Millions of workers across the country remain uncovered by the National Labor Relations Act. Policymakers and workers can expand the right to organize, bargain, and strike for those excluded workers. These workers often include state and local public sector workers like public-school teachers, domestic workers like housecleaners and nannies, and farmworkers.

Virginia provides an example of both progress and work still to be done. The commonwealth lifted the ban on collective bargaining for public sector workers in 2021, allowing localities to permit collective bargaining by their public employees. Teachers in Fairfax County organized and formed the largest bargaining unit of 2024 nationally — the 27,500-strong Fairfax Education Unions. But Virginia’s governor vetoed a bill that would have extended collective bargaining to public sector workers statewide, leaving critical work to be done in the coming year.

Another way is to decrease the cost of organizing by making the conditions for organizing more hospitable and less risky. Some of these changes have been won in the last decade such as Just Cause for Fast Food Workers in New York City. Just cause protections make it illegal to terminate an employee without warning or a good cause. This means workers can feel more secure in coming together with their colleagues in forming a union.

Decreasing turnover in service sector industries, by mandating more predictable schedules or paid meal and rest breaks, might make it easier for workers to stay at a given job for a longer period of time and organize. Likewise, guaranteeing eligibility to a dignified amount of unemployment benefits for any worker without and looking for work would improve the likelihood that workers take action on the shop floor.

Workers in several states have already won and can win more policy changes that decrease the risks they face when they go on strike or take other action.

When workers decide to go on strike, they take on significant economic risk to fight for dignity. States like New York, New Jersey, Oregon, and Washington expanded unemployment insurance eligibility to striking workers, just like other employees temporarily out of work. Writers Guild of America East and Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists members put those programs into good use in New York and New Jersey as they struck in the summer of 2023. Other laws that guarantee strong retaliation protections backed by well-funded enforcement for workers who are fired can further boost the likelihood of action.

Setting industry-wide standards decreases employers’ cost differential for having organized employees. In the United States, some jurisdictions have created industrial standards boards like Minnesota’s Nursing Home Workforce Standards Board. Worker, industry, and state government representatives set industry-wide wage, hour, and health and safety standards, with strong worker-led compliance training and enforcement.

When that happens, competing employers face more uniform labor conditions, and unionized employers are able to compete without being at a disadvantage because of their higher labor standards. That means firms can’t compete and profit from keeping wages down and cutting corners on health and safety. As a result, businesses would have less reason to oppose workers unionizing.

State resources can create new opportunities for nonorganized workers to come into contact with labor organizations.

The unemployment insurance system presents one such opportunity. The program has low uptake rates among those eligible. Thanks to the organizing of unions, unemployed workers, and other community organizations during the pandemic, Maine established a community navigator program in which worker organizations helped disadvantaged workers apply for unemployment insurance. It significantly improved access to unemployment insurance for people out of work. It also raised workers’ expectations and changed their attitudes about action on the shop floor.

Other states could replicate this kind of program. They could go further and take inspiration from the Ghent system used by several European countries, in which unions directly administer unemployment insurance and deliver benefits. Similar programs would enable workers to come into contact with and join labor organizations.

Worker protection laws face a crisis of underenforcement. Employers often bet that underfunded public agencies, hampered by decades of austerity, will never enforce state and local laws against them; as a result, too many cut corners, pay less than the minimum wage, refuse to pay overtime, and ignore health and safety rights. Workers have won and can win more laws that increase the chances they catch scofflaw corporations, highlight the benefits of unions, and bolster revenues for their enforcement agencies.

For example, the EmPIRE Worker Protection Act, a bill proposed in New York State, would give workers, whistleblowers, and unions the right to sue on behalf of the state over violations of labor rights for fines. The law would enable workers who fear retaliation to seek help from a union that could bring a case for all workplace violations; as such, it would give workers more reason to turn to the labor movement for help.

The categories and examples above are neither exhaustive nor mutually exclusive but represent just some of what is possible if workers organize — not just on the shop floor but also in city halls and state capitol buildings and take action to enact policy that empowers working people.

Many elected state and local officials are worker allies; some, including many who just won their primary elections, come from the labor movement and will fight fiercely to pass laws that facilitate worker organizing and building strong unions. Other elected officials will not help grow the labor movement. With either group, worker organizing and strategic action is needed for government policy to change: worker allies within the government need external support, while fence-sitters and opponents need external pressure.

The resulting legislative process represents a forge for new tools workers will need to scale their organizing. Once workers win a new policy, it requires implementation to make sure it’s real in people’s lives, then rigorous organizing to make the most of it and use it for unionizing goals. For example, to turn mandatory paid rest and lunch breaks into organizing conversations at lunch, workers must know their protections, rights, and abilities under the law inside and out, unions need to actively educate and support workers taking action and exercising their rights, and the government must enforce the law.

Only then will the policy promise of the soon-to-be-elected crop of pro-worker state and local officials be fulfilled with union density growth.

The federal trial is one among the thousands of cases against Meta and other social media giants, with a common comparative frame appearing time and time again: Big Tobacco. The idea that social media companies are harmful, know it, and not only ignore the dangerous effects of their products but go out of their way to hook consumers, including minors, on them offers a neat parallel with the tobacco industry.

For decades, tobacco companies knew they were harming, even killing, people. They nonetheless lied and insisted they were innocent. Court judgments against them over the years hobbled tobacco makers. Though the fight continues against the industry, which has leveraged its capital and political influence to defend itself, it is a proof-of-concept case that even massive industry players can be held accountable if we’re willing to fight and demand our political and judicial leaders follow suit.

The harms at issue in these cases are neither frivolous nor abstract. By now, the psychological injury these platforms inflict on growing minds are well known: anxiety, depression, compromised focus, and an increased tendency toward self-harm, all encouraged by an architecture designed to be as addictive as possible. But the fight behind these trials is about more than addressing these harms. It is a fight to preserve childhood as a period of maturation and development rather than surrender it to algorithms designed to monetize attention. Breaking free of them can help provide room for children to “touch grass” — to spend time outside, take risks, experience boredom, play with flesh and blood friends.

Social media companies are worth trillions, with Meta alone valued at approximately $1.4 trillion. That’s a lot of money, a lot of power, and a lot of influence. But Silicon Valley’s colonization of children’s minds — and our lifeworld more generally — is not inevitable, nor is the ubiquity of their technologies an eternal barrier to a different world. A barrier? Yes. An insurmountable one? Not necessarily.

Maybe it’s inaccurate to say that nature sometimes heals itself, though. The backlash against social media platforms, and their framing as addictive and predatory, is driven by activists taking part in social movements, individuals using the legal system for its intended purpose, and politicians who haven’t been captured by Big Tech who have the courage to demand justice and to enforce the law. Left to their own devices, tech giants would capture every last second of our daily attention spans, drawing us down their rabbit holes of endless doomscrolling or envy-scrolling, stopping on the occasional advertisement to complete the unholy trinity.

The suite of technologies that destroy mental health and political institutions in equal measure — and for the same reason, profit — is engineered and operated by companies that are neutral on the substance of content as such. They’ll call it free speech or consumer rights, but the concern of companies who long only to capture and keep your attention are interested only in the emotional valence of content: whether the stuff you’re seeing and/or hearing draws you in by provoking a response, whatever it might be. In short, the companies are psychopaths. That’s who we’re dealing with.

Targeting minors is a strategy to get users when they’re young, locking them into an ecosystem that will grow along with them over the miserable years to come. It’s evil, irresponsible, and antisocial in the proper sense of the word. Younger people addicted to social media become older people addicted to social media, just like past generations of teen smokers who took up the habit tended to stick with it for the length of their statistically shorter-than-average lives. You might expect that harming or even killing your consumers makes for a bad business model, but addictive substances and technologies at scale share a capacity to compensate for any losses through consistency and volume. There’s always another person to hook. We keep making them, and the companies keep capturing them.

Individual actions and social movements, necessary and useful as they are, can only do so much to combat the dynamic. Court cases, penalties, and state regulation are essential to controlling company behavior as well as product design and implementation. Society has a right and a duty to defend itself through collective action and the institutions of state, and that right extends to setting limits and expectations for corporations, especially those with an outsize influence on our lives and politics.

We can’t predict what will come of cases brought against Meta and other social media companies, though we can be sure these companies take every measure they can to resist judgment, reform, and taking responsibility for the effects of their products. We can, however, recognize that the current trajectory points toward reform and taking back control of our attention spans — and, in turn, our own health and the health of the body politic. We can build upon these efforts and the victories they’re already yielding to fight harder. There is reason to think we might win. That calls for optimism, even joy, because we’re making good progress on an important matter — and we’re doing it together, socially.

As I have argued in these pages, while heterosexual coupledom is one of the sites where gender inequality is reproduced, it is also a setting where those inequalities can be confronted and transformed. Drawing on our findings in a research project on involuntary celibacy and singlehood, colleagues and I have argued that men and women who lack experience of intimate relationships with one another may find it easier to turn each other into political abstractions rather than flesh-and-blood human beings. Involuntarily single men have a more critical stance toward gender equality, and both men and women describe how they have gained more understanding for each other through long-term romantic engagement. In this sense, love has the possibility to become a “revolutionary laboratory,” and falling in love can have consequences for how we make sense of the world.

So even if the experiment no doubt deserves criticism — both as a symptom of the broader collapse of what was once a genuinely educative broadcaster and as a rather cruel way of turning people’s desire for intimacy into content — the impulse behind it is not quite as absurd as it might initially appear. In fact, it is hard not to see something preferable in it to the current vogue for heteropessimism, a sensibility that has taken root in both feminist and anti-feminist circles.

From opposite political directions, these camps increasingly converge on the same bleak conclusion: that men and women are fundamentally incapable of understanding one another, let alone of forming meaningful, sustaining relationships. As Samanta Pinson Wrisley argues, building on a lecture held by Lauren Berlant, this heteropessimism is problematic partly because it lets go of the possibility for change while making heterosexuality itself the problem, rather than the political context in which women and men meet:

The fact is that heterosexuality has a lot of problems, but it is not the problem. Rather than making heterosexuality the receptacle for all of our bad feelings about the state of sexual politics, which obviously exceed heterosex, feminism needs to acknowledge negative affects as part of the fabric of ambiguity that cloaks sexual politics. Leaning into feminist negativity and uncertainty is a tall order, for doing so means making peace with what Maggie Nelson summarizes as “the fact that everything is not going to be OK, that no one or nothing is coming to save us, and that this is both searingly difficult and also fine.” But let’s not mistake this position for a nihilism or a different form of pessimism; it is, instead, a capacious view of the intricacies of desire, the tensions that define it, and the conflicts that give it life. I will resist going so far as to call it an embracing of hetero-optimism, but it is a move in that direction. May we discover the requisite “skills for bearing this transition,” as Lauren Berlant said in 2019, and rebuild our “confidence in how to be together”.

Seen in this light, Silent Attraction’s clumsy attempt to create the conditions for people to meet begins to look less ridiculous — and perhaps even faintly utopian. Yet watching the show makes clear that we still have a long way to go, to say the least. The women are hardly heteropessimists: for the most part, they are simply asking for equal rights, and most are closer to liberal feminism than radical feminism. Yet the men describe them as “really hardcore.”

