The architect is easy to imagine somewhere above the city, a kind of deity with the vision to change the landscape of a metropolis and the power to make everyone else go along: scores of people to build it, and the rest of us to live in it. A line on an architectural drawing can eventually become an instruction for many others to build something. But getting from that line to the building requires engineers, contractors, construction workers, clients, and public agencies, along with plenty of work inside the architecture firm itself.

The work can mean navigating building codes and zoning rules, responding to clients, and producing and revising digital models and drawings. “There is drudge work,” an associate at Dattner said. “It’s not all drawing pictures and picking colors.”

Becoming a licensed architect can take a long time, too. According to the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards, the average person who earned a license in 2025 took 12.3 years to get there, including their education.

For all that education and training, architecture is not an especially lucrative profession for many of its practitioners. The profession nevertheless retains a powerful image of the architect as a singular creative genius, a Frank Lloyd Wright whose talent might eventually bring wealth and acclaim. For those who imagine they might someday join his ranks, long hours and modest pay can seem like dues worth paying.

“There’s this culture of suffering for the work, of pouring yourself into it because it is this creative discipline,” the Dattner architect said. “I’ve been in situations before where we felt like we needed to explore another idea, we needed to explore another scheme, and it’s just not acceptable to say, ‘We don’t have time for that.’”

Long hours are familiar to architects well before they enter the profession. Architecture students routinely spend nights in the studio, and the hours don’t necessarily improve once they’re employed. Firms compete for commissions, often on price, and employees can end up working nights and weekends to get projects finished.

“I know many of my classmates who have already left the profession before they got licensed because it wasn’t sustainable for them,” the designer said.

The cost of living in New York has made the profession’s pay harder to accept. “My rent costs more money, and I’m more exhausted than I’ve ever been in my life,” the Dattner associate said.

“We were all sold this bill of goods: go to college, get educated, become a white-collar professional, and you’re going to have a good life,” said the Dattner architect:

We love what we do. I do have a good life, and there are certainly many working-class people who are being squeezed much more. But between the affordability crisis, AI, and discussions of how things need to change in our industry that have been going on for the past decade, it has created a moment where folks like us see an opportunity. People who came before us fought for labor rights, fought for the ability to bargain, and now it’s our time to take up the charge.

Architects have not traditionally thought of themselves as the sort of workers who form unions. But neither did many other white-collar professionals — including graduate students, journalists, and tech workers — who have been organizing in recent years.

C. G. Beck, an architect and writer involved in organizing in the industry, welcomed the Dattner campaign. “Dattner’s unionization campaign is a step forward for all workers in our industry,” Beck said.

Peggy Deamer, an architect and a founder of the Architecture Lobby, a grassroots organization advocating for better working conditions and unionization in the profession, has spent years urging architects to think of themselves as workers, with the same concerns about pay, hours, and working conditions as anyone else.

Through its Architectural Workers United campaign, the IAM has been involved in a small wave of organizing efforts at New York City architecture firms, where private sector unionism had barely existed for generations. In 2021, workers at SHoP Architects filed for an NLRB election with the IAM. They withdrew the petition shortly before the scheduled vote after what the union described as a “powerful anti-union campaign.”

In 2022, workers at Bernheimer Architecture took another route: the firm voluntarily recognized its union, the first union at a private sector American architecture firm in decades. The workers ratified a first contract in 2024, winning a thirty-six-hour workweek, compensatory time off for additional hours, and overtime pay after forty-five hours. Workers at Snøhetta voted thirty-five to twenty-nine against unionization in 2023. At Sage and Coombe Architects, workers won voluntary recognition that year and ratified a first contract this spring. Of those campaigns, the two that have reached a first contract were recognized voluntarily.

At Dattner, workers have asked management to agree to a process for recognizing the union without an NLRB election. Under the proposed agreement, Dattner would remain neutral while a third party checked whether a majority of employees had signed union cards.

On September 23, workers sent Dattner’s partners a letter requesting a card-check neutrality agreement. Six days later, the partners circulated a response to employees, reviewed by Jacobin, calling the IAM’s approach “secretive” and arguing that union representation should be decided through an election, “just as the way we pick a mayor or senator.”

Architecture firms have been struggling with a prolonged downturn. According to the American Institute of Architects, firms have reported declining billings for most of the past three and a half years. In August, firms in the Northeast reported their steepest decline since 2020.

The partners, meanwhile, warned that unionization could cost Dattner clients, claiming that the small architecture firms where the IAM had won recognition “have not thrived in the wake of unionization and the employees do not seem to have benefitted.” They also claimed that once employees unionized, it would become illegal for management to make individualized accommodations for employees, although federal labor law does not categorically prohibit such arrangements. They further disputed the idea that collective bargaining would give workers a say in which projects the firm pursued or how it conducted business. Dattner’s management did not respond to a request for comment.

The organizing committee sent a second letter on October 5. “We are not requesting voluntary recognition, nor an election agreement,” the workers wrote. “Considering the current federal administration, we believe that it would be best for everyone to find a process outside of the NLRB.” They also emphasized that they were not seeking a predetermined union contract. “Our contract is our own,” they wrote. They asked the partners to meet with their union representative and respond by Friday, October 9. In an email to staff on that date, Dattner management wrote that it did not believe card-check neutrality “would be in the best interest of Dattner Architects or our employees.”

“Meet us at the table,” the Dattner associate said when asked what she would like to say to Dattner’s management. “We’re ready and excited to talk about the ways that we see this being beneficial, not just for the firm, but for something larger than ourselves.”

If the union is recognized, the IAM says, Dattner would become the largest unionized architecture firm in the United States. Workers argued that unionization could help the firm retain employees and appeal to clients that share its commitments. They also hoped to have more influence over how the firm operates, including greater transparency around compensation.

“We can’t see the books,” the Dattner associate said. “The office purports to have positive values, including equity, and they tell us that we have pay equity. But we can’t confirm that without really having a seat at the table.”

“This is not a movement against anything,” she said. “It is a movement for something. There’s a lot of positive energy among the group about how working as architects doing important work for the city and beyond can be something that also includes a great quality of life and a great working experience.”

While the electoral rolls in India are revised every year to add new voters and remove people who have died or moved away, the SIR, which launched back in June 2025, has inverted the voter registration process for the first time in the country’s history. Instead of election officers verifying voters at their homes, the SIR asked voters to fill out a form and prove their eligibility to vote. Voters are matched against records from a previous SIR conducted between 2002 and 2004 and in many cases asked to provide documents showing they are eligible to vote. Critics of the SIR claim that it is stripping eligible voters from the rolls.

The SIR is the work of the Election Commission of India (ECI), the country’s chief electoral body, which oversees national elections and provincial elections, including in states with populations larger than California’s. The commission is led by a three-person panel whose chief, like a Supreme Court judge, can be removed only if the Parliament impeaches them.

In a key development in December 2023, the Indian government passed a law making changes to the selection process for choosing election commissioners. The result is that the executive branch of the government now has the most influence in the process. The same law also quietly inserted a clause giving these commissioners legal immunity. Making matters worse, the election commissioner responsible for introducing the SIR, Gyanesh Kumar, just so happens to be the first chief election commissioner appointed under the new law, raising questions about what’s really going on.

Criticism of the SIR intensified after The Indian Express reported on September 23 that two of the three election commissioners were sidelined despite raising objections at least fourteen times about the exercise. Among their criticisms were concerns about the process in which new voters were registered, how names were deleted and restored, who had the power to file appeals against restored voters, and who had access to the voter database.

The electoral body has maintained that access to the voters’ list is secure and decentralized, meaning that local electoral officers make the judgment on who stays on the voter list. But the revelations in The Indian Express showed that the SIR was relying on ECINET, a digital platform that logs voters. The result is increasing centralization, giving more control over the voter rolls to the commission’s headquarters in Delhi. In one instance, the newspaper documented that officials in the state of Goa flagged ninety-seven voters who were mistakenly removed. Despite eight emails from Goa’s chief electoral officer to officials in New Delhi, the voters were knocked off the rolls when the deadline passed.

India’s principal opposition leader, Rahul Gandhi of the Indian National Congress, alleged that the additions and deletions of voters were undertaken as an exercise to disenfranchise a section of voters critical of Modi’s BJP. In the state of West Bengal, the exercise removed some nine million names from the electoral rolls in the months before the state elections in April 2026. Modi’s BJP won power in the state for the first time in the election. Thirty-four percent of those removed from the rolls were Muslim even though they make up just 27 percent of the state’s population. The BJP has maintained that many Muslims eliminated from the lists were “illegal Bangladeshi migrants,” even though evidence has shown scores of Indian nationals were also removed. Of the few appeals tribunals have decided — under 3 percent of some 2.5 million — about 90 percent ended in restoration.

With the BJP falling short of a majority in the 2024 general election, the stakes are high for Modi. The party was forced to form a coalition with regional allies that do not share a Hindu-nationalist ideology. The opposition alliance led by Gandhi’s Congress won 234 seats, thirty-eight seats shy of a majority, despite the Congress having its bank accounts frozen and being comfortably outspent. The result is that for the first time in years many Indians are no longer afraid to openly criticize their government — they are even prepared to fight back.

In May, the curiously named Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) first made global headlines after it hit roughly fifteen million followers on Instagram in a week — then again at the end of July after it forced the resignation of India’s minister of education, no small feat. Though the CJP appeared to come out of nowhere, it was the result of long-simmering tensions in India. It started as a satirical joke made by Abhijeet Dipke, an Indian student in Boston, after India’s chief justice, Surya Kant, likened unemployed young Indians questioning the government to “cockroaches” and “parasites.” Dipke posted a comment on X, “What if all cockroaches came together?” and millions responded. He returned from Boston to New Delhi on June 6 and headed directly to Jantar Mantar, launching a protest against the government’s mishandling of a competitive public exam.

Though he had limited experience in political organizing, Dipke joined hands with left-wing student organizations in New Delhi. Their first protest lasted thirty-six days and attracted people from all over India and from all walks of life including a vast number of students, exam aspirants, schoolteachers, construction laborers, activists working with civil society organizations, Dalits, Muslims, and other social minorities.

By taking up the issue of competitive exams, the movement’s leaders tapped into frustration among young people in India who have seen pathways to social mobility fall apart in recent years. Among those with graduate and postgraduate degrees, the rate of unemployment is particularly high. More than twelve million candidates applied for 8,868 openings in the state-owned Indian Railways company in 2025. The unemployment crisis is further compounded by the high cost of living, hikes in petrol prices, and the effects of pollution, which has left a near-permanent industrial haze over many Indian cities. The country has touted 7.7 percent growth in GDP numbers for the last fiscal year while ignoring persistent inequities on the ground.

Despite well-documented inequalities in the country, India has long maintained an orderly and transparent electoral process. But a generation of political observers have now witnessed the erosion of once powerful institutions and the threat of detentions and police action against dissenters.

In 2019, as Modi ran for a second term, the Election Commission cleared him in six separate complaints that he had violated the election code of conduct. In his second term, he further undermined the independence of the selection of election commissioners, seen as a fresh attempt to tip the political playing field in favor of his party and turn India into a one-party state. Then in 2024, Modi led an even more divisive campaign even as his opposition decried inaction from the election commission. The SIR exercise too has invited widespread public anger since it asked citizens to submit multiple documents simply to prove their eligibility to vote. In some cases, it even forced people identified as dead to come forward to prove that they were, in fact, alive.

On September 24, a day after The Indian Express broke the story on the many inefficiencies of the SIR, Abhijeet Dipke and the Cockroach Janta Party called for a protest seeking the removal of the chief election commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar, and the rollback of the SIR process. And with that, the “cockroaches” kickstarted an even bigger public outcry.

As with the summer protests over education reforms, the Gen Z movement hoped to channel the growing anger in India over the undermining of democratic elections. Alongside the Cockroach Janta Party, the left-wing student organization All India Students’ Association (AISA) was credited with some of the more robust protest actions in the past week. AISA is the student wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist) Liberation, and its cadre have had to use all their experience, discipline, and political commitment in organizing mass collective actions in the protests.

“[The protests] have opened democracy’s Pandora’s box to talk about all the other ways we can ask for accountability,” said Neha Bora, the president of AISA, speaking to Jacobin before this month’s protests. “The energy from this movement should be put into struggles to build our country anew. . . .  We know that every mass protest is the possibility of something new and reinforces the idea there could be an end to this violent period.”

The movement’s leaders, including Dipke of the CJP and Bora of AISA, announced a united mass protest on October 10. In response, police in India detained over ten thousand people across the country. Then on the day of the protest, the government deployed the overwhelming force of twenty thousand police and paramilitary personnel in order to prevent protesters from gathering in the city.

The unprecedented crackdown has done little to stem the tide, as the opposition parties led by Rahul Gandhi held a protest of their own, marching to the Supreme Court on October 12 along with thousands of people. The sheer number who took to the streets this week was reminiscent of previous mass outcries in the Modi era against the disenfranchisement of India’s Muslim community, and against laws that would have left farmers vulnerable. But those protests faced a similar crackdown from the BJP: smear campaigns against the leaders, the use of excessive police force to stop demonstrations, and the eventual arrest of activists under anti-terror laws. Muslim activists and intellectuals like Sharjeel Imam and Umar Khalid have been jailed without trial for six years.

However, the Gen Z movement has posed new questions to the BJP and has made it difficult for the party to control the narrative, despite its influence over mainstream television news channels in India. TV news has tried to paint the protesters as agents of India’s supposed external enemies like Pakistan and China. But the arrest of two of the Cockroach Janta Party’s leaders, Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka, while they were holding the Indian national flag has made that charge hard to sustain.

The movement has not only been able to rapidly form a broad coalition on common social interests; it has also mobilized concerns shared by young Indians across religion, caste, and class divides. It has offered Indians the first real sign of lasting political change — little wonder that Modi is now throwing the full might of the state against them.

