This time of year, those of us living in the United States often return to routines—of work, of school, of mass civic participation. Yet in an age of upheaval, many of our usual cycles seem to have been dramatically disrupted.
As we finalized this issue, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump was grazed by a bullet in a July 13 shooting at a Pennsylvania campaign rally. One week later, incumbent President Joe Biden exited the race with just a few months left until Election Day, endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic candidate. This episode was perhaps the climax in a grimly cartoonish election season, highlighting a system that is, as John Nichols writes in these pages, “showing signs of severe strain, as one party evolves into a cult of personality, while the other has been torn apart” over concerns about an aging, genocide-enabling, President Joe Biden. Other stories here illuminate the same. Just in time for the bell to ring in another academic year, our lead Public Schools Advocate project fellow, Jeff Bryant, lays out the opposing populist visions dueling for the soul of our schools. Elsewhere, Mindy Isser takes readers into the quagmire parents must navigate to find child care, or what labor leader Ai-Jen Poo famously calls “the work that makes all other work possible.”
Yet these aren’t disruptions so much as a degradation of cycles that were vicious to begin with: a calcified, corporate ballot; public schools perennially starved of funds and resources; workers who have never been guaranteed parental leave or child care. In addition to leaving our elections ineffective, our schools ideological battlefields, and our workforce broke and burned out, these tired political pathways perpetually lead us to the worst possible ends: genocide and the ever escalating threat of nuclear war. In this issue, you’ll see explorations of both—from Palestinian political cartoonist Mohammad Sabaaneh’s wrenching interpretations of the assault on Gaza to Jim Carrier and Roger Rapoport’s breakdowns of a nuclear industry committing to dangerously new and old technologies, respectively.
None of this is a rebuke of cycles themselves. Over the past few years, I’ve been immersed in writing my first book, which explores how climate change is affecting the places where we live, and whether we can live there at all. As I drove cross-country to document this phenomenon, from Wisconsin to South Carolina to California and back, I confronted a durable truth: We need routines and patterns and cycles to live. We need familiar places—now disappearing—to which we can reliably return. We need the rotation of seasons, now warping, to sustainably grow plants. We need dependable goods and services at regular intervals to ensure we can enable our continual needs to sleep, eat, and breathe—let alone cultivate a just, democratic society.
The challenge, then, is not only to dismantle oppressive cycles but also to initiate new ones that work for us all. Inside these pages, readers will find powerful testament to doing just that: from the story of the political alliance that brought about the New Popular Front’s stunning progressive victory in France, to a report on ballot initiatives making gains for voters who have been failed by politicians, to ideas from leading thinkers for reimagining the Supreme Court, to Sarah Jaffe’s coverage of Ohio electric vehicle workers’ historic wins in the United Auto Workers union national agreement with automakers. These offerings show how we might meet the uncertainty of the moment: not by yielding to the chaos but by finding the routines, patterns, and cycles—the organizing tactics, term limits, labor demands, municipal blueprints, and more—that will lead us collectively home.
In solidarity,
Alexandra Tempus