For generations, historians have downplayed the American Revolution as a squabble between elites. But the revolution unleashed egalitarian forces its architects could neither control nor contain.
An Independence Day Without Common Sense
Americans have celebrated Thomas Paine’s Common Sense for generations. What gets lost in the fanfare is how common sense is not some eternal repository of political wisdom, but something continually reshaped by democratic debate, argument, and persuasion.
What Clarence Thomas and the State of Israel Have in Common
In his dissenting Supreme Court opinion this week, Clarence Thomas argued for a version of the idea that citizenship is a matter of ancestral lineage — a position not unlike that of Israel, which assigns citizenship on the basis of Jewish descent.
Jonathan Chait Doesn’t Understand the Socialists He’s Attacking
Jonathan Chait’s Atlantic essay claims the Democratic Socialists of America has betrayed the legacy of its founder, Michael Harrington. It gets DSA’s history, and what the organization is today, wrong.
An Unchangeable Constitution?
Americans used to fight for constitutional change — and not just in the Supreme Court chamber. Jill Lepore talked to Jacobin about the decline of the amendment process and the rise of judicial power.
American Freedom Was Built on Endless Conquest
The Founders made expansion the precondition of American freedom. We must find an alternative.
Socialism cannot mean merely managing capitalism more fairly. It must point toward a society where survival is no longer contingent on the market — and where democracy extends into the economy itself.
Socialism Was Central to W. E. B. Du Bois’s Thought
The leading black intellectual and freedom fighter W. E. B. Du Bois was a longtime committed socialist and, eventually, a Marxist — commitments that were central to his life and work. Liberals are dead set on suppressing this aspect of his legacy.
When the Personal Is Political — and When It Isn’t
The feminist insight that personal life is political is complicated by neoliberalism, which casts political problems as matters of personal virtue. This moralization of personal conduct can displace the collective action needed to transform society.
What If Socialism Takes Over the Democratic Party?
Could democratic socialism become the brand of a new generation of political actors — not just on the fringe, not just in New York City, but across the country?
Parsing Fact From Fiction on Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries
The last of Ireland’s Magdalene laundries, workhouses for “morally wayward” women, closed in 1996. Since then, the institutions’ many horrors have come to light, but misinformation has also been endemic. A new book provides a granular, factual account.
Neoliberalism didn’t win an intellectual argument — it won power. Vivek Chibber unpacks how employers and political elites in the 1970s and ’80s turned economic turmoil into an opportunity to reshape society on their terms.
The Founders Never Meant the US to Be a Democracy
For Madison and the other Framers, the danger wasn’t the power of elites but that of the mob.
Nurses Are at the Heart of the US Labor Movement
Nursing in the US is highly unionized, well-paid, and increasingly central to the economy. Rank-and-file nurses are well-positioned to fight for common good demands and for a broader revival of the labor movement.
Inequality Is Shortening American Lives
The US incarcerates more people than almost any country on Earth. Meanwhile, pharma executives, Wall Street bankers, and fossil fuel companies escape meaningful accountability for harms that have killed far more Americans than street crime ever has.
US Empire’s Belligerent Decline in Latin America
Brutish and bigoted, grubbing and petulant, Donald Trump is an uncannily apt embodiment of the full sweep of US imperial arrogance and decadence in Latin America.