26 The Nation. August 12/19, 2019
B
ecause of lipinski’s views on abortion, he has enjoyed
support from groups that don’t generally support Democrats.
Sometimes, their tactics are downright Trumpian.
Before the 2018 primary, the conservative Susan B.
Anthony List sent canvassers to knock on doors and dis-
seminated Facebook ads and direct mailers calling Newman a pro-
abortion extremist. Constituents received text messages from an
unknown source that claimed that she was running an abortion
clinic. (All I saw in her living room were overstuffed couches and
campaign interns on laptops.) “There’s something FISHY about
Marie Newman,” said one mailer funded by the ostensibly non-
partisan group No Labels, featuring an image of a dead fish lying
atop a garbage can. “We know Lipinski is going to straight-up lie,”
Newman said, rolling her eyes. “He will say, ‘She is from Mars and
has horns in her head and kills puppies.’ ”
Newman sees herself as “ridiculously thick-skinned,” yet it’s
tough to fight Lipinski and the groups that support him and the
Chicago machine—and on top of that, the DCCC. The vendor
policy has set back her campaign; finding, vetting, and registering
vendors is time-consuming and expensive. The DCCC rejects the
description of its policy as a blacklist, but Newman said vendors
have received threatening phone calls for even considering work
with her. The organization has even gone after primary challeng-
ers directly: In 2018 it published opposition research against Laura
Moser, a Democrat running for Congress in Texas.
This practice of prioritizing incumbents over candidates from
a diversity of racial, ethnic, gender, and ideological backgrounds
frustrates many Democrats—and, of course, Newman. Because
even if the IL-03 seat is safely in Democratic hands, what’s the
point if someone with Lipinski’s views is wielding that power?
Newman said there should be consequences if incumbents can’t
hold up their end of the political deal.
“I wouldn’t put my money on a losing horse,” she said. “I
wouldn’t put my money on an unethical horse that behaves badly
at every turn. And I wouldn’t put my money on a horse that doesn’t
belong in the corral.” Q
The refuse of humanity came in all shapes, colors, and textures—
yellow fishing nets, rusted tin cans, pink candy wrappers, a black TV.
We picked up as much as we could, filling white bags that we dragged
back across the sand to our Zodiacs so we could drop them off in
Longyearbyen. It was so distracting that we couldn’t look up.
Even without the spectacle of Arctic garbage, we encountered
human damage at every stop—glaciers calving as though they were
losing their teeth, their shorelines receding like sickly gums. It put
the idea of sovereignty into perspective in a different, cosmic way:
Who are any of us to be here at all?
In the modern world, the concept of state sovereignty governs
how we govern. Its legitimacy is rarely questioned, even though it is
a human invention—the setting of borders, the wielding of power,
the deciding of who belongs. But in the Arctic, as in any remote
place, it’s obvious that we’re not actually in charge.
We carry no special privileges or diplomatic immunities in spaces
where nature makes the rules. It is absurd to impose the construct
of the nation-state, what with its laws and regulations, on something
so wild, so unruly. Svalbard’s landscape disregards any concept of
national borders, of industrial time, or of politics as we know it. We
aren’t its citizens, residents, or denizens; we are its guests.
No wonder it’s a place that, for a hundred years, has quietly chal-
lenged what countries can do. Q
(continued from page 17)
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