Warren’s starting point was that the old social glue was gone. For generations, churches (like unions and political parties) could count on people showing up out of habit and social pressure, since neighborhood communities were so tightly knit. “Instead, membership is now an act of commitment,” he writes.

Organizing in hypersprawled Southern California, Warren saw that Americans had become mobile, lonely, isolated, and easily distracted by screens. “We’re experiencing an epidemic of loneliness in society,” he warns. But rather than simply mourn this, he spotted an opening: “This ‘longing for belonging’ provides the church with a timely opportunity. Positioning the church as an extended family, as ‘a place where you are cared for,’ will strike a sensitive chord in many lonely hearts.”

Evangelicals like Warren grasped the organizing consequences of community collapse long before the Left did. Much of the progressive movement and the Left still organize as if community already exists and just needs to be mobilized or represented. In today’s atomized conditions, Warren convincingly explains, belonging has to be built deliberately, by design.

Belonging before belief is one of the core strategic insights of the seeker-sensitive evangelical movement. Warren’s approach starts from a fishing metaphor. “If your church is serious about reaching the unchurched, you must be willing to put up with people who have a lot of problems. Fishing is often messy and smelly. Many churches want the fish they catch to be already scaled, gutted, cleaned, and cooked. That is why they never reach anyone.”

At Saddleback, newcomers were invited to “Come and see!” and weren’t expected to have their lives in order. “At Saddleback Church we do not expect unbelievers to act like believers until they are.” Warren would “rather have a southern California pagan attend our crowd service in shorts and a Budweiser® T-shirt than stay home or go to the beach.” He writes that he lost count of the unmarried couples who started attending while living together and then asked him to marry them once they converted; one pair had been living together for seventeen years.

Nor did Warren care much why people first walked in the door. “It doesn’t matter why people initially come to Jesus, what matters is that they come. He can work on their motives, values, and priorities once they enter his presence.”

While seeker-sensitive evangelicals let people belong before they believe, liberals and leftists tend to ask people to believe before they belong.

This has major organizational repercussions. Warren sets a low bar at the door and a high bar for membership at the same time. “We expect very little from the seeker who is investigating the claims of Christ . . . . On the other hand, we require a major commitment from those who want to join our church.”

Most of our organizations do the reverse. The bar at the door is high: you’re expected to know the right vocabulary and hold the right positions. Yet the bar for engagement is actually quite low: click a button, sign up for an email list, or, at most, pay modest dues. Nothing else is expected of you.

Warren repeatedly warns readers not to copy him. “To artificially plant a Saddleback clone in a different environment is a formula for failure,” he writes. “Even I wouldn’t do everything we do at Saddleback if I were in another part of the country. You must figure out what works best to reach seekers in your local context.” It’s a method, not a formula.

Before holding a single service, Warren spent twelve weeks going door-to-door with five survey questions, starting with “What do you think is the greatest need in this area?” Reflecting on the responses he received to the question “If you were to look for a church to attend, what kind of things would you look for?” he recalls: “This single question taught me more about thinking like an unbeliever than my entire seminary training.”

What he heard became Saddleback’s blueprint. Locals said sermons were boring, members were cliquish, churches only wanted their money, and the childcare was bad. So Warren rebuilt his preaching, trained greeters, announced every week that visitors weren’t expected to give money, and published strict childcare guidelines.

Organizers know this as a listening campaign. The best unions do it before they pick their fights. But most activist groups decide their positions and messaging first, and only then go looking for an audience. Warren’s rule is blunt: “No book or demographic report can replace actually talking with the people in your community.” Asking questions is not just how you find out more; it’s also one of the best ways to get people to eventually open up to whatever you might have to offer. As Warren puts it, “I’ve learned that most people can’t hear until they’ve first been heard.”

Unlike much of the Left, Warren realized that just being “right” would not automatically translate into effective recruitment. Getting people through the door had to be treated like a science, full of experiments, rigorous assessments, and readjustments.

Warren is refreshingly honest about how much failed. “The truth is, we’ve tried more things that didn’t work at Saddleback than did. We’ve never been afraid of failure; we just call everything an ‘experiment.’” He jokes that he could write another book called 1000 Ways to NOT Grow a Church.

The Purpose Driven Church is mercilessly critical of self-flattering metrics. Warren recalls a Peanuts cartoon in which Charlie Brown is practicing archery. “Instead of aiming at a target, he would shoot an arrow at his fence and then walk over and draw a target around wherever the arrow stuck.” Too many churches, he says, do the same: “We just draw a bull’s-eye around whomever we reach and settle for that.”

Nonprofits and left organizations do this constantly. Instead of questioning our priors, we declare success no matter what, based on whoever happened to show up. And we often count activity (doors knocked, emails sent, events held) or political righteousness instead of results. Warren insists on judging growth relative to what’s ambitiously possible: “To be realistic, you need to focus on the percentage of population being reached, not the actual numbers.”

Above all, Warren refuses to let being correct serve as an excuse for being ineffective. He mocks congregations that treat their marginality as a badge of honor: “Some churches point to their lack of a crowd as proof that they are biblical, orthodox, or Spirit-filled.” Anyone who has spent time in small activist circles will recognize the type.

Warren, a Southern Baptist preacher who believes in biblical truth, is emphatic that arguments aren’t what win people over. “More people are won to Christ by feeling God’s presence than by all of our apologetic arguments combined. Few people, if any, are converted to Christ on purely intellectual grounds.”

His biggest regret from his church’s early years was not taking this seriously enough. “In the first years of Saddleback, I made the mistake of underestimating the power of music so I minimized the use of music in our services.” Why does it matter so much? “A song can often touch people in a way that a sermon can’t. Music can bypass intellectual barriers and take the message straight to the heart.”

True to form, Warren figured out what music to play by asking people. He handed out three-by-five-inch cards at a service and asked everyone to write down the call letters of the radio station they listened to. Saddleback soon stopped singing hymns in its services oriented to newcomers, and within a year attendance took off. The press took to calling it “the flock that likes to rock.” Warren admits the switch cost him hundreds of potential members, but he says it won thousands more.

“Too many church services resemble a funeral more than a festival,” he writes. On the Left, too many of our meetings resemble a graduate seminar or a wake. It wasn’t always this way: the labor and civil rights movements sang, socialized, and celebrated. Zohran Mamdani’s campaign and New York City Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) soccer leagues have offered glimpses of that tradition’s revival. The challenge now is to make participatory joy the norm, not the exception.

“The problem is, the longer you are a believer, the less you think like an unbeliever.” Warren saw two reasons for this. First, insiders stop spending time with outsiders. “One of the greatest barriers to evangelism is that most believers spend all their time with other Christians. They don’t have any non-believing friends. If you don’t spend any time with unbelievers, you won’t understand what they’re thinking.” Second, they start talking in code. Of such pastors, Warren quips: “Every Sunday they speak in an unknown tongue without being charismatic!”

Warren warns against “developing such a close-knit fellowship that newcomers are afraid or unable to break into it.” He adds that “the problem with most small churches is that they are all core and nothing else. The same fifty people come to everything the church does.” Whether in church or on the Left, tight bonds are good; tight bonds that nobody new can penetrate are fatal.

It’s easy for insiders to conclude that outsiders just aren’t interested, but what Warren saw in the survey results suggested otherwise. None of the complaints were theological, and he didn’t meet many who said they skipped church because they didn’t believe in God. “Most of the unchurched aren’t atheists: They are misinformed, turned off, or too busy.” His conclusion: “Churches need to stop saying people are closed to the Gospel and start finding out how to communicate on the unbeliever’s wavelength.”

All of this translates directly. Progressive and left activists often have few apolitical friends, our rhetoric is thick with jargon, and when our efforts fall flat, we’re tempted to blame external conditions or the people we failed to reach. “They’re just not yet ready for our message,” we tell ourselves. “They’ll come around eventually.” But what if the problem is our less-than-effective organizing?

From day one, Warren focused on what we in the labor movement call organizing the unorganized. In his membership class, Warren told transfers from other churches bluntly that “if all you intend to do is attend services, we’d rather save your seat for someone who is an unbeliever.” Being a member of Saddleback meant you were expected to spread the gospel.

Ten days before Saddleback’s first Easter service in 1980, Warren and his tiny group hand-addressed and hand-stamped fifteen thousand invitation letters to local homes. The letter opened: “AT LAST! A new church designed for those who’ve given up on traditional church services!” It didn’t mention Jesus or the Bible, and this didn’t go over well with the faithful: “In fact, all of the critical and angry letters I received in response to this first letter came from Christians who questioned why I had not mentioned Jesus or the Bible.” Some even questioned whether Warren himself was saved.

But 205 people showed up for that first service, and eighty-two of them converted over the next ten weeks. Warren’s takeaway: “You have to decide who you want to impress.”

Leftists face the same choice, and we usually choose wrong. Progressive organizations and nonprofits spend much of their time building coalitions with other existing organizations, most of which are similarly small and/or staff-heavy. Socialist groups tend to orient toward the small existing milieus of the already radicalized, and we struggle to recruit broadly, in part because we’re so focused on looking over our left shoulder.

The overwhelming majority of Americans of all racial backgrounds remain unorganized. We have to decide whether our main concern is recruiting those millions or orienting to the thousands of existing leftists and nonprofits.

For Warren, the most important ingredient in church growth isn’t a technique at all. “Loving unbelievers the way Jesus did is the most overlooked key to growing a church. Without his passion for the lost, we will be unwilling to make the sacrifices necessary to reach them.” Recalling what new converts told him had drawn them to Saddleback, Warren writes, “I’ve never had anyone say, ‘It was because of the Reformation theology you believe.’ . . .  Instead, the most common response was, ‘I felt an incredible spirit of love toward me that drew me in.’” The catch is that it’s easy to love those who already come week after week. “Of course, every congregation thinks their church is loving. That’s because the people who think it is unloving aren’t there!”

At Saddleback, love for unbelievers was measured above all in the consistent focus placed on bringing in new people. But it also took the form of small sacrifices made for newcomers. Members stood through packed services so visitors could sit. On cold days in the church’s tent, they offered visitors their coats.

Progressives and leftists often profess love for the marginalized and the working class in the abstract. Actual people, however, are another matter. Those who disagree with us too often face condescension or outright contempt. People can feel that from a mile away, just as Warren’s visitors could tell whether a church wanted them. In Warren’s words, “There is no method, no program, and no technology that can make up for a lack of love for unbelievers.”

The uncomfortable truth behind many nonprofits and socialist organizations is the one Warren saw in small churches: on some unconscious level, we don’t want a crowd — or at least we don’t want it enough to shake up our routines and assumptions. A tight circle of the already convinced is comfortable, as is being a big fish in a small sea.

For Warren, growth ran through members’ own relationships. “The fruit of a believer is another believer,” he writes. Saddleback needed advertising only at the start. “Today, with thousands of members inviting friends to our church, advertising is unnecessary.”

Warren offers a simple metric: a church should have at least 25 percent more regular attenders than members. If it doesn’t, “it means almost no one in your church is inviting unbelievers to come with them.” At Saddleback, twice as many people attended as were members. And if members don’t bring friends, that should worry leaders: “If most of our members never invite anyone to come to our church, what are they saying (by their actions) about the quality of what our church offers?” Very few liberal or left groups even track whether their members are bringing anybody in.

Warren is just as clear about what doesn’t bring in newcomers: “By making members feel guilty for not inviting friends? No. By putting up a big sign that says ‘Visitors Welcome’? No. By cold-calling on homes in your community? Probably not.”

That last line should give us pause. Even a big success like Zohran’s campaign relied mostly on volunteers knocking on the doors of strangers, rather than recruiting their coworkers, neighbors, or fellow congregants. Knocking on strangers’ doors can win an election. It’s a much weaker way to build a deep, lasting organization.

As a kid, Warren would sometimes bring non-Christian friends to his father’s church. Inevitably, that would be the Sunday his dad preached on tithing or a visiting missionary showed slides. Eventually he gave up inviting anyone: “I wouldn’t think of inviting my unchurched friends from the office because the service wouldn’t make any sense to them. The messages are for me, the songs are for me, the prayers are prayed in terms I understand, and even the announcements are for me.”

The root problem, Warren explains, is that “in every church there is constant tension between the concepts of ‘service’ and ‘serve-us.’ Most churches end up tipping the scales toward meeting members’ needs because the members pay the bills.” His solution: “Create a service that is intentionally designed for your members to bring their friends to.” Saddleback’s weekend services were built for newcomers, while a separate midweek service fed the committed. He also urges churches to keep their internal business far away from visitors.

Many of our organizations don’t have a front door at all. There’s often no regular, in-person gathering designed for visitors, and very little serious onboarding. A newcomer’s first experience is often a digital mass call where they make no human connections or a general meeting run for insiders: committee reports, points of order, or faction fights over resolutions they’ve never heard of. That’s a believers’ service, being used as a seeker service. No wonder that so many never come back — or that so few of our members are inclined to invite their friends, family, and neighbors to join in.

Warren knew that warmth doesn’t happen by accident: “While some relationships will spontaneously develop, the friendship factor in assimilation is too crucial to leave to chance. You can’t just hope members will make friends in the church. You must encourage it, plan for it, structure for it, and facilitate it.”

So Saddleback engineered it. The best parking spots were reserved for visitors, and pastors and staff parked on the dirt. There were four distinct types of welcome ministers: parking attendants, greeters, hosts, and ushers. Greeters wore no badges, so newcomers would feel welcomed by friendly members rather than officials. Warren made flash cards to memorize names and knew everyone in his church by name until the church grew past about three thousand people.

My favorite of Warren’s practices is the simplest. “In the early years of Saddleback, the members practiced what we called the ‘three-minute rule.’ We all agreed that for the first three minutes after the service was over, members would talk only to people they’d never met.”

