Jackson Lears is the Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University and editor-in-chief of Raritan. His most recent books are Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality from Camp Meeting to Wall Street and Conjurors, Cranks, Provincials and Antediluvians.
The world needs Seymour Hersh. Without his indefatigable reporting, we would know even less than we do about the crimes committed by the US national security state over the last fifty years. While most of his peers in the press have been faithfully transcribing what are effectively official lies, Hersh has repeatedly challenged them, revealing scandalous government conduct that would...
The anti-Russian hysteria in Washington has slipped beyond self-parody. We now have front-row seats in a theatre of the absurd, watching the media furor explode after Robert Mueller’s ‘indictments’ of 13 Russians and three Russian companies for interfering in the 2016 presidential elections. Mueller’s actions deserve the scare quotes because they are not really indictments at all. The accused parties will never be extradited or brought to trial. Nor is it clear that their actions rise to the level of crimes. The supposed indictments are merely dramatic accusations, a giant publicity stunt.
We can gauge the corrosive impact of the Democrats’ fixation on Russia by asking what they aren’t talking about when they talk about Russian hacking. For a start, they aren’t talking about interference of other sorts in the election, such as the Republican Party’s many means of disenfranchising minority voters. Nor are they talking about the trillion dollar defence budget that pre-empts the possibility of single-payer healthcare and other urgently needed social programmes; nor about the modernisation of the American nuclear arsenal, which raises the risk of the ultimate environmental calamity, nuclear war.
Ronald Reagan, as Jackson Lears wrote recently in the LRB, was a ‘telegenic demagogue’ whose ‘emotional appeal was built on white people’s racism’. His presidency left the United States a far...
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