Meredith ap Robert

Category: politics

  • Is America Back? It Depends on What You Mean by “Back”

    It’s hard to overstate the significance of this election in terms of Democratic advances nationwide — but is America “back”? There are real reasons to be hopeful about the next chapter of American politics, but we must be clear-eyed about the road ahead and remember how we got here in the first place.

  • Things I no longer believe

    When the powerful tell us we have to keep relying on fossil fuels to facilitate the transition to renewable energy, I just don’t believe them anymore. Look at how long they’ve had — twenty years, thirty years, forty years — to make the move and how they continue dragging their feet.

  • Thoughts on Pride: Escaping the binary

    Thoughts on Pride: Escaping the binary

    Truth be told, learning to think of myself as a non-binary person has been a bit underwhelming. It’s not a liberatory revelation to discover that someone’s provided you a new label. 

  • This wasn’t entirely inevitable

    This wasn’t entirely inevitable

    Since last week’s local and devolved elections, I’ve heard a lot of the I-word floating around. How inevitable everything was. How voters were dissatisfied with the pace of change so it was inevitable that Labour would lose. I think Morgan had cards left to play—maybe Labour couldn’t have kept power, but she could’ve kept her…

  • What I’m thinking about on the day of the 2026 Senedd elections

    What I’m thinking about on the day of the 2026 Senedd elections

    Today, Scotland and Wales both have devolved parliamentary elections. So, here in Cymru, we’re deciding who will represent us in the Senedd in Cardiff, our capital. Unless the polls have been incredibly mistaken, Labour’s century-long hold on Cymru is over. The question is: what’s next? Will UK’s answer to MAGA, Reform, come away as the…

  • What the Middle Ages Can Tell Us About Racial Reconfiguration and Political Realignment Today

    We are living in an era of renewed “flexible definitions,” when everything old is new again —  “a moment in which cultural race and racisms, and religious race, jostle alongside race-understood-as-somatic/biological determinations — uncannily renews key medieval instrumentalizations in the ordering of human relations.” The Welsh weren’t the first cornered into renouncing their identity to…

  • Thoughts from the 2:37 bus for Amalfi

    Thoughts from the 2:37 bus for Amalfi

    A young woman’s coat has claimed the last free seat on the bus. Incredulous, you would later comment that it was rude of her not to move it. But, hanging on with both hands as the bus trundled along the too-tight turns, I only thought about how proud I was of you. 

  • New article on Nation.Cymru

    Separated by five years and a day, the events of January 6, 2021 and January 7, 2026 will remain stamped in the memories of Americans for a generation. The first, when we realised that a peaceful transition of power is no longer a given following the attempted insurrection at the US capitol. The second, when…

  • When do we stop seeing this as an aberration?

    Today, as the United States inches closer toward forcible regime change in Venezuela, I wonder what any of this is for. What’s on the other side of this madness? How long do we insist “this is not who we are” until accepting evidence to the contrary?

  • Americans are the frog in the pot: The Obama years, and what could have been

    It’s hard to believe that twenty years have come and gone since Barack Obama burst onto the national scene. It’s been twenty-one years, actually, since Obama’s speech at the 2004 DNC. This was the rousing speech that effectively introduced Barack Obama, “a skinny kid with a funny name,” and his audacious hope.