It’s an extraordinary victory: The first round of Democratic debates shows that all the major candidates are working within a progressive framework. Robert Borosage says Bernie gets the credit—and he argues that, although Biden currently is far ahead in the polls of Democratic voters, he has nowhere to go except down, once he is challenged on his record: Iraq, mass incarceration, NAFTA, and Clarence Thomas.
Also: 50 years after Stonewall, historian Martin Duberman argues that, despite the obvious and necessary victories, the radical heart of gay liberation has been abandoned. The Gay Liberation Front of the late sixties critiqued monogamy, rather than campaigning for marriage equality, and opposed militarism and imperialism, rather than fighting to get gays into the military. Duberman is a longtime activist and writer on gay politics.
Start Making SenseTwitterStart Making Sense is The Nation’s podcast, hosted by Jon Wiener and coproduced by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes each Thursday.
Jon WienerTwitterJon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and co-author (with Mike Davis) of Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.