The Atlantic

This Upheaval Is How America Gets Better

What’s happening right now is the way the U.S. corrects its own wrongs.
Source: Eric Lee

This is an extraordinarily tense moment in the United States. Currently on display are police brutality, racism, a president fanning the flames and threatening to use force against peaceful protesters, and a Defense Department leadership initially complicit in using the military for partisan purposes—during a pandemic, no less. Authoritarian states jeer at us, and friends . The head of the venerable Council on Foreign Relations the U.S. a “power in retreat.” Some American commentators compare the protests to , because in both cases, protesters believe that, as the writer Steven A. Cook has put it, “political institutions of the state and the to justify our country as a functioning democracy.

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from The Atlantic

The Atlantic4 min read
Private Equity Has Its Eyes on the Child-Care Industry
Updated at 1:30 p.m. ET on February 22, 2024. Last June, years of organizing in Vermont paid off when the state’s House and Senate passed landmark legislation—overriding a governor’s earlier veto—that invests $125 million a year into its child-care s
The Atlantic5 min readSocial History
The Pro-life Movement’s Not-So-Secret Plan for Trump
Sign up for The Decision, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage. Donald Trump has made no secret of the fact that he regards his party’s position on reproductive rights as a political liability. He blamed the “abortion issue” for his part
The Atlantic4 min readAmerican Government
How Democrats Could Disqualify Trump If the Supreme Court Doesn’t
Near the end of the Supreme Court’s oral arguments about whether Colorado could exclude former President Donald Trump from its ballot as an insurrectionist, the attorney representing voters from the state offered a warning to the justices—one evoking

Related Books & Audiobooks