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What Trumpism Means for Democracy

Andrew J. Bacevich TomDispatch
American democracy has been failing for decades, so a disturbing number of us are turning to authoritarianism. Is Trump our Juan Perón? Trump's Atlantic City empire has crumbled. But Trump himself has somehow emerged stronger than ever. The man who sought to lure all aspiring monarchs to A.C. ('welcome to a kingdom where everybody's treated like a king') has whipped up a heady mix of xenophobia, political bromides, and so-light-it-floats policy proposals into a movement

His Paula Deen Takedown Went Viral. But This Food Scholar Isn’t Done Yet.

Michaele Weissman Washington Post
In June 2013, shortly after disclosure of Deen’s past use of the n-word made her the culinary world’s reigning persona non grata, Twitty posted an open letter to her on Africulinaria.com Twitty told Deen that far more repugnant to him than the n-word was “the near universal erasure of the black presence from American culinary memory.” How did this self-trained historical cook and unaffiliated scholar come to be recognized a a figure in the world of culinary scholarship?

The Scholar Denied : W.E.B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology

Monica Bell Los Angeles Review of Books
This new book argues that W. E. B. Du Bois was the first of the USA's modern sociologists. Du Bois's empirically-based studies of African Americans at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries are models of sociological research. Aldon Morris details this legacy, which academic Sociology still does not universally acknowledge. In this review, Monica Bell considers the significance of Morris's argument.

The Die-Hard Republicans Who Say #NeverTrump

Megan McArdle Bloomberg View
Thousands of people are tweeting with the hashtag #NeverTrump. I invited lifelong Republicans who had decided that they couldn’t vote for Trump in the general, even if he got the nomination, to tell me their stories. Hundreds of e-mails poured in. I was surprised by the number of people, their passion, and their breadth. Here's what these folks are thinking.

Santa Ana: Living Behind Cardboard Walls

Capital and Main Staff Capital and Main
Isabelle Lopez, her husband and their dog live in a tiny room, perhaps 130 square feet, in the impoverished Lacy neighborhood in the Orange County city of Santa Ana. The room has cardboard walls, which Lopez’s husband painted white to provide at least an illusion they were solid. On those walls, she has tacked family photos and a large reproduction of a painting titled Angel de la Guarda, surrounded by cutout paper butterflies.

Thank You Melissa Harris-Perry

Dave Zirin The Nation
The Melissa Harris-Perry Show wasn't diversity for diversity sake. This was a show that introduced us to community leaders, academics, small town politicians, and musicians that otherwise never would have seen the light of day. The most diverse, intellectually bracing show on network news was treated as expendable, and its host would not have it. She and her show will be sorely missed.

Beneath Hillary Clinton's Super Tuesday Wins, Signs of Turnout Trouble

NICHOLAS CONFESSORE New York Times
Democratic turnout has fallen drastically since 2008, the last time the party had a contested primary, with roughly three million fewer Democrats voting in the 15 states that have held caucuses or primaries through Tuesday. The results suggest that Mrs. Clinton, who has outraised every other presidential candidate and has the overwhelming support of her party’s elected leaders, still faces a difficult road to reassembling the winning Obama coalition.