Katrina vanden Heuvel: Our Moment of Political Upheaval

Pope Francis waves as he arrives at the airport in Santiago de Cuba on Monday. 

(Tony Gentile/Pool/European Pressphoto Agency)

By Katrina vanden Heuvel  September 22

“Vertigo: a condition in which one has the feeling of whirling or of having the surroundings whirling about one, so that one tends to lose one’s balance; dizziness” — Webster’s New World College Dictionary

Maybe the wave of vertigo washed over me the evening one of the cable channels ran the caption, “Awaiting Donald Trump’s National Security Address on the USS Iowa.” Or, perhaps my bout with vertigo this season has simply been caused by all the events I try to make sense of in my job as the Nation’s editor. Just think about what we are witnessing in these vertiginous days:

Editor and publisher of the Nation magazine, vanden Heuvel writes a weekly column for The Post. View Archive

A pope visiting the United States for the first time who talks in radical terms about “an unfettered pursuit of money,” about a climate in crisis and a social debt owed to a global poor being ravaged by poverty and speculative capitalism. “This system is by now intolerable,” he said. “Farm workers find it intolerable, laborers find it intolerable, communities find it intolerable, peoples find it intolerable . . . . The earth itself — our sister, Mother Earth, as Saint Francis would say — also finds it intolerable.” Echoing the late Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero (whose 1980 assassination at the hands of U.S.-trained-and-supported, right-wing death squads was recognized as a martyrdom by Francis in February), His Holiness describes the excesses of capitalism as the “dung of the devil” and calls for securing for all people the “sacred rights” of life, liberty and land.

A Democratic candidate for president who has launched the first such effort by a democratic socialist since Norman Thomas waged the last of his six campaigns in 1948. This is truly dizzying for longtime Nation readers — we’ve been covering Bernie Sanders for close to 30 years — and to centenarians, who may recall that we endorsed Thomas for president in 1932, before switching to FDR for the next three elections. Sanders is forcing the mainstream media to rethink their coverage of issues formerly — and condescendingly — considered marginal, fringe or fanciful and unrealistic.

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