And Saddleback measured whether it was working. Every first-time visitor got a postcard asking what they noticed first, liked best, and liked least. Nearly 90 percent said the first thing they noticed was the warmth and friendliness of the people. “That response is not an accident. It is the result of an intentional strategy to express love to visitors in a manner that they can comprehend.”

But a warm welcome at a big event is not enough for people to belong. Getting newcomers into small groups of about a dozen people that meet up weekly is what keeps them. At Saddleback, such groups brought members together, usually at someone’s home (and often with good food), to study the Bible, forge friendships, support one another, and work on shared projects. “We tell people, ‘You won’t really feel a part of this church family until you join a small group.’” And it paid off. “Small groups are the most effective way of closing the back door of your church. We never worry about losing people who are connected to a small group.”

“A lot of preaching is what I call ‘Ain’t it awful!’ preaching. It just complains about our society and makes judgments about people in general. It is long on diagnosis and short on remedy.” Sound familiar? Warren’s point is that people already know things are bad. “They are looking for solutions, not a scolding.” That’s why, he argues, “What people need today are fewer ‘ought-to’ sermons and more ‘how-to’ sermons.”

Much of the Left specializes in “Ain’t it awful!” politics: doom-posting, moralizing, and endless exposés of how terrible things are. Though diagnosis matters, people join organizations that offer hope and a practical path forward.

This positive vision also shapes how you motivate members. “Never use guilt or pressure to motivate people for ministry. It’s vision that motivates; guilt and pressure only discourage people.” The same goes for money. Warren notes that “people give to vision, not to need” and concludes that “churches with money problems often actually have a vision problem.” As Warren puts it, “People want to join a church that knows where it’s going.”

Routine, repetition, and ritual are how we absorb important truths. Referencing the Book of Nehemiah, Warren coined what he calls the Nehemiah Principle: “Vision and purpose must be restated every twenty-six days to keep the church moving in the right direction.”

Saddleback repeated its five purposes everywhere: in every membership class, on banners and brochures, and in songs. They were even etched into the glass of the worship center’s foyer. Warren preached the same “state of the church” sermon every January, updating only the illustrations. “Don’t be afraid to repeat yourself, because nobody gets it the first time. I call repeating things over and over in fresh ways ‘creative redundancy.’” He also invested in catchy phrases like “Every member is a minister,” reasoning that “slogans, maxims, mottoes, and pithy phrases are remembered long after sermons are forgotten.”

Warren closes his recruitment case with a tale of two preachers. George Whitefield preached over eighteen thousand sermons, once addressed nearly one hundred thousand people near Glasgow, and helped spark the Great Awakening in the 1730s. But “Whitefield often left his converts without any organization so the results of his work were of short duration. Today, very few Christians would recognize George Whitefield’s name.” John Wesley preached to huge crowds too. “But Wesley was also an organizer. He created an organizational structure to fulfill his purpose that far outlasted his lifetime.” That structure is called the Methodist Church.

The lesson: “For any renewal to last in a church, there must be a structure to nurture and support it.”

The American left has been in its Whitefield era for a generation. Since the giant protests against the Iraq War in 2003, we’ve seen one ephemeral explosion after another: the immigrant rights marches of 2006, Occupy, the Women’s March, the 2020 uprising after George Floyd’s murder. Each drew and inspired millions. Few built or strengthened lasting institutional power.

Warren saw where that road leads. “If you don’t have a system and a structure to assimilate and keep the people you reach, they won’t stay with your church. You’ll have as many people going out the back door of your church as are coming in the front door.”

The deeper lesson is that recruitment is not a one-way funnel but a cycle: recruit, assimilate, develop, deploy, recruit again. The people who come through the front door have to be absorbed into relationships, developed into committed members, and given meaningful work. Then they become the people bringing in and building the next wave. That’s how to turn growth into self-sustaining growth. And it’s where Part 2 — on developing an organizing machine — begins.

Because climate change is making life more expensive, financial burden is one of the primary ways that people feel the impacts of the climate crisis in their daily lives. Climate policies can provide immediate relief by focusing on cutting costs.

Take electricity, for example, a popular focus in affordability conversations. Electricity costs have exploded in recent years because of the massive data center build-out, extreme weather, and foreign wars increasing already-volatile fossil fuel prices. As residential electricity rates have risen, more and more people have fallen into utility debt. One in six households are behind on their power bills. Meanwhile, utilities are working hand in glove with data center developers and tech companies, creating huge bill increases for everyday people.

The federal government can create an Electricity Debt Cancellation Program, which would provide $20 billion in forgivable loans to utility companies conditioned on eliminating all residential ratepayer debt, reconnecting users, and submitting a concrete affordability plan that tackles the root causes of increased electricity prices, like the climate crisis and data center explosion. This would save people in the United States millions in utility bills and also show them that the federal government can and should intervene more explicitly in managing utilities to keep rates affordable and make electricity green and reliable during extreme weather events.

Beyond financial instability, climate policy can also protect people from the threats to their survival exacerbated by the climate crisis. Extreme heat, hurricanes, wildfires, and severe storms are not just increasing costs for communities already facing a broader affordability crisis but damaging homes and infrastructure while endangering and displacing people.

Federal responses to disaster is one salient part of this picture: instead of building out the public institutions that deliver security, like the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Trump administration has been gutting the already under-resourced agency in order to divert funds for staffing and capacity to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), even as FEMA was facing increased demands for emergency disaster response.

The consequences are twofold: not only are ICE’s operations violating people’s rights, but FEMA is forced to help carry out deportations and immigration enforcement rather than disaster relief.

Congress can alleviate these harms by reducing the ICE budget and redirecting resources to FEMA to better fund disaster response as the climate crisis intensifies. Redirecting federal investment from militarized police to disaster response would not only keep people safe from ICE’s intensely unpopular and violent enforcement tactics, but it would allow Department of Homeland Security funding to go to much-needed scaling up of the public institution responsible for protecting people facing hurricanes, wildfires, extreme heat, and flooding.

As of June 2026, more than $100 billion was provided to ICE through budget reconciliation that has gone unused. Moving that money to be used by FEMA would demonstrate that safety can be built through state capacity and preparedness rather than coercive enforcement.

Beyond bringing down the knock-on financial costs from the climate crisis and mitigating direct harm, immediate relief should also support the right to thrive in the fullest sense. Most working people are not only struggling to pay for electricity bills and home insurance premiums, they are suffering from lower quality of life overall. People are working more, making less, and lonelier than ever — and the climate crisis is making this worse.

One way to fix this is through policies that work to adapt communities. The federal government can invest just $10 billion in public parks that would provide outdoor space for community interaction, increase flood absorbency, and offer heat relief in the summer months. Access to public works is not just important for people’s sense of quality of life; it can provide much-needed green infrastructure as cities and towns adapt to a changing climate.

As the United States faces a dire cost-of-living crisis, affordability should be an anchoring priority to provide immediate relief to working people. Climate policy should be central to any agenda that provides this economic relief, and it can also go beyond cutting costs here and there to bringing immediate relief across the spectrum of everyday life. By acting quickly to move federal investments, Congress can show that government can accomplish the first steps of a capacious agenda that brings relief to millions of people who need it.

2016 was an odd time for the radical left. For those of us standing outside of the most transformational development within the American political landscape to have taken place in many years, having to explain that Bernie wasn’t a true socialist to scores of newly energized and activated young people made us feel like killjoys, no matter how we tried to spin it.

The group that I was a member of, the International Socialist Organization (ISO), insisted that we could relate to the movement around Bernie without supporting its candidate, by showing up to rallies with our newspaper and by engaging in organizing work around demands like Medicare for All. The main thrust of our argument served as a wet blanket.

The radical left quibbled with some of Bernie’s positions, but his cardinal sin was collaboration with the Democratic Party and the fact that, despite decades of holding political office as an independent, he was running for president within the Democratic primary. The reasoning behind the argument isn’t entirely wrong: the Democratic Party is a party controlled by big business. Ruling elites have traded political power among themselves through the Democratic and Republican parties for over 150 years.

The entrenchment of the two-party system in the United States is unique in comparison to other capitalist democracies. Because of antidemocratic and restrictive barriers to entry into the electoral arena, independent parties of the working class, poor farmers, and the oppressed have struggled heroically — and largely failed — to assert themselves or break the stranglehold of the two parties. In that context, Bernie Sanders and others who have followed in his footsteps since have opted to run for political office utilizing the Democratic Party and its open primary elections.

Despite the conservative leadership of the party, Sanders wagered, socialist politics could appeal to the base of the party and create a movement from within. Sanders understood it was a serious problem that workers didn’t have their own party and were largely stuck with the Democrats, but also that the structural limitations of American politics made a break with them impossible in the short term. So he developed a strategy of running for president within the Democratic Party and engaging mass numbers of Americans while remaining independent of and often explicitly hostile to the party’s elites.

Many on the already existing radical left weren’t buying it. Bernie was just another “sheepdog,” according to Bruce Dixon of Black Agenda Report, “charged with herding activists and voters back into the Democratic fold who might otherwise drift leftward and outside of the Democratic Party.” Howie Hawkins, a Green Party leader who himself had run for various offices on the Green Party line, argued at the time: “Sanders is violating the first principle of socialist politics: class independence.” Bernie’s positions on the issues, he explained, are “secondary to the question of whether his politics are helping the working class act for itself or subsume itself under the big business interests in charge of the Democratic Party.”

According to this line of argument, the party leadership actually benefits from such campaigns, because the campaigns reengage otherwise disaffected voters.

The “well-trodden path” worn by Dennis Kucinich was the prime example. Running in the Democratic primaries for president twice, in 2004 and 2008, on a platform opposing war in Iraq and in support of single-payer health care, he garnered less than 4 percent of votes, eventually throwing his support behind John Kerry and then Barack Obama.

The radical left assumed the same fate for Bernie Sanders in 2016. “The Democratic establishment can breathe a collective sigh of relief,” argued one Socialist Worker article. “It doesn’t, in fact, fear liberal Democrats like Kucinich or Sanders, but third-party challenges like [Ralph] Nader’s that have the prospect of breaking their stranglehold on votes from workers and the oppressed, as several local and statewide campaigns have shown over the last few years.”

From there flowed a familiar refrain of arguments: No sustained movement would come of it. The Democrats have always functioned as the “graveyard of social movements.” Radicals attempting to change the Democratic Party would only end up changed themselves, ostensibly into toothless reformists. And the old favorite, quoting historian Howard Zinn: “What matters most is not who is sitting in the White House, but ‘who is sitting in’ — and who is marching outside the White House, pushing for change.”

The only revolutionary socialist organization to endorse Sanders was Socialist Alternative. It took the awkward tack of endorsing Bernie while urging him to run as an independent in the general election, in the likely event that he lost the primary (although he had made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that he would not do so). It tried to distinguish its politics from the larger DSA, which was much more integrated into Bernie’s campaign. Meanwhile, the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), which defends the political legacies of figures like Joseph Stalin, ran its own presidential candidate but welcomed the Bernie movement as a positive development for the socialist left. It criticized other socialists for dismissing Sanders as “not a real socialist.” By 2020, PSL would argue for critical support for Sanders’s campaign.

Of course, what actually happened in 2016 didn’t follow the expected script. Entering the campaign with no name recognition and polling just 3 percent at the start, Sanders went on to win twenty-three primaries and caucuses and about 46 percent of pledged delegates at the Democratic National Convention. Leaked emails among Democratic National Committee members (who, as it turned out, were much more afraid of Sanders than they ever were of third-party challengers like Nader) exposed behind-the-scenes work in the committee to help Hillary Clinton secure the nomination.

Bernie did endorse and campaign for Clinton in the general election, as promised. But that didn’t stop millions of his supporters from learning a bitter lesson about the party’s establishment. The word “socialist” went from a slur to a point of pride. The “political revolution” that Sanders promised came to be through a growing number of democratic socialist campaigns, from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s upset victory over ten-term incumbent Joe Crowley in 2018 through to Zohran Mamdani’s New York City mayoralty today.

But while the Left as a whole was buoyed by Bernie’s 2016 run, some radical socialist organizations floundered. DSA grew exponentially by the tens of thousands, and groups like the ISO shrank. Three years later, when it came time to decide how to relate to the 2020 election, most of the revolutionary left opted to just run it back. What could arguably have been considered an understandable mistake in 2016 was by 2019 a different ballgame.

Sanders had proven that it was possible to make a serious run; that millions would be radicalized rather than sheepdogged; that tens of thousands would become politically activated in a more long-term way, whether through joining an organization like DSA or by taking inspiration to organize their own workplace.

But despite the fact that reality did not play out in the way that the theory had said that it would, the revolutionary left doubled down. Unwilling to adapt the theory to fit new realities or even to acknowledge obvious truths standing right in front of it, the revolutionary left made clear that opposition to the Democratic Party was its core political identity. That identity was hard to part with, and it precluded a serious political and strategic discussion of how to go about rebuilding the Left in a country where the undemocratic two-party system has a stranglehold over electoral politics. So much so that a remotely viable third-party challenge, on a national level, has not happened in a very long time.

As the Left reorganized, three critical lessons emerged. First, theory, even that which has been elevated to first principles, is good only insofar as it explains the world around us. If we can’t question our a priori assumptions when they no longer fit reality, then we have become pure propagandists. Second, if those principles become your identity and the organization holding that identity becomes more important than the health of a broad, effective left, then you have become a sect rather than a serious political project.

In the ISO, which I was still a member of in 2019, a small group of us attempted to shift the organization’s electoral strategy to allow for endorsing Bernie Sanders and other socialist candidates running on the Democratic Party ballot line and were met with dismay from the majority of the organization. One document written against our proposal understandably argued that willingness to work within Democratic Party campaigns “logically spells the end of the ISO as a distinct organization on the left.” Pointing out that without a hard abstention from the Democratic Party, the ISO’s politics would be “virtually indistinguishable from the left-wing socialist currents inside DSA,” the document asked: “Why would someone eschew joining a vibrant and growing organization of 40,000 socialists — which includes a growing faction that accords with their politics completely — in favor of joining a political facsimile which is not only outside of DSA but boasts a membership that is a mere 3% of the size of DSA?”

