Thousands of Americans cohabitate but don’t marry because doing so would result in the loss of Medicaid eligibility. Marriage penalties (and bonuses) are just part of why we need a universal social-democratic welfare state.
Despite lofty ambitions, four years of professional-managerial approaches to governing moved the Democrats even further away from their New Deal roots.
The war in Ukraine has given new prominence to Russia’s neo-Nazis, as official media echo their xenophobic claims. No longer afraid of repression, such groups circulate videos of spectacular street violence among hundreds of thousands of followers.
Throughout the Russo-Ukrainian war, each side has cast its enemy as heirs to the Nazis of World War II. In Ukraine, this has fueled comfortable myths about the nationalists of the 1940s, whose role in the Holocaust is routinely ignored.
Former Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh, who died last week, embodied public decency but also the contradictions of India’s neoliberal turn, which helped fuel today’s Hindu nationalism.
In Italy, blue-collar industrial workers are abandoning the Left. As in other countries, they don’t represent the entire working class, but their loss of support should still deeply trouble the Italian left.
Democrats have a choice: continue as the loyal opposition in a political order defined primarily by the populist right, or mobilize a transformative ideological vision and distinctive set of policies capable of defining the political order itself.
Robert Eggers’s remake of the original 1922 vampire classic Nosferatu is a master class in atmospheric dread. You won’t even mind the occasionally clunky script.
No US president has ever been willing to call the system imposed by Israel on the Palestinians what it is: apartheid. Except Jimmy Carter.
In July 1979, Jimmy Carter described a spiritual “crisis of confidence” that could “destroy the social and the political fabric of America.” But the neoliberal policies of his administration helped make the US a more atomized, mean-spirited society.
As a worker in the 1970s, I looked forward to a Jimmy Carter administration. By the end of his term in office, like millions of my union sisters and brothers, I felt betrayed.
The presidency of Jimmy Carter was deeply constrained by economic and political crises. His unwillingness to take a radical stance forced him to respond to these events by imposing austerity and doing little to strengthen labor.
In the popular imagination, Jimmy Carter is associated with an idealistic “human rights agenda” for US foreign policy. In reality, by the end of his term in office, he was paving the way for Ronald Reagan’s aggressive anti-communism.
In the latest episode of the Jacobin Radio podcast Confronting Capitalism, Vivek Chibber discusses the difference between social democracy and socialism and how real change has been won in the past.
How AMLO turned an anti-corruption campaign into an opportunity for economic redistribution.
Karen Silkwood died in 1974 while trying to expose dangerous conditions in her workplace. Her death — and the smear campaign that followed — highlights how retaliation against whistleblowers deflects scrutiny from power by targeting the messenger.
Andreas Babler’s election as leader of Austria’s Social Democrats last year raised hopes of a left-wing revival. But the euphoria has worn off, as the former Marxist has placed a show of “moderation” above the promises on which he campaigned.
Jacobin’s documentary, The Ecuadorian Candidate, chronicled the young leftist economist Andrés Arauz as he faced right-wing opposition and embarked on a journey to become the next president of Ecuador. It’s a gripping feature now available for free.
Today the Chabad-Lubavitch movement champions far-right religious zealotry under a messianic banner. But a century ago, left-wing Jewish thinkers like Walter Benjamin and Franz Kafka understood messianic prophecy as foretelling universal liberation.
Fifty years after the publication of The Power Broker, the legacy of urban planner Robert Moses is ripe for revisiting.