Living in the USA

Over 8,000 names are engraved on the Middle East Conflicts Wall Memorial, and each year, more are added. The wall is unlike any other war memorial in the US -- particularly because of its location: not in Washington DC but in Marseilles, Illinois, a small prairie town with a population of about 5,000. We talk with historian Andrew Bacevich about his recent visit to the memorial. Also: Isn't abortion rights a women's issue? Katha Polllitt says, 'no' and explains what men should be doing differently to help women and themselves. Plus: Michael Ames on Bowe Bergdahl & the disaster of the Afghan war--his new book is "American Cypher". And Ilhan Omar on John Nichols’ new podcast from The Nation, “Next Left.”

Since the demise of Biden’s Build Back Better bill, the Democrats need other achievements to run on in the midterm campaigns. That means Biden should start using executive action. Harold Meyerson talks about the most politically important possibilities: student debt cancellation and action on prescription drug prices. Also: the Senate confirmation hearings for Biden’s Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson follow a familiar script. Progressives instead should be arguing--inside and outside the hearings--that the Constitution requires protecting our “republican form of government” from becoming a “moneyed aristocracy” or “oligarchy.” Joseph Fishkin and William E. Forbath explain; their new book is The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution: Reconstructing the Economic Foundations of American Democracy. Plus: Congressman Jamie Raskin, member of the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 insurrection, talked about the committee’s evidence against Trump–-and the committee’s future if Republicans prevail in the midterms. He was manager of Trump’s second impeachment trial.

What the Democrats have done wrong, and what they’ve done right: Michael Kazin on the party’s history, and its future. His new book is “What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party.” Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson won’t be seated on the Supreme Court until late June, but we’re still thinking about the significance of her confirmation as America’s first Black female supreme court justice and of that horrible confirmation hearing she endured. We have UC Irvine Law professor and Nation contributor, Michele Goodwin, on the show to reflect. Also: Many proposals to reform the police were made after the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, the largest protest movement in American history. But the problem, Erwin Chemerinsky argues, is not just the police; the Supreme Court has empowered the police and subverted civil rights. Erwin is Dean of the law school at UC Berkeley, and author of many books— most recently "Presumed Guilty."

Repealing Roe v. Wade will be a disaster for women, but a gift to Democrats in the upcoming midterms--an opportunity to win close races in swing states. Harold Meyerson runs down the key races where Dems should be able to win. Also: It’s all up to the states now, where grassroots groups are preparing an enormous logistics operation to move people across entire regions of the country that are about to go dark on abortion access. Amy Littlefield, The Nation’s abortion access correspondent, weighs in. Plus: Why did we stop believing that people can change? Don’t we want people who did bad things to understand the damage they caused? Don't we want them to acknowledge it and make reparations? Bestselling author, Rebecca Solnit explains.

May 22, 3:00 PM Bernie is back on Page One of the New York Times, but their report last weekend was not about his new plan to save public schools–the most progressive education program in modern American history–or his proposal to end all subsidies for oil and gas companies. Instead, it was about a trip he made to Nicaragua in 1985, more than 30 years ago. They didn’t like it. How do we explain the New York Times’s coverage of Bernie Sanders? Amy Wilentz comments. Plus: There are 1,000 redactions in the 448 pages of the Mueller report--individual names and entire pages--that we are not allowed to see. They are part of a larger problem of government secrecy which started long before Trump and which is now threatening to cripple our democracy—Karen Greenberg explains.