It was only a couple days after the nation celebrated its 250th anniversary of independence when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in an unmarked vehicle shot and killed fifty-two year old Houston father Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. He had been a homebuilder and a law-abiding U.S. resident for decades. One mourner who visited a memorial to Salgado Araujo called him “Houston’s dad.” His son Ronaldo Salgado said, “He dedicated his life in the United States to giving his family the American dream.”
In the smoke-filled summer air of 2026, it’s become harder than ever to ignore our national hypocrisy.
We see our neighbors illegally snatched off the street by federal agents as we are expected to celebrate the United States of America and all that it stands for. During our celebrations, we are advised to avoid store-bought produce because it could make us sick, due to underfunded food safety monitoring. We can’t harvest our own fruits and veggies at the height of the growing season without inhaling a dangerous amount of particulate matter from climate crisis-fueled wildfires. In the leadup to the midterms, the Trump Administration continues to cast doubt on election integrity even as it has succeeded in gutting voting rights. When the administration tried but failed to create a slush fund for their allies who claimed harm from so-called government overreach, it switched tactics and announced it would henceforth target leftist activists with visa restrictions. Even when we manage to dodge the artificial intelligence summary search results on any of this and turn to professional news organizations instead, we are met with a disturbing mix billionaire monopolies and state-approved coverage, if not outright state-run media.
Lest we mistake any of this as “unprecedented,” or “not American,” we might take a long hard look at ourselves in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
When it was constructed more than a century ago between its namesake and the Washington Monument on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., the pool was intended by its architect as a grand mirror. But from the beginning, it has reflected our national hypocrisy. At one end, the image in the water is of a temple to the Great Emancipator, a fulfillment of the nation’s highest ideals of freedom and equality under the law. At the other end, the pool doubles the full length of a towering tribute to a slaveholder and the first U.S. President, the foundation of which was in all likelihood built by enslaved people.
As a metaphor, the story is almost too perfect. Under the Trump Administration in 2026, the pool’s reflective bottom is painted over is in a color called “American flag blue,” and our ability to see ourselves is further obscured. The unaddressed rot at our roots now grows like scum, right on top.
For our August/September issue, smack between the nation’s semiquincentennial and a midterm election threatened by anti-democratic reforms, The Progressive is covering the State of our Disunion. The stories throughout these pages document the crumbling of our most sacred and valued institutions and norms. They also highlight how rebuilding from the ground up requires revealing what’s been buried.
Bill Blum writes about how U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts has completed his decades-long mission of killing the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Terrance Sullivan, former executive director of the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights, argues that while we can’t abandon the ballot box as we face a compromised midterm election, we must begin to write our own rules. Author Brea Baker makes a practical case for reparations for Black Americans following the Trump Administration’s attempt to establish its slush fund. Our Public Schools Advocate lead fellow Jeff Bryant reflects on how attacks on public schools under the Obama Administration persist in the Trump Administration’s agenda today. Mark Hay writes about the proliferation of homeschooling families and groups filling the gap with their own white nationalist curricula. Victor Pickard dissects our co-opted media landscape, and Ruth Conniff dives into AI anxiety. John Nichols profiles a new wave of midterm candidates carving out a different view on Democratic foreign policy.
One piece in this issue details the release of Palestinian American Salah Sarsour, president of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee, from illegal ICE detention in June. Despite the rights violations and violence he experienced, Sarsour ultimately came home with more than 400 letters of support from across the nation. “We belong here,” he concluded upon his return. “And we want to continue to build here.”