When the men try to explain their unease with feminist accounts of women’s subordination and men’s power — pointing, for instance, to men’s high suicide rates or to their own experiences of being unable to express their feelings as young men — some of the women dismiss these arguments as attempts to shift attention away from the “real” problem. In the process, the possibility of a deeper understanding of how gendered patterns harm all of us, albeit in different ways, is lost. So too is the attraction between the men and women.

What does this tell us? Perhaps that political change can begin with something as simple as attraction: the willingness to encounter another person before reducing them to a political category. But attraction alone is hardly enough. For intimacy to become politically transformative, we also need a way of understanding our relationships that takes gendered power seriously without turning men and women into clear-cut camps of winners and losers.

The point is not to deny the inequalities that shape our relationships, but to recognize that their effects are more complicated than a simple distribution of privilege and suffering. Gendered power does not leave one side unscathed and the other victorious. In different ways, we all find ourselves on the losing side of a social order that makes it harder to understand one another — and, ultimately, to be together.

The ideas articulated in his essay, however, had not always been so well received in the industry. During the first Trump administration, Silicon Valley reacted with widespread concern as the White House sanctioned and blacklisted top Chinese tech firms, worried that decoupling American tech firms from the enormous Chinese market could harm the tech industry’s growth and revenue. After the Biden administration signaled bipartisan political support for the new Cold War by implementing sweeping semiconductor export controls on China, the industry rankled, with some US chip firms lobbying furiously against them.

Today, however, Aschenbrenner’s manifesto is a foundational text in the growing Silicon Valley consensus around the new Cold War. In his own 6,500 word essay this month, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg wrote that obstructions to the AI build-out’s necessary energy and data center infrastructure represented a national security risk to US dominance in the AI race with China. Others, from liberals like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic chief Dario Amodei to right-wing venture capital heavyweights Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, agree.

In an address at the conservative Hudson Institute that quoted Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, Palantir CEO Alex Karp put it bluntly. When it comes to the AI race, he said, “There are only two cultures that are going to win in the next year. It’s going to be us or China.”

Ironically for Aschenbrenner, it was Chinese tech competition that brought his hedge fund crashing down. On July 30, in a seeming repeat of January 2025’s DeepSeek moment, a Chinese start-up named Moonshot AI released a cheaper, open-weight AI model that bested its closed-source US counterparts in some benchmarks, sending AI stocks — and Aschenbrenner’s highly leveraged portfolio — tumbling.

The Moonshot moment, however, also highlighted material differences between the US and Chinese tech sectors, much of which can be traced to the state policy that shaped them. The Chinese government has kept a tight rein on its tech industry. After Jack Ma, the billionaire head of the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, criticized the country’s financial regulators in 2020, the state torpedoed his firm’s historic $37 billion public stock offering, removing him from control of the company and splitting Alibaba into six different firms.

It was the start of a sweeping regulatory crackdown that disciplined the nation’s technology industry and wiped out $2 trillion in value from the sector. Today the Chinese state has ushered in AI development plans focused more on practicality than dreams of superintelligence, a strategy that prioritizes efficiently diffusing AI tools and services throughout the economy and has been described by Xi Jinping as an approach “strongly oriented towards applications.”

By contrast, until the 2020 election and the arrival of Lina Khan to head the Biden administration’s Federal Trade Commission, decades of bipartisan consensus blessed the emergence of America’s tech monopolies, placing technology policy and related industrial strategy in the hands of a few powerful Silicon Valley players.

Even the rise of a new technology like AI highlighted the centralization of power in Silicon Valley. Microsoft entered into exclusive deals and profit-sharing partnerships with OpenAI, while Google and Amazon took major stakes in OpenAI’s main rival, Anthropic. Nvidia, which controls 90 percent of the AI semiconductor market, has similar arrangements with much of the AI industry. Much of the trillions in capital flowing into the AI investment boom represents gains extracted from state-sanctioned monopolies that span cloud services, online advertising, social media, and e-commerce, as well as hardware monopolies like Nvidia.

Both the US and Chinese technology industries are products of their respective states’ policies, neither of which have been particularly democratic. The very first words of Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness manifesto describe the results of the long-standing US approach to industrial policy and technology regulation: “You can see the future first in San Francisco,” he wrote. “Right now, there are perhaps a few hundred people, most of them in San Francisco and the AI labs, that have situational awareness.” His proximity to the concentrated power and capital of America’s inventor-investor-policymakers facilitated his vision. “Let me tell you what we see.”

What he sees is what the CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and Amazon see, along with many of their twenty-four-year-old engineers: opportunity. The idea of looming conflict with China has its conveniences, offering an existential AI arms race that entices funders and increases firm valuations while providing built-in marketing for products that are still searching for consumer desire.

Some benefits are more personal. The Situational Awareness treatise enabled Aschenbrenner, who lacked investing experience entirely, to raise an initial $100 million for his hedge fund — which, in the span of under two years, reached a scale that its peers took decades to achieve — and cushioned his fall from grace when it came crashing down around him. Today investors are clamoring to reinvest.

But the ultimate return on this vision is even more lucrative. At its core, the new Cold War with China is a framework that provides Silicon Valley crucial insulation from democracy. At a congressional hearing in 2018 where he was grilled about an infamous Facebook data breach, Mark Zuckerberg’s notes laid out the strategy as simply as it gets: “Break up FB? US tech companies key asset for America; break up strengthens Chinese companies.” A photograph of the notes, taken by the Associated Press, quickly went viral.

The national security refrain developed into a commonly used defense against antitrust and tech regulation efforts during the Biden administration. In 2021, faced with the possible passage of a bipartisan slate of antitrust bills aimed at their industry, top Silicon Valley firms organized a letter from a dozen senior Trump, Obama, and George W. Bush administration national security officials, including former Defense Secretary and CIA Director Leon Panetta, later a key speaker at the 2024 Democratic National Convention. Legislation to rein in American tech giants would degrade America’s military and intelligence dominance, they wrote, a regulatory mistake that would come “at the expense of U.S. economic and national security” and “cede U.S. tech leadership to China.” It was a useful argument: despite bipartisan backing in Congress and growing public support, none of the antitrust bills were passed.

Today the Cold War with China that Leopold Aschenbrenner so breathlessly relayed is a potent shield both for Silicon Valley and the national security state. A bipartisan backlash against the growing power of Silicon Valley to dictate the terms of American life is underway, with Americans across the political spectrum finding common ground in opposing the automation of their jobs, data centers and their associated energy costs, the increasing prevalence of surveillance tools like Flock cameras, and the spread of extractive rent-seeking tools like algorithmic price-fixing of groceries and apartment rents. Against this backdrop, arguments about national security and great-power rivalry offer an attractive way for tech firms to short-circuit growing public demands for control over the technologies shaping their lives.

The new Cold War with China offers the national security establishment a similar opportunity to safeguard its own power from democratic control. Recent disastrous choices, including Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the US war on Iran, are significantly weakening the foreign policy establishment’s hold on both parties and igniting support for antiwar politics. A new existential threat abroad that must be managed by experienced operatives with the commensurate security clearances, however, could provide fertile ground for re-entrenchment.

Neither trillions of dollars in AI investment nor a worldwide program of gunboat coercion can conceal the slipping grasp of Silicon Valley and the national security state over American public opinion. How many people desire to live out Leopold Aschenbrenner’s vision — a world in which a few hundred people scattered across Silicon Valley AI labs and Washington national security posts are afforded “situational awareness” through their proximity to unassailable power and can act to shape the world accordingly? Few to none. The shadow of the new Cold War with China points to the unanswered question straining at the heart of Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Silicon Valley vision: How much longer will Americans be willing to surrender democratic control of the world-structuring institutions that shape their lives?

Before getting into the comparison, it’s worth establishing what exactly the House Freedom Caucus is. The caucus was founded in January 2015. The impetus for its founding was the failure of far-right Congressmember Mick Mulvaney to win leadership of the Republican Study Committee (RSC). Founded by New Right impresario Paul Weyrich in the 1970s to pull the party right, by the 1990s the RSC had become a central Republican leadership institution in the House. During Barack Obama’s administration, frustration with the RSC had mounted among the most conservative House Republicans, as the committee tended to support Speaker John Boehner in cutting budgetary compromises with the Obama administration rather than shutting the government down. When Mulvaney lost the RSC leadership contest to Texas energy executive Bill Flores, he and his ideological confreres determined that a new organization was needed for conservatives unwilling to compromise with liberalism.

While the RSC leadership vote was the proximal cause, the founders of the HFC were also reacting against the failure of the House Tea Party Caucus. This caucus had been founded in July 2010 as the organization of the new belligerent right that was then storming Republican primaries. But despite the attention the caucus and its members commanded, by summer 2012 the organization was defunct, having failed, as an organization, to have much influence on anything.

Mulvaney and his comrades, notably Jim Jordan of Ohio and Raul Labrador of Idaho, were determined to avoid a repeat of the Tea Party Caucus. Instead of a group that was publicity-seeking and undisciplined, they wanted a group that would be secretive and highly coordinated. To that end, they shut out House members like Louie Gohmert and Thomas Massie, who, while deeply conservative, had reputations as undisciplined loose cannons. The new caucus would be invitation-only and, unlike most caucuses, would not make its membership public. It would also bind its members by rules like the 80 percent threshold, which held that if 80 percent of the caucus supported a vote, the remaining 20 percent would have to follow.

Very quickly, the caucus became a thorn in Speaker John Boehner’s side, denouncing him and voting against bills like Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding and trade deal authority for the president. Boehner used his power as Speaker to retaliate, removing HFC members from subcommittees and cutting some off from National Republican Congressional Committee funds. In July, Mark Meadows filed a motion to vacate the chair, calling for a vote on Boehner’s speakership in the middle of the term. It was an extraordinary move, the first such motion in nearly a century. In order to avoid a bruising leadership fight that might end in defeat anyways, Boehner announced his retirement. He was replaced by Paul Ryan.

In the 2016 presidential race, the HFC didn’t play much of a role. The group was opposed to Trump, who it correctly saw as totally uncommitted to fiscal conservatism. It was largely divided between Ted Cruz, who had built a strong connection with the HFC, and Rand Paul, whose dogmatic libertarianism appealed to several of the group’s leaders. Though discipline and unity had been the caucus’s founding watchwords, it did not attempt to make a coordinated intervention into the Republican primary.

When Donald Trump became president, the posture of the group shifted considerably. While it continued pushing for far-right priorities, it did not engage in the kind of all-out warfare it had directed against Boehner. Instead, the group often compromised, and when it did fight, it often lost.

On taxes, perhaps the cause closest to the caucus’s heart, there were two priorities in 2017. First, it wanted Trump’s tax cut to be deficit-neutral so it wouldn’t increase the deficit. In this, it was in accordance with the House leadership. Paul Ryan wanted the same thing. But it was opposed to Ryan’s means of paying for it — a border adjustment tax (BAT) that would amount to a huge tax increase on importers. This formed its second priority. Ryan would junk the BAT in summer 2017, though the HFC could hardly claim sole credit. The tax spurred opposition from a huge sector of business, from retailers to the Koch brothers, the latter of which used their connections with the Trump White House to turn the administration against the BAT as well. But with the BAT gone, there was no way to make the tax cut deficit-neutral without huge spending cuts that would derail the entire bill. The HFC pushed for these, but got nowhere, and the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed without any compensating spending cuts or new revenue.

