The Future in Context

Taking a page from other countries, the United States is moving toward establishing a Native American Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the hope that reconciliation begins when the survivors are heard.

It looks as if the United States is going to begin to come to terms with the dark legacy of the Indian Boarding Schools. On May 11, 2022, the U.S. Department of Interior released volume one of an investigative report on the history and legacy of these schools, which existed to force Native American children to break with their Native communities and traditions and assimilate into the dominant white culture as quickly as possible and as forcibly as necessary. The 102-page report makes for grim and chilling reading: violence, malnutrition, beatings, sexual abuse, solitary confinement, untreated diseases, unreported deaths, and disappearances.

The congressional House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol held its first prime-time televised hearing on Thursday evening. Dismissed by critics as show trials, these hearings may test the medium's ability to capture the nation's attention.

20 million US households tuned in.

The question is whether the six televised hearings will make much of a difference in public perceptions of the Trump presidency and its aftermath.

And so we ask: When's it going to stop? What can we do? Is this who we are?

Competing political narratives about gun violence have not satisfied the yearning for justice after the Uvalde tragedy. Our resident humanities scholar offers four propositions to help us think through a uniquely American and polarizing problem.

It's Primary season in America, with all the chaos, expense, and bombast that phenomenon has come to represent in our national political life. The major media now give more attention to off-year primary elections in half a dozen battleground states than they gave to the quadrennial general national election a generation ago. As if they were interpreting the Tarot or reading tea leaves or deconstructing a Papal Encyclical, the myriad pundits hover near the cameras and microphones to pontificate about slight distinctions between in-person day of the election voting, in-person prior to the election voting, mail-in ballots, overseas ballots, military ballots, counts, recounts, automatic recounts, audits, hand recounts, and all the attendant election lawsuits.

With primary season underway, our resident historian examines the origins and role of primary elections in American politics and the intensification of American partisanship.

During his presidency, Roosevelt did more to conserve America's natural resources and its places of special beauty than any other president. He convened state executives to aid in the cause, which led him to create the National Governors Association.

Public institutions suffer reputational damage when partisan drama Is televised, streamed or leaked. What the public sees is: ill-considered legislation has to be cleaned up by the courts, confirmation processes turn dirty and selective leaking is used in an effort to flip narrow majorities.

Legal scholar, historian and author John Vile points to televised (or streamed) hearings and the failure of Congress to act decisively on difficult issues as contributing to our current state of affairs but insists that partisan drama is not new in our judicial history.

We are approaching the 50th anniversary of Watergate, the effects of which are still with us today.

We have the movie All The President's Men as a popularized summary of the first draft of that history but historian and journalist Garrett Graff tells Clay that that capsule misses a lot - a weirder, zanier, bigger and different story about how Americans lost faith in the presidency, government and institutions.

This is a bonus installment in a Governing series on the history of the Supreme Court, following the Senate's historic confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson on April 7.

The elevation of Judge Jackson to the nation's highest court will not only make history but help shape America's future, one case at a time.