Luke Savage is the author of The Dead Center: Reflections on Liberalism and Democracy After the End of History and a writer on Substack.
Bernie Sanders’s proposal to create a national emergency health insurance plan could have a transformative effect on the national health care debate, long after the COVID pandemic is over. But that plan, along with any other progressive policies, will be rendered moot if Joe Biden sticks to his insistence on seeking Republican support in Congress.
Joe Biden used to brag that he practically wrote the Patriot Act, the Bush-era law that massively increased government surveillance powers. Given his purported plan to pass a new domestic terrorism law once in office, the danger is real that the January 6 Capitol attack will be used as an excuse to severely curtail our civil liberties.
Investigative reporter Ken Klippenstein, who will soon be joining the staff of the Intercept, has honed the craft of Twitter trolling to an art form. But he’d prefer to be known for his journalistic scoops, based on a painstaking analysis of declassified documents and a roster of sources working in the bowels of federal agencies.
The promise of $2,000 survival checks helped the Democrats gain control of the Senate. They should send them out immediately, and absorb the lesson of this election: when Republicans are forced to confront bold proposals to help the broad working-class majority, they lose.
Donald Trump has long stoked the kind of abhorrent far-right action that we saw storm the Capitol today. But it’s not just Trump who deserves the blame: mainstream conservatives created this monster, too.
Economist Larry Summers helped Bill Clinton deregulate finance in the ’90s and pushed Barack Obama to scale back economic stimulus after 2008. Now he’s unhappy with Bernie Sanders’s championing of a $2,000 stimulus check. It’s a useful reminder of how destructive Democratic Party neoliberalism can be.
Joe Biden’s rise has been a clarifying moment for the Left, showing its relative powerlessness within the Democratic Party. But the Left’s ideas are popular in the country at large. The priority now must be advancing those ideas outside the framework of Democratic Party politics.
For forty years, governments around the world have been cutting taxes on the rich, claiming that the result would be more jobs and higher incomes. A new study shows how catastrophically wrong that policy has been.
A recently released audit of the 2020 Iowa Democratic caucus reveals an absolute disaster from top to bottom. The Iowa caucus was a textbook case of the morass of professional political hacks and vendors looking to make a buck that is central to the Democratic Party as it exists today.
Tens of millions of Americans are struggling to feed themselves, as cases of shoplifting to obtain basic food staples surge worldwide. The pandemic is wreaking economic havoc while Congress dithers.
McKinsey & Company’s lethal role in the opioid epidemic may be shocking, but it should come as no surprise. The company is a citadel of America’s amoral capitalist elite, whose only loyalty has always been to profit.
This year’s election cycle was the most expensive in history — and, thanks to oligarch-friendly campaign finance laws, we don’t even know where much of it came from.
Canada’s self-image as a land immune to US-style extremes of wealth is increasingly divorced from reality. Canadian billionaires have quadrupled in a generation, and without a wealth tax, their share of the country’s riches will only keep growing.
America’s biggest corporations have made record profits during the COVID-19 pandemic — while denying or clawing back their workers’ hazard pay.
CEOs at companies like Walmart and McDonald’s continue to pull down multimillion-dollar salaries while their workers’ wages stagnate. And the whole system is underwritten by what amounts to a massive public subsidy.
The incoming Biden administration risks repeating the catastrophic policy failures of the past decade. Deficit cutting won’t help ordinary Americans struggling amid the crisis — but direct relief and increased federal spending will.
Joe Biden is signaling he has no intention of offering cabinet slots to Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. Despite spin to the contrary, it’s the latest sign that the Biden team is planning to govern from the extreme center — and that we’ll have to push him to win any progressive gains.
The Democratic leadership went into this election with a strategy: stick to the center, avoid the Left, and promise bipartisanship. When the results proved disastrous, guess who they decided to blame: the Left.
A Very British Coup embraced the intrigues of class war, but its sequel falls prey to the mundanities of culture war.
With the Trump presidency thankfully in its death throes, Joe Biden and the Democratic leadership are in thrall to a dangerous illusion that they can take the country back to the political world of 2015 as if nothing happened. They’re about to learn that they’ve won a Pyrrhic victory.