The second major fight for the HFC was Obamacare repeal. The caucus wanted a full repeal. Here the HFC did come into serious conflict with the Republican leadership and the Trump administration and was regularly denounced by both. Two members actually left the caucus in the midst of this battle. Paul Ryan had developed a bill, the American Health Care Act (AHCA), that would repeal much of Obamacare but left in place some of the original bill’s new taxes and also offered refundable tax credits to help households purchase health insurance. The HFC refused to support the bill, and lacking the votes to pass it, the House leadership canceled its scheduled vote on it. It subsequently passed amendments that would bring the bill closer in line with what the HFC wanted.

Though it didn’t win all of its demands, the HFC agreed to support the bill. Mark Meadows explained that “had we not come around . . . there would have been the typical stereotype that they’ll never get to ‘yes.’” But even in compromising, the HFC was unable to achieve its demands. The revisions to the bill had made it too conservative for moderate Republicans, who pulled their support, dooming the AHCA once and for all.

When the Democrats took back the House in 2018, the HFC faded in prominence. The reason is simple. To be a minority of a majority is to have some power. But to be a minority of a minority is simply to be powerless. From 2019–2023, the HFC voted basically the same as other Republicans. It joined the fight to defend Donald Trump against impeachment, causing one of its members, Justin Amash, to leave, and also worked to punish Liz Cheney for voting for impeachment after January 6. But neither of these distinguished the HFC from the bulk of House Republicans. When its party was in the minority, the caucus simply did not have very much power.

All of this changed after the GOP took the house back in 2022. As soon as the new Congress came in, the HFC was determined to exercise its power. Though the vote to confirm Kevin McCarthy, who had led the GOP conference since Paul Ryan’s retirement in 2019, would normally have been pro forma, it turned into a bitter struggle between the HFC and McCarthy’s allies. The caucus demanded McCarthy and the conference leadership take up various fights, such as impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and creating a congressional subcommittee on the supposed persecution of January 6 rioters. McCarthy also agreed to give HFC members more committee assignments, to refrain from intervening in primaries without an incumbent, and, most consequentially, to bring back the motion to vacate the chair, which allows a single Republican to initiate a new election for Speaker.

McCarthy’s speakership was hamstrung from the beginning by resistance from the HFC. As he attempted to pass budget bills that Joe Biden was willing to sign and hence avert a government shutdown, the HFC continually denounced him, demanding cuts that would make the bills unacceptable to Biden. As a result, in the spring and the fall McCarthy ended up passing more liberal budgets than he would have preferred, because he had to rely on Democratic votes to pass them. Though the HFC succeeded in weakening McCarthy, its actions made the actual policy outputs of this period more liberal.

In October, the axe fell. HFC member Matt Gaetz filed the motion to vacate, and the House voted 216–210 to remove McCarthy. The race to replace McCarthy was messy. Four candidates tried and failed to win majorities. Mike Johnson, a fourth-term congressmember from Louisiana, finally succeeded after a chaotic three weeks. Though not a member of the HFC, Johnson had attended caucus meetings and received money from the group’s PAC. His election was widely viewed as a triumph for the caucus.

Yet while Johnson was quite friendly to the HFC, for the remainder of Biden’s presidency, the group had little success in shaping policy. The Senate still held a slim Democratic majority, so any bill the House hoped to pass needed to be acceptable to Chuck Schumer. When Johnson pushed through appropriations bills that did little to advance HFC priorities, caucus members wailed and gnashed their teeth but could not change the legislation and would not try to remove Johnson over the betrayal.

The Republicans’ victory in the 2024 elections returned the party to unified control over the federal government. The margin in the House, however, was quite small. As such, it might be expected that the HFC would yield disproportionate power in this environment. However, the reality has been rather different. As political scientist Frances Lee has shown, “During the first seven months of 2025, the HFC collapsed as a distinct voting bloc in the House Republican conference.” When Trump wanted to pass a continuing resolution that sustained spending levels appropriated under Biden, the HFC unanimously supported him, despite some complaint. Similarly, when Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill failed to include spending cuts savage enough to offset its tax cuts, the HFC released a document criticizing the bill, and five members voted against a rule to proceed. But when Johnson continued pushing it, the HFC folded and unanimously voted for the bill it had just described as “morally and fiscally bankrupt.”

As the 2026 midterms approach, the situation of the HFC has deteriorated even further. Almost the entire leadership is leaving the House. In the statehouses, where local franchises of the HFC have been set up, it is losing ground. Wyoming had been its most successful state. The caucus had won majority control of the statehouse in 2024 and announced an ambitious legislative agenda. But after it failed to pass most of it, its reputation sank. In the primaries this week, the caucus lost thirteen members in the House and six in the Senate.

To sum up, as of this writing, the future of the House Freedom Caucus is uncertain. It does not exist as a distinct voting bloc anymore, and its leaders are departing. If, as seems likely, the Democrats win control of the House in November, its power will be diminished even further, as it returns to the status of a minority of a minority.

Where does all of this leave the argument that socialists in office should emulate the caucus’s practice of what Matthew Green has called “legislative hardball”? In my view, there are three things that stand out as particularly relevant from the experience of the HFC.

First, the returns to legislative hardball are highest when the caucus is a minority of a majority and particularly when there is an opposite-party president. In these situations, the caucus could use its size and discipline to compel the House leadership to enter into fights with the administration that it otherwise would have avoided. These were also the situations in which the caucus succeeded in winning more power for itself in the form of committee apointments and so on.

When the caucus was a minority of a minority, it was effectively powerless and indistinguishable from the rest of its party. When a party majority was combined with a same-party president, the caucus often made noise and complained about policies being made but was generally unsuccessful in shaping the policy outputs.

Second, the caucus’s actions often resulted in policy moving the opposite direction from what it preferred. Its obstructionism led its party leadership to look for votes on the other side of the aisle in some circumstances. Since some compromises had to be made in order to attract these votes, the resulting legislation was more liberal than it would have been if the caucus had simply supported it. Recalcitrance can have real costs.

Finally, the HFC’s accomplishments have fallen far short of its ambitions. HFC members hoped that its work would build the caucus into a kind of third party in American politics (effectively a right-wing version of the party surrogate model that is popular in the Democratic Socialists of America). This has plainly failed. The caucus has failed to sustain itself as an independent voice in Congress and is deteriorating institutionally as well. The very tactics that gave it its power are in large part responsible for this deterioration. The caucus gained a reputation as obstructionists and is unpopular with much of the rest of the party.

There are a few implications for socialists in office. On the positive side, the conditions in which socialist legislative hardball are most likely to be successful are those in which the Democratic Party has a majority in Congress and an opposite-party president. This is the situation that will likely obtain after the midterms. Given that, I think it makes sense to look for some opportunities for the new socialist bloc in Congress to throw its weight around. However, it is worth saying that socialists in Congress do not have the kind of organizational coherence the HFC operated with. They do not have an official caucus or any institutional means of cooperating. Building this should be a priority.

On the whole, however, I think the experience of the HFC should lead socialists to be cautious about legislative hardball as a general stance. The risks are very high. A socialist caucus that rejects legislation as not left-wing enough, only to lead the House leadership to look to pass it with Republican votes instead, is not accomplishing very much for the cause of socialism. And obstructionism within the party can actually isolate a caucus instead of winning a leading role for it.

In other words, I’m afraid the lessons of the House Freedom Caucus for socialists are fairly limited. This is a pity, because the task in which socialist legislators are now engaged, as members of a party they do not lead, is a tremendously difficult one in which there are few models from which to learn. But the experience of the HFC does at least provide some guidance as to the risks of following its example.

There are so many recent examples that it’s difficult to know where to begin. Remember when Trump and co. just searched a glossary of vaguely left-ish words — including “history,” “culture,” and “climate” — and then just mindlessly cancelled whichever grant or contract came up in the results, even if it screwed over their own voters? In the process of enforcing their own particular brand of political correctness, Donald Trump and the GOP defunded everything from research into diseases contracted by firefighters on September 11 and cancer studies, to Holocaust-related history projects and programs for disabled teens — all simply because they used words that made them uncomfortable.

This was on top of scores of government workers placed on creepy public watch lists run by right-wing groups linked to the White House for the crime of having political opinions that offend the MAGA movement. At least half of those workers were forced on leave or ended up leaving their jobs.

Nothing like any of this happened under what Trumpworld calls the “woke and weaponized” government run by Joe Biden. In fact, the big, bad, woke, cancel-culture scandal under that administration was that Twitter, both under government pressure but sometimes of its own accord, throttled the reach of some conservative accounts — a serious matter, but one that doesn’t nearly rise to the intensity and scale of the speech-related repression we’ve seen since Trump took office.

Speaking of which, that tech censorship of Bad Opinions hasn’t stopped under Trump, even though he won promising to end censorship and signed an executive order supposedly doing just that. The only difference between the old regime and the new one is the targets: instead of anti-vaccine posts, social media censors now target abortion-pill providers, pro-Palestinian advocacy, anti-CEO comments, pro-LGBTQ posts, and more. In fact, MAGA has expanded its woke weaponization of social media beyond the digital realm, revoking people’s visas, denying them entry into the United States, pulling their travel privileges, and more because of posts and memes critical of Trump, his allies, or US policy.

This is all anecdotal, you might retort. But MAGA cancel culture isn’t worse because it feels like it is. We know it is, by the numbers.

After the murder of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk last year, Trump, his Vice President J. D. Vance, and their allies went on a cancel culture crusade, publicly demanding the heads of anyone daring to make utter a critical word about the late commentator — a speech stricture, by the way, that they themselves regularly violate.

The result? More than six hundred Americans were fired, suspended, investigated, or otherwise disciplined by their bosses for saying things that triggered the White House and MAGA world, according to a review by Reuters, the majority of them educators, including fifty academics and top administrators at universities.

Compare that to the twenty-two academics who lost their jobs in the “Woke 1” frenzy of 2020 and the 160 people fired for their pro-Palestinian advocacy over 2024 during the start of what we might call the “Watermelon Scare” — the ongoing and yearslong hysteria around, and resulting repression of, advocacy for Palestinian rights. Nor did those episodes see the threat of state power mobilized to try to get a comedian thrown off the air for personally offending a left-leaning politician, but this is exactly what happened after Kirk’s death, after Trump was angered by a joke late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel made. That intimidation effort against broadcast news networks is still ongoing, by the way.

In other words, not only is “Woke 1” objectively not as bad as “MAGA woke,” it doesn’t even come close.

In a separate Reuters analysis, the outlet found that the Trump administration was slapped down by federal judges — ten of them appointed by Republicans — in a whopping seventy-five First Amendment cases in his term so far, out of a total of ninety-three. By contrast, over the “woke and weaponized” Biden administration’s entire four years, federal judges weighed in on twenty-seven First Amendment challenges to its policies — a fraction of what Trump’s already racked up — and ruled against it in thirteen of those, or less than half, compared to Trump’s rate of 81 percent.

