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Cornel West Should Run as a Democrat; Plus, Supreme Court Wins and Losses

On this episode of the Start Making Sense podcast, Nation editor D.D. Guttenplan discusses the primaries, and David Cole analyzes the Supreme Court and the Constitution.

Jon Wiener

July 13, 2023

The Nation

Cornel West speaks at the 2019 Hutchins Center Honors W.E.B. Du Bois Medal Ceremony at Harvard University on October 22, 2019.(Paul Marotta / Getty Images)

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Harvard Takes a Stand; plus Musk and the Technocrats | Start Making Sense
byThe Nation Magazine

While Trump’s attacks on the universities have broadened, and while Columbia is submitting to his requirements, Harvard’s president has declared that Harvard will not comply with the Trump’s demands in exchange for keeping its federal funding. David Cole comments – he recently stepped down as National Legal Director of the ACLU to return to teaching law at Georgetown.

Also: Elon Musk’s obsession with rockets and robots sounds futuristic, but “few figures in public life are more shackled to the past” – that’s what Jill Lepore has found. His ideas at DOGE seem to come from his grandfather, a founder of the anti-democratic Technocracy movement of the 1930s. Jill Lepore teaches history and law at Harvard, and writes for The New Yorker.

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Cornel West is running for president as the Green Party candidate. On this episode of Start Making Sense, Nation editor in chief D.D. Guttenplan explains why West ought to run in the Democratic primaries, instead.

Also: The Supreme Court, in the term that just ended, was not completely terrible. It surprised us all by doing some good things, especially with regard to voting rights. David Cole, national legal director of the ACLU, is on the podcast to analyze what happened and why.

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.


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