Meagan Day is an associate editor and former staff writer at Jacobin. She is the coauthor of Bigger than Bernie: How We Go from the Sanders Campaign to Democratic Socialism.
Battered by poverty and coronavirus, South Texas should have been deep blue turf for Joe Biden. It wasn’t. But in the Rio Grande Valley, the story is less about growing conservatism than about the rise of nonvoting — and despair.
The demand to cancel student debt is vital, but it would be politically dangerous to let it get detached from a broader left vision for higher education. We should unite it with another key working class demand: tuition-free public college and trade school.
Even if the new bipartisan relief proposal does pass, it will be inadequate, forcing millions of Americans to rely on the generosity of family and strangers this winter. Millions of Americans are suffering, and our political leaders don’t care.
Joe Biden’s choice to install two former BlackRock execs in his cabinet is a major signal of his deference to Wall Street and the superrich. But it’s also a sign of the times: the world’s largest asset management company is revolutionizing finance by investing in capitalism itself.
A trillion dollars could maintain wages at pre-crisis levels for all workers in America, enabling people to stay home and stop the spread of the virus, for four months. Instead, it’s gone into the personal piggy banks of a handful of billionaire owners and investors.
Joe Biden represents something now rare in American politics: he's a dyed-in-the-wool true believer in austerity and deficit reduction. To climb out of our current economic hole, we'll need massive public investment and income support — but if current patterns hold, Biden will opt for austerity and half-measures instead.
In the United States of 2020, millions are desperate for help, and they’re forced to compete for scraps from Twitter philanthropists.
If Joe Biden managed to pull off a victory despite his lackluster campaign, it’s in part because the electorate felt the urgent need for a president who would focus on the coronavirus crisis instead of railing against a series of cultural bogeymen. No wonder: most people care more about their material conditions than the partisan culture wars.
Nothing is certain yet, but we may be gearing up for what amounts to a Biden-McConnell coalition government. The Left will be up against a split government composed of two parties bent on pushing austerity and war.
There’s a real danger that the Right will steal the election by halting the vote count. But US elections can be stolen in more prosaic ways — like the Electoral College. If there’s a discrepancy between the Electoral College and the popular vote, the Left should make it clear that the result is illegitimate.
The Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma falls into the common trap of conflating the far left and far right, grouping both under the umbrella of “extremism.” In reality, the politics advanced by the socialist left represents a countervailing force to right-wing conspiracism and reaction.
Americans want a universal public health plan, but the idea has no champion in this presidential election. Instead, we have Donald Trump’s scorched-earth campaign against the ACA, and Joe Biden moving further and further away from even a universally available public option.
The politically complacent ’90s produced a surprisingly large number of mainstream American rom-coms about fighting the Man. You’ve Got Mail gave us a new fantasy, fully neoliberalized: What if the Man is Mr Right?
One in four rural households have been unable to get the medical care they need during the coronavirus pandemic. Rural Americans have been struggling to obtain and afford care like never before, and Donald Trump could end up paying the price in November.
There was no gender pay gap among Wisconsin teachers until Scott Walker’s brutal assault on the state’s public sector unions almost a decade ago. Now women teachers are earning less than men. It’s yet more proof: unions empower women.
Newly leaked documents show that ExxonMobil is planning a major increase in oil production, despite warnings from scientists about calamitous climate effects and the company’s own promises. We can’t keep relying on oil companies to regulate themselves — they need to be brought under democratic control.
The president made a big show of stepping in to help struggling Americans when Congress failed them. But his executive orders have failed, too. Trump claims to back the working class, but he has abandoned them at every turn.
In last night's debate, Donald Trump failed to condemn white supremacists — even telling the Proud Boys to “stand by” — then refused to promise he would encourage his supporters to refrain from political violence in November. His rhetoric is growing more and more dangerous.
In both his campaigns, Trump has run ads aimed at killing black voters’ enthusiasm for the Democratic nominee and lowering their turnout. The strategy is craven, but the ads exploit real disillusionment. Without a sharp break from their history of failing black constituents, Democrats will remain vulnerable to such opportunistic gambits in the future.
On Jacobin’s tenth anniversary, staff writer Meagan Day reflects on ten Jacobin articles that heavily influenced the way she thinks about politics.