Is This Really the “Age of Class Dealignment”?
Class dealignment perspectives tend to overstate the extent to which center-left parties can boost their fortunes today through a strict focus on pocketbook issues.
87 Articles by: Chris Maisano
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Chris Maisano is a Jacobin contributing editor and a member of Democratic Socialists of America.
Trump Doesn’t Win by Bread Alone
Donald Trump offers a bleak vision of the good life, founded on hierarchy and self-indulgence. The Left needs to put forward a politics that can counter the affective pleasures of Trumpism, rooted in solidarity rather than cruelty and exclusion.
Republicans’ and Democrats’ Biggest Corporate Sponsors
Both political parties in the US receive exorbitant amounts of donations from corporations and the very rich. A close look at the money trail shows which sections of capital favor Republicans and Democrats, respectively.
Learning From Italian Antifascism
You cannot understand antifascism if you don’t understand fascism, both in its contemporary guises and historically in countries like Italy.
The Passions and the Interests
An effective left politics can’t just speak to workers’ material interests. It also has to construct myths that speak to people’s sense of dignity and humanity.
What We Get Wrong About White Workers
Deindustrialization has helped create a right-wing turn in many Midwestern towns. Long traditions of labor militancy can explain why it hasn’t in others.
What Does Left Internationalism Mean in the 21st Century?
Israel’s genocide in Gaza has put international concerns front and center for the US left today. Jacobin spoke with three leading internationalist organizers about how leftists should think about international solidarity in the 21st century.
There’s No Outbidding the Right-Wing Politics of Strength
Defeating Donald Trump will require going beyond rational appeals to economic self-interest.
Debating Class Dealignment
Class dealignment posits that Democrats have been losing working-class voters in favor of middle- and upper-class voters. Is this actually happening? And to what extent is it a problem?
Bayard Rustin Showed the Promise and Pitfalls of Coalition Politics
At the height of a calamitous war presided over by a Democratic president, the brilliant socialist organizer Bayard Rustin tried to forge a mass coalition to deliver progressive change. His failure to do so in the 1960s tells us much about building one today.
The Making of Millennial Socialism
Jacobin has been a flagship publication of “millennial socialism,” a phenomenon that began gathering force around 2010 and first fought its way into the political arena through the 2016 Bernie campaign. How did this generational movement come to be? And where does it go now?
The Left’s Electoral Strategy Is Working. Let’s Keep Building It.
Democratic socialists have made their most significant electoral inroads in years by operating as a left-wing faction in the Democratic Party. Chris Maisano argues that we should own that strategy, and push it further.
Like It or Not, the Left Can’t Get Away From the Democrats
While the Left agonizes over its relationship to the Democrats, the extreme right has few qualms about throwing elbows within the GOP. Socialists should follow their lead and accept doing battle within the Democratic Party as the only viable political option.
What Does Revolution Mean in the 21st Century?
We live in an era of major mass protest in nearly every single region in the world. Yet social revolutions as we knew them in the twentieth century are nowhere to be found. Why?
Don’t Blow Up a Pipeline
The clock is ticking on averting the worst of climate disaster, raising the question for many if activists should turn to militant actions like industrial sabotage. But it’s not time to give up on democratic politics to save the planet.
Beyond Chomsky and Walzer
We must condemn US foreign policy — but we must also articulate the socialist alternative to it.
Rolling Back Birthright Citizenship, Rolling Back Democracy
The Right’s recent attacks on birthright citizenship are a further step in their slide toward “postfascism.”
The Party Was Not Always Right
The tragedies, brutalities, and absurdities of Stalinism are all there onscreen in Costa-Gavras’s classic 1970 film The Confession.
We Can Build Pro-Worker Cities
Progressives at the city level face all sorts of constraints, from business interests to hostile state legislatures. But we shouldn’t preemptively clip our wings: left reformers like Chicago’s Brandon Johnson can transform cities into pro-worker havens.
The Constitution Is a Plutocratic Document
There’s no reason to venerate the framers of the US Constitution. The document they created was explicitly designed to check the democratic will of ordinary people and protect the plutocratic interests of the propertied elite.