The assumption that carried the argument was that the ISO’s brand, identity, and survival as an organization were paramount. This was not because members of the ISO, or any other radical socialist organization, were particularly inclined toward sectarianism. But the many years and decades of operating in isolation, which were imposed by a historically weak Left and labor movement, had left their mark. Detached from working-class movements, the Left developed deeply harmful habits and a mindset that assumes that your organization’s preservation is critical above all else.

Lastly, while revolutionary socialists weren’t wrong in their assessment that it’s a huge problem that the Left doesn’t have its own party, they were wrong in their prescription for how we get there and wrong in their assumption that a third party is on the agenda at this moment. Some pointed to polls showing widespread support for a third party. In fact, at least 40 percent of Americans have told Gallup a third party is needed every time it has asked the question since 2003, and majorities have said so in every poll since 2013. But the idea of a third party is very different from actually voting for a third party that has no chance of winning in a system stacked against it.

Thus in 2016, while millions donated to, and over 13 million voted for, Bernie Sanders, Green Party candidate Jill Stein received 1.5 million votes, just over 1 percent of the total. The high points of third-party electoralism included Ralph Nader’s 2000 run, which garnered less than 3 percent of the vote and in which Nader was excluded from ever appearing at a presidential debate. As a socialist, I helped lead a Nader 2000 committee at the time, and the experience showed a huge potential for organizing vibrant electoral campaigns. But Nader’s relegation to “spoiler” status by our undemocratic electoral system made it impossible to make substantive headway on Election Day.

Worse, the backlash against Nader’s campaign once George W. Bush won (arguably stole) the election by a slim margin only further set back the left electoral project. Even Eugene Debs, the American socialist movement’s greatest popularizer, won 6 percent of the vote in 1912. The Populist Party made its most impressive national gain in the 1892 presidential election with just over 8 percent of the popular vote.

Today, with democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani the mayor in New York City, making good on promises to freeze rent and provide universal childcare, the popularity of socialist ideals is soaring, with a majority of young people, women, and people of color favoring socialism over capitalism. Meanwhile, a recent CNN poll showed the Democratic Party’s favorability ratings at a low of 30 percent, while Mamdani, Ocasio-Cortez, and Bernie Sanders top most lists of politicians by popularity. It seems that their campaigns, rather than rehabilitating the Democratic Party, have accentuated the fissures within it. Democratic socialist politicians, no matter their popularity, haven’t been immune to criticism either — a point brought home when Sanders’s slowness to call out Israeli genocide in Gaza earned him scorn from his own supporters.

Ten years after Bernie’s first presidential run, his political revolution is still in its early stages. Organizing an independent left pole within the Democratic Party has already scored significant victories, strengthened insurgent left organizing, and popularized the ideals of socialism to millions of people.

The Left has grown quickly over the past decade. Despite largely settling the question of whether we can work within the Democratic Party, which was so anathema to many radicals before 2016, we must still grapple with questions of how to do so effectively while avoiding the pitfalls that so many previous American leftists have fallen into in engaging with the party. Winning mass-based electoral campaigns against the Democratic establishment is the first hurdle. But navigating the complexities and contradictions of socialist governance in a capitalist state is a harder hurdle to clear.

If we can absorb the lessons that Bernie first started teaching us a decade ago — shedding permanent outsider status and purity politics in favor of broad-based organizing, avoiding the pitfalls of sectarianism in favor of building a powerful left, and discarding rigid theoretical commitments in favor of tactical flexibility rooted in firmly held political principles — who knows where the Left will be another decade from now?

Let’s look at some specific cases. Former Air Vice-Marshal Sean Bell alone has appeared multiple times, partly as a result of being employed as Sky News’ military analyst. His defense consultancy, rarely acknowledged, provides strategic defense advice to national and international clients, leveraging his senior Royal Air Force (RAF) experience — which included overseeing military contracts and projects with Saudi Arabia.

Sir Patrick Sanders, former chief of the General Staff, has appeared repeatedly in the last year, including on Channel 4 News and in The Times. He’s a defense adviser to Santander Bank and chair of strategic intelligence at Herminius.

Last year, the government Advisory Committee on Business Appointments had to issue a warning letter imposing restrictions on Sanders’s work. This was because it found that, in view of his military background, there was a “significant risk that he could offer Herminius unfair access and influence” should it or its clients “wish to influence policy decisions and/or work with government.”

Major General Rupert Jones, former Standing Joint Force commander, is a media regular, including serial appearances on Sky News. He is an adviser to Skyral, which builds artificial intelligence technology for the defense, national security, and enterprise sectors. The firm has contracts with the UK and US governments and with NATO.

The major general has further commitments as a partner and head of strategy execution at Strategia Worldwide, which conducts business risk assessment, and a consultant at Berwicks Consultants, which manages risk and crisis response. He also works for Pallas Advisors, which advises tech companies on national security — not to mention the fact that three years ago, he became a senior adviser at IBM.

The former commander of the Joint Forces Command, Sir Richard Barrons, has frequently made media appearances in the last twelve months. This year, he has been arguing publicly for substantially higher UK defense expenditure, with an extra £10 billion a year. He is also founder and cochairman of Universal Defence and Security Solutions (UDSS), a defense and security consultancy. This affiliation was not disclosed alongside his commentary.

While Bell, Jones, Sanders, and Barrons are the most frequent TV and press military advocates of arms production, they are far from alone. Lord David Richards, Sir Mark Carleton-Smith, Sir Peter Wall, and Sir Nick Carter, all of whom are former chiefs of the Defence Staff or the General Staff, have made multiple appearances. They have been joined in this propaganda effort by figures like Sir Richard Shirreff, a former senior NATO officer; Sir Chris Deverell, former commander of the Joint Forces Command; and a host of others.

We can find a legion of senior secret service bosses right alongside these military figures. Until recently, it would have been unheard of for the public even to know the names of serving or retired security chiefs. It was only in 2010 that Sir John Sawers became the first “C” — the head of MI6 — to deliver a public speech.

Now leading spooks are all over the airwaves bolstering the new militarism. The UK intelligence chiefs use a strategy described as “more open to stay secret.” Instead of staying completely in the shadows, modern spy chiefs treat public relations as a strategic tool to propagandize for government policy, recruit, and maintain public trust.

The current head of MI6 and three former heads of MI6, the current director general of MI5, the former CEO of the National Cyber Security Centre, and the former director of Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) have all made public interventions and appeared on media outlets that include the BBC, Sky News, and The Guardian.

The director general of MI5, Sir Ken McCallum, delivers televised annual addresses from MI5 headquarters. In September 2026, he took to the pages of the Independent to publish a high-profile “call to arms,” warning the public of state-sponsored threats from Russia and China.

In December 2025, the newly appointed chief of MI6, Blaise Metreweli, used her inaugural public speech to explicitly warn that the UK is operating in “a space between peace and war,” directly identifying cyber threats and information warfare from Russia and China. In 2022, the spy-media love-in went so far that the BBC invited GCHQ Director Jeremy Fleming to guest edit Radio 4’s flagship news program Today.

The media blitz by the security services is so extensive that even some people deep in the political establishment are worried it may all be too much. The UK’s intelligence watchdog, the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament, has said the media work by senior spies has gotten out of hand. Such media appearances were becoming so frequent that “they risk trivialising the important work of the Agencies” and could end up “diverting their focus from national security priorities.”

It also seems to have worried about the spymasters getting sucked into spats on social media with bots, since “social media is also known to be a battleground for covert hostile state action.” This warning came from a committee whose members include Lord Alan West, himself a frequent military media pundit.

The generals and the spooks have a (much smaller) supporting chorus of academics. Some academics appearing in the media are critical of the new drive to war, like Paul Rogers of Bradford University’s School of Peace Studies. But they are a small minority. Most academic commentators do not come from universities but from establishment think tanks with close links to the military and security apparatus, like Chatham House and the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).

Matthew Savill, director of military sciences at the RUSI, spent over twenty years at the Ministry of Defence. He began his career in 2003 as an Iraq analyst and was seconded to the Cabinet Office National Security Secretariat. Emily Ferris, senior associate fellow at RUSI, is a senior Russia analyst for Control Risks, a major corporate intelligence and security firm.

Nicholas Hopton, chairman of the Advisory Board for the Middle East strand and Mediterranean program at the Centre for Geopolitics at the University of Cambridge, served as the British ambassador in a series of Middle Eastern and North African countries — Yemen, Qatar, Libya, and Iran — between 2012 and 2021. Crucially, he worked in the UK Cabinet Office, where he drafted the UK’s first-ever National Security Strategy in 2008. Dr H. A. Hellyer, senior associate fellow in international security studies at RUSI, was appointed deputy convenor of the UK government’s Task Force on Tackling Radicalisation and Extremism after the 2005 London bombings.

The contrast with the much more limited mainstream media presence of antiwar voices is stark. The combined media footprint of the military and security spokespeople, plus the think tankers, accounts for roughly 90 percent of all appearances about war and security issues. Representatives of antiwar organizations have to make do with the remaining 10 percent.

Even when antiwar activists get a hearing, the interviews are often not about government policy, military threats, or the politics of ongoing conflicts but about the nature, or policing, of the protests they help organize. If the comparison is restricted to occasions where contributors are invited specifically to interpret war, defense, or foreign policy, as opposed to being interviewed about a protest, the disparity is even starker — something in the region of thirty to one.

The state’s mission creep into the media is not the only way that increasingly politicized arms of the state are shaping events. Sir Mark Rowley, perhaps the most overtly ideological commissioner London’s Metropolitan Police has ever had, is playing the role of a politician as much as that of a policeman, without having gone through the tedious bother of being elected.

Recently, he effectively overrode London Mayor Sadiq Khan by pushing to get Palantir reinstated in a tech trial for the Met Police, despite the mayor’s very real fears about the notorious corporation. Rowley is spearheading the Met’s crackdown on Palestine protesters, arresting more than two thousand people for acts of solidarity with Palestinians, many of whom have been detained under terrorism legislation that was never supposed to be used against civil political protest.

Rowley himself is a very politically engaged figure, especially in his dealings with supporters of Israel. He has held private meetings with Israeli Ambassador Tzipi Hotovely, and he has spoken at the annual conference of an Israeli think tank linked to the country’s military and intelligence services.

In March this year, Rowley attended a dinner hosted by the Community Security Trust (CST), a group that equates anti-Zionism with antisemitism and aggressively targets critics of Israel. On his watch, the Met has invited the CST into its special operations room during the monitoring of pro-Palestine protests.

The Starmer government’s ban on Palestine Action under terrorism legislation has triggered a 660 percent increase in arrests for “terrorism,” mostly involving people who were nabbed for holding a sign expressing support for the proscribed group. If these arrestees are actually convicted — and many are being tried in no-jury courts — there will be more political prisoners in the UK than in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

US President Dwight Eisenhower coined the term “military-industrial complex” in his 1961 farewell address. Who can deny the contemporary relevance of Eisenhower’s description of this “immense military establishment,” whose influence was “felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government” and that affected “the very structure of our society”? Eisenhower’s warning that “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist,” and that such power could “endanger our liberties or democratic processes,” also feels strikingly topical.

Eisenhower certainly did not want an end to US military power — he simply wanted it to be more carefully managed. But the term has outlived him, and it remains useful in describing how militarism and capitalism work in the imperial core of the system.

There is some danger that the term can be misused if it diminishes our ability to see how other very powerful capitalist interests, such as Big Oil or Big Pharma, wield power in the state. But there are phases of imperial development where the military-industrial complex becomes the dominant driver of events.

The current massive rearmament drive in Europe looks very much like such a moment. Advocates of austerity, who previously justified it in terms of the supposed need to “balance the books” on the good-housekeeping model, now tend to present it as a way to free up resources so we can rearm for a European war that is only years away. European leaders copy Donald Trump’s rearmament binge, not least because they fear that Washington’s “pivot to the Pacific” is leaving them militarily exposed to a greater degree than at any time since World War II.

The propaganda war is a major part of this development. It is necessary precisely because the whole war preparation project is hitting a wall of public skepticism. In one poll, 50 percent of young people aged sixteen to twenty-nine in the UK said they would never fight for Britain under any circumstances. An additional 38 percent would do so only “under some circumstances.”

This is part of a wider disillusionment with the way society is structured. Only 36 percent believe their lives will be better than those of their parents (down from 63 percent the previous year), while 38 percent believe their lives will be worse. Just 25 percent feel the political system treats them fairly, and 56 percent agree that democracy in Britain is in trouble.

Popular consciousness is always formed by three contradictory factors: what the establishment tells people is true, what their own experience tells them is true, and what the experience of struggle teaches them is true. In Britain and its European neighbors, the establishment is telling people things about war that conflict with their own experience of its effects in the period since the invasion of Iraq.

From the anti-conscription demonstrations in Germany involving hundreds of thousands of high school students to the blockades by students in France, the mass protests over housing in Spain, and the international Palestine solidarity movement, there are plenty of signs that the ruling bombocracy will not find it easy to march us all down the road to war.

Siege gained no real traction at the time, but eventually its articles were gathered and bound as SIEGE (1992), a book described by scholars of the far right as “required reading” for contemporary neo-Nazis, “a foundational text — one arguably rivalling even Mein Kampf in contemporary fascist gravitas” and “a neo-Nazi Bible,” held responsible for the spread of online “SIEGE culture” and real-world terrorist networks.

