Dear Progressive Reader,
It is now nearly a month since the presidential election was decided at the polls. Donald Trump has still declined to concede the obvious, but almost all of his lawsuits to attempt to overturn the results have been rejected or failed in the courts. While his twitter-storm continues to assert theft and fraud, it is beginning to look like he will exit the White House on January 20. As Mark Fiore illustrates in his regular comic, this is something to be thankful for this week.
Meanwhile, the incoming Biden Administration will have many messes to clean up, and many pressing issues to address. Author Thomas Frank tells Roger Bybee, “If Biden is to lead the nation through the multiple crises with which Trump has left him, he must move boldly away from his centrist past and work toward building the kind of multi-racial, working-class coalition that Franklin Delano Roosevelt triggered to confront the enormous problems of the Great Depression.”
Scholar and journalist Luis Feliz Leon reports this week in a thorough look at nationwide organizing efforts, “Black and Latinx voters helped deliver the nation to Joe Biden—now, he owes them.” But, as labor studies professor Armando Ibarra points out, the media often misses the point when it lumps all “Latino” voters together. “In fact,” he writes, “the term ‘Latino’ more often obscures rather than clarifies the politics of specific ethnic or racial communities with growing class divisions. In particular, we miss the deeply rooted actions that Latino workers take to build political and economic power for themselves and their communities under neoliberal capitalism, irrespective of political parties.”
This Thanksgiving week, editor Bill Lueders looks back at the life and writing of Mark Anthony Rolo, who passed away in May. “The late, great Native American writer from Wisconsin always found a reason to give thanks,” writes Lueders. Rolo had once invited Trump to attend a Thanksgiving dinner. The President did not show up, but Rolo wrote about the things they might have discussed at the table. “I would like to tell the President that, despite his nose-thumbing at tribal sovereignty and treaties, there is gratitude growing throughout Indian Country. Tribal communities are doing more than surviving, we are thriving. Tribes are creating sustainable economies that respect and give back to the Earth.”
Finally, this past week marked the anniversaries of the deaths of two important world leaders. November 22 was the fifty-seventh anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. A year earlier, Kennedy, when asked by editor Morris Rubin to write something for The Progressive’s special issue on the hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, had sent a letter to our magazine saying, “[T]he Emancipation Proclamation was more than an individual act of wisdom and courage. It was a part-payment on our debt to the Founding Fathers of this republic—an installment in our national determination to realize for all our citizens the promise of equal rights and equal opportunities to which this nation is forever dedicated.”
It is also four years since the death of Cuban President Fidel Castro on November 25, 2016. Castro was often covered in the pages of The Progressive, as I chronicled in an article following his death. But it was the 1963 reporting of French journalist Jean Daniel in The New Republic that told the story of Castro’s reaction to Kennedy’s death. Speaking with Castro on November 19 of that year, Daniel wrote that the Cuban leader had postulated, “He still has the possibility of becoming, in the eyes of history, the greatest President of the United States, the leader who may at last understand that there can be coexistence between capitalists and socialists, even in the Americas. He would then be an even greater President than Lincoln.” Three short days later near the beach at Varadero, as they received news of Kennedy’s death, Castro intoned, “Everything is changed. Everything is going to change.”
Keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.
Sincerely,
Norman Stockwell
Publisher
P.S – Our new 2021 Hidden History of the United States calendar is now available for purchase through our website. They make great gifts and hang well on walls and refrigerators.
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