In his dissenting Supreme Court opinion this week, Clarence Thomas argued for a version of the idea that citizenship is a matter of ancestral lineage — a position not unlike that of Israel, which assigns citizenship on the basis of Jewish descent.
For generations, historians have downplayed the American Revolution as a squabble between elites. But the revolution unleashed egalitarian forces its architects could neither control nor contain.
Americans have celebrated Thomas Paine’s Common Sense for generations. What gets lost in the fanfare is how common sense is not some eternal repository of political wisdom, but something continually reshaped by democratic debate, argument, and persuasion.
The leading black intellectual and freedom fighter W. E. B. Du Bois was a longtime committed socialist and, eventually, a Marxist — commitments that were central to his life and work. Liberals are dead set on suppressing this aspect of his legacy.
The feminist insight that personal life is political is complicated by neoliberalism, which casts political problems as matters of personal virtue. This moralization of personal conduct can displace the collective action needed to transform society.
Jonathan Chait’s Atlantic essay claims the Democratic Socialists of America has betrayed the legacy of its founder, Michael Harrington. It gets DSA’s history, and what the organization is today, wrong.
The last of Ireland’s Magdalene laundries, workhouses for “morally wayward” women, closed in 1996. Since then, the institutions’ many horrors have come to light, but misinformation has also been endemic. A new book provides a granular, factual account.
Americans used to fight for constitutional change — and not just in the Supreme Court chamber. Jill Lepore talked to Jacobin about the decline of the amendment process and the rise of judicial power.
Could democratic socialism become the brand of a new generation of political actors — not just on the fringe, not just in New York City, but across the country?
Nursing in the US is highly unionized, well-paid, and increasingly central to the economy. Rank-and-file nurses are well-positioned to fight for common good demands and for a broader revival of the labor movement.
The Rural Urban Bridge Initiative’s flagship program shows how local organizing can reduce partisan polarization and slow the GOP’s inroads among rural voters — a clue for what it might take for the Left to win in red areas of the country.
The US incarcerates more people than almost any country on Earth. Meanwhile, pharma executives, Wall Street bankers, and fossil fuel companies escape meaningful accountability for harms that have killed far more Americans than street crime ever has.