Today, therefore, this culture’s celebrated predecessors are Hitler, Tommasi, Mason himself, and Manson. And SIEGE is undoubtedly the key source for understanding the idea of Manson that dominates the far right. But to understand Manson’s own ideas during the years Mason was promoting him, the key source is a far less public one, namely, the astonishing correspondence between the two men.

Some years after first finding out about Manson, Mason finally reached out. He initially entered into correspondence with Lynette Fromme and Sandra Good, who were at that time still incarcerated themselves and still very close to Manson. They then made the introductions, and in 1981 Mason sent off an initial letter to Manson.

Thus began a correspondence that lasted a decade, maybe longer, and that offers an extraordinary point of access into Manson’s thinking during this period, reveals the extent to which it was Manson who determined the content of Mason’s writing in Siege, and also makes clear where the two men’s respective ideas diverge.

As Kathleen Belew has shown, it was broadly during this same period, between 1975 and 1995, that white power consolidated into a new social movement. It was not a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan but a movement that managed to bring together previously distinct and even mutually exclusive right-wing and racist groups.

And crucially, unlike earlier right-wing and racist violence, white power was directed against, rather than in defense of, the state. “The white power movement sought revolution and separation — the founding of a racial utopian nation,” writes Belew, who adds that many in the movement “connected ideas of a radical political future with belief in imminent apocalypse.”

The principal catalyst here was the Vietnam War or, rather, veterans who brought the war home, because they were traumatized, because they were inappropriately demobilized and reintegrated, and because they felt betrayed by their own government.

White supremacist Louis Beam, for example, who is credited with popularizing “leaderless resistance,” was a veteran who by his own account remained forever stuck in the “rice paddies and skies of Vietnam” and who recognized no difference between the enemy abroad and at home (and at home that enemy did include the state).

Many in the movement experienced the 1980s as a downturn, and certainly this was true of Mason. Names known to scholars of the radical right pepper his letters, but Mason’s incessant refrain is that the movement is in dire straits. For the far right, the 1980s felt like far less fertile soil than the early twenty-first century would prove to offer, though even then, during that new century’s first decade, Kaplan could still characterize the movement as “tiny and fractious.”

But Belew’s more recent retrospective gaze reveals an upward trajectory and a distinctly new, strident radicalism. “The old ways have failed miserably,” Beam wrote in his 1989 Essays of a Klansman. “Out with the conservatives and in with the radicals! Out with plans for compromise and in with plans for the sword!” At that point, Mason had been railing against conservatism in the movement for about a decade, often in radically antipasséist language influenced by Manson.

When Mason first began mentioning Manson to others in the movement, it did not go over well. Though some simply dismissed it — “I’ll consider that this is your latest fantasy and that it’ll be gone in a couple of months” — others fretted: “Now you’ve got me scared,” said one, and another, “Does he plan to become a party member?”

But for that very reason, according to Mason, Manson could serve as a kind of litmus test, or “threshold,” something to separate the wheat from the chaff: “Manson represents the great divide between those persons who imagine there still are choices to be made casually on the basis of Establishment mores and those who have a profound, individual sense of ‘no going back.’”

Besides, there was the matter of brand recognition and impact: “Charles Manson exerts a fascination over Youth today, in the entire West.” So, undeterred by the fact that movement veterans were nervous about having a notorious murderer and madman join their ranks, Mason continued to promote Manson in Siege: “I have done what I could to inject — subtly and overtly — as many of Manson’s ideas into Movement thought as possible,” he wrote in 1986.

Indeed he had, and frankly it has not been sufficiently appreciated how extensive was Manson’s influence on Mason, a man whom scholars of the far right have characterized as “one of the most influential ideologues to rethink fascism in the face of twenty-first-century realities.” Comparing the correspondence with the newsletter, it is clear that Manson’s language came to shape Mason’s.

Mason really leans into Manson’s discourse of authenticity, for example, so that increasingly enemies inside the movement come to be called “fakers” who are “role-playing” and so on, and Manson himself is identified as the exemplary “Non-Faker.” Very obviously too — and this matters in terms of tracking the movement’s new radicalism — Mason’s modernism came from Manson, a man forever obsessed with being “new” and “now” (or “nuness,” his neologism meaning “no past or place in the past and no thought of future”).

“The most important word is NEW! You can’t carry the past into a NEW world,” Manson wrote to Mason. This is also why Manson chides him for any idolatry of Rockwell, or of Hitler for that matter: “If you got no dead heroes, you can be yourself more.” “Your [sic] dragging the past on your back,” he warns him, then counsels with the rather Baudelairean “if you’re trying to march Wagner’s music back through with a marching band dressed in 1814 garb you wake up negative thought” and “Fat sloppy people in German dress with armbands on don’t help.”

Soon Mason can publish a line about “the entire Right Wing” that might as well have been written by Manson: “If they haven’t been living in 1933, they’ve been living in 1865.” Modernism was also why Manson urged Mason to drop the name National Socialist Liberation Front — “That’s preposterous and it has to go,” he quotes Manson — and adopt instead the name Universal Order. “One world. One government. One mind.” One index finger.

Universal Order had a long shelf life. “As we move farther towards the Universal Order, we become more on the offensive with our world view. Wild wishes for the end times,” read a Siege Culture website launched in the 2010s.

But according to Nikolas Schreck, Manson had already broken with the Universal Order in the late 1980s, and in retrospect one must wonder about the fact that when Manson recommended the name change, he did also insist that Mason swap out his emblem’s right-facing swastika over an automatic weapon for a left-facing swastika between a set of balancing scales.

Though in the aftermath of the Tate–LaBianca murders no one on the Right recognized themselves in the Family, in retrospect of course one can see why Manson seemed to Mason a kindred spirit, obviously starting with the swastika, even if it did face the wrong way for a Nazi. There was also Manson’s allergy to miscegenation, including repeat references to the figure of the black rapist and the need to “save” white women and children, both well-worn white racist tropes.

To the extent that it meant an imminent, apocalyptic war of the races, “Helter Skelter” must have seemed simply a traditional truism to Mason, who overlooked the fact that Manson and the Family believed that black’s victory over white was karma, and instead focused on promoting the Tate–LaBianca murders as a political attack on the degeneration of a formerly white system.

But the crucial element was what Mason imagined Manson’s political project to be:

a racial-socialist colony in Death Valley . . . TRIBES of White Warriors, bands of White Men with their Women and Children who have drawn together and then pulled away from the System to allow it to fall without taking them with it.

Of course, Mason’s embrace of Manson may have looked mad to more traditional American Nazis in the 1980s, which were after all the heyday of Manson’s most infamous performances on national television, but politically none of this was at odds with the increasingly alienated white power movement.

In other respects, however, Charles Manson did not fit well within the white power movement. Manson was never an anti-communist, and to put it mildly, he disliked the (Christian) church. His “Family” was far from nuclear, he promoted free love, and he was neither straight nor cisgender.

He and the Family partook in the romanticization of the Old West, imagining themselves as cowboys and Indians and pioneers at Spahn’s and in Death Valley, but unlike white power ideologues, Manson never saw this land as “empty.” And while Manson was a fan of the founding fathers, he was sooner a supporter of Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa than of the movement-supported Contras in Nicaragua. So even if he was happy to erase the boundaries between war and peace at home, Manson was not a supporter of American empire.

Above all, Manson did not overlap with the white power movement on the environment, so that although Mason adopted Manson’s Death Valley–based survivalism, environmental degradation had little to do with it. And this also filtered right into their most basic divergence, which Mason summed up in a 1983 issue of Siege as follows:

The Manson people look upon and accept the NS Movement in America with curiosity, some admiration and some dismay. “Hate,” they say, “is not going to get it.” Trying to live in another time and place isn’t going to get it either. To our charges of a monstrous, Jewish conspiracy, they simply counter with the stated belief that people today have a death wish for themselves. We say that without unpolluted, White blood, there’ll be no civilization left. They say that without an unpolluted world, there can be no White Race . . . or any other race for that matter.

Indeed, in multiple letters, Manson corrected what he thought was Mason’s understanding of Manson’s views on race or otherwise differentiated those views from Mason’s. Mason’s views are quite straightforward, informed by a white supremacist means-end utilitarianism. Manson’s views, meanwhile, remained contradictory as ever.

On the one hand, he continued to believe that races are best maintained rather than mixed and, as of old, recommended that one should only have sex by race: “Only put that rod in something that looks like you,” he writes, and “I’ve only fucked white guys” (though he immediately adds he also “fucked a phony Jew when I didn’t have better sense” and in another letter that he “even fucked a cow once”). But as in the 1960s, he argued that this was as much to preserve other races as it was the white race because, historically, miscegenation had led to the disappearance of people of color.

Plus he continued to hold whites in contempt above all others: “There is no white people in the truth,” he writes, and “I get more respect from black brown yellow + red more than I do my own,” or he might snark about “this white pride B.S.” He insists that, from fear of black people, whites use other whites to defend themselves — “You wouldn’t believe the things they have done to me with their fear of black people” — though often, such whites appear in his letters as “PJs” and “PCs,” meaning “phony Jews” and “phony Christians,” that is, categorized along lines of authenticity.

He tells Mason that he has a friend who is Jewish, and that he feels “they have a place in this world. The real Jews do.” “Look,” he writes in 1986, “I never ask my people to hate anyone because of race.” In fact, as in the 1960s, Manson’s imagination still settled on a “separate but equal” elite order, but by the 1980s it had hypertrophied, somehow become even more maximalist and militarized. So, whereas James Mason would “send black back” — to Africa presumably — Manson countered with this vision:

I would make them the ZZ like the SS only worse (better). The white SS & the Black SS and then do away with the PJs and PCs in the middle. Then I’d put Green back on the land with the air force & army & the navy [&] would empty the zoo & all wildlife back [&] make a garden & only there children could return to earth garden.

This is an astonishing rainbow-fascist, eco-totalitarian dream of epic, even biblical, proportions. But it’s not King Charlie ruling a black planet, nor the James Mason–inspired whites-only world promoted by SIEGE culture.

If initially Manson was too much for Mason’s veterans in the neo-Nazi movement, perhaps ultimately the movement was too much for Manson. Racist and separatist though he was, Manson just never advocated for the elimination of people of color. Aside from the fact that the most important fault lines in his thinking were determined not by race but by what was “real” — and obviously he had no problem with the idea of eliminating an entire world of “phonies” — Manson was also simply too antiwhite.

That does not mean that Manson’s letters, at least during the 1980s, were not crammed with racist remarks and antisemitic tropes, because they most certainly were. And in fact, even if part of what the expression “PJs and PCs” captured was whiteness, one suspects that because whiteness was also firmly tied to “money,” the phony/real binary had by the 1980s also become entangled with antisemitism for Manson, though arguably one could read all this as a class-based critique too, because Manson often argued that the powerful used race to keep down the powerless.

Finally, for the record: Manson’s interest in Adolf Hitler during the 1960s has been overstated — there exists only the most minimal evidence — but it is impossible to read the letters he wrote to James Mason and come away with anything but the certain knowledge that “AH” was one of Manson’s most prominent discursive tics during that period.

Nonetheless, Manson’s views diverge from Mason, neo-Nazism, the far right, and SIEGE culture. It seems important to mark the differences, not least so as to be able to delineate the various strands that make up white radicalism in late modern American culture, and because maybe it matters that in some respects contemporary white supremacism outstrips the extremism of a man whose very face has long been a symbol of the country’s most radical racism.

Chronological age advances at precisely the same rate irrespective of income, occupation, or circumstance. The more complicated phenomenon is biological aging. Our organs and physiological systems do not deteriorate uniformly. Two individuals of the same chronological age can differ substantially in cardiovascular health, immune function, and susceptibility to disease. One may remain independent into their eighties, while another develops chronic illness decades earlier.

Researchers have attempted to quantify these differences using biological aging markers, including changes in DNA chemical modification, called methylation. Methylation influences gene function and underpins so-called epigenetic clocks, some of which estimate physiological deterioration or predict subsequent disease and mortality.

A 2025 longitudinal study published in The Journals of Gerontology examined disadvantage during childhood and adulthood alongside epigenetic measures around the age of fifty. Both were associated with faster aging on certain measures. An unequal childhood may leave DNA signatures that persist for decades, although circumstances in adulthood continue to matter too.

In May 2026, researchers publishing in JAMA Network Open examined nearly 3,800 adults and conditions across 267 American counties. Those raised in areas characterized by greater poverty, educational disadvantage, and racial segregation subsequently exhibited biological signatures associated with accelerated aging and inflammation. Some associations remained after accounting for individual and family socioeconomic circumstances. The wider environment in which someone grows up may leave measurable traces in their biology twenty years later.

Poverty does not make every disadvantaged person biologically older by a predictable number of years. What the evidence increasingly supports is that biological aging is socially and politically patterned and cannot be understood by examining individual behavior alone.

Lifespan is the number of years you live. Health span is how many of these years you remain healthy. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), global life expectancy reached 73.3 years in 2023, compared with healthy life expectancy of 62.8 years. This means that for most people, living longer is decoupled from living well.

The WHO’s 2025 report on the social determinants of health found that people born in countries with the highest life expectancy could expect to live thirty-three years longer than those born in countries with the lowest. But mortality describes only part of the inequality. The years preceding death determine whether someone can work without debilitating pain, remain physically independent, and enjoy the ordinary freedoms that reasonable health makes possible.

In Britain, the figures are particularly damning. For 2022 to 2024, the Office for National Statistics estimated that men in England’s most deprived areas could expect just 49.8 years of good health, compared with 69.2 in the least deprived areas. For women, the corresponding figures were 48.2 and 68.5 years. These are estimates of healthy years across a lifetime, not the ages at which everyone becomes ill. Nevertheless, the gap approaches twenty years within the same country, under the same health care and retirement arrangements.

Across the Atlantic, a landmark American study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that among those reaching forty, men in the richest 1 percent could expect to live 14.6 years longer than those in the poorest 1 percent. Among women, the difference was 10.1 years. From 2001 to 2014, life expectancy increased substantially among the wealthiest Americans, while gains at the bottom were small. Longevity was improving, but its benefits were being distributed along familiar economic lines.

