For Moroccan officials, the presence of The Odyssey crew was a propaganda coup. They have made it clear they see it as just the beginning of Dakhla’s development as a base for international film productions. This is despite the fact that the wider Western Sahara remains the site of an ongoing armed conflict between the country’s military and the Sahrawi pro-independence movement, the Polisario Front. Last month, three Polisario fighters were killed in a Moroccan drone attack close to the 2,700 kilometer sand berm that separates Moroccan-controlled territory from the desert areas held by Polisario.

If the construction of the vast defensive berm in the 1980s was Morocco’s attempt to entrench its military control over Western Sahara, the transformation of Dakhla into a tourist destination and green energy hub in recent years aims to consolidate the occupation as an irreversible economic reality. From the Moroccan leadership’s perspective, Sahrawi independence will look increasingly unrealistic if it can develop the territory in conjunction with international investors. It is also incentivizing Moroccan settlers to move to the territory with generous subsidies and jobs.

The clearest expression of this strategy is Morocco’s Atlantic Initiative, which looks to provide landlocked countries in the Sahel region with maritime access to the Atlantic via a new €1.3 billion port facility currently under construction in Dakhla (and set to be operational by 2028). Positioning the occupied city as a key logistics hub for northwestern Africa, the project aims to further integrate Western Sahara into regional trade networks.

Tourism is also key to normalizing Moroccan control, with Dakhla in particular recast as an international destination for kitesurfing and ecotourism. On a 2022 visit, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner were photographed at one of the growing number of high-end hotels on Dakhla peninsula, as well as on the sweeping Atlantic coastline that would later attract the film crew shooting The Odyssey. The couple’s holiday photo shoot offered a vision of luxury resorts and leisure in which the military occupation and indigenous Sahrawi population were erased from view.

Airline Ryanair’s announcement in 2024 that it was opening new direct routes connecting Spain with Dakhla and the Sahrawi capital El Aaiún marked a further expansion of this model of occupation tourism — even as the European Commission informed airlines that routes involving Western Sahara would not be covered by the terms of the EU-Moroccan aviation agreement. At the same time, international journalists, trade unionists, and human rights defenders have looked to break the Moroccan media blockade by boarding these low-cost flights over the last eighteen months, only to be detained at the airport or arrested when they made contact with local Sahrawi activists. Footage from last year even showed a left-wing delegation from the European Parliament being physically blocked from disembarking a Ryanair flight by Moroccan security forces.

The Odyssey’s subsidized production forms part of this same effort to establish Dakhla as an international — but firmly Moroccan — destination while limiting scrutiny of the occupation itself. Yet as news of the Dakhla shoot emerged last summer, Sahrawi filmmakers, journalists, and activists took to social media to contrast the free rein afforded to Nolan’s Hollywood production with the systematic repression they faced in trying to document the Moroccan state’s human rights violations, or simply in exercising creative freedom.

“I grew up in the Sahrawi refugee camps in Algeria and today, as a Sahrawi filmmaker from the occupied city of Dakhla, I cannot freely enter my homeland to tell my own stories”, director Brahim Chagaf posted as part of the online campaign organized by The Western Sahara International Film Festival. “That is the great contradiction behind this landscape: while a few privileged people like Nolan can turn it into a movie, others are still waiting for the day when we can simply return to it”.

Campaigner Ghalia Djimi’s message was even starker: “Mr Nolan: I am a human rights defender. Morocco disappeared me for 3 years and 7 months in a secret prison in occupied El Aaiún.”

Her experience is far from exceptional. In its latest 2024 report, human rights NGO CODESA catalogued dozens of abuses carried out by Moroccan security forces that year. These included the repeated violent suppression of peaceful protests, the harassment and arbitrary detention of activists, and the suspicious deaths in custody of three Sahrawi civilians. In November 2023, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention concluded that the detentions of two dozen Sahrawi activists and journalists, held ever since the Gdeim Izik protest camp in 2010, were illegal. It also found that in the case of eighteen student activists detained in 2016, torture was used to extract confessions.

