Ben Burgis is a Jacobin columnist and coauthor of the forthcoming book The Blueprint: How Socialism Can Work in the Real World.
Democratic leaders have focused far too much on process and decorum while explaining the government shutdown to voters. By instead emphasizing politics over bureaucratic machinations, Bernie Sanders and AOC are showing how it should be done.
Donald Trump’s new security directive labels anti-capitalist beliefs as a predictor of political violence. The irony: left-wing structural analysis actually pushes people away from lone-wolf attacks and toward mass organizing for change.
Centrist Democrats like Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom seem to think the best way to disparage Donald Trump is to highlight his departures from free-market orthodoxy. Good luck with that.
Over the past week since the horrific assassination of Charlie Kirk, we’ve watched conservatives unabashedly take ownership of “cancel culture” and crack down on free speech right before our eyes.
J. D. Vance has attacked birthright citizenship and equality before the law by claiming that “America is not an idea.” But the realization of the idea of civic nationalism has been our greatest achievement.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk threatens to embolden the far right and provide Donald Trump with a pretext for crushing dissent. Escalating political violence corrodes democratic norms and poses a unique threat to the Left.
Elon Musk is poised to become the world’s first trillionaire. Still, liberals are hand-wringing about the potential pitfalls of wealth redistribution. In truth, we should have stopped the rise of the economic superelite long ago. Better late than never.
Socialists accept that some degree of inequality may be inevitable in a complex society. But there’s one kind of inequality that’s intolerable: the kind where resources are allocated according to factors that individuals can’t control.
Instead of trying to persuade the hundreds of millions of Americans to our right, sometimes we leftists seem to be competing to prove our radical bona fides to each other. That’s not politics — it’s just wasting precious time.
Increasingly, mainstream Democrats have sought to carve out a space for “acceptable” Zionism by saying that they support Israel but oppose Bibi Netanyahu. But the horrors of Gaza are a result of processes far more vast than one right-wing leader.
Forget partisan finger-pointing. The Jeffrey Epstein scandal cuts across party lines, indicting economic and political elites alike.
Anyone who wants to make it easier for Americans to start families should support childcare policies like the ones being proposed by New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.
No one should be surprised that Zohran Mamdani supports democratic control over the economy, the end goal of socialism. But he won because he combined socialist politics with practical solutions to the cost-of-living crisis facing working people.
Bill Clinton’s last-minute endorsement of Andrew Cuomo in New York City’s mayoral race is all too fitting: both men represent the corporate Democratic establishment, opposed by socialist candidate Zohran Mamdani, that has abandoned the working class.
Last weekend’s massive “No Kings” rallies proved Donald Trump’s deep unpopularity. But Trump should be opposed as a symptom of America’s vast warmongering, oligarchic elite, not a simply a grotesque anomaly.
Contrary to popular belief, many undocumented workers are organized in unions across the US. But ICE’s mass arrests will target these unionized immigrants disproportionately and weaken the hand of labor.
The slap fight between Donald Trump and Elon Musk has highlighted the absurdity of keeping so much of our space program and satellite internet infrastructure in the hands of a single oligarch.
NYU’s decision to withhold Logan Rozos’s degree for denouncing genocide in Gaza in his graduation speech is the latest example of right-wing cancel culture. After criticizing it on the Left, conservatives have learned to rally “woke” mobs of their own.
J. D. Vance has attacked birthright citizenship and equality before the law by claiming that “America is not an idea.” But the realization of these ideals has been America’s greatest achievement.
Donald Trump’s attorney general Pam Bondi’s call for Luigi Mangione to receive the death penalty is a dangerous political intervention in support of the indefensible.