Speaking of the Watermelon Scare, the crackdown on criticism of Israeli policy and defense of Palestinian justice is worse than ever under Trump. It turns out, somewhat bizarrely, that it’s criticism of the foreign country of Israel that is the most sensitive spot for the nominally America First movement.

Donald Trump’s forces have arrested, locked up, and tried to deport, often successfully, hundreds of students merely for saying things that the MAGA movement finds offensive — specifically, criticism of Israel. It revoked one pro-Palestinian activist’s green card explicitly for criticizing Israel and is still trying to deport him today. Another activist had her visa revoked for cowriting an op-ed in her college newspaper criticizing the university’s response to the genocide in Gaza. They are just two of many. This has been condemned as dangerous and un-American across the board, by both the typically more left-leaning American Civil Liberties Union and the more right-leaning Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

Both Trump’s administration and the MAGA movement behind him regularly conflate antisemitism with criticism of Israel — a conflation that is itself, by their own definition (“Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel”), antisemitic. Using this dubious and offensive idea, Trump’s people have strong-armed universities into carrying out heavy-handed policing of what their students and faculty say, all in the name of protecting Jews on campus — by which they actually mean pro-Israel activists — from being offended.

We know this is what they really mean, because it is Jews themselves who have often been targeted in this crusade, a form of pro-Israel cancel culture masquerading as a campaign against antisemitism.

In fact, a whistleblower complaint just this week from within the Department of Justice laid out how much of this was driven not by actual concern about antisemitism but by MAGA world’s determination to cancel people for their pro-Palestinian speech. DOJ attorneys were, for instance, ordered to open an investigation into Columbia University based on a single New York Post article that detailed how protesters said and carried pro-Palestinian slogans and items. In another instance, investigators were ordered to do interviews with Middle East studies professors, Muslim ones in particular, at Brown University who had been accused of nothing, in order to trap them into saying something they could then call problematic.

All of this has led to an unusual situation where — in the words of the Forward, a pro-Israel, Jewish publication — the Trump administration has both “sought to ban diversity measures meant to benefit minority groups, while in several cases requiring universities to create new policies to benefit Jews.” This is at the same time that cheerleaders for Trump’s cancel culture policies speak in language indistinguishable from “woke” progressive college students — like billionaire Bill Ackman, who complained about “how aggressive, intimidating, and disruptive [protests against the war in Gaza] could be to Jewish and Israeli students” and that “racism against white people has become considered acceptable by many.”

This form of MAGA wokeness hasn’t just negatively impacted the Left. It has also boomeranged on Trump’s own movement, as when figures serving or appointed to serve in his administration were thrown out for their criticism of Israel, which a rival political faction within Trump’s movement cynically mislabeled as antisemitism. Ironically, several out-and-out antisemites continue to serve in prominent positions under Trump with none of the same objection from this faction — because just like with “Woke 1,” the exponents of MAGA Woke often use cynical accusations of bigotry as a way to litigate completely separate political disagreements.

The excesses of “Woke 1” were very real and unhelpful, which the Left has to acknowledge if it wants to be able to move on from that period.

But it doesn’t hold a candle to the frenzy of MAGA-driven wokeness that we are in the middle of right now, where it’s not just the private sector bringing the hammer down on workers who offend Trump and his movement but where the far-reaching use of state power is punishing and even criminalizing people for speech that MAGA figures regard as politically incorrect. Those efforts have seen people locked up, fired, doxed, exiled from the country, and even criminally prosecuted for their speech.

This is all objectively worse than anything that happened in 2020–21. It would be good if, in between obsessing over dumb, years-old tweets about Thanksgiving and whiteness, the media grilled Trump-backed candidates about some of it.

“Universal snow clearing” seems almost like a parody of what a Canadian socialist running for municipal office would campaign on. But for Damian Mikhail, who is running for Waterloo Ward Six, it made sense. Harsh winters and inconsistent — or a complete lack of — snow clearing means that walking around becomes basically impossible.

“That universal snow clearing argument has tended to be quite universally liked. Among young families and seniors, especially,” Mikhail told Jacobin.

Mikhail was formerly the president of the Waterloo University Student Association as well as cochair of the Ontario New Democratic Party youth wing. His first major foray into politics was fighting to “return night transit to Waterloo and stop cuts to the local LRT [light rail transit]” through the New Democratic Party campus club.

Ward Six contains the University of Waterloo but also extends into established residential neighborhoods, creating sharp divisions between the student areas and nonstudent areas, as well as between renters and homeowners. The challenge for Mikhail will be running up the vote count in the student neighborhoods while remaining competitive elsewhere. Turning out students — notoriously difficult to mobilize in municipal elections — will be a challenge in and of itself.

Mikhail is prioritizing door-knocking over digital communication. He says he has already knocked on every door in the ward and encountered a positive response. The last election’s turnout was 23 percent, and the incumbent won with only 896 votes cast.

Mikhail’s platform — three policies that can fit on the back of a postcard — reflects a trend toward a kind of socialist minimalism. In addition to universal snow clearing, he proposes a renters’ protection office “with a mandate for proactive and consistent inspections of rentals in the city and to report on the issues plaguing renters,” as well as a municipal housing corporation that will function as both a public builder and housing operator.

The policy, if enacted, could begin to reshape housing in Waterloo. Despite its avowedly socialist character, Mikhail presents it as less an ideological project than a demonstration of the possible strengths of a municipal government willing to flex its muscles.

“This is actually a conversation we have had as a campaign team. How ideological do we want our kind of framing to be? I’m Palestinian, and a lot of my organizing has been around Palestinian [liberation]. . . .  I’m obviously a very kind of partisan person in many senses.” Mikhail said.

“But the conversation that we wanted to have is that there . . . tends to be a belief that nothing is possible, that change isn’t possible, that the government can’t really do anything for you.

“What we want to do with our platform is give very concrete actions that the city can take that will just improve your life, and the idea for that is, from a more philosophical perspective, is to show the people of Waterloo that you can expect something from your government, that your government should be actively improving your life.”

Solomon Yi-Kieran, another student organizer turned candidate, has been campaigning since February — first for the nomination to run on the Coalition of Progressive Electors (COPE) party line, and now as one of the party’s five candidates running for city council.

“One of the benefits of a long campaign is that it has been amazing to see just how much momentum we’ve been building when we’re out there. . . .  I went from being a student organizer whose base was mainly other students to being able to go to any part of the city, do a canvass, and get recognized by every couple of people when I’m out there.”

Vancouver is unique among major Canadian cities in having a well-established municipal party system. This provides some advantages: the formalized party form allows socialist candidates to organize throughout the year and forge strong connections with social movements that, in turn, help promote all their candidates. 

But COPE, Vancouver’s oldest active left-wing party, has won the mayor’s seat and a council majority only once, in 2002. For much of the 2010s, it had no representation on council and was generally considered to be in decline. Then in a 2025 by-election, the city elected Sean Orr — a democratic socialist, dishwasher, and punk vocalist. His victory helped COPE mount a resurgence. Yi-Kieran is emblematic of COPE’s renaissance. Young, social media savvy, and avowedly a radical.

Yi-Kieran has blended together a folksy charm and a militant attitude to produce a constant deluge of videos. In contrast to Mikhail’s minimalism, Yi-Kieran embraces a more wide-ranging politics, campaigning on everything from more municipal Wi-Fi hotspots and universal metro cards to banning surveillance pricing. It fits the Vancouver ecosystem of young, downwardly mobile students and graduates who are tapped in online.

“If we as socialists want to be educating voters, given the kind of horrifically low turnout for municipal elections, we need to be using social media to connect with people in an organic and genuine way.” Yi-Kieran believes. “No matter what policy we’re talking about, the same through lines are always there. It is about equitable access to good services, no matter what part of the city you live in. . . .  It is about making sure that we have a government that is listening to people.”

One of Yi-Kieran’s principal challenges will be the uniqueness of Vancouver’s electoral system. A candidate’s prospects are tied partly to the fortunes of the party, but councilors are also elected at-large rather than ward-by-ward. Rather than representing specific areas or constituencies, each elector votes for up to ten candidates from across the city. It makes campaigning much harder.

“As someone who takes transit and does not drive, you need to go to literally every part of this city for campaigning. It is definitely a challenge.”

“I spend a lot of time on public transit,” Yi-Kieran joked, “but at the same time, I’ve also really enjoyed the way I’ve gotten to campaign within this system. In that, I am literally going to every corner of the city. I am becoming intimately familiar with every single neighborhood.”

Yi-Kieran, who says their dream job would be a high school teacher, has embraced a rhetoric of class war. In their acceptance speech for the COPE nomination, Yi-Kieran embodied the renewed vigor of COPE.

“We didn’t start this class war, but we’re going to win it.”

Few candidates in Canada have taken the fight to landlords as directly as Chiara Padovani. A tenant organizer and social worker who helped lead one of Toronto’s largest-ever tenant strikes, Padovani is running for city council in York South–Weston (YSW).

Unlike Mikhail and Yi-Kieran, Padovani has run before. She ran in 2022, coming within ninety-four votes of unseating incumbent Frances Nunziata, whose office was later found guilty of using city resources to campaign, a violation of the city’s code for councilors.

Padovani’s campaign didn’t end with her defeat. During the race, Padovani had turned her office into a local organizing hub, distributing tenant’s guides door-to-door and helping establish a building-based tenant union. Afterward she was concerned that losing the physical space would slow the nascent organizing effort in YSW. YSW, a deeply racialized, quickly gentrifying, and high-density tenant area, was a prime spot for such organizing.

“I called up about 200 of my election supporters who had contributed to my campaign to run for city council, and I told them I really want to try to keep the office open,” Padovani said. She asked if people could chip in CA$5 or $10 a month.

It worked. She was soon able to guarantee enough reliable income from monthly donations to extend the lease. It has been “the foundation of resourcing this movement, just by having a physical space in the community where people can meet and organize.”

What began as a campaign has since become more durable. It is now an organization operating between electoral and movement work and building a measure of worker power in YSW. “You can’t run an election on a socialist mandate for tenants’ rights if you’re not organizing the tenant community and getting concrete material wins for them to have some faith that things can change.”

There is a confidence and professionalism to Padovani’s current campaign, refined through years of organizing. In many respects, Padovani has acted as YSW’s shadow councilor — hosting community skate events, dealing with constituency work, and building a strong foundation for her current run.

Consequently, the campaign feels almost like an incumbent run. But that just reflects the strength of the movement Padovani has helped build in a corner of Toronto. The first campaign fed into the movement, and now the movement feeds back into the campaign.

“Between the electoral campaign and the organizing campaigns, we’re not doing this to make a point. We’re doing it to win. We need to win material differences in people’s lives. Like, this is what’s at stake. If I wanted to just make points, I would be on Twitter all day, right?”

The Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 transformed Canada’s socialist and labor movements. But it wasn’t until 1934 that Winnipeg elected its first socialist mayor and, with him, a labor-controlled city council. It was a rare victory for Canadian municipal socialists. Sewer socialism never found its footing here as it did south of the border. Instead, political energy was focused on winning provincial governments and chasing the dream of a socialist prime minister.

