THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

The age of the conventional Democrat is over. The time of the Democratic contrarian has come.So says Adam Jentleson, anyway. The veteran political operative and former adviser to the late Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid recently launched a think tank that asks Democratic candidates to ignore pressure from the far left, take positions outside the “liberal box,” and be a lot more “heterodox” in general. If this seems to you like Beltway speak for asking Democrats to sound more like Republicans, well, you would be at least partly correct. The Democratic Party used to have supermajorities in Congress because it allowed its members to hold a wide range of positions, Jentleson told me. To start winning again, the party needs to bring that back, he said. His new think tank, Searchlight Institute, plans to help.With its seven-person team, a polling arm, and a $10 million budget, Searchlight promises to offer… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “The Unfinished Revolution,” a project exploring 250 years of the American experiment. To be a patriot in Donald Trump’s America is like sitting through a loved one’s trial for some gruesome crime. Day after day your shame deepens as the horrifying testimony piles up, until you wonder how you can still care about this person. Shouldn’t you just accept that your beloved is beyond redemption? And yet you keep showing up, exchanging smiles and waves, hoping for some mitigating evidence to emerge—trying to believe in your country’s essential decency.Patriotism is as various and complex as the feeling of attachment to one’s own family. It can be unconditional and unquestioning, or else move—even die—with the fluctuations in a nation’s moral character. It can flow from a hearth, a grave, a landscape, a bloodline, a shared history, an ethnic or religious identity, a community of… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Illustrations by Nicolás OrtegaEditor’s Note: This article is part of “The Unfinished Revolution,” a project exploring 250 years of the American experiment. Other peoples have risen. Other peoples have risen up to defend their rights, their dignity, and their democracies. In the past 50 years, they’ve done it in Poland, South Africa, Lebanon, South Korea, Ukraine, East Timor, Serbia, Madagascar, Nepal, and elsewhere.In the early 1970s, for instance, the democratically elected leader of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos, tried to centralize power in his own hands. Students rose up: A clash between them and police left six protesters dead. Transit workers went on strike, followed by joint student-worker demonstrations. Marcos countered by declaring martial law. Led by Cardinal Jaime Sin, the archbishop of Manila, Catholics arose to resist.In 1983, Marcos’s key opponent, Benigno Aquino, was assassinated. Marcos banned TV coverage of Aquino’s funeral. But 2 million mourners showed up for what… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Since immigration-enforcement agents began their descent on Chicago, acting with seemingly unprecedented speed and ferocity, Evelyn Vargas and her colleagues at Organized Communities Against Deportation have been in a frenzy. They help run an emergency hotline that refers people who have been detained to immigration lawyers and directs their families to support services such as food pantries, emergency housing, and mental-health care. (On a single day last week, it took 800 calls.) And they oversee a team of 35 “rapid responders” who have been sprinting across the city to film arrests, aiming for at least two to arrive on the scene within 10 minutes.When training volunteers, OCAD instructs them to stay a safe distance from agents and makes clear that their goal is to observe but not intervene or prevent arrests. They share footage with elected officials and lawyers representing those apprehended, but do not post the videos online. And… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

With the government shutdown well into its second week, President Donald Trump’s strategy to break Senate Democrats has become clear: Maximize the pain of the closure to force them into retreat. His administration is firing civil servants en masse, threatening to withhold back pay from furloughed federal employees, and canceling billions of dollars in funding for states that voted for his opponent last year.Yet with only a couple of exceptions, the party’s senators are holding firm—to the unexpected delight of House Democrats worried that their counterparts across the Capitol, whose votes are needed to reopen the government, might cave in the face of Trump’s heavy-handed pressure campaign. “I’m surprised, but I’m happy,” Representative Eric Swalwell told us. Like many of his House colleagues, the California Democrat had been bitterly frustrated when Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer surrendered the last spending fight in March, making the current shutdown nearly a forgone… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.