As The Odyssey opens at the global box office, one of the Gdeim Izik prisoners, Enaâma Asfari, is currently in the fourth week of an indefinite hunger strike. In calling for his immediate release last month, Frontline Defenders said it was “concerned about reports describing medical neglect, reprisals and other forms of ill-treatment against Sahrawi human rights defenders in prison.”

“When Christopher Nolan steps on the red carpet on his way to the premiere’s screening, he will also be stepping on International Law”, insisted María Carrión, executive director of The Western Sahara International Film Festival, last month. “We ask the public to treat this film as they would a movie made in occupied Ukraine with [Vladimir] Putin’s permits, or in the illegal settlements in Palestine with [Benjamin] Netanyahu’s blessing.”

A series of rulings from the European Union’s highest court back this claim. Over the past decade, the Court of Justice of the European Union has repeatedly found that Western Sahara is a territory with a “separate and distinct” status to Morocco and that legally its resources cannot be exploited without the consent of the Sahrawi people. Those judgments concern specific EU-Moroccan trade agreements, which the EU has tried to revive despite successive rulings from its own courts that they contravened international law. But the rulings raise broader questions about the responsibilities of international companies operating in the occupied territory, including film studios.

Given his back catalogue, Nolan’s brilliance as a writer and director is unquestionable. Yet with The Odyssey, he and Universal Pictures have set a dangerous precedent as they pioneered a new form of filmmaking for our Trumpian age: occupation cinema. A country subject to a brutal colonization and a system of effective apartheid is not a legitimate backdrop for either international tourism or a Hollywood blockbuster.

It took until 2019 for the workers who cut and harvest trees and the truckers who transport the wood to have the right to collectively bargain in Maine. Until then, the state’s loggers and wood haulers were barred from doing so by federal antitrust law, because, as mostly independent contractors, it would supposedly constitute price-fixing. It was a technicality that employees across many agricultural sectors had run headfirst into over the years, leading the Maine state legislature to carve out exemptions from antitrust law for an ever-expanding list of workers.

Having become president of Maine’s state senate the previous year, Jackson swiftly turned to make sure woods workers were made part of that list. At the close of March that year, flanked by a group of loggers risking a blacklist from the state’s large landowners, the logging companies, he introduced a bill to create that exception. Less than three months later, it became law — a victory that was the culmination of decades of struggle by Maine’s forestry workers to get a fair slice of the profits increasingly hoarded by the state’s corporate mills and landowners.

Over 1998–99, Jackson had been one of a trio of loggers in Maine’s overwhelmingly rural, long-declining Aroostook County who had led a series of work stoppages trying to win more jobs and better pay. At first aimed squarely at the Maine logging industry’s use of foreign labor, the stoppages kicked off years of agitation by loggers that would ultimately turn its sights on corporate exploitation of workers and their lack of rights to resist it.

What drove the loggers to begin with was the hiring of Canadian loggers from just across the border who could work via a “bonded labor” program that let them enter and work in the United States for a specific employer until they had completed the job they had been hired for. The program had been a sore spot for Maine loggers ever since it had been created in the 1940s because of how it undercut American loggers. “I am not anti-Canadian — most are decent, hard-working people — but the fact remains that they have our jobs and are keeping prices down,” Jackson wrote in a December 1998 op-ed.

That was two months after he and ten other loggers from the Allagash and Fort Kent areas had clogged a border crossing into Quebec with their pickup trucks, demanding an injunction on any more bonded workers and jobs for American workers, and stranding dozens of Canadian loggers and Maine truckers hauling lumber to Canadian mills in the process. When the Canadians looked to get in through an alternate path, Jackson and the other loggers expanded the blockade to two more border crossings.