Australia offers another illustration. For 2020 to 2022, official statistics estimated that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men had a life expectancy 8.8 years shorter than nonindigenous men; among women, the gap was 8.1 years. These inequalities cannot be reduced to income alone. Structural discrimination, geographical disadvantage, and unequal access to resources help explain why the benefits of a wealthy society remain so unevenly distributed.

There is a term for the process through which social disadvantage contributes to premature deterioration of health: “politically accelerated aging.” This does not mean governments determine the biological age of every citizen. It describes how political and economic arrangements influence the conditions under which aging takes place, systematically exposing some populations to greater physiological harm than others.

Consider the accumulation of disadvantage across an ordinary working life. A child grows up in overcrowded housing, exposed to damp, pollution, and material insecurity. Employment brings unpredictable hours, physically demanding work, and limited protection against illness. As adulthood progresses, disturbed sleep, financial anxiety, and difficulties accessing timely health care become familiar companions.

None of these exposures guarantees premature deterioration. Cumulatively, however, they may increase the risk of ill health through chronic stress responses, inflammation, metabolic dysfunction, and cardiovascular disease. What appears in a medical record as hypertension, diabetes, or premature functional decline may reflect decades of circumstances over which the individual exercised remarkably little control.

Housing standards, employment protections, wages, environmental regulation, social security, and health care provision are not natural phenomena. They are shaped by legislation, economic priorities, and public spending. Though governments are not responsible for biological processes, they are responsible for political ones: whether low-paid workers can afford to be ill, whether homes are habitable, whether workplaces are safe, and whether preventive care is available before disease becomes disabling.

The language of personal responsibility becomes particularly harmful here. Individuals are encouraged to improve their sleep, reduce stress, exercise regularly, and make healthier dietary choices. Much of this advice is sound. But its practical application depends upon resources that are unequally distributed. Adequate sleep is difficult when employment requires irregular night shifts. The instruction to reduce stress offers little assistance to someone facing eviction. Nutritious food requires not only knowledge but money and time.

To the Bryan Johnsons of the world, aging is a process to be rigorously optimized. For many working people, daily life must be organized around the demands of earning enough to survive.

Johnson’s experiment reveals the extraordinary resources now being directed toward extending healthy life. Much of his program rests upon established principles: physical activity, sufficient sleep, sensible nutrition, and attention to cardiovascular and metabolic health. Other interventions remain experimental, with uncertain long-term benefits. There is no secret elixir of youth. There are, however, immense privileges and resources to operationalize these principles. These advantages cannot be reproduced merely by instructing someone on a low income to follow the same protocol. Yet the increasingly commercialized longevity industry presents aging as a problem of personal investment, selling biological age testing, supplements, and specialist clinics to those able to afford them.

Advances in geroscience, the field of medicine that investigates how biological aging drives chronic disease, may eventually produce substantial public benefits. The contradiction arises when the promise of longevity is detached from the circumstances that determine who becomes ill early and who can obtain effective treatment. A society that struggles to provide adequate preventive health care to disadvantaged communities can apparently sustain a flourishing market in personalized interventions for the affluent.

Consider retirement. Governments increasingly discuss longer working lives in the name of pension sustainability, as though chronological age adequately measures everyone’s capacity to remain economically active. Someone who has spent decades in physically demanding employment, developed chronic illness in middle age, and received limited preventive care is not entering retirement in circumstances comparable to an affluent professional with autonomy over their working life. Both may reach the same statutory pension age. Their capacity to enjoy the years that follow can be profoundly different. Extending working lives, without confronting these inequalities, risks imposing further costs upon those already carrying the greatest burden.

The political response cannot consist solely of widening access to commercialized, fad-driven longevity technologies. Decent housing, secure employment, adequate incomes, safer working conditions, accessible public spaces, and properly funded health care can prevent avoidable deterioration. These things are important beginning in childhood, not at the threshold of retirement. By the time someone reaches old age, much of their lifetime exposure to disadvantage has already occurred, and we have simply missed the boat.

Understanding the processes of aging should make the politics of their unequal distribution more urgent. If researchers can identify biological signatures associated with poverty and chronic stress, policymakers can no longer plausibly treat these conditions as separate from population health. The ability to measure aging must be matched by a determination to prevent its avoidable acceleration.

There is something deeply perverse, Dickensian even, about a society that can investigate whether the wealthy might live beyond the ordinary limits of aging yet tolerates conditions that leave millions debilitated long before old age. Bryan Johnson’s extraordinary efforts may improve his health, though I am willing to bet my medical license that his lifespan will be firmly ordinary. The more immediate concern is for those experiencing material deprivation: lives are being shortened, independence restricted, and, increasingly, biological deterioration appears to be accelerated.

The challenge is not simply to discover how humans might live longer. It is to confront why the opportunity to grow old in good health remains so unequally distributed. A longer life should not depend upon the ability to purchase protection from the conditions that make others age prematurely.

“This is not real,” warn the opening credits, “but it could be.” Britain, the show’s narrative implies, is not ready for possible war. The problem is simple: the nation does not spend enough on the navy or the air force to fend off a foreign attack and must change course urgently. The Wargame’s cast, however, are far more than just bad actors with an opinion.

Many have skin in the game. Jim Murphy’s appearance, which the Guardian glowingly compared to that of an “MGM movie star,” was only an extension of his day job. After losing his seat in parliament in 2015, the former foreign office minister founded Arden Strategies and has worked as a political lobbyist ever since. Serving the “Defence and Security” sector, which the firm promises to help “successfully navigate politics and policy,” is a core part of Arden’s business model. Murphy’s recent client list includes the US military contractor Northrop Grumman, one of the world’s largest arms companies and a major partner of the British Ministry of Defence. Only last year, then-Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government awarded Northrop a £20.5 million contract to provide navigation support across new Royal Navy vessels. Sat around the fictional cabinet table on Sky’s set, Murphy barely had to stray from the script he’s been delivering for over a decade. He wasn’t the only one.

General Sir Richard Barrons, who plays the chief of the defence staff, currently serves as the cochair of Universal Defence & Security Solutions. The consultancy, which lists the UK Government and a range of arms companies among its clients, specializes in “defence modernisation” and “professional military education.” Pleading with his colleagues to “understand how under-resourced we are as a nation,” Barrons uses Sky’s simulation to advance his own view that social spending should be slashed to pay for war. There is “no point worrying about our welfare if the cities are in ashes,” he blustered earlier this year.

Around a third of The Wargame’s cast has financial ties to the weapons sector. While Sky omitted these crucial details from the cast’s biographies, the show is hardly subtle. Instead the production is an act of regime stenography with a clear message: Britain’s political class has put their sworn differences aside in service of protecting the nation, and the public should follow suit. Attending the premiere, UK defence secretary and Atlanticist poster boy Wes Streeting — who handed National Health Service patient data to Peter Thiel’s Palantir while a health minister — heaped praise on the show for “making people think about where they would put defence in the order of priorities as voters.”

His comments reflect one of The Wargame’s most important myths. Sky’s scenario, set just six months in the future, relies on the implication that conflict is inevitable, and Britain must act accordingly. Explanations for the hypothetical attack are limited to nationalistic platitudes, like Gove’s suggestion that Russia has declared war on “our way of life.” Western chauvinism litters the series as the cast frequently frames events in civilizational terms, recycling the language many of them deployed to justify imperial intervention in the Middle East a quarter-century ago.

By quietly invoking Samuel P. Huntington, Gove and his colleagues reveal the intellectual weakness of the wider rearmament agenda. Geopolitical conflict, they insist, arises from hostility to “British values” rather than a rupture within the American-led system. This is neatly illustrated in the simulation when, after a request for Washington’s military support is rebuffed, Jim Murphy quickly points out that “if the shoe were on the other foot, we would rally to the US defence.”

Instead, The Wargame signifies the coalescence of political, state, and media interests around military Keynesianism as a solution to Britain’s crises. As the world of transatlantic liberalism collapses, rearmament is presented not only as an opportunity for industrialization but a short-term route back to Donald Trump’s good graces. This is one part of Keir Starmer’s legacy Andy Burnham is keen to safeguard, committing to carry forward his predecessor’s unfunded “Defence Investment Plan.” While redistributing public wealth to private companies, Britain’s militarization promises to discipline the population, curtail the public’s democratic rights — as Elbit Systems have already demonstrated — and narrow the scope of ideological contestation. One does not need to look to dramatic fiction for examples of these effects.

Days before The Wargame aired, the BBC News website ran a headline asking if the British people were psychologically ready for the coming conflict. “Do you know what would be expected of you?” the article asked. The Liberal Democrats were quick to respond, proposing that the prime minister establish a register of civilian volunteers who could be called up in the event of an invasion. For the British governing class and liberal democracies across Europe, the war drive is the last resort of an elite desperate to save itself from contradictions of its own making.

One might expect Michael Gove, who suggested awarding the Israel Defense Forces the Nobel Peace Prize in 2025, or Harriet Harman, a Labour minister who voted for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, to turn up in a program like The Wargame. What conveys hegemonic support for the military-industrial complex, however, is the presence of seemingly more dissident figures: Nicola Sturgeon and, to a lesser extent, Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, who resigned from the Conservatives’ front bench in 2024 over the party’s failure to condemn Israel’s genocide.

The former first minister of Scotland, Sturgeon has been a member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament since she was a teenager, yet emerged from Sky’s studio with a changed mind on militarization. The simulation of conflict, she said, led her to “think a bit differently” about “defence as something that should be deprioritised in favour of health and education and welfare.” This was no damascene conversion. In March 2022, six months after she called for North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) troops to remain in Afghanistan for “as long as is necessary,” Sturgeon suggested that NATO should implement a no-fly zone over Ukraine following Russia’s invasion, risking catastrophic escalation. Warsi also grew more hawkish in Sky’s secret bunker, reflecting afterward that Britain was “woefully underprepared for war.”

In the third part of the docudrama, Sturgeon dismisses the Left’s “butter not guns” approach, instead stressing the need to avoid a “divided government” in Britain faced with “Kremlin aggression.” Whitewashing the program’s jingoistic propaganda, such comments delegitimize antiwar sentiment and convey to the masses that even their ostensibly progressive politicians have embraced the case for conflict.

Real war games, meanwhile, are already afoot in the North Atlantic. Late last month, a US-UK weapons firing exercise sank the decommissioned USS Klakring off the Scottish coast. The following day, Chancellor John Healey announced that his £6 billion investment to upgrade the Trident nuclear submarine fleet would anchor “a new age of reindustrialisation.” Rearmament is rapidly reorganizing the British economy as the establishment rushes to manufacture consent for war.

Hysterical interventions like The Wargame, however, portray this reality with total transparency. In so doing, they draw clear dividing lines between hawkish politicians and their constituents, to whom Sky’s production denies any real agency or voice. The public instead appears as an inconvenient obstruction to the military’s grand plans: so much so that at one stage Harriet Harman suggests banning social media, and Jim Murphy proposes taking control of the nation’s airwaves.

Recent polling confirms that less than a quarter of Brits support increasing defense spending at the expense of public services. The Wargame was explicitly designed to change that. This is the tension that opponents of militarism must look to exploit, working to build organization among the people whose concerns Michael Gove and his fictional cabinet are determined to ignore while simultaneously gambling with their lives.

Die Linke’s activity in Neukölln offers a window into the turnaround in the party’s fortunes.

Die Linke was founded in 2007, when the eastern-centered Party of Democratic Socialism merged with a left-wing split from the SPD called the Labor and Social Justice – the Electoral Alternative (WASG). At the time, the Neukölln branch of Die Linke numbered around two hundred members. Operating in a district of what was once West Berlin, the Neukölln branch had little weight in the Berlin party compared to the large ex-PDS branches in the former East Germany, where membership numbered in the thousands and Die Linke could count on a huge share of the vote.

It’s important to realize that Die Linke has been in the Berlin government before, albeit as a junior partner. The eastern branches made up the constituencies of the politicians who formed the SPD-PDS/Die Linke governments in Berlin from 2001–11 after the post-reunification fiscal crisis and the Berlin banking scandal of 2001. These governments took measures like the firesale of 70,000 council homes of the public housing corporation GSW and slashing the pay of Berlin public sector workers. Such moves haunt the Berlin party still. The ensuing disillusionment led to the net loss of more than three thousand members between 2001 and 2011 and halved the 22.6 percent vote share the PDS had reached in Berlin, even though it made gains elsewhere in Germany.

The Neukölln district party made a point of being critical of the neoliberalism and austerity in which the party had engaged in government. Here the founding of Die Linke in Neukölln involved dozens of revolutionary socialist activists — mainly from Marx21, a reformation of Linksruck — joined a few years later by the Sozialistische Alternative (SAV). The anti-Stalinist Marxist groups in the Berlin WASG brought with them their experience from social struggles against the neoliberal reforms of Gerhard Schröder’s SPD-led government, the anti-Nazi street blockades of the 1990s, and the student strikes against tuition fees, leading the branch into the social movements.

The district party set up four local branches (Basisorganisationen, BOs) which all elected branch organizers. The BOs started organizing regular paper and flyer stalls and regular meetings for prepared discussions on current events, strategy, and theory.

Members would and still do prepare their own input or would arrange for an external speaker from a local campaign, strike, or movement. During discussions, a moderator ensures time limits, encourages women and inter-, transgender, and nonbinary people to speak, and can award priority on the speakers list.

The BOs also plan a wide array of activism. Members coordinate their presence at demonstrations and visits to picket lines, but also educationals, reading groups, and conferences. Throughout the 2010s, they also devoted time to signature drives for referendum campaigns like Deutsche Wohnen & Co Enteignen (resulting in the 2021 popular vote to nationalize the big landlords) or 100% Tempelhofer Feld, alongside Palestine, Greece, and refugee solidarity work. Die Linke gained members by being supportive and effective: politicizing the issues but being careful not to co-opt existing campaigns.

