On April 21, Mahmoud Khalil listened to his first child’s birth over the phone from a detention center in Louisiana.
“During your first moments, I buried my face in my arms and kept my voice low so that the seventy other men sleeping in this concrete room would not see my cloudy eyes or hear my voice catch,” Khalil later wrote in a letter to his son. “Why do faceless politicians have the power to strip human beings of their divine moments?”
Every day, we’re confronted with more and more news that indicates our democracy is terminally ill. Khalil is one of at least 1,200 students at U.S. universities and colleges who have had their visas or legal status revoked as of late April. Meanwhile, the Trump Administration also welcomed fifty-nine white South Africans as refugees with a possible pathway to citizenship, on the same day that it announced the end of temporary protected status for Afghan refugees and just after it asked the Supreme Court to cancel the legal status of 500,000 immigrants—mostly from South America and the Caribbean. “It’s important to understand who they’re opening the doors to, and how they’re closing the doors to certain people,” said journalist Paola Ramos on Instagram of these events, connecting them to Donald Trump’s long-standing eugenic beliefs.
At this point in history, our ailments have been thoroughly diagnosed. The racism, ableism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia baked into our cultural diet, and our refusal to reckon with this, have brought us here. After the American Revolution, “a new gender system dominated public discourses and ultimately came to structure an emerging middle class,” writes Yale historian Ned Blackhawk in his 2023 National Book Award-winning volume, The Rediscovery of America. At that time, “Unlike their European counterparts, American leaders remained more attuned to racial differences,” he continues. “Their beliefs about race informed their answers to questions like citizenship, liberty, and intermarriage. It was a dark vision that they fashioned into laws to ensure racial purity.” Almost 250 years later this dark vision, having devoured all else, has finally turned in on itself. Now, all of us—not only the most marginalized—will know the privations of fascism.
In these pages, John Nichols takes us inside the political struggle to rescue a threatened cornerstone of the U.S. social safety net: Medicare and Medicaid; Amy Littlefield shows us how abortion bans at Catholic hospitals anticipated the widespread patient maltreatment and deaths we see post-Dobbs; Katie Rose Quandt details how the persistently used practice of solitary confinement has long been linked to suicides; David Masciotra introduces us to one Chicago organization that provides food and health services to the local LGBTQ+ community—and recently, the city’s growing migrant population as well. Amy Goodman and Juan González speak with new Pulitzer Prize winner Mosab Abu Toha, whose writing in The New Yorker unravels the multivalent public health breakdown that is Israel’s ongoing genocide—directly aided by the United States—of Palestinians in Gaza.
What we know equally as well as the scourges that plague us are the many antidotes to them. Finding our way to a healthy democracy—perhaps a different one entirely from the one we have now—will be a bottom-up, community-led process. As Sarah Jaffe writes in her column, “workers have a tremendous opportunity to step into the public eye and make their case for a very different vision of the country.” This will require the full force of our numbers, the breadth of our skills, and the expanse of our imagination.
A final note: The Progressive was saddened to learn of the death on April 13 of our longtime contributor Sharon Johnson. A former New York Times national desk reporter, Johnson was a health care and Medicaid expert who developed much of the Times’s COVID-19 coverage during the pandemic. For our magazine, she regularly covered the efforts of community clinics and health care workers. We hope this latest issue, covering the health of our democracy, would have made her proud.
In solidarity,
Alexandra Tempus