There are many reasons for the renewed interest in municipal socialism: The worsening housing crisis, the cost-of-living crisis, and the growing failure of government to address either. But Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York City has altered what people perceive as the political horizon. Winning power locally has never seemed more possible.

Winnipeg’s 1934 socialist city council would be the last. It was a disappointing experience for many. Unable to make significant changes, the movement fell apart. Winning is not a guarantee of victory. But a victory from either Mikhail, Yi-Kieran, or Padovani would establish a beachhead for a different kind of Canadian city — one capable of proving that government can materially improve people’s lives.

The result of all this disaffiliation is an exceptionally low-trust generation. The General Social Survey recently asked Americans if most people could, in fact, even be trusted. Their answers depended entirely on when they were born: the Silent Generation (born just before World War II) had the highest levels of trust, with 41 percent agreeing that “most people can be trusted” and 51 percent instead saying “you can’t be too careful in dealing with people.” For Gen Z, only 13 percent agreed that most people could be trusted and a whopping 74 percent answering “you can’t be too careful.” This raises a big question: How do progressives plan on winning the kinds of transformative social policies they campaign on, policies that presuppose a strong degree of social trust, if the next generation of Americans have so very little of it?

None of this is a surprise to Murphy. The senator from Connecticut recently published a book on the subject, The Crisis of the Common Good: The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America. You don’t have to have read it to agree that when it comes to the “common good” we do, indeed, have a crisis on our hands. Demsas agrees too — she even praises Murphy for making a sustained political argument instead of using the book as campaign propaganda.

Yet Demsas thinks Murphy is nuts to call for a “cult of the common good” — which she likens to an actual cult. Whatever Murphy is arguing, it’s clear he doesn’t want to sign everyone up for Heaven’s Gate. The “cult” language is certainly a provocation, meant to juxtapose our neglect of the common good with the popular cults of profit and technology regularly celebrated in the business press. No doubt Demsas knows as much, but she nonetheless tries to paint Murphy as part of some lunatic fringe. Why?

Murphy, it should be said, is among the very few senators who have actually acknowledged the widespread feeling of anomie and alienation growing in our society. Recently, he garnered headlines for calling attention to the ways in which private equity had taken over youth sports, even preventing parents from filming their kids’ hockey games. Since at least the mid-century, according to political scientists like Robert D. Putnam, Americans have been sliding down a slope of ever-increasing loneliness. In just the past half century, community bonds have dissolved, romantic love has become harder to come by, church pews have emptied out, associations have atrophied, labor unions have been crushed, and whole towns have been hollowed out by deindustrialization. During that same period, the rich have gotten richer, markets have grown wider, and technological progress has taken off. To fill this void, we’ve been fed a steady diet of social media and cheap consumer goods. It doesn’t seem to be working out so well. The result is that, according to new research reviewed by the Financial Times, “on an average day in 2023, one in 10 young Americans aged between 23 and 29 did not spend a single minute interacting face to face with another person.” But according to Demsas, we’re not meant to talk about that. Just go to church, she argues.

To be sure, Murphy is no socialist, let alone a radical. Yet he at least understands that Democrats — or better yet, Americans — need more than just “abundance” if they are to have any chance of fixing this country’s profound social problems. Demsas’s polemic, on the other hand, reveals a kind of harrowing fear about Murphy’s concerns. She likens his call for a renewed public commitment to the common good to a literal witch hunt. Here’s Demsas:

Now, obviously, I don’t think Murphy supports hanging women for witchcraft. Nor does punishing someone for price gouging necessarily lead to witch trials. But it’s also not an accident that a community with enough coercive power to punish someone for charging a lot for nails ends up using that coercive power in other realms of life as well. The regulation of prices, religious orthodoxy, and women’s behavior all stemmed from the same view: that “the community” could define the good, interpret dissent as moral disorder, and punish the dissenter.

The crux of her argument here is that no demos could ever satisfactorily define the common good. Live and let live — and let everyone’s individual consumer preferences be catered to, regardless of the damage done.

But here’s the thing: we are already living Demsas’s dream. The America of the 2020s is largely her world, not Murphy’s. And it’s her version of liberalism that is hegemonic, not Murphy’s. Where today do we find widespread, stultifying traditionalism? Excluding ultrareligious sects, where can you even find these overbearing “communities” she fears? In fact, most Americans complain about the opposite problem. The rise of antisocial behavior and the inability of the “community” (or whatever is left of it) to enforce even basic social norms. Today our political subjectivity is thoroughly neoliberal: atomized, asocial, and acquisitive. According to research sponsored by the Wall Street Journal and NORC, the only social value that has increased in popular appeal since 2020 is how much we see “money” as of paramount importance. America no longer has citizens, just consumers.

Still, the trouble is, according to Demsas, that while liberalism “begins with the presumption of freedom,” Murphy “begins with an Official Version of the Good Life.” This is untrue. Of course liberalism has its own version of the Good Life: it is found in Demsas’s unflinching defense of individual autonomy, echoing Isaiah Berlin’s concept of “negative liberty.” For liberalism, the highest good is the freedom of the individual to express their desires however they choose, so long as that desire doesn’t inhibit another. Importantly, as Demsas is careful to note, this entails a wide degree of economic liberalism — the freedom of markets. Yet what happens when this kind of freedom has liberated us from the very bonds that hold us together as a society? What happens when markets have dissolved so much of what we share in common that we’re left as strangers? Are liberals prepared to argue that contemporary market society is good simply because we are free to buy cheap junk on Amazon?

I suspect much of what lies behind Demsas’s surprisingly vituperative reaction to the mild-mannered senator is that Murphy has been vocal about America’s broken economic system. He is a major critic of globalization, whereas Demsas sees no problem in importing cheap Chinese cars, American jobs be damned. Murphy thinks the financial sector is bloated, shamelessly corrupt, and a drag on broad prosperity. Demsas claims it’s “dead wrong” to blame the housing crisis on Wall Street. Murphy argues against Big Tech’s overweening influence. Demsas says, if you don’t like tech’s influence over our politics and our social lives, or its corrosive effect on our collective psyche, just buy different junk. Ultimately, Murphy is a critic of atomizing individualism and “the loss of connection to, and identification with, community,” a tendency encouraged by the unfettered marketization of everything. For Demsas, well, community doesn’t matter much. As she puts it, “this idea that repeat interactions with a lot of people that you are in community with is the foundation of a good democracy, a good society, a place where people will donate their kidneys to one another, because they know each other . . .  I just don’t think that’s true.”

A lot of Demsas’s objections are also downstream from the larger divide in the Democratic Party. Demsas is a partisan of the Abundance faction, while Murphy is more of a populist. As Vincent Bevins insightfully notes, any visitor to this country can see that America has already chosen abundance. Remember all the European World Cup tourists freaking out about the size of our gas stations? The infinite supply of cheap, hot food? No one would deny that America excels at growing its economy — the trouble is that since at least the 1970s, we’ve been terrible at sharing the abundant harvest in anything like a fair distribution. The professional class has pulled further and further away from the working class in terms of income and assets, meanwhile the superrich are in another world entirely. The resulting asset-based K-shaped economy is no doubt responsible for much of the widespread social dysfunction.

Affluent liberals could almost be forgiven for not seeing how dire the situation has become. In professional social circles, all seems well for the most part; they’re still somewhat insulated from the worst of it. Affluent professionals still enjoy long stable marriages. They still have large friend groups. They’re more likely to go to church. And now, according to a new paper by Jesús Fernández Villaverde and Patrick Norrick, the rich may even be having more kids than the working class and the poor — a trend that would have been unthinkable just a few decades ago. When parenthood and even friendship become luxury goods, something has gone seriously wrong. Maybe then we need social policies that bring people together to help reform those bonds?

And yet all of Demsas’s fearmongering about the danger of Big Government coercion — no doubt the liberal version of the Right’s “I will not eat the bugs! I will not live in the pod!” — is leveraged against Murphy’s policy proposal: a program to send young people around the country on public service missions for half a year. This is his supposedly intolerable “cult-like” agenda. What exactly is wrong with this? If anything, the plan is far too modest. Yet for Demsas, it’s a gross overreach. Small-bore “nudges” are fine, she says, but the state should basically stay out of the business of trying to influence any prosocial behavior. Presumably only the market is qualified to shape our social behaviors.

Demsas concludes that “Politics shouldn’t create meaning, it should make room for it.” That sounds good, as far as it goes. The trouble is that politics — that is, the kind of politics Demsas favors (more markets, more choices) — has produced a degraded public sphere and an epidemic of anomie. The power of the market in America, unique among developed nations for its lack of buffering social democratic institutions, has crowded out everything else. Our economy, structured as it is, has radically reduced our opportunities for genuine social communion, and in that way it has radically reduced our opportunities for developing shared commitments. It’s made us selfish and shortsighted.

Maybe that’s no problem for liberalism, but it is for democracy. Democracy depends on our shared commitments to one another as much as it does on our ability to express dissenting beliefs. After all, a commitment to some minimum level of shared social morality — one might even call it an “Official Version of the Good Life” — certainly inspired framers like James Madison, who argued: “To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.”

And it turns out there is virtue in the people. Most Americans agree that we ought to live in a society where people can retire with dignity, where they can form and sustain a marriage, raise a couple kids in a home they own, all in a safe neighborhood. This is what most Americans understood as a normal life for generations. Today it’s a luxury product. Getting back to that norm starts with rebuilding social trust. At least Murphy is trying to figure out ways to do so.

In the end, it’s liberalism, enthralled to a cult of the individual, that cannot see the reality of widespread social alienation in this country. And Demsas’s preferred politics will do little more than help “make room” for more opportunities to check out.

The regional and national incarnations of Indian CLGs really emerged in the late 1960s and ’70s. The member-activists of the earlier two regional CLGs in the states of West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh were, in large measure, radicalized youth who strongly identified with the Naxalite struggle on behalf of the rural poor. They sought these activists’ release from incarceration and their rights to be treated by the state as political prisoners, not criminals.

While Pandey’s book carries detailed accounts of state-level CLGs, the central focus, which also provides a template for wider overall judgements, is on two national-level bodies: the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) and the People’s Union of Democratic Rights (PUDR), both headquartered in Delhi. The author has widely interviewed their many participants and longtime members (these bodies were first formed in 1976) and deeply studied over 250 of their histories and reports. Key here is the period of Emergency Rule (from 1975–77): a watershed moment that exposed the fragility of India’s constitutional commitment to a liberal democratic polity, and which served as great fillip to the subsequent emergence of the PUCL and PUDR.

Nested between the introduction and conclusion are five chapters that in turn explore and assess a) the membership and political trajectories of CLGs; b) how they relate to political parties; c) their operating methods and key functions; d) ideological debates within and among CLGs shaping their basic practice; and e) how as one particular embodied form of “concerned citizenship” (there are others like charities, resident welfare associations, and NGOs) they contested the state on behalf of civil society.

