The midterm elections were a mixed bag for both Democrats and Republicans, and there's a lot of speculation about what comes next for both parties. We have a minute (hopefully) before the 2020 campaigns start in earnest, so now is a good time to take some breathing room and try to reassess what comes next for everyone who isn't in Congress or running for office.
Tuesday's elections highlighted what will be key issues in the next couple of years as Trump and the GOP fight to keep him in the White House: demonizing immigrants, intensifying voting restrictions, and floods of dark money. It's a lot to keep track of at once, but there's plenty of material out there to get a better handle on what happened in the midterms and what we can expect to see more of as political machines lurch into high gear.
How did American politics get almost completely dominated by billionaires' interests? How can Republicans keep any kind of voting base when their actual policies are destructive and widely unpopular? The answer, as Nancy MacLean writes, goes back to a furious but shadowy backlash over integration. The evolution of conservatism into a fantasy factory for the libertarian 1 percenters was a very deliberate process, one that's built on convincing Americans that the government is their enemy and deregulation is the answer to every problem. The result has not only been a massive lurch to the right, but in billionaires hoovering up even more money, property, and politicians.
While nearly 1.5 million felons won the right to vote in Florida on Tuesday, voter suppression from Georgia to North Dakota remains one of the biggest stories of the election. But conservative politicians and writers have been orchestrating ways to undermine the Voting Rights Act since the day it was signed. Reporter Ari Berman digs into the non-stop war against poor and minority people’s right to vote—and its unqualified success—in a book that shows that "get out the vote" efforts can only go so far when elections are designed to stop people from voting.
After reporting from Ferguson after the shooting of Michael Brown, Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery started covering police shootings of unarmed black men across the country. The result is this book, a mix of memoir and relatively straightforward account of the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. Lowery brings together hundreds of interviews with activists as he tries to work through the pitfalls of covering police violence in America, contextualizing it within his own life and generations of brutal, racial oppression.
Novelist Valeria Luiselli has worked as an interpreter for Central American children crossing Mexico to reach the U.S. In order to stay in America, the children have to satisfactorily answer 40 questions, including "Why did you come to the United States?" and "Did anything happen on your trip that scared you or hurt you?" Tell Me How It Ends is a very short book that looks at migration as a source of hope, as well as a technical, bureaucratic process that eats up people (and children) caught in the trauma of trying to navigate it.
While Mexico tends to dominate any discussion of immigration, countries in Central America actually make up the lion's share of illegal immigration into the U.S. El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras are countries overwhelmed by intense violence, due largely to America destabilizing local governments to maintain control in the region. Óscar Martínez gives a sense of the absurdity and despair that drives people from these countries, compiled in his first-person accounts of dealing with police, criminals, victims, and, in one chilling section, the people tasked with excavating bodies from mass graves.
Michelle Alexander's 2010 book is practically a classic by now, and understanding her critique of the criminal justice system is essential to understand race and policing. In essence, Alexander argues that the prison system has replaced slavery and Jim Crow as a way to brutalize and profit off of black people in America. By creating draconian mandatory sentences in a "War on Drugs" and then relentlessly policing black neighborhoods, the country has built up a massive prison population of mostly black men who continue to be marginalized and oppressed long after they've served their sentences. Rather than being preoccupied with crime and punishment, Alexander argues, the justice system is actually designed for social control.
Donald Trump's order to to send thousands of U.S. troops to the border is a horrifying display of political theater, turning military might on asylum-seekers just to gin up midterm votes. But as Justin Akers Chacón argues, the border has always been a site of extreme state-sanctioned violence that has as much to do with money as fear of invading foreigners. That's not to whitewash the racism with talk of "economic anxiety," but that there's economic incentive for business owners to have a steady, replaceable, largely rights-less group of people they can hire and fire for any reason. The history of abuse—legal, political, and vigilante—of immigrants in the Southwest is impossible to separate from Trump's desperate appeals to the white nationalist wing of is base.
Written shortly after the 2016 election, No Is Not Enough pinpoints what would become one of the Democrats’ biggest problems under the new regime: They have to be more than just the Anti-Trump Party. Without having an alternative vision, without something more to offer than “at least we aren’t this asshole,” there’s no way to beat Trump or to prevent someone more competent but just as toxic from coming along behind him. Klein looks at how to build support and get people involved, because there are no shortcuts.
The premise is simple: The Republican Party is willing to gut the democratic process to ensure its minority rule over the rest of the country, and there’s no bipartisan solution to that. Instead, the Democrats need to be just as ruthless when they’re back in power if they want to save American democracy. (As the other books on this list illustrate, that’s not hyperbole.) Faris lays out how they can do that, from the practical to the hugely ambitious: packing the Supreme Court to overtake the right-wing majority, for example, or splitting California into multiple states to bump up the number of likely-Democratic senators. The Democrats need the kind of total control that Republicans have enjoyed the last few years to accomplish this, but these aren't things that can be won with just one election. They're blueprints to make sure that Republicans never force the rest of the country into their most nightmarish fantasies.
