Luke Savage is a staff writer at Jacobin. He is the author of The Dead Center: Reflections on Liberalism and Democracy After the End of History.
Opinion polls give us important insights to build political strategy from. But the way Democrats have become obsessed with them is completely distorting the party’s strategic thinking. It’s a recipe for incoherence and defeat.
With an election formally called, all signs point to another dismal exercise in fake Conservative culture war pandering and equally fake Liberal gestures toward social democracy. The social-democratic NDP now has a chance to shake up the race with its ambitious populist plans to tax billionaires and excess corporate profits.
There isn’t a single place in the United States where minimum-wage workers can afford to live near their jobs. Addressing the affordability crisis will require a major rollback of market influence over the housing sector.
Justin Trudeau is widely expected to call a snap election. With the Tories and Greens in disarray, the NDP is well-positioned to make gains — if it runs an effective and unapologetically populist campaign.
If there’s a lesson in the Ohio 11th race, it’s about the lengths to which the Democratic machine is willing to go to defeat its leading critics — and the lows to which it’s ultimately willing to stoop.
Much like Ronald Reagan’s defeat of the air traffic controllers, Scott Walker’s assault on public sector unions should be remembered as a turning point in American history that opened the floodgates to new attacks on the working class — and as a harbinger of Trumpism.
Only in a country whose ruling class has grown deeply deluded could a space joy ride like Jeff Bezos’s be seen as cause for public celebration rather than the symptom of moral rot and institutional decay that it so clearly is.
A newly published study finds that the amount of medical debt owed by Americans is even larger than previously thought. It’s just further proof of the moral abomination that is for-profit health care.
Even modest rental housing is now out of reach for millions of full-time workers — and the pandemic has made an already bleak situation even worse.
Like an aged one-hit wonder, James Carville has made a career of playing his favorite tune over and over: a warmed-over centrist jeremiad against the Left that has proved to be as wrong as it is stale.
Billionaires like Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk are parasites, worse than socially useless. But they’ve got to justify their existence somehow, so, like five-year-olds, they’re now pretending to be astronauts.
Thanks to shortsighted nationalism and corporate power, it’s now expected to take until 2078 to achieve global vaccination. The lesson is clear: COVID can’t be overcome until we put human needs before private profit.
From Ronald Reagan’s notorious 1961 rant against the horrors of socialized medicine to present-day propaganda of the insurance industry, right-wing and corporate efforts to halt the expansion of public health care seem to strike the exact same notes again and again — and draw on the same bogus arguments.
It’s often said that politicians pander to polls. Not so for health care: despite repeated lopsided majorities in polls favoring a public system, leaders in both parties don’t seem to care.
The special election in Ohio’s 11th congressional district, where Hillary Clinton and the Democratic establishment are struggling to defeat former Bernie Sanders surrogate Nina Turner, is the latest illustration of how Democratic elites prioritize defeating the Left over strengthening their own party.
Socialism is now a real part of the political landscape — while “capitalism” has never been more unpopular.
The billionaire class isn’t just a group of people who happen to be superrich. It’s a dynastic oligarchy with a single overriding objective: controlling the government to protect its inherited wealth.
Twenty years ago, Barbara Lee cast the lone vote against the Authorization for Use of Military Force — the blank check for endless war Congress gave George W. Bush after 9/11. She’s been vindicated by history. Those who pushed the “War on Terror” have not.
A specter is haunting America — the specter of negligibly higher chicken bowl prices at Chipotle. That’s the latest talking point in the conservative crusade against fair wages and unemployment benefits.
A new report on the state of dynastic wealth in America explodes the myth of the hardworking, meritorious rich. If America ever was a meritocracy, it certainly isn’t now.