“I am a father of two small children whom I love dearly, but soon I will have to return to the border with the knowledge that in doing so I will be arrested,” Jackson wrote. “I am willing to commit to this in order to get people to realize just how serious I believe this problem to be.”

Jackson had seen firsthand how work for Americans in the logging industry, virtually a way of life in remote northern Maine, had deteriorated over the decades, and the role the bonded labor program had played. First meant to let the industry dip into the Canadian workforce when there weren’t enough American workers to fill jobs, the program slowly morphed into a way for employers to undercut American workers. Since Canadian loggers didn’t need health insurance, thanks to Canada’s universal health care system, and were willing to work for lower wages because of the weaker Canadian dollar, they had a built-in advantage over US workers.

Years later, Jackson would describe to Beacon, an independent outlet in Maine, how, as a twelve-year-old boy, he had watched firsthand a landowner use the threat of bonded workers to intimidate more than a hundred loggers who were threatening to strike after he cut the prices he would pay for their wood.

“He didn’t get out and ask, ‘How do we resolve this?’ Or, ‘I know it’s a big cut.’ He just said, ‘If you don’t go back to work in the morning, I’ll replace you all with Canadians.’ That was the whole negotiation,” he recounted.

A few weeks after their first blockade, Jackson’s father told the Bangor Daily News how his truck had been sitting in his driveway for nine months because he had no work, and how he and Jackson had had to sell a $300,000 piece of machinery they couldn’t use but were still spending thousands of dollars on in monthly payments. “Come with me, and I will show you machinery owned by Canadians, and it’s in the woods working,” Jackson told the paper. The following year, he described helping several friends pack up and move because of a lack of jobs.

What Jackson and other loggers saw around them and felt in their own lives made them leery of assurances by officials and employers that bonded workers weren’t affecting Americans’ jobs, and that landowners were not breaking the law by using them, as the US and Maine departments of labor (DoLs) determined after an investigation prompted by the original blockade.

They were equally unimpressed with the meetings they won with Maine officials and, eventually, with the state’s contractors and landowners too, all together in one room for the first time over two days in February 1999. Despite a lengthy list of items the state and federal DoLs agreed to investigate, the thirteen hours of meetings ended with Jackson storming out after an official representing Maine’s largest landowner spoke for the first and only time during closing statements, when he couldn’t be questioned.

So Jackson continued to evangelize about the plight of Maine loggers, serving as a panelist on the subject at the University of Maine and giving state labor department officials a tour of the woods. A year to the day after the original weeklong blockade, frustrated with how little had been done, he helped lead a second blockade of the Quebec border, which this time saw state police sent to escort them out. “We took the only option they gave us,” Jackson said.

Deciding further action at the border was a bust, Jackson and the other loggers took their protests to the doorsteps of government officials, telling the press that “our problems are with landowners and the Department of Labor, not with the police at the border.”

“We’re here because, legally and morally, the state and federal governments should be doing something to protect us,” Jackson told people who had gathered at the state DoL in November 1999, warning that “they’re killing our town, they’re killing northern Maine.”

The official indifference to their plight seemed borne out by a series of releases by the state DoL, including a study that dropped that same month. It concluded that Canadian workers were not having a downward effect on American loggers’ wages, except for “in isolated labor markets in far northern Maine, primarily in and around the St. John Valley” — in other words, in the exact geographic area that Jackson and the other loggers lived and worked.

“Are we not considered Americans here in the St. John Valley?” one of his fellow protest leaders bitterly remarked. “Maybe the solution is to declare the St. John Valley a third country.”

But for all the focus on the bonded worker program, the loggers’ struggles went much deeper than the use of foreign workers. One factor was the industry’s shift decades earlier from treating workers as wage-earning employees to independent contractors, leaving them suddenly bereft of benefits and having to cover expenses like machine upkeep and workers’ compensation.

As a result, Maine loggers complained at a January 2000 summit, business costs had doubled while their wages had flatlined — all as the wood-buying companies still exerted minute control over virtually every part of the “independent” contractors’ work. Under those conditions, working at McDonald’s was a better deal, one contractor charged.

