Chris Lehmann on Republican Plans for 2023, Plus Adam Hochschild on Repression in WWI America

Chris Lehmann on Republican Plans for 2023, Plus Adam Hochschild on Repression in WWI America

On this week’s episode of Start Making Sense, discussions on the GOP’s “Commitment to America” and how the First World War threatened democracy. 

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What will Republicans do if they win control of the House in the midterms? Now they’ve said something about that, officially: They call it their “Commitment to America.” Chris Lehmann calls it “a grab bag of cultural resentments papering over an anemic policy wish list.”

Also: The Trump era is not the only time American democracy has been threatened; the World War I years, when Democrat Woodrow Wilson was president, were another. That’s what Adam Hochschild argues—his new book is American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis.

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The chaos and cruelty of the Trump administration reaches new lows each week.

Trump’s catastrophic “Liberation Day” has wreaked havoc on the world economy and set up yet another constitutional crisis at home. Plainclothes officers continue to abduct university students off the streets. So-called “enemy aliens” are flown abroad to a mega prison against the orders of the courts. And Signalgate promises to be the first of many incompetence scandals that expose the brutal violence at the core of the American empire.

At a time when elite universities, powerful law firms, and influential media outlets are capitulating to Trump’s intimidation, The Nation is more determined than ever before to hold the powerful to account.

In just the last month, we’ve published reporting on how Trump outsources his mass deportation agenda to other countries, exposed the administration’s appeal to obscure laws to carry out its repressive agenda, and amplified the voices of brave student activists targeted by universities.

We also continue to tell the stories of those who fight back against Trump and Musk, whether on the streets in growing protest movements, in town halls across the country, or in critical state elections—like Wisconsin’s recent state Supreme Court race—that provide a model for resisting Trumpism and prove that Musk can’t buy our democracy.

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