Who are the CLGs’ members? They mostly come from middle-class, “respectable” professions like lawyers, academics, journalists, social workers, occasional celebrities from the arts and entertainment domains, and so on. This itself lends a certain respectability to the wider public concerning their interventions. Long-standing CLGs, like some regional ones, and certainly the PUCL and PUDR, have a steadier and more regular set of activists than those one-off groups that periodically spring up in response to some dramatic turn of events, do their reports, and then fade away. These actions, too, are testimony to the existence of a wider pantheon of the politics of amplification.

Prominent scholars have characterized these CLGs as “non-party political formations,” an understanding that Pandey has rightly criticized as ignoring the more complex relationship between them and political parties. A number of party loyalists (a spectrum that includes left and far-left sects and both Indian National Congress and non-Congress oppositionists but excludes the culturally exclusivist BJP) were accepted as active members of CLGs. But for the most part, they were procedurally and numerically constrained from being able to turn them into party fronts.

Fact-finding missions have been a central form of activity undertaken by CLGs. To retain their credibility, these reports — for example on unjustified police violence in Kashmir province — have had to imitate juridical processes of showing impartiality in the accumulation of material evidence, including witness recollections. Their aim is to expose deficiencies and possible cover-ups in official judgments and claims. This also allows a place for help from sympathizers both within and outside the ruling parties at local, state, and central levels.

Mainstream media have often focused on the outcomes of such fact-finding reports, either to malign or endorse them in some measure. But beyond that, such missions have helped to legitimize the testimonials of ordinary citizens, ignored by an officialdom whose upper-class and caste ties motivate it to repress the truth.

CLGs’ work has also been significantly helped by the establishment, after the Emergency period, of Public Interest Litigation (PIL). Through it, ordinary citizens and citizen groups have the standing to approach the High Court and the Supreme Court on behalf of the indigent and deprived to call for investigations and judgments alternative to otherwise official or dominant narratives. Given this “judicialization” of civil liberties activism, it is hardly surprising that some dedicated lawyers do pro bono work for CLGs and are a key component of such allyship activism.

This legalism of both procedure and practice is common to all such groups. Still, there remains an important ideological difference between the PUCL and PUDR (as well as between and, to some extent, within other groups), not only at the level of motivation but also in their basic political and advocacy thrusts. In practice, the more moderate liberal-left wing of legalism aims to get state power to behave as the existing liberal democratic constitution at its best demands. The more radical left wing seeks to create a broader counternarrative, or what Pandey calls “discursive contestation,” to persuade the public to think beyond the constitution about the need for a more “revolutionary transformation” of the social order.

Not surprisingly, the former is less prone to rationalize and in part justify the resort to violence by the oppressed or by their agents (far-left groups) to counter overt or more “institutionalized” forms of violence by social oppressors or the state. This may be the case even if this rationale is not explicitly declared by the CLG in question. To put it another way, the general literature on rights discourse has four major areas of debate: 1) the material and moral foundation for the construction of rights: universalism versus cultural relativism; 2) individual versus group rights; 3) the question of civic and political rights versus economic and social rights: Isn’t the sufficient and equal fulfillment of basic needs as important, if not more so, than equality of basic liberties?; and 4) how far to expand the domain of rights.

It is really with respect to the last two areas that differences exist, deep down, between the two currents of activism, even when they are not perceived as such.

In her penultimate chapter, Pandey refers to the “concerned citizenship” embodied by CLGs. Her book deserves much praise for the new ground covered and will instill in the reader greater respect and understanding for the role that particular forms of allyship play in the defense of democratic rights and in their extension to those in India most deprived of these rights.

After her book was published, one more recent development has surfaced that obviously could not be featured in her text. It threatens to greatly accelerate the already ongoing erosion of democratic freedoms. For Narendra Modi’s government has declared that there is no single document or set of documents that axiomatically and irrefutably identify one as an Indian citizen. Even the passport will not do.

In today’s world, to be a rights-bearing person you have to be a citizen. Only then can one avail oneself of the range of rights whose depth and scale varies according to the country to which one belongs. But what becomes of the capacities to exercise positive forms of “concerned citizenship” such as civil liberties activism, when the government has the arbitrary power to question and decide one’s very status as a citizen?

So far, there has been no judicial rejection of this official presumption. It is uncertain that this will indeed happen. Now more than ever, parties, movements and CLGs need to fight together against this Hindutva-ized and thus truly anti-national government.

Why was US hegemony in decline? For Wallerstein, American hegemony of the twentieth century hardly differed from Dutch hegemony of the seventeenth century or British hegemony of the nineteenth. These three powers (and only these three, he thought) achieved hegemony by riding a wave of economic forces they could not quite control and by prevailing militarily over a rival. After triumphing, the hegemonic power went on to create organizations in its image. The British, for example, prevailed over France and then created the Concert of Europe in 1815.

America’s rise to hegemony began following the global recession of 1873. As Wallerstein told the story, Great Britain’s declining share of world markets was due to the United States and its chief rival, Germany. The United States became a major producer of steel, then automobiles, whereas Germany became a major producer of industrial chemicals. Each state’s economic rise followed an internal political crisis and (relative) stabilization: for America, the Union victory in the Civil War; for Germany, unification under Prussian leadership after war with France.

Wallerstein understood the two world wars to be an extended thirty years’ war between the rivals. He noted that the United Provinces of the Netherlands and Great Britain also became hegemonic following wars lasting about three decades (in the Dutch case, this came after the original Thirty Years’ War between 1618 and 1648).

After prevailing over Germany and the Axis powers in 1945, US leaders believed that it needed three things to maintain its prosperity: one, international customers for its industrial production; two, a world order guaranteeing commerce at a low cost; and three, a compact of sorts ensuring that production would be unimpeded.

Washington achieved these objectives by reconstructing Western Europe and Japan, by creating major international institutions such as the United Nations, and by striking a kind of bargain with the Soviet Union. The last of these moves, symbolized by the Yalta conference of February 1945, was for Wallerstein much more significant than the founding of the UN two months later.

In the conventional view, the Cold War of roughly 1945 to 1991 (to use the longest possible measurement) was a contest between American and Soviet adversaries. For Wallerstein, this period was really structured around an implicit compact between the great powers. The American sphere of influence covered about two-thirds of the world, with the Soviet sphere of influence accounting for the rest. Each power could dominate its zone of influence and use the threat of the other to corral reticent partners. Yalta was enforced by a “balance of terror” between the nations.

The peak of American hegemony ran approximately from 1945 to 1970. Like all hegemons, the US became a victim of its success. By 1970, Western Europe and Japan were in Wallerstein’s view the economic peers of the United States. In the process of building up trading partners, crucial to American postwar success, the US also built up rivals.

Like all hegemons, the United States began to lose its economic advantage in the same sequence through which it was originally built. First, the hegemon loses its advantage in agriculture and industry. Then it loses an advantage in commerce. Finally, it loses its advantage in finance.

Also in the 1970s, Washington’s defeat in Vietnam exposed US military weakness and showed its inability to impose its will on the world. Vietnam, Wallerstein wrote, symbolized a rejection of the US world order by the forgotten peoples of the world, sometimes called the Third World, sometimes called the Global South. The independence movement in Vietnam against colonial powers (France, Japan, and the United States) was an extension of the global protest movement that came to a head in 1968. According to Wallerstein, “the 1968ers did not merely condemn US hegemony. They condemned Soviet collusion with the US, they condemned Yalta,” and they saw only “two camps — the two superpowers and the rest of the world.”

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, again contrary to conventional wisdom, was for Wallerstein a disaster for the United States, because it lost its great Other. In a 1992 essay, Wallerstein insisted that the Cold War was “not a game to be won but rather a minuet to be danced  . . .  The end of the Cold War in effect eliminated the last major prop of the US hegemony and the US prosperity, the Soviet shield.”

Washington’s response to hegemonic decline has been to assert its greatness, in speech and in deeds, seeking to reclaim its position in the world. But, as Wallerstein explained on C-SPAN, “if you’re number one, you don’t have to shout that you’re number one. People know that you’re number one. If you have to shout, there’s something wrong. There’s something going on.”

Many C-SPAN callers were not happy with Wallerstein’s message of decline. One asked if flags flew on the Yale campus, given Wallerstein’s apparent anti-American bias. Another accused Wallerstein of being a Vietnam draft dodger, without realizing Wallerstein had been drafted at an earlier stage during the Korean War. A third shivered at the thought of Wallerstein as president: “If a guy like him were to be running the United States, the United States would end up like an armadillo, rolled up in a ball, waiting to be kicked.”

Such expressions of outrage were normal for Wallerstein, who had written about the national-psychological toll that hegemonic decline takes upon those who experience it. It was a potentially dangerous period for domestic politics and the leaders to whom the public might turn.

On the show, Wallerstein explained he was just the messenger, and that the United States was isolating itself from the world — not simply from nations it needed to court but from its closest allies too. “If you overestimate your power, and you go around acting like a bully,” he said, “you lose more than if you engage in elementary dialogue.”

Some callers saw Wallerstein as being engaged in an attempt to reform US foreign policy. One asked how to respond to accusations of anti-Americanism. Wallerstein explained that he tried using reason. He argued that US foreign policy operated against individual interests:

I’m not appealing to your altruism. I’m appealing to your selfishness. You are bringing about a much swifter negative impact on the US and the lives you live. In terms of your own standard of living, in terms of your risk of death, in terms of everything that you stand for, you’ll be worse off pursuing these policies than if you shift policies.

Decline did not mean catastrophe. Historically, hegemonic powers do not fall very far. They land among the other great powers, albeit with greater material comfort than most (just look at the Netherlands or the United Kingdom today).

Furthermore, as Wallerstein wrote in that 1992 essay, decline could be “the greatest blessing of all.” The United States had an opportunity to embrace morality. It “was Abraham Lincoln who sounded the moral note: ‘As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.’”

In the early 1990s, Wallerstein saw two possible futures for America. One would involve neofascism, characterized by social conflict, with the lower strata subject to brutality and prejudice. The second, more hopeful scenario would be a form of national solidarity through social democracy and the movement toward egalitarianism.

Although Wallerstein was not prone to overly optimistic predictions, he thought the egalitarian path was more likely than the neofascist path. He envisaged catharsis from “a shared social stress,” combined with American economic prosperity and popular notions of liberty, that would produce a movement against the major aspects of “unequal allocation”: gender, race and ethnicity, age, and class. He figured that the momentum of 1968, having disrupted American hegemony and dethroned the ideology of centrist liberalism, would lead to a mass movement for progress.

Wallerstein also had history as his guide. In the first two instances of hegemony in the capitalist world-economy, Dutch and British, hegemonic decline was followed, eventually, by a movement toward welfare and equality. Why should the United States be so different?

However, Wallerstein also left open the possibility of neofascism. If the end of the Cold War meant the end of US dominance over two-thirds of the world, then it also meant the end of centrist liberalism as a cultural guarantor of the capitalist world-economy. At least since the revolutions of 1848, centrist liberalism had been the gravitational force that kept the radical left and conservative right in check.

Centrist liberalism promised the realization of democratic rights and economic well-being, not immediately for all peoples, but in a slow and orderly process to be managed by the state over generations. Centrist liberalism, as Wallerstein put it in his book The Modern World-System IV, was used by “the strong [to] temper the discontent of the weak.” Strong individuals tempered the discontent of weak masses, and strong states tempered the discontent of weak states.