“There is only a shortage of American workers willing to work at the landowners’ and contractors’ offered prices,” environmentalist Mitch Lansky said later that year at a tense seven-hour meeting held by the Maine DoL about its November 1999 study, disputing employers’ claims that they had to hire Canadians because Americans simply refused to work. “If wages were high enough to make a decent living, Americans would return to the woods.”

The fact that employers were able to get away with this was a product of another shift: namely, as that same study had determined, that there was a “concentration of landownership in northernmost Maine among relatively few large landowning companies.” As a result, the study had concluded, loggers’ bargaining power was weaker, and there was a “double squeeze” on both logging contractors’ profits and loggers’ wages.

That shift had gotten markedly worse over just the year before the report came out, after the New Brunswick–based conglomerate, J. D. Irving Ltd, became the state’s largest landowner by buying up nearly a million acres of northern Maine forest land. A year later, the Professional Logging Contractors Association of Maine reported that since the purchase, the rates contractors were getting had been cut 25–30 percent.

“They’re kind of creating a situation that the Americans can’t work here because we can’t afford to,” one contractor told the Bangor Daily News, predicting that they would then turn to Canadian bonded workers, “because they’ll say that nobody around here wants to do the job anymore.” He spoke to the paper anonymously, as all the contractors did, fearing retaliation since Irving was “going to be the only game in town,” as one put it.

Another contractor later charged he had had his contract withdrawn after complaining publicly about Irving’s prices. In the years ahead, the contingent of American loggers — some of whom came from generations of lumberjacks, including one of Jackson’s fellow protest leaders — permanently leaving the industry grew and grew.

Jackson, who had regularly stressed that his protests were not “anti-Canadian,” subtly shifted the target of his ire, even as he remained critical of the bonded labor program. He increasingly took aim at what he called “the sale of most of northern Maine to corporate Canada” in his public rhetoric, and condemned Irving’s “financial slavery,” charging that “the state is in the landowners’ pockets.”

In a February 2000 op-ed for the Bangor Daily News, he praised an earlier report by the paper examining the Irving family’s domination of the Canadian province of New Brunswick just over the border, and how local officials there had “pandered” to the firm by skipping an environmental assessment to approve one of its projects.

“It would seem to be a natural presumption that Irving would have the same practices in other industries, in other countries,” Jackson wrote.

The protests and blockades had seemingly hit a wall in terms of what they could achieve, partly thanks to Maine politicians who, in Jackson’s estimation, said the right things but offered no substantive help at all. So he decided on a new course of action: to join them.

“I thought maybe if I come down here and change people’s minds, we’d have a better chance,” Jackson later said.

Running for office later that year as a Republican, he criticized Irving and pointed to the DoL study’s findings that landowners’ profits had risen 169 percent over the previous quarter-century, while total wages had dropped 20 percent.

It took Jackson’s second tilt in 2002 to win the seat for Maine’s 151st District, one of the state’s largest and most remote. He had quit his job with a land developer to plunge full-time into campaigning, reportedly visiting 98 percent of the homes in the district, and declaring that he would “remind people in Augusta that we do exist up here, that we have been unfairly treated” by politicians if he won.

Jackson had already played a direct but small role in the push for legislative solutions to the crisis facing loggers. The blockades and protests had spurred the state legislature to create a roundtable committee to draw up recommendations for lawmakers, whose roughly dozen members Jackson had been a part of. Once elected, he could continue the fight from within the halls of the state capitol.

Jackson, now an independent, submitted five bills identical to the roundtable’s recommendations on wages and conditions in the forestry industry to be considered by the next legislature. Members of the state legislature’s labor committee told the press they knew of no other bills that had been submitted on the matter. That December, Jackson arranged a meeting with dozens of loggers to discuss with them his legislative push.

