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Matt Karp is an associate professor of history at Princeton University and a Jacobin contributing editor.
Nina Turner’s primary loss this week stings, but a close look at the numbers makes clear her loss wasn’t the result of a bold left-wing candidate being unable to win over black workers. On the contrary: in black working-class districts, Turner performed well.
We talk with historian Matt Karp about how ending our great age of inequality will take a renewed working-class politics.
There were many good things in the stimulus package. But claims that Biden’s Democratic Party has embraced structural change are overblown: an injection of much-needed cash isn’t the same thing as empowering workers or creating a constituency for change.
The mass inequality of America’s first Gilded Age thrived on identity-based partisanship, helping extinguish the fires of class rage. In 2021, we’re headed down the same path.
It is not enough to question the decisions, the justices, or even the structure of the current court — we need to challenge, as Abraham Lincoln did, the foundation of its power to determine the law.
It is not enough to question the decisions, the justices, or even the structure of the current court — we need to challenge, as Abraham Lincoln did, the foundation of its power to determine the law.
How he lost and where we go from here.
The antislavery movement of the mid-nineteenth century fused moral appeals against the sin of slavery with demands that spoke to the material interests of ordinary Northerners. Matt Karp, author of “The Mass Politics of Antislavery,” explains how that movement led to emancipation — and what lessons it offers to those trying to forge a political revolution today.
There is no use in sugarcoating the scale of last night’s defeat. But there is still a pathway to victory for Bernie Sanders.
The United States is the only developed country in the world that does not guarantee all its citizens health insurance, family leave, childcare, and a college education. The Democratic Party elites opposing Bernie Sanders and these measures aren’t “moderates” — they’re conservatives.
The overthrow of slavery in the United States wasn’t a byproduct of capitalist development nor the triumph of an enlightened activist vanguard. It was a battle waged and won in the field of democratic mass politics — a battle that holds enormous lessons for radicals today.
A new look at the 2018 midterms shows that while Bernie Sanders has already won back “Obama-Trump” voters, Elizabeth Warren was decimated in exactly the kinds of places Democrats need to win in 2020.
Do you want to see Donald Trump defeated in 2020? Of course you do. The candidate who is best positioned to do exactly that: Bernie Sanders.
In a 2020 campaign against Donald Trump, a bet on Elizabeth Warren is a risky wager on its own terms. But over the next twenty years, a turn toward progressive technocracy is not a bet at all — it’s an unconditional surrender to class dealignment.
After Republicans lost their first election in 1856, the nineteenth-century Nate Silvers were happy to declare the antislavery movement a radical, fringe idea. Four years later, Abraham Lincoln won on a radical program of change.
As 2020 approaches, we indulge in some crass Sunday morning horse-race punditry.
The midterms have given the Democratic Party a boost. But their professional-class politics are a cul de sac — we desperately need a political revolution driven by the needs and aspirations of the multiracial working class.
Democratic leaders still haven’t learned: you can’t fight the forces of oligarchy without naming the enemy.
Historians Eric Foner and Matt Karp on the international ambitions of the US slaveholding class — and the abolitionist movement that brought them down.
The slaveholding class defeated in the Civil War were no ragtag band of sectionalists — they were the masters of the US state.