Seeing Red
Timeless stories from our 174-year archive handpicked to add context to the news of the day.
Trump’s America
[ A U G U S T • 1 9 4 1 ]
“Nice people don’t go Nazi. Their race, color, creed, or social condition is not the criterion. It is something in them.”
Read “Who Goes Nazi?” by Dorothy Thompson
[ J A N U A R Y • 2 0 1 7 ]
“You sense the sort of stupor that follows a great calamity, which is accurate enough. After a presidential contest that seemed to last forever, Donald Trump has prevailed.”
Read “Mourning in America” by James Marcus
[ F E B R U A R Y • 2 0 1 7 ]
“Donald Trump is different....A new kind of president demands a new kind of citizen.”
Read “Trump: A Resister’s Guide,” a forum
[ A U G U S T • 2 0 2 0 ]
“It will take naming the people who brought us to this point, and it will take a willingness to confront them and to make enemies—something Republicans have long been happy to do. It will, finally, take a political project that can match the feeling of participation and excitement that the Trump movement has offered.”
Read “The Art of Losing” by James Pogue
[ J U L Y • 2 0 1 6 ]
“If you boil the strange soup of contemporary right-wing ideology down to a sort of bouillon cube, you find the idea that things are not connected to other things, that people are not connected to other people, and that they are all better off unconnected.”
Read “The Ideology of Isolation” by Rebecca Solnit
[ M A Y • 2 0 1 2 ]
“The thought comes to mind when I hear one of the season’s political candidates offer to ‘take America back.’ Back where? From whom? What means of conveyance? Aboard the Mayflower, or at the point of a gun?”
Read “Ignorance of Things Past” by Lewis H. Lapham
[ M A R C H • 2 0 0 8 ]
“The American system of democracy has many defenses, and the Bush Administration overcame each of them in turn.”
Read “Vote Machine” by Scott Horton
[ N O V E M B E R • 1 9 2 4 ]
“Deplorable? Certainly.”
Read “The Presidents We Deserve” by Elmer Holmes Davis
[ N O V E M B E R • 1 9 8 5 ]
“When a concerted assault on the habits of freedom ceases to shock us, there will be no further need to assault them, for they will have been uprooted once and for all.”
Read “Liberty Under Siege” by Walter Karp
[ D E C E M B E R • 1 9 0 5 ]
Trump pulls a Cleveland, but with none of the character.
Read “The Integrity of American Character” by Grover Cleveland