They would all, in the end, coalesce around one demand in particular, and the bill that would make it law: LD 1318, which aimed to extend collective bargaining rights to loggers and wood haulers, and create an arbitration board to settle disputes. “Although this stems from legislation proposed by us, this was actually born after the blockade of roads we did on the border,” Jackson told the press.

What followed for the next year was what we would now call an inside-outside strategy. In Augusta, dozens of loggers and truckers made the pilgrimage to testify about how dismal their working conditions had become and to lobby lawmakers to advance the bill, hoping to counteract the fierce and well-funded lobbying campaign against it from Irving and other landowners. Meanwhile, back in the woods, with Jackson’s encouragement, loggers and wood haulers formed an organization, the International Loggers Association (ILA), and planned a strike in response to Irving’s lowball rate offer for their new contract.

“Organizing may be the way to go anyway. Whatever needs to be done has to come from you guys. I will do whatever you guys need me to do,” Jackson told the loggers, warning them that the company would try to pit workers against each other.

In January 2004, the loggers voted 47–3 to launch a work stoppage that raised alarms by exacerbating a work shortage in the industry — a fact that Jackson and others claimed bitter vindication over, having said for years that loggers were being driven out of the industry and region by poor wages. Nearly three weeks later, they voted to end it, partly on the condition that the governor John Baldacci, who opposed the bill, not veto LD 1318, which he refused to agree to.

Meanwhile, Irving strong-armed the loggers, giving them an ultimatum to either take their contract offer or lose their jobs, peeling off some of the strikers and luring them back to work. “These woods workers need the legislation that is pending in Augusta,” Jackson commented, pointing to “heavy-handed tactics” by the firm.

That opportunity came a few months later. Jackson — who continued to work as a delimber, getting up sometimes at the crack of dawn to work a twelve-hour day in the woods, and driving four-and-a-half hours to spend the work week in Augusta — served as one of its leading champions in the state legislature. He helped tweak the bill to make it easier to pass, limiting it to apply only to landowners who owned more than one hundred thousand acres, and later to four hundred thousand, effectively applying to only three companies; he switched to become a Democrat, owing to the party’s overall support for the bill; and he spoke with Baldacci, convincing the governor, in his telling, to sign the bill when he confessed his fears that if it failed, he would end up costing people their jobs.

“I remember one lobbyist telling me that ‘everyone in the building was working against you,’” Jackson later recalled.

The loggers, meanwhile, took advantage of the seasonal lull in April to lobby for the bill in Augusta, more than two dozen of them holding meetings in lawmakers’ offices and stopping legislators in the hallways, and even holding a sit-down with the governor to make their case. In the end, the bill passed the state senate, where it had previously died, by one vote, and was signed into law by Baldacci. Jackson was convinced the loggers’ presence is what tipped it over the line.

At his request, the governor waited for Jackson, en route to the capitol, to do the signing, so that he could do it with a special pen he was bringing: one gifted to Jackson by his father-in-law, made from bird’s-eye maple harvested from the North Woods by an Allagash logger. Two years later, Jackson endorsed Baldacci for reelection, saying that whatever their differences, he had sided with “everyday working people” over big money when it most counted.

One of the ironies if Jackson takes the Democratic nomination is that he will be challenging and even serving alongside lawmakers who he and other loggers regularly criticized for not lifting a finger to help them. The blockade had come about in the first place, Jackson had charged in January 1999, because the offices of Susan Collins — his potential general election opponent — and other top elected officials refused to meet with the loggers on three separate occasions.

When the blockade finally won them meetings with Collins and, later, a representative from her office, Jackson and the loggers were left underwhelmed by her opposition to their work stoppage and promise to simply look into the matter. “Shame on our hard-working politicians for hiding like cowards in the shadows or saying there is nothing they can do,” he wrote in February 2000.

