Luke Savage is the author of The Dead Center: Reflections on Liberalism and Democracy After the End of History and a writer on Substack.
Labour MP Jon Trickett speaks to Jacobin about leader Keir Starmer’s triangulation on the corporation tax and the need for the Labour Party to advance a bold, activist agenda in the pandemic era.
Here’s a documentary no one asked for: a Van Jones and Meghan McCain production arguing that the problem with America isn’t poverty and exploitation, but political divisiveness. It’s warmed-over centrism that won’t solve any of the problems ailing the United States.
Under capitalism, automation destroys jobs. In a socialist society, it could free us from work and offer untold leisure to all.
The Biden administration has made some encouraging noises on immigration policy. But activists are tired of talk — they want to see action.
Pete Buttigieg, a shape-shifting knockoff of the Obama original, has written a book about the importance of Trust — a surprising topic for a politician who elicits suspicion every time he opens his mouth. Can we just let bootleg Obama wander off into obscurity?
What a surprise — the Texas energy disaster has been turned into a yet another culture war scrimmage field, pitting right-wing advocates of fossil fuels against liberal supporters of renewable energy. But the red vs. blue framing conceals something important: when it comes to the climate, Texans are far to the left of their representatives.
The Democrats’ confused and inept handling of the final stage of the impeachment trial revealed the contradiction at the heart of the party’s politics: whether it’s trying to represent bold change or simply a return to the pre-Trump status quo.
So far the Biden administration’s stated climate policies have shifted the US government from a stance of death-wish climate nihilism to one that resembles a typical center-right European government. But without a sharp move to the left on the economic aspects of climate transition, even that much progress won’t materialize.
For decades, presidents have used their power to declare emergencies to sideline badly needed regulations and entrench the national security state. Now a group of Congress members led by AOC is proposing that those powers be used for good: to force action to avoid a climate catastrophe.
Lawmakers and wonks who insist on means-testing every government program like to posture as champions of the poor and downtrodden. But the fake Robin Hood act is just a cover for their deep-seated suspicion of the welfare state.
The Great Depression thoroughly discredited laissez-faire economics. But over the postwar decades, with the help of generous business funding and political connections, figures like Milton Friedman led a remarkable revival of nineteenth-century economic ideas. They did it by adopting a pseudo-populist rhetoric that celebrated individual choice and autonomy.
The GameStop saga was more than a simple tale of upstart traders taking on big business. But it highlighted again how disconnected Wall Street is from ordinary workers — and new polling finds that even more Americans now resent Wall Street.
From last year’s Democratic primaries to this year’s Biden agenda, TV news coverage of the health care debate is outrageously skewed against single-payer reform. To understand why, we need look no further than their business model.
By one estimate, Elon Musk owns more than a quarter of all active satellites orbiting Earth. Though his fantasy of becoming emperor of Mars probably won’t materialize, we have to scale back the unchecked power of deranged Bond villain types like Musk before it extends from Earth to the skies.
The Robinhood trading app is an attempt to commercialize a powerful but thoroughly fictional myth: that finance can be democratized while ownership and control remain in the hands of powerful capitalists.
When tech platforms, regulatory agencies, and social media companies conspire to swat down share purchases that get in Wall Street’s way, they’re doing us all a favor: they’re showing us the ruthlessly hierarchical reality of neoliberalism behind the friendly mask.
Much of the news these days is unhinged, but nothing can compare, in terms of pure lunacy, with QAnon. The Daily Beast’s Will Sommer, longtime observer of the far right, spoke with Jacobin to explain QAnon’s origins and evolution — and why he thinks the movement is here to stay even if “Q” and “The Storm” are never heard from again.
Journalist Libby Watson started a newsletter to document the horrors of the US’s profit-driven health system. She spoke to us about the insurance industry’s windfall COVID-19 profits, Joe Biden’s phantom public option proposal, and how growing up with Britain’s National Health Service made her experiences with America’s grotesque system all the more enraging.
We’ll have to wait to find out whether Joe Biden’s domestic agenda will actually reflect the surprisingly progressive noises he’s been making since his swearing in. But the exultant days and weeks surrounding Barack Obama’s inauguration offer a cautionary tale.
In his inauguration speech Wednesday, Joe Biden promised health care that will be “secure for all.” But no amount of rhetorical triangulation can erase the fact that a single-payer system is the only viable alternative to the status quo.