The Best of The Indy From a Tumultuous Decade: A Final Look Back at Our Coverage From the 2010s

Illustration by David Hollenbach.

The Editors Jan 3, 2020

It’s been a decade of dueling populisms: the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter and the conservative reaction that propelled Donald Trump to the presidency in a desperate effort by a dwindling white majority to preserve its privilege. A corporate-friendly elite remains entrenched in power in both of America’s main political parties while grassroots movements led by the likes of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the left and by white nationalist Trumpians on the right seek to uproot them.

The social movements we’ve seen in the past decade should offer us hope as we look to the future

Motivating the push from below is the failure of capitalism, now three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, to resolve its systemic contradictions, which have only grown more extreme. Its promise of opportunity is smothered by a prevailing racism. The internet is a data harvesting operation for corporations and shadowy surveillance agencies. America’s wars abroad only seem more pointless the longer they go on. With no end in sight, the body count grows. The accumulation of vast amounts of wealth by those on top of the social pyramid is coupled with widespread privation for those at the bottom. As Sanders recently put it, “If you are working 40 hours a week in America, you should not be living in poverty.” And yet many are.

Looming in the background of all our social conflicts this past decade and sure to make its presence felt ever more in the next is climate change.

Here at The Indy’s office at 388 Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn we have a little poem pinned up to the wall by our front door, W.B. Yeats’ “Second Coming.” “Things fall apart,” he writes, “the centre cannot hold.” Published a century ago in the wake of World War I and on the eve of the bloody War of Independence in Yeats’ native Ireland, the poet’s words have never rung truer.

Listening to leading Democrats complain that Medicare for All is unrealistic or propose watered-down solutions to the climate crisis, who cannot help but suspect that “the best lack all conviction?” Meanwhile, chants of “U.SA., U.S.A” at any given Trump rally confirm that “the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

Certain that “some revelation is at hand,” Yeats asks, “what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” That beast, its “gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,” is arriving in the form of wildfires, droughts, mega-storms like Sandy and Maria and mass extinctions.

From The Indy’s 2011 OWS special edition.

But the social movements we have seen in the past decade from those taking on the beast and the racist, fossil-fuel economy powering it should offer us hope as we look to the future. From the global youth climate strikes to the tenants movement right here in New York that, in 2019, won the most progressive housing law reforms since Fiorello La Guardia presided over the Big Apple — these inclusive, multi-racial movements provide not only a vision of social equality, peace and ecological sustainability but a path to achieving it in our lifetime. As Antonio Gramsci cautioned, pessimism of the mind, optimism of the will.

Below are some highlights from our best coverage of the tumultuous ‘teens. Month after month, amid a collapsing journalism industry, we did our job and we did it well. With your support, we can do more great work in 2020 and beyond.

2010

Obamacare: Now that Congress has acted, the struggle for universal, affordable, high-quality healthcare can finally begin
By Eric Laursen

Gaza On My Mind: A Middle-Aged Mom’s Unlikely Journey from Apathy to Action
By Alex Kane

Insecure Communities: Feds Target NYC immigrants for More Deportations
By Renée Feltz

Bringing Back the Disappeared
By Joseph Huff-Hannon

Why Are Schools Are Broken — And How To Fix Them (Special Issue)
By John Tarleton, Arthur Goldstein, David Enders, Lois Weiner, Stanley Aronowitz, Amanda Vender

Inside the Mind of the Tea Party
By Peter Bratis, Arun Gupta, Abby Scher

2011