“You couldn’t get anyone on the federal and state level to do anything about it,” Jackson recalled after winning his first election in 2002. “If you ask our congressional delegation, they say it’s a state issue, referring you to the Maine DoL to file a complaint. This is the treadmill Maine loggers have been on for at least thirty years,” he complained in June 2005, as he pushed legislation to even the playing field between American and Canadian loggers.

Jackson was equally scathing about then-Governor Angus King, now the independent senator for Maine, who Jackson will serve alongside if he wins the Senate seat. King “seems to be blind to what is going on in northern Maine, or maybe he just doesn’t want to get his hands dirty,” he complained. He “says we need to be patient, but I don’t think he has been out of work for a year and worries about providing for his children,” Jackson wrote.

In contrast to Baldacci, who remained relatively active in response to the loggers’ complaints despite his pro-business bent, Collins largely excused herself from the whole matter after giving the loggers a couple of meetings. Other than backing emergency relief for loggers for natural disasters and during the pandemic, there’s nothing in the public record that suggests Collins remained engaged in efforts to improve their working conditions — though in 2022, she did introduce a resolution recognizing October 12, 2022, as “National Loggers Day.”

As Jackson told the Bangor Daily News in December 2002, it was the futility he felt meeting with such officials in the 1990s that had, ironically, shaped how he operated as a politician. “I want to listen to what the guys have to say tonight,” Jackson said about the meeting he had arranged with the loggers. “A lot of times when these guys talk to people who say they are going to help them, well, they just don’t believe it.”

As the fact that it would take another fifteen years for Maine loggers to get full collective bargaining rights suggests, the passage of LD 1318 in 2004 would ultimately be a dream deferred. One of the conditions of Baldacci’s signature was to narrow the legislation further, so in the end it effectively only applied to a single company: Irving. Soon after, Irving exploited a loophole in the law to avoid arbitration over its rates, forcing the loggers and lawmakers back to the drawing board.

The 2019 law would be the culmination of many more years of organizing by Maine’s loggers and persistence from Jackson, who continued to advocate for the industry’s workers in Augusta, and to push for more aggressive government action to help them. Sometimes those efforts were successful, like a 2005 law that made employers show proof that foreign workers owned equipment before they hired them. Sometimes they weren’t, like when Maine’s previous self-styled right-wing “populist” governor vetoed Jackson’s bill in 2017 that would have incentivized the state’s employers to offer jobs to Maine and US workers first, before foreign ones.

In any case, Jackson’s history is a case study of something today’s American left has often talked about but less often seen: a genuine working-class politician who emerged from the struggle of workplace organizing; who sought to use his position in power to advance the goals of his fellow workers; and who had a vision of how workers’ movements and their allies in elected office can work in concert to do it.

The Graham Platner saga is a sad situation on many levels. But if it opens the door to a version of that at the federal level, it would be a considerable silver lining.

The most straightforward extension of the emerging consensus on Gaza would be to scale back American militarism. If eliminating military aid to Israel is the clearly articulated demand, a natural extension is to flip the cozy relationship with other abusive and belligerent actors like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Similarly, it is a no-brainer to avoid military interventions like the war in Iran, whose historic unpopularity points to widespread public fatigue with American war-making. Slashing a bloated defense budget set to top $1 trillion is also a clear part of this agenda.

But while scaling back militarism is a necessary component of a progressive foreign policy, it cannot be the only component. For example, Darializa Avila Chevalier has called “to have our tax dollars come back home to invest in our babies here and not in bombs abroad” — useful rhetoric, to be sure, but this framing also presents a binary between doing good at home and causing harm abroad. The possibility of progressive international engagement is absent.

The problem with the United States’ Israel policy is its backing of egregiously violent and undemocratic action — not that the United States is engaging internationally. Indeed, the depth of the horror that many Americans have felt watching children suffering in Gaza demonstrates that their solidarity is by no means limited to American citizens. In any case, in a deeply interconnected world, even fulfilling promises to Americans will depend on effective management of the US relationship with the world.

But