The Nation.
since 1865UPFRONT
4 By the Numbers: Private
equity predicaments;
8 Comix Nation: Peter
Kuper; 10 Activism:
Keeping the faith
3 A Moon Shot for
the Earth
D.D. Guttenplan
4 Philip Roth’s Effects
Elizabeth Pochoda
5 Asking for a Friend
Liza Featherstone
COLUMNS
6 The Liberal Media
The Distraction
Distraction
Eric Alterman
10 Between the Lines
Conditional Citizenship
Laila Lalami
11 Deadline Poet
Go Back Where
You Came From:
A Coincidence
Calvin TrillinFeatures
12 No Man’s Land
Atossa Araxia Abrahamian
In a uniquely governed
Arctic locale, borders take
on a different meaning.
18 Go Not Abroad in
Search of Monsters
David Klion
Can a new transpartisan
think tank change the DC
foreign policy playbook?
22 Marie Newman vs. the
Democratic Machine
Rebecca Grant
The Illinois congressional
candidate is not just
challenging the incumbent.
She’s challenging her
own party.Books & the Arts
27 Territory of Dreams
Becca Rothfeld
31 Right-Wing Troika
Bryce Covert
33 Family Matters
Larissa Pham
36 Beats in Every Heart
Bijan StephenVOLUME 309, NUMBER 3,
August 12/19, 2019
The digital version of this issue is
available to all subscribers July 30
at TheNation.com.
Cover photos: Atossa Araxia Abraha-
mian (top); Yongyut Kumsri (bottom).W
hat is it about the left and the space program? Back
in the summer of ’69—long before he became
The Nation’s lead editorial writer—the late Andrew
Kopkind pointed out the inextricable ties between
American militarism on earth and our country’s higher aspirations.
A Moon Shot for the Earth
“We Aim at the Stars (But Hit Quang Tri),” he wrote,
decrying a system “that swells the profits of the big-
gest military/space corporations without changing
the system of distribution of those profits one whit.”
Critics might say we’re still at it, still harshing the
national buzz by noticing those on whose backs that
giant leap was launched—just as we did at the time,
when The Nation impertinently remarked that amid
all the talk about “the blackness of space,” the faces
on the screen were uniformly white.
So perhaps this is an odd place to
confess my lifelong love affair with space.
On that July Sunday, I’d just returned
exhausted from a Boy Scout camping trip
yet somehow prevailed upon my parents
to wake me up in time to watch Neil
Armstrong going down that ladder. It
was thrilling then and, despite all we’ve
learned—and published—still sends a
chill down my spine. As did the realiza-
tion, some 30 years ago, that the auto me-
chanic I was interviewing in Harlem was the father
of Ronald McNair, the African American astronaut
who died in the 1986 Challenger disaster.
Which doesn’t mean those who pointed out the
irony—and political misdirection—permeating that
’69 landing in the Sea of Tranquility while cities
burned back home (and were being bombed to cin-
ders in Vietnam) were wrong.
It has always been a question of priorities. The
Cold War—and the blow to America’s collective
ego struck by Sputnik—made the space race into a
well-funded national obsession. Yet even those most
critical of recent attempts to revive that apocalyptic
antagonism might cheer a renewed rivalry aimed
not at conquering new worlds but at saving this one.
Why not make the Green New Deal this generation’s
moon shot? Why not invite Russia—and China and
India—to join us in a race to save Spaceship Earth?
NASA once estimated it took over 400,000 sci-
entists and technicians to land human beings on the
moon. That’s a huge backup team—and if applied to
the basic research, applied science, and engineering
that would be required to end America’s fossil fuel
addiction, could also be a course correction for our
economy in ways that might satisfy even NASA’s
longtime critics. Like Eisenhower’s National De-
fense Education Act, the massive investment re-
quired to educate and train such a workforce would
have consequences far beyond the Green
New Deal. Likewise the millions of jobs
involved in building energy-efficient
public housing, a 21st century rail net-
work, and all the other components of a
truly comprehensive response to climate
change. Only instead of ignoring or exac-
erbating racial and economic inequality,
the Green New Deal would directly ad-
dress those problems. (That’s the “New
Deal” part.)
It’s not a new idea. In 2003 the Apollo Alliance
tried to bring labor and environmental groups to-
gether around a $300 billion 10-year program to
speed up the transition to clean energy. Five years
later, in these pages, Van Jones argued for a green
capitalism that would unite environmentalists, so-
cial justice activists, and organized labor. Yet neither
was nearly ambitious enough. The Apollo lunar
program cost $288 billion in today’s dollars.
The Green New Deal won’t be easy to pass—or
to deliver. As President Kennedy said, “We choose
to go to the moon in this decade and do the other
things not because they are easy but because they are
hard.” Building the postcarbon economy we desper-
ately need while unraveling the noose of inequality
around our necks will be a gigantic undertaking.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that unlike
going to the moon, saving the earth isn’t an option.
It’s a necessity. D.D. GUTTENPLANCOMMENT