gyms, and movie theaters are operating at pre-pandemic capacity, not a face covering to be seen; even grade schools and universities have started to relax testing