In cooperation with the Neukölln board, BOs also mobilize for major direct actions in Germany like blockades of AfD party conferences; climate actions at lignite mines; protests against antiabortionist marches by fundamentalist Christians; and demonstrations against NATO or G7 summits.

At the same time, Marx21 comrades less involved in the branch played a leading role in the Ver.di union’s drive at the Vivantes Klinikum Neukölln, culminating in the massive hospital strike of 2021. Other practical-minded Die Linke members focused on organizing tenants in the south of the neighborhood around their issues.

Die Linke in Neukölln became a training ground for all-around socialist activism attuned to Marxist theory and regular practical discussions. This alternative model was notably attractive to an anti-capitalist milieu in Berlin that had recently learned to be wary of political parties. Importantly, the branch calls frequent meetings of the district assembly (MVV) every three months or so, where all members can attend and discuss the way forward, while electing a board and delegates to Berlin and national party conferences. In the spirit of full democracy, ample time is devoted to discussions, proposing amendments, and putting motions to a vote.

The overall result was a steady growth of the Neukölln branch, from 230 members in 2008 to 600 in 2020, with the percentage of women also rising from 26 to 38 percent. The party’s vote here also rose, from 5.6 percent in the 2009 Berlin elections to 14.3 percent in 2021, surpassing Die Linke’s Berlin average for the first time. These federal elections saw much higher results in Neukölln, up from 13.9 percent in 2009 to 18.2 percent in 2017, a clear indication of discontent of Die Linke voters with the Berlin government. As these graphs show, the gains were concentrated in the urban, multicultural north (WK1, WK2, and WK3) with lesser success in the more conservative suburbs in the south (WK4, WK5, and WK6).

The late 2010s to early 2020s saw a long crisis in Die Linke, with a conservative, sovereigntist faction around leading member Sahra Wagenknecht eventually splitting away. Die Linke’s federal vote share sunk to 4.9 percent in the 2021 federal elections — almost enough to knock it out of parliament — and it suffered heavy losses also in Neukölln (down to 11.9 percent) and Berlin in general (11.4 percent). Die Linke’s membership shrunk by 20 percent federally and by 10 percent in Berlin between 2017 and 2023.

Revolutionary organizations in the branch also experienced ruptures. The Sozialistische Organisation Solidarität (Sol) split from SAV in 2019. A significant number of central, founding members of the Neukölln branch first left the Marx21 network to found Sozialismus von Unten (SVU) and then left Die Linke in the course of 2024, leading up to the expulsion of the Palestinian-German SVU member Ramsis Kilani despite the protest of Die Linke Neukölln.

Still, the branch maintained its membership and level of activity. The fact that Wagenknecht split away also opened the door for anti-racists, LGBTQ activists, ecologically minded people, and people worried about Wagenknecht’s Russia-friendly stance. The anti-capitalist foundations of the Neukölln branch, too, helped members focus on the long-term strategic goal of building the branch and the movements rather than despair at the lack of immediate electoral success.

After the October 7 attacks and Israel’s turn to all-out genocide, Palestine solidarity became central, also for the many new members in Die Linke Neukölln. The district is home to the biggest Palestinian diaspora in Europe and many others from the entire Middle East and North Africa, as well as mostly young Israeli and non-Israeli Jews. As riot cops raided Neukölln’s Arab shopping streets and went after the Palestine solidarity movement with full force, the government announced blanket bans on demonstrations. Amnesty and Human Rights Watch issued worried reports about worsening democratic rights in Germany.

Palestinian school children were humiliated for wearing keffiyehs or the Palestinian flag. One seventeen-year-old reported at a local Die Linke meeting that her teacher ripped her red-green-black wrist bracelet off and threw it away in front of the entire class, claiming, “Palestinians don’t exist.” School protests were banned, like at the Ernst-Abbe-Gymnasium on the Sonnenallee. The Berlin government sanctioned schools to ban signs of Palestinian identity and funded the classroom distribution of the revisionist pamphlet Mythos#Israel1948 by the Zionist group Masiyot.

Die Linke Neukölln already had good relations with the Palestinian community, having — unlike much of the German left — long proven its solidarity. The Neukölln council fraction, headed since 2021 by Palestinian-German civil rights lawyer Ahmed Abed, successfully pressured the mayor to retract the Mythos#Israel1948 pamphlet from schools.

Since 2024, the Neukölln branch has also continued to intervene in Die Linke nationally to start a campaign to stop weapons exports to Israel and to call out the genocide. In defiance of ever more vicious smear campaigns in the national press and politicians from all other parties, Vedi Emde (now a Die Linke member of the Berlin parliament) organized what turned out to be huge public meetings on Gaza and Berlin’s biggest Palestine solidarity demonstration, with 70,000 people, on September 27, 2025.

At the same time, the national party abruptly found its way back from the abyss. In summer 2024, Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democrats (CDU) broke a previous taboo by seeking majorities together with the AfD to combat migrants and asylum seekers, prompting a huge wave of protests. Die Linke was now able to catch a wave of progressive, anti-fascist indignation, prompting a wave of young, often female and increasingly also migrant members showing up to meetings.

Olaf Scholz’s SPD-led coalition government fell in November 2024, leading to snap elections Die Linke was hardly prepared for, in Neukölln or anywhere else. But Die Linke Neukölln saw a chance to put the party’s first ever directly elected candidate in the Bundestag (parliament) in the former West Germany, Ferat Koçak, through a massive door-knocking campaign. The ad hoc campaign group mobilized over two thousand party members and sympathizers, reaching 139,000 doors, and was a wild success with 25.2 percent of the party vote and 30 percent for the individual candidate. By the end of February 2025, Neukölln branch had doubled its membership to over two thousand, winning a thousand mostly young, mostly female, and ever more diverse members over the course of months.

After the election, the Neukölln board and local district-level groups were overwhelmed by the growth in new membership and invested huge efforts into contacting them all, organizing welcome and orientation meetings, and resorting the existing structures. They involved new members in preparing meetings and actions, mapped the issues and forms of activity that members were most interested in, and got people started in their group.

This year, the branch has grown further to 2,600 members and ten self-organizing BOs. The district party has grown younger as well, with half of the increasingly multiethnic membership under thirty-five and achieved gender parity in 2025. The election campaign was better prepared and managed to integrate the door-knocking campaign with flyer stalls, rallies, and street events. Actions were organized by each local candidate’s volunteer teams and local BO structures and supported by two full-time staffers hired for campaign logistics and coordination.

The result was an unprecedented 33 percent of the vote, verging on an absolute majority in the northern half of Neukölln. That is a powerful confirmation of a desire for a real change and a break with the politics of austerity for the sake of militarism, and of official appeasement of the fascists. It is also a vote of trust in an organization that is widely known by now as a mass socialist activist party not afraid to stick to its principles despite sustained smear campaigns.

This September’s election victory in Berlin caught the ruling classes and the media off guard, prompting them to go on the warpath against Die Linke in a way that dwarfs the outrage over the AfD landslides just two weeks prior. Die Linke Neukölln has been a primary target, with Green national coleader Franziska Brantner saying on election night that her party wouldn’t govern with “antisemites from Neukölln.” The fabricated accusations of Jew hate, mixed up with wild conspiracy theories about Neukölln Bundestag member Ferat Koçak’s unfortunate minor contacts with a Lebanese crime boss, further increased pressure on the branch and hurt Ferat’s standing.

More attacks of this kind can be expected in the attempt to derail Die Linke and put it on the defensive during coalition negotiations. At the last district assembly this past Tuesday, Die Linke Neukölln made clear that it will not be intimidated and will not give in to the attacks. The membership unanimously passed a motion defending all members caught in the crosshairs, including the newly elected Berlin parliament member Vedi Emde, Neukölln Councilor-elect Basem Said, and the national speaker of the Die Linke Palestine working group, Hannah Bruns, against whom expulsion procedures are underway.

However, this past Friday, the Berlin-wide Die Linke leadership chose to cave in to the slanders against the Neukölln branch by approving a joint declaration with the SPD and Greens affirming Israel’s “right to exist” and the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism while banning the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The text blandly conflates Israel, Zionism, and Jewish life in Berlin. The parties also agreed to ramp up secret-service surveillance and policing to “recognize and combat antisemitic threats early” while not sparing one word for the violence, virulent racism, and outright pariah status that Palestinians experience in Berlin, nor indeed the countless Jews fed up with being used as a prop for a genocidal apartheid state.

This declaration is an act of self-humiliation. There was no objective reason for it, other than to use the situation to discipline the left flank of Die Linke and facilitate a neutered coalition government. The now publicly confirmed threats to exclude Emde, who gained 46.2 percent of the candidate vote alongside 50.2 percent for the party-list vote in her district, prove the point. The leadership is trying to appease the SPD and Greens by forcing us in Neukölln to humiliate ourselves and destroy our solidarity with the Palestinian community. They would rather decimate the party and its roots in communities and movements than risk an escalation of the fight by defending our massively successful branch.

Rather than be a Bally Bagayoko — the France Insoumise mayor of Saint-Denis, who used his own body to protect protesting high schoolers from the police — party leaders are throwing the pesky kids under the bus. Oppositional motions on the Berlin board of Die Linke were rejected by a majority this past Friday. But this isn’t what the Neukölln branch, the left wing of the party more widely, or countless new, mostly young members signed up for. We campaigned for real change, to challenge the ruling classes, and for the right to protest. The fight for the soul of the party is on. And with the threat of fascism looming large, we cannot mess this up.

Eugene Debs wasn’t born a radical. He arrived at socialism through sobering experience — with corporate power, capitalist courts, and the daily injustices of living and laboring in Gilded Age America. Born in 1855 to Alsatian immigrants in Terre Haute, he joined the railroad at age fourteen as the nation hurtled toward buccaneer capitalism. Thrown out of work during the economic depression of 1873, Debs soon became an organizer in the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, using his rising position to oppose strikes, echo the “law and order” rhetoric of his bosses, and espouse the Brotherhood’s conservative craft union credo of “benevolence, sobriety, industry.” He went so far as to deliver a speech defaming the Great Railroad Strike for its “anarchy and revolution.”

At decade’s end, Debs made his first foray into electoral politics, first as a Democratic city clerk, then a state representative. He proved a moderate labor reformer, respectable and accommodating to business. Notably, he broke with his party in an unsuccessful effort to eliminate racial distinctions from state law but remained decidedly antiradical (even sponsoring a pro-militia bill). Imbued with a Great Man view of history and belief in the power of individual fortitude, he then rose quickly within his whites-only union. Unlike many trades leaders, Debs didn’t openly scapegoat black workers. But nor did he use his position to challenge the color line. Rather, he avoided the subject of race entirely out of either indifference or worry that it would repel white workers. Young Debs’s activism was defined by what Gude calls “parlor room reason,” not organized insurgency.

But class struggle and the violent obstinance of capital soon wrenched Debs out of complacency. Unrewarded by loyalty to the employer class, Debs led his first strike in 1888 against the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad. He emerged a changed man, embracing broad federation over craft exclusivism and later eschewing the two-party system. Through a new consciousness that drew from the abolitionists and the Knights of Labor, he became active in the Populist movement and was further stirred by anti-worker violence at Homestead and elsewhere. By the time he founded the American Railway Union (ARU) in 1893 and orchestrated the Pullman Strike the following year, Debs was convinced of the permanent structural conflict between owners and workers.

The story of Debs’s first incarceration and radicalization is familiar to readers on the Left, but Gude delivers it with both rigor and style. Like so many revolutionaries, Debs underwent his greatest transformation while in prison. Abandoned by Samuel Gompers and his American Federation of Labor (AFL) craft unions, Debs devoured books by Edward Bellamy and Laurence Gronlund. He read Karl Kautsky and Karl Marx, too. As Gude puts it, the Pullman Strike constituted an almost spiritual awakening, “a baptism . . . out of which a new Debs was born. He was now, and would forever be, a radical working-class agitator.”

Debs soon declared himself a socialist, one committed to unions and not utopian schemes. Believing that a workers’ republic would soon dawn (after all, how could the sharp contradictions and profound inequalities of industrial America persist?), Debs embraced the “political socialism” of organizing a working-class party to contest elections, popularize socialist ideas, and act as the political arm of the labor movement. He learned a new language of Marxism, then distilled it for Oklahoma farmers, New York garment women, Montana copper miners, and Louisiana sharecroppers. Fueled by a mix of radical Christianity and American history, he charged through nonstop cross-country tours spanning five presidential campaigns. As he advocated a big tent that was both ballot- and strike-conscious, the question of how to win immediate reforms with the ultimate goal of winning socialism defined Debs’s crusade for the next quarter century.

Debs’s party made socialism a force in American politics for the first time in US history, but political mobilization and governance proved grueling. Intraparty rifts emerged along class, strategic, and regional lines. Debs felt that conservatives, led by Victor Berger, “diluted the revolutionary aims” with their fixation on electability. But unlike his future Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) compatriot Bill Haywood, he couldn’t imagine a democratic revolution occurring in the United States without attaining power through the ballot box. At times, it appeared that the popular Debs was the only personality holding it all together.

As an independent party (and not the electoral arm of unions, like the British Labour Party), the Socialist Party (SP) likewise ran afoul of Gompers, who eagerly supported the two capitalist parties. Debs walked what Gude describes as the tightrope of “how to press mainstream organized labor away from exclusionary positions without isolating the Socialist Party.” At times, Debs seemed to believe that, if he only attacked AFL bureaucrats strenuously enough, their rank and file would bolt toward socialist reform.

