\n
![](\"https:\/\/progressive.org\/downloads\/21783\/download\/RippedUSAFlag.jpg?cb=84e705d6f3512f23fe8569611083af93\")
<\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\n
On April 21, Mahmoud Khalil listened to his first child\u2019s birth over the phone from a detention center in Louisiana.<\/p>\n
\u201cDuring your first moments, I buried my face in my arms and kept my voice low so that the seventy other men sleeping in this concrete room would not see my cloudy eyes or hear my voice catch,\u201d Khalil\u00a0later wrote<\/a>\u00a0in a letter to his son. \u201cWhy do faceless politicians have the power to strip human beings of their divine moments?\u201d<\/p>\n Every day, we\u2019re confronted with more and more news that indicates our democracy is terminally ill. Khalil is one of\u00a0at least 1,200 students<\/a>\u00a0at U.S. universities and colleges who have had their visas or legal status revoked as of late April. Meanwhile, the Trump Administration\u00a0also welcomed<\/a>\u00a0fifty-nine white South Africans as refugees with a possible pathway to citizenship, on the same day that it\u00a0announced<\/a>\u00a0the end of temporary protected status for Afghan refugees and just after it asked the Supreme Court\u00a0to cancel<\/a>\u00a0the legal status of 500,000 immigrants\u2014mostly from South America and the Caribbean. \u201cIt\u2019s important to understand who they\u2019re opening the doors to, and how they\u2019re closing the doors to certain people,\u201d said journalist Paola Ramos on Instagram of these events,\u00a0connecting them<\/a>\u00a0to Donald Trump\u2019s long-standing\u00a0eugenic beliefs<\/a>.<\/p>\n At this point in history, our ailments have been thoroughly diagnosed. The racism, ableism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia baked into our cultural diet, and our refusal to reckon with this, have brought us here. After the American Revolution, \u201ca new gender system dominated public discourses and ultimately came to structure an emerging middle class,\u201d writes Yale historian Ned Blackhawk in his 2023 National Book Award-winning volume,\u00a0The Rediscovery of America<\/em>. At that time, \u201cUnlike their European counterparts, American leaders remained more attuned to racial differences,\u201d he continues. \u201cTheir beliefs about race informed their answers to questions like citizenship, liberty, and intermarriage. It was a dark vision that they fashioned into laws to ensure racial purity.\u201d Almost 250 years later this dark vision, having devoured all else, has finally turned in on itself. Now, all of us\u2014not only the most marginalized\u2014will know the privations of fascism.<\/p>\n In these pages, John Nichols takes us inside the political struggle to rescue a threatened cornerstone of the U.S. social safety net: Medicare and Medicaid; Amy Littlefield shows us how abortion bans at Catholic hospitals anticipated the widespread patient maltreatment and deaths we see post-Dobbs<\/em>; Katie Rose Quandt details how the persistently used practice of solitary confinement has long been linked to suicides; David Masciotra introduces us to one Chicago organization that provides food and health services to the local LGBTQ+ community\u2014and recently, the city\u2019s growing migrant population as well. Amy Goodman and Juan Gonz\u00e1lez speak with new Pulitzer Prize winner Mosab Abu Toha,\u00a0whose writing<\/a>\u00a0in\u00a0The New Yorker<\/em>\u00a0unravels the multivalent public health breakdown that is Israel\u2019s ongoing genocide\u2014directly aided by the United States\u2014of Palestinians in Gaza.<\/p>\n What we know equally as well as the scourges that plague us are the many antidotes to them. Finding our way to a healthy democracy\u2014perhaps a different one entirely from the one we have now\u2014will be a bottom-up, community-led process. As Sarah Jaffe writes in her column, \u201cworkers have a tremendous opportunity to step into the public eye and make their case for a very different vision of the country.\u201d This will require the full force of our numbers, the breadth of our skills, and the expanse of our imagination.<\/p>\n A final note:\u00a0The Progressive<\/em>\u00a0was saddened to learn of the death on April 13 of our longtime contributor Sharon Johnson. A former\u00a0New York\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0national desk reporter, Johnson was a health care and Medicaid expert who developed much of the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u2019s COVID-19 coverage during the pandemic. For our magazine, she regularly covered the efforts of community clinics and health care workers. We hope this latest issue, covering the health of our democracy, would have made her proud.<\/p>\n In solidarity,<\/p>\n Alexandra Tempus<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n