Yet the US economic advantage faltered as the Global South began to reject the Yalta power structure. After one of the main players, the Soviet Union, fell apart, the weak masses and states proved to be not so weak after all. In this situation, for Wallerstein, “conservatives would again become conservatives, and radicals, radicals. The centrist liberals did not disappear, but they were cut down in size.” The ideological possibilities were now endless.

After the Cold War, Wallerstein saw great potential for American hegemonic decline to be accompanied by domestic economic redistribution. Ten years later, the radical movement had not materialized, while conservative hawks were firmly ensconced in power. They sought to flex military might because, in their thinking, “if Washington doesn’t exert its force, the United States will become increasingly marginalized.”

But Wallerstein saw their actions having the opposite effect. Given the inevitability of decline, the muscular foreign policy of the Bush administration “will only contribute to the United States’ decline, transforming a gradual descent into a much more rapid and turbulent fall.”

In retrospect, Wallerstein’s 2002 essay and television appearance constituted an attempt to move the United States off of its trajectory. He had evidently abandoned hope for a social democratic movement and now redirected his attention to the declining hegemonic power itself.

In the summer of 2002, over six-in-ten Americans favored opening up a second war in Iraq. Wallerstein’s opinion was that of an unpopular but persistent group of critics. When faced with such criticism, President Bush would note simply note that history would judge his actions.

Today it is clear that the hawks could not preserve American hegemony, nor remake the world in a manner more conducive to US interests. What has transpired between then and now?

The twenty-first century has not gone well for the United States. American leaders have pushed to reclaim lost hegemony. As US economic power has diminished in comparison to the rest of the world, Washington has used its military to demonstrate strength and to achieve policy ambitions.

In fact, the United States has embarked on more military interventions since 1991 than it did between 1798 and 1990. This choice was the classic strategy of a declining hegemon in denial, aware of its descent, but unaware that its best viable option was the proper management of decline.

The United States has not made the world more peaceful or more prosperous, nor has it improved the nations it invaded. In European Universalism: The Rhetoric of Power (2006), Wallerstein questioned the logic of interventionism. The invading power rarely makes the invaded place better off than if it had not intervened, a conclusion confirmed by US military adventures across the Middle East.

Wallerstein’s 2002 verdict could have been written this year (or this week for that matter). He wrote that the United States finds itself “a lone superpower that lacks true power, a world leader nobody follows and few respect, and a nation drifting dangerously amidst a global chaos it cannot control.” The backlash of 1968ers that he described came from the nonaligned Global South as well as discontented masses at home. In the twenty-first century, the concatenation that began at the level of the world-system quickly moved to American domestic politics, and then outward again.

The end of the Cold War unmoored radicalism and conservatism from centrist liberalism. The effects were drastic. Decades of neoliberal consensus were challenged by the likes of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. When Trump assumed the presidency — first in 2017, again in 2025 — he did so as a critic of America’s liberal order.

However, “America first” has not resulted in the revival of domestic production, improved social welfare, or the protection of workers. Instead, Trumpism is characterized by massive, brazen corruption (at home and abroad), militarism abroad, and domestic policies of mass deportation. The United States has continued to expand its military commitments and military spending, but without a commitment to domestic social welfare. Meanwhile, optimism about the future among Americans has overall declined since 2013.

In short, the United States has chosen the neofascist path that Wallerstein initially considered the least likely: social conflict, brutality, and prejudice. Members of the upper strata have sought to hold on to their remarkable privileges and rewards. Americans consequently have more precarious lives, living paycheck to paycheck, with fewer protections against the risks of illness, age, and employment instability.

In 2026, America’s war in Iran encapsulates two tendencies of US hegemonic decline. One is the inability of the United States to get its way despite an extremely powerful military. The other is the discontent of the American public at a diminished standard of living and a leadership class it no longer trusts.

Such feelings of discontent, as Wallerstein noted, can be powerful catalysts for political action. Washington may find itself surprised once again by chaotic global and domestic events it cannot control.

Contra our reputation for idealism, many of the sharpest left-wing thinkers have expressed deep skepticism about utopianism. This, of course, started with Karl Marx, who famously chastised socialists he disagreed with by disparaging them as “utopian.” In his more hard-edged moods, Marx mocked utopianism as writing recipe books for the cookshops of the future. Such schemes were nothing but a speculative and ahistorical indulgence (though one Marx himself often indulged in). Following in his footsteps, many orthodox Marxists insist socialism must be “scientific,” or it isn’t socialism at all.

More thoughtful Marxists take a different approach. In his seminal Archaeologies of the Future, the late, great Fredric Jameson notes how utopian science fiction has often been a constructive genre for progressives to imagine what better futures might look like, the better to realize them. The genre, of course, began with More himself, whom Jameson describes as a broadly progressive satirist of power offering a damning “point by point commentary on English affairs and the English situation.” Utopian literature carried on in various forms as authors from Edward Bellamy to Ursula K. Le Guin used science fiction as a means of both criticizing the status quo and hypothesizing about what a better future might look like. But ultimately Jameson expresses wariness of the utopian genre’s transformative power and suggests it may well have been exhausted by the postmodern twenty-first century. He notes how today the utopian genre has all but evaporated, giving way to bleak depictions of the future where it is easier to imagine the end of the world than an end to capitalism. In a telling sign, even works that start by presenting utopias usually end by revealing them to be not all they’re cracked up to be. The seemingly idyllically pink world of Barbie (2023) turns out to be riven by suppressed existential dread and gender animosities. The more recent Star Trek series like Picard and Discovery take the bright cosmopolitan future promised by Gene Roddenberry’s United Federation of Planets and show that it has secretly depended on covert manipulation, exploitation of the marginalized, and much else.

Contra Jameson, Albertson and Blakely see the utopian genre as very much alive but not well. This is a dire problem since the need for “constructive” utopias is urgent. Albertson and Blakely are very critical of right-wing populism and the havoc it is wreaking, but they argue that much of this flows from the Right’s own (frequently disavowed) utopian aspirations. These include the nationalist dream of a unified ethnos, which Albertson and Blakely describe as a “peculiar kind of failed utopia.” Nationalists conjure an “imagined spirit of the nation that creates an illusion of cultural unity” — one that purports to draw on real history even as they constantly downplay or militantly resist historical facts that don’t gel with the patriotic myths they want to spin. Albertson and Blakely wryly note that nationalists constantly have to “prop up the obvious falsehood that the make-believe geist [national spirit] remains pure from overlapping, constituent, or neighboring cultures, and that it never changes in time.”

They also see many of the same fantasies at work in the Right’s “most feverish utopian hope”: that we might one day achieve the “most pristine, geometrical, frictionless vision of the ‘free market.’ Entire generations of Americans have lived as though the market were the only tolerable utopia.” Albertson and Blakely are scathingly critical of this vision, and rightly so, calling this a “monstrous utopia” for asking little of people and giving less in return, all while the money system is treated like a “minor deity.”

I would go still further than Albertson and Blakely and suggest that the meritocratic conception of capitalism, that each will be rewarded according to what they deserve, is not just a bad utopian vision — it is the most pie-in-the-sky utopian vision ever conceived. Ancient philosophers had the wisdom to accept that only the very visible and omniscient hand of God could reward people based on what they deserved, and then only in a perfect realm beyond this one. Only American conservatives have ever imagined a world so fantastic that the invisible and mindless hand of the market would reward people based on what they deserved, and in this life. Compared to meritocratic capitalism, even the most rosy-eyed communist is a clear-eyed realist, since they only imagined it was possible to give people what they needed while keeping it an open question what they deserved.

By contrast, Albertson and Blakely are more sympathetic to utopias on the Left but think they remain constrained by certain fundamental limitations. They express some sympathy for liberalism, while highlighting how “postwar liberalism stalled” due to a regression into “right libertarianism, sometimes called neoliberalism.” This regression into neoliberalism “betrayed the [liberal] tradition’s original ideals” of achieving liberty, equality, and solidarity for all. Albertson and Blakely are also critical of the Marxist tradition for failing to recognize how true revolutions never start in the economic sphere. Instead we need a transition in values by aiming for higher ethical standards. They don’t spell out what this would entail in detail, but their approving references to humanist and left-wing Christians like More himself, Martin Luther King Jr, and the late Alasdair MacIntyre provide many clues.

What makes Albertson and Blakely’s position interesting is the extent to which they call for a utopian vision that will be at once liberal, anti-capitalist, and deeply spiritual. Needless to say, this is a challenging combination to achieve — though one might ask what good is an unambitious utopian vision? Unfortunately, the authors don’t make much of an attempt to spell this out in any kind of detail, even if they provide a suite of moving examples in the lives of More and King. My own Marxist instincts kick in here, leading me to suspect that individual acts of grace simply will not be enough. The lack of a clear theory of power — something to complement the fiery condemnations of injustice and the critique of ideological straitjackets — is a real limitation to their vision.

But for all that, Albertson and Blakely are to be commended for the strength and boldness of their vision, even their audacity. They are no doubt right that a kind of utopianism may well be more realistic than a thoughtless adherence to a status quo that isn’t working. Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results isn’t wisdom, after all. It’s insanity.

In response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, on February 27, 2022, a majority of the German Bundestag decided to shed the country postwar constitutionalized pacifism and transform it into Europe’s largest and most lethal fighting machine. A goal that, in view of twentieth-century European history, should make a chill run down the spine of everyone with a modicum of historical sense.

Reaching this goal first meant abandoning Germany’s ordoliberal insistence on balanced budgets (the “black zero” rule). This was followed three years later, after some hair-raising parliamentary chicanery, by the abandonment of the “debt brake” that constitutionally required the federal government to keep aggregate German public debt at 2009 levels — a fixture comparable to the US debt ceiling.

Open went the spigot: defense spending rose from $56 billion in 2022 to $67 billion in 2023 and $88 billion in 2024. The federal government aims to increase this to $152 billion in 2029, by which time Germany should be able to withstand any Russian attack without US aid. As long as, that is, Russia sticks to the script of conventional warfare only.

The German Greens have long forgotten their pacifist heritage (the party’s founding manifesto back in 1980 had preached nonviolence and the dissolution of both NATO and the Warsaw Pact). Yet while this latest report takes for granted the need to counter the Russian threat, in fact its attention lies elsewhere.

The real focus here is industrial decline and economic depression. As the document’s first paragraphs summarize, the German economy is in dire straits, with its industrial core hemorrhaging 15,000 jobs per month, its famed “Mittelstand” (the manufacturing backbone of Germany of small family-owned firms) closing by the thousands every year, and its GDP flatlining for four years now. All this is spawning the material conditions for potentially huge victories for the nationalist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in September’s three state elections. In Saxony-Anhalt, a state in the former East, the AfD is expected to take over 40 percent of the vote, while even in Berlin, long a progressive stronghold, it appears to be on the verge of becoming one of the largest parties, polling at 17 percent.

How to ensure that the massive uptick in defense spending does not fill the coffers of American arms producers alone but instead serves the average German voter? How to turn it into a “smart” industrial policy 2.0 for Germany itself? That is the key question the report tries to address.

