Dave Denison

Oct 18, 2024 | thebaffler.com | Dave Denison

People laughed when J. D. Vance blurted out his most memorable line in this month’s televised vice-presidential debate with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. It came when Walz turned to Vance and asked whether Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. “Tim, I’m focused on the future,” said Vance. It was a comical dodge, but it was also a prepared talking point. He’d made the same comment earlier in the evening when CBS moderator Norah O’Donnell asked him whether he would challenge this year’s election results.

Sep 3, 2024 | thebaffler.com | Dave Denison |Leif Weatherby

Over the last half century, Texas has become the most important stronghold of the Republican Party in the United States. The Lone Star State hasn’t given its huge haul of electoral votes to a Democratic presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter won in 1976. It went twice for Ronald Reagan and gave the nation two presidents named George Bush. Since then, it has produced a steady stream of ever-more reactionary politicians who make the Bush tradition look moderate.

Aug 31, 2024 | davedenison.substack.com | Dave Denison

Dear Readers,Last Saturday morning, I sat down to breakfast and became absorbed in a front-page story in the Times: “Philosopher President, Near His End, on How to Be Truly Free.” It was about Pepe Mujica, the former president of Uruguay, who is now 89 and being treated for cancer in his esophagus. Reporter Jack Nicas traveled to Mujica’s home on a chrysanthemum farm near Montevideo to see how he was doing.

Mar 28, 2024 | thebaffler.com | Dave Denison |Shamira Ibrahim |Esmat Elhalaby

In his 2002 book State of the Union: A Century of American Labor, historian Nelson Lichtenstein traced the rise and fall of “the labor question” from the Progressive era, when union members began to push for a living wage and for industrial democracy, through the 1930s, at which time the labor movement got significant boosts from the New Deal, to the precipitous decline of union power in the 1970s and 1980s.

Oct 20, 2023 | thebaffler.com | Dave Denison

When the national edition of the Sunday New York Times landed in my driveway on October 8, it carried the banner headline, PALESTINIAN MILITANTS INVADE ISRAEL. By that time, most of the wired-in world was well aware of the previous day’s surprise attack by Hamas fighters from Gaza. Knowing of the carnage in Israel, most would know, as well, that all hell was about to break loose.