The SP also struggled at times to forge a coherent vision. According to Gude, Debs “never laid out precisely what a democratic socialist economy would look like.” While railroads, steel mills, coal mines, and other large industries would be publicly owned and subject to democratic oversight, Debs never outlined the precise role of workers, cooperatives, small firms, or markets within his envisioned socialist state. Like many fellow socialists, Debs thought it premature or potentially divisive to formulate a specific blueprint for life after capitalism.

Although its electoral achievements were remarkable, the party stalled. Debs received nearly a million votes while running from prison in 1920, but that was proportionally fewer than his 1912 tally. Gude details how many working-class voters couldn’t bring themselves to back Debs for a host of reasons, from party loyalty and patronage to simple political viability. “Debs was still a long shot, even if they believed in his ideals,” he reminds, “and, of course, plenty didn’t.” For all of Debs’s energy and magnetism, after two decades the SP seemed pressed hard against an electoral ceiling.

Why? Much of the answer lay in the party’s basic lack of resources and machinery. Violent state repression during World War I exacerbated those disadvantages, leading many socialists to shun electoral democracy in favor of revolutionary action. But the answer also lay in the herculean — and still unsettled — task of how to unite the world’s most diverse working class.

Like socialists today, Debs encountered the problem of how to organize workers who were deeply atomized by race, gender, age, ethnicity, language, region, religion, and national origin. The SP’s default position was to maintain that capitalism exploited all workers equally, advocate for “race-neutral” goals, and insist that racism would resolve itself naturally through material struggle. A capacious movement naturally required making space for all kinds of disciples, but socialists adhered to an unofficial white standard, viewing active anti-racism as undesirable either in principle or because it would supposedly fracture their fragile movement.

Scholars and activists have spent a century critiquing what Philip S. Foner termed this “Debsian view” of racial evasion. That critique originated with black leftists at the time, who underscored the SP’s shortcomings on the race question (convinced of the party’s unseriousness on race, Hubert Harrison resigned his membership in 1914). During the sectarian battles of the 1920s and ’30s, Communist Party theoreticians weaponized Debs’s (often decontextualized) statements to discredit the SP by exposing its complicity with white supremacy. The result was, at times, a caricature of the Socialists’ alleged racial indifference.

Historians since have offered greater nuance. Lamenting the SP’s failure “to adopt a specialized program for the Negro people,” Ray Ginger saw the party as immobilized by “Berger’s prejudice,” on the one hand, and “Debs’s oversimplified analysis” on the other. Later critics, especially in the New Left, cited Debs’s more feeble or decontextualized statements (“We have nothing special to offer the Negro, and we cannot make separate appeals to all the races”) as proof of his inadequacy or indifference, but others recognized Debs as moving personally toward anti-racist practice. Nick Salvatore traced how Debs’s racial mindset “changed over the course of his career” from a “one-dimensional” outlook toward, by the end of his life, “a fundamental critique of white American culture itself.”

Gude’s account enriches this discussion tremendously by balancing the deficiencies of both Debs and the SP more broadly against myriad external limitations and near-impossible party dynamics. Utilizing new sources and subtle insights into black socialism, American Socialist complicates Ginger’s racist vs. apathetic binary and vitalizes Salvatore’s conclusions. It does so by situating Debs’s transforming views alongside African American politics and SP imperatives.

There was little in Debs’s upbringing — one of racial segregation in southern Indiana — to suggest that he would become a racial equalitarian, much less an opponent of racial injustice. That metamorphosis came slowly and through material struggle. As early as the 1890s, Debs leveraged his position as president of the American Railway Union to challenge the union’s whites-only code, perhaps out of personal conviction, but clearly as a matter of union interest. When some delegates defended racial restriction because black workers had been used as strikebreakers (and avowed that Debs himself would be hanged for such an offense in the South), Debs cited that as the best reason to welcome them into the union. His speeches in defense of black membership sometimes reflected popular prejudices (he did not “advocate association with the negro,” for example), and his inclusionary position went down in narrow defeat, but progressive black newspapers praised his efforts.

Although Debs as an early socialist trafficked in lazy generalizations and pushed an overly narrow “class-first” logic, such as in his 1903 assertion, “There is no ‘Negro problem’ apart from the general labor problem,” Gude leaves little doubt that the Hoosier firebrand was “a radical on race for his day.” Racial conservatives within the SP certainly “had no difficulty seeing the radicalism of Debs’s overall positions,” the author contends, which sometimes alienated him from other white socialists. And when turn-of-the-century black publications criticized Debs, they did so “invariably from the Right, with an attitude of Booker T. Washington–style accommodationism.”

There was more to come. Chronic race riots, especially in his native Indiana, inspired Debs to write more prodigiously on the “race question.” He assailed state SP platforms that included Jim Crow clauses, publicly attacked popular racist literature, and famously refused to speak at venues that excluded African Americans. As his worldview solidified, what Gude calls the “bigoted tics that had previously seeped into his speeches” became less common; he grew more vocal, and his race thinking became more sophisticated.

Debs also learned from the black left. Critically, that engagement coincided with the turn against the self-help and entrepreneurial approach of Booker T. Washington, whom Debs allies such as George Washington Woodbey assailed as “a good servant of capitalism.” Influenced by African American delegates William Costley, a California trade unionist, and two Indiana coal miners, John H. Adams and Edward D. McKay, the 1901 SP founding convention adopted a six-paragraph resolution stating that owners sought to foment “race hatred between the white worker and the black” and “betray the negro in his present helpless struggle against disfranchisement and violence.”

Pinpointing racism as a national, union-inhibiting dilemma and viewing black support as essential to any workers’ movement worthy of the name, Debs looked South. In a 1903 organizing drive through Dixie, he “hoped to peel off trade union members and former Populists” through class-based interracial appeals that flouted regional norms. Likely inspired by W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, published that same year, Debs addressed the problem of white identity.

Like Du Bois, he recognized the irony by which the region’s poor whites, “themselves the foul product of the capitalist system,” were “held in lowest contempt by the master class, yet esteeming themselves immeasurably above the cleanest, most intelligent and self respecting negro.” Walking back his former “color-blind” approach and earlier claims regarding the identical condition of white and black wage earners, Debs acknowledged that black workers were “doubly enslaved.”

Debs’s most rapid evolution occurred during the mid- to late 1910s. Influenced by activists of color and pressured by demographic change that saw black workers (and potential voters) begin settling in Northern cities, white socialists as a whole became more attentive to race. It was a matter of both political opportunity and ideological sincerity. Socialists had long dispatched black speakers including Woodbey into black communities while using emancipationist language to liken Debs to John Brown, but they slowly codified that racial progressivism into the party line. By 1918, a new SP platform condemned “hanging and burning; widespread political disfranchisement, and loss of civil rights” in the South and demanded that Dixie comply with the Fourteenth Amendment.

Debs continued to drive home the old idea of statutory equality (“The Socialist Party knows neither color, creed, sex, nor race”) but now occasionally jumped into the civil rights fray, even when he had seemingly little to gain electorally. He joined a public campaign to save a black Arkansas teenager named Earl Gilchrist from the death penalty in 1911; four years later, he walked a picket line with black Terre Hauteans to protest D. W. Griffith’s white supremacist blockbuster, The Birth of a Nation.

Such efforts drew praise from black leaders including Du Bois and Ida B. Wells, who invited Debs to address her Negro Fellowship League. Meanwhile, Debs befriended black Socialists including Ross D. Brown, Chandler Owen, and A. Philip Randolph, who championed the Hoosier in his radical newspaper, The Messenger. Their growing influence became a part of what Gude describes as Debs’s broader “reassessment on race” predicated on “more immediate measures to combat racial oppression.”

Gude details how Debs’s racial education continued until his death and encompassed the cultural elements of white supremacy. In one of his final columns, Debs covered the Osage Indian murders in Oklahoma, deploring the killings and mocking the idea of the “White Man’s Burden.” He exhausted some of the last political energies of his life collaborating with Randolph, a close comrade and future civil rights elder whose Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, according to Gude, had become a “living embodiment of Eugene Debs’s emancipatory dream.”

Debs’s racial views were hardly perfect, his language sometimes problematic, particularly as an early socialist. But as various black reformers noted and as Gude rightly maintains, it is undeniably significant that at the pinnacle of Jim Crow — as social scientists concocted new racial taxonomies, Yankee imperialists proclaimed “survival of the fittest,” and prominent race leaders urged social deference — Debs was the only national politician advocating the “obliteration of the color line.”

But if Debs evolved toward a deeper understanding of the layered oppressions facing workers of color, why didn’t the Socialist Party adopt an actively anti-racist program? Why didn’t the foremost white economic justice advocates of their day attempt to organize black workers at the point of production, launching organizing drives into the Southern fields to recruit miners and sharecroppers (in the vein of the Communist Party)? Why didn’t the early SP systematically campaign against lynching or racism in housing, education, transportation, or the courts? The answer is manifold, involving a combination of indifference, strategic and ideological missteps, structural constraints, and open hostility.

First, as Gude illustrates in detailed and dramatic terms, the party was perpetually fractured between racial progressives and racial reactionaries. Debs’s views represented one such camp, but he never possessed a stranglehold over the entire party or its competing factions (in fact, by 1904 Debs was already retreating from party policymaking). To further confuse the issue, racism/anti-racism didn’t always map neatly onto other right/left divides within the party. For example, SP activist William English Walling helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) but ended up supporting US involvement in World War I.

Moreover, even progressives like Debs largely failed, especially in the party’s first decade, to articulate how SP reforms would undermine racism, perhaps seeing a direct confrontation with Jim Crow as what Gude calls “a diversion from Socialists’ fundamental battle.” Debs’s own statements during this time proved contradictory. He spoke to the compounded oppression of the “doubly enslaved” only to then misguidedly state that “when the working class have triumphed in the class struggle . . . the race problem will disappear.”

There were also practical intraparty constraints. The Socialists were a small, cash-poor party, and many members saw expensive and potentially dangerous organizing campaigns as infeasible. Debs likewise commanded overwhelmingly white audiences, which made his message of equality noteworthy but also placed functional limits upon it. The party relied on dollars and support from the bona fide white supremacists who were an everyday presence within the party’s big tent (as late as 1912, the peak year of SP dues-paying membership, the convention featured a report that argued racism “is not so much a result of social as of biological evolution”).

Perhaps most critically, broader social and cultural conditions were distinct — and more challenging to multiracial organizing — during Debs’s peak influence. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, racially progressive Socialists grappling with the “race problem” in a nation barreling away from racial equality were fighting a rising tide. In most ways, according to Gude, “the space to organize had closed as the noose of Jim Crow tightened.” The great tragedy of early socialism is that Debs’s personal anti-racism never translated into a concrete movement to recruit black workers within the SP.

Eugene Debs was, as the abolitionist Horace Greeley once referred to Abe Lincoln, a “growing man.” More than previous biographers, Gude illuminates the ways Debs never stopped learning, sharpening his socialist perspective, or recalibrating and expanding his conception of solidarity. From hard compromises within the ARU to his cofounding of the IWW to pondering the formation of an “American Labor Party,” Debs pursued a never-ending quest of how best to empower workers and win socialism.

American Socialist evocatively highlights this ongoing political education. As socialism brought Debs into a global movement, he progressed from a Democrat who supported immigrant exclusion as the solution to labor competition to a staunch internationalist who championed labor organization abroad and insisted that US workers had far more in common with toilers of other countries than with their own elites. Drawing on personal experience, Debs likewise became an ardent critic of the carceral state, deeming prisons a form of “torture” rather than rehabilitation. And although he had always backed women’s suffrage, his gender views and allyships radicalized with time as well. According to Gude, Debs was eternally “finding another injustice to rail against” and “never seemed to see one without immediately dedicating himself to fighting it.”

Flexible transformation meant that Debs wore a cast of rotating hats, often at the same time: a humanist whose politics were imbued with Christian symbolism; a world citizen who presented socialism as entirely consistent with American political traditions; and a racial equalitarian whose words and policy proposals often fell short of his ideals even as he moved toward anti-racism — a theme that is one of the book’s most compelling features.

Indeed, Gude’s attention to race vis-à-vis earlier biographers evinces how leftists have long grappled with the precise relation between racism and capitalism, including how to undertake class-struggle anti-racism in moments of comparative decline. As in Debs’s time, US workers today — run ragged by rising costs and crushing workloads, disciplined through scarcity discourses and techno-authoritarian surveillance, and isolated through remote and gig labor — appear, at times, almost hopelessly segmented. Owners use religious, generational, and immigration issues to pit blocs of workers against one another. Politicians and media elites leverage various identities to subvert discussions of inequality, labor rights, and material redistribution. Meanwhile, nonreactionary alternatives, including (an easily commodified) liberal “anti-racism,” aggravate the issue by ignoring class politics, absolving capital, and reducing racism to a problem of individual attitudes or cultural representation. Debs’s life, in Gude’s capable hands, exposes these difficulties of multiracial organizing in conditions of anti-worker propagandization and weak structural power for labor.

Although he traces Debs’s legacy from the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the Highlander Folk School to Martin Luther King Jr’s opposition to the Vietnam War, Gude suggests that the “Debsian spirit” has never held more purchase than it does in our current New Gilded Age. Importantly, then, this captivating book isn’t for socialists so much as it is for those who, exposed to the injustices of today, relate to Debs’s expanding consciousness and sense of indignation. It’s for any emerging critic of our wildly undemocratic economy — one that is fixed for the ultrarich while the seemingly powerless majority languish in exploitation and unaffordable and unresponsive systems in housing, education, and health care. It’s for all who recognize that capitalism is failing to deliver on its promise of freedom.

Debs’s politics were, at their brightest, tenacious in undercutting what Gude calls “all forms of unaccountable power — rich over poor, men over women, white over Black, colonizer over colonized — as poisonous to human freedom.” A page-turning delight, American Socialist is an engaging and valuable tool for anyone who seeks to win a world where that kind of freedom reigns supreme.