Here is where the “garbage can” origin of the report becomes clear. It joins geopolitical security concerns and industrial policy at the hip in an attempt to bring on board also those who remain unconvinced that the surge in defense spending is worth the inevitable costs in terms of social security, environmental policy, and public infrastructure.

The subtext of the report: even if you are not convinced that the Russians are coming and the Americans are exiting, you may well support us, the Greens, because we are going to make sure that our increased defense spending will ultimately benefit us all.

It is neoliberal “trickle-down economics” all over again.

Or in the report’s own words:

History shows that increased defense spending can trigger waves of innovation: GPS, the early internet, or modern material sciences all came out of military research funding. Whether similar spillover effects happen today is still unclear. More money alone isn’t enough. It depends on what it’s used for.

It is not hard to see, in this, a repetition of Mariana Mazzucato’s wildly popular argument about the entrepreneurial state. In her 2011 book, she uses examples of civilian spin-offs from US defense projects to debunk the neoliberal claim that only markets are innovative while the state is always a drag on growth. Although true in the abstract, we might question whether her examples were such a happy choice. These were, after all, part of defense packages that have brought death and destruction to civilians across the Global South, for which the mixed blessings of the internet and the smartphone have been a meager offset, if any at all. Moreover, reasoning that imitates Mazzucato’s now increasingly serves as a fig leaf for former progressives across the European Union to back an arms race that is not going to make the world more secure and will make citizens much poorer.

The nub of the question is the claim that, while more money is surely not enough, the problem is all about how it is spent. Here the report gets into its stride and starts to read like your average consultancy think piece. It abounds in terms like “spillover,” “ecosystems,” “innovation agents,” “start-ups,” “system integrators,” “feedback loops,” “dual use technologies,” “strategic multipliers,” and more, plus the necessary paeans to artificial intelligence.

The same is true for its list of recommendations. They range from inserting “security” as a key requirement for national research-funding programs to better incentives for academics to turn to defense and security issues and directing research money to “dual purpose” defense projects. It also proposes a lower defense vetting threshold for SMEs (small and medium businesses) by setting up “onboarding programs,” drawing on dedicated “High Tech demand and supply maps.” It further offers full-fledged state guarantees for private business and cofinancing schemes along the lines of infamous public-private-partnership (PPP) models. It always boils down to the same thing: the privatization of gains and the socialization of risks and costs.

The language reflects a deep belief in what Thomas Frank in his forthcoming book, The Creativity Con, has identified as a cosmetic innovation speak that itself has a dual use. Indicating that one knows how to talk the language of capital is the first one. It is a goal that is particularly important to the once rebellious German Greens, former outsiders who were invited in and who, now in opposition, want to get back in as soon as possible. Becoming insiders in European politics, as is well known, depends on three commitments: embracing the EU, accepting NATO, and speaking the language of capital to indicate a belief in the sanctity of liberal property rights, the cornerstone of capitalism.

The Greens had become insiders at least as early as 1999, when party grandee Joschka Fischer, as German foreign minister, backed the illegal NATO bombardment of Kosovo and Serbia, which, according to Human Rights Watch, killed at least five hundred people. More recently was its participation, from December 2021, in the “traffic light” coalition headed by the abovementioned Olaf Scholz of the German Social Democrats and its support for the “Zeitenwende” he announced two months later. The Greens have even ruled with the center right in several states.

The Greens’ insider status is clearly reflected in the roster of participants in the working group that signed off on this report. As the German daily Berliner Zeitung revealed, many of the largest German and European arms producers are among its members, including luminaries such as Airbus Defence & Space, Heckler & Koch, Hensoldt AG, and Safran Electronics & Defense. This would suggest that this is not so much a neutral public-policy document but a lobbying report, much like consultancies the world over produce.

As for average voters, they find themselves in a Germany slowly but gradually moving toward further military escalation, funded by severe cutbacks to the supposed foundation of modern Europe, namely the much-cherished welfare state.

For that is the most striking part of the report: what it does not mention.

In the sanitized world of the professional-managerial class that populates the German Greens, war is at worst a game and at best a managerial problem that can be solved by some brainstorming, the right incentives, a spreadsheet, and a bit of cross tabulation. That these weapons are designed and built to maim, kill, and destroy is cosmetically obscured by the euphemistic consultancy speak.

The report likewise ignores the massive literature that throws doubt on any claim that defense spending has an economic upside. The political economists Robert Pollin and Heidi Garrit-Peltier had already in 2009 calculated that the employment gains of defense spending are half those of any dollar spent on health care, education, public transport, or construction. And of course, this is referring to the United States, which is home to the largest defense sector in the world.

It is in line with the econometric quantification of the “multiplier” (i.e., how much does one unit increase of public spending add to GDP) by mainstream macroeconomists. A Dutch meta study indicates that the multiplier is near zero. That means that an extra dollar or euro spent on defense adds next to nothing to GDP. This is why economists continuously refer to defense spending as “dead consumption,” not investment, meaning that it does not generate a quantifiable return like when states “invest” in education, health care, or infrastructure. And why, whenever you hear politicians relabeling it as “investment,” you know you are being manipulated in a way that comes straight out of the playbook of NATO’s cognitive warfare program.

Ramping up arms spending is a shameful waste of scarce public resources and an environmentally destructive one. Disgracefully, the Greens have totally forgotten this. Given that the party is nominally left-wing, we can only hope that some of its disappointed members will pick through the garbage and find its founding manifesto. That document was all about how peace, détente, diplomacy, and the abolition of NATO will help save the planet. The Greens would do well to rediscover this, before disaster strikes.

Over the past three decades, football increasingly has moved from local ownership to a new set of proprietors: billionaires, Gulf sovereign wealth funds, and Chinese state-backed capital. Some, like Bordeaux’s Gérard López, mismanaged clubs and ran them into the ground.

Others — notably the owner of Paris Saint-Germain (PSG), Qatar Sports Investment — poured in so much money that it inflated costs across the sport, notably for the transfers or salaries of players. It became difficult or impossible for competitors to keep up without risking financial ruin. Having increasingly dominated the French league in the fifteen years since its ownership change, PSG became only the second team to retain the European Cup since 1990 after defeating Arsenal in this year’s final.

Over the last decade, there has been a new trend, with private equity firms, primarily American, buying football institutions. These actors have invested over €10 billion in European football since 2016, and financial firms now own 36 percent of all clubs across Europe’s top five leagues (England, Spain, Germany, Italy, and France). While Europe is the sport’s most “mature market,” this dynamic has expanded across the world, from US Major League Soccer to the leagues of Mexico, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and other countries.

According to economist Luc Arrondel, this trend can assume several different forms. Investment firms can acquire a majority stake — RedBird for Toulouse and AC Milan, Apollo Global Management for Atlético Madrid — or buy a minority portion, as Silver Lake did with Manchester City. Investors can even purchase commercial rights for entire leagues, as CVC Capital did for Spain’s La Lisa in 2021, or the right to operational functions: Sixth Street now has the right to participate in running Real Madrid’s Santiago Bernabéu stadium over the next twenty years.

This market is made up of traditional private equity firms, firms that specialize in sports investment, and other financial institutions such as hedge funds or venture capital companies. Private equity does not acquire clubs as personal trophies or a long-term asset. Instead, they invest other people’s money with the objective of generating a return, which often means reselling at a profit.

Elias Gouabella, a private equity professional, describes the contrasting logics at work:

Yes, individual owners may care about profits, but aside from soft power or fiscal interests, they usually buy clubs for “passion capital.” This means the biggest difference [in the ownership models] is time. Private equity firms are short-termists, their maximum horizon is ten years, and they are entirely focused on rentability. Individual owners can afford to be patient and have the deep pockets to reinvest, while private equity firms are beholden to their internal rate of return.

As a result, they usually look for ways to expand commercial revenues, monetize “assets” (such as stadiums, youth academies, fan bases, or legacies), and restructure the club’s management and finances to resemble those of a private company. As Gouabella puts it: “Since they won’t be there long, they are hyperfocused on things like quickly trading players or accumulating titles. This is a totally different approach to the sport.”

In addition to higher ticket prices and streaming games on pay-television platforms instead of free-to-air television, another concern for fans is the multiclub-ownership model (MCO). Half of England’s Premier League is now in some form of MCO structure. The model allows an owner to treat several clubs as parts of the same portfolio, moving players, coaches, and money between them.

For example, BlueCo, the investment group owned by Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital, bought Chelsea and then Strasbourg. The firm uses the French club to develop young players and then “sells” them to Chelsea — a transaction between two parts of the same organization. This year, Strasbourg’s manager, Liam Rosenoir, also left the club midseason to take over at Chelsea.

Gouabella points to the harmful implications of the MCO model: “In multiclub ownership, the satellite teams essentially become subsidiaries of the flagship clubs. This goes against the culture of football, where every team has its own identity, and serves the interests of its fans.”

Balancing across assets is a familiar practice in the financial sector, but it raises fundamental questions about what happens to the sport when a club is turned into an investment product.

FIFA President Gianni Infantino was widely condemned for making the 2026 World Cup a consumer capitalist spectacle. This involved a host of tactics, from hiking ticket prices to astronomical levels and installing a dynamic pricing system to the addition of mandatory hydration breaks that doubled the ad revenue time for corporate sponsors.

In spite of international outrage, from his perspective, Infantino’s plan largely worked. Viewership broke historic records, and demand for tickets exceeded supply. This testifies both to the unmatched passion for football in comparison with any other sport and to the willingness of the wealthy to hijack this passion, without any qualms about what this could do to the game they claim to love.

In the weeks following the end of the World Cup, Infantino once again came under fire for a controversial proposal to spin off FIFA’s commercial interests into an investable vehicle called the FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE). He believed that FIFA was still “undermonetized” when compared to the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) or the Premier League and saw US sports leagues, notably the National Football League, as examples to follow.

Infantino drew up this plan in spite of the fact that FIFA is a nonprofit organization with no concerns about financial precarity (in fact, it has billions of dollars in reserves to hand). FIFA has since abandoned the proposal after international outrage and outright opposition from the European, North and Central American, and Asian member confederations, with threats of a World Cup boycott.

This abortive scheme did not take shape in isolation. It was the most visible manifestation to date of trends that have been unfolding at almost every other level of professional football.

The increase in private equity investment comes at a time of excess liquidity in the sector. While football institutions are relatively high-risk assets, ones that take a long time to yield returns when compared to traditional private equity investments, the entertainment industry offers a uniquely “reliable” home for surplus capital amid growing financial and social uncertainty about artificial intelligence.

There will likely be much change and upheaval in the economy in the coming years, but the willingness of fans to support their local football team and go to games will persist. Private equity sees this as something to exploit.

Last month, when all fifty-five UEFA members announced a boycott of FIFA events as long as the proposal to privatize part of the organization remained alive, they explicitly rejected the capture of the sport by private investors or its treatment as an investment product:

Some things are simply too important to sell. The FIFA World Cup belongs to football. It always will. And so long as Europe has a voice, it will never be for sale.

This opposition was critical and commendable. But we should not only be concerned with these high-profile flash points. If we want to protect the right for everyone to participate in the beautiful game, we also need to pay attention to the less prominent but equally dangerous processes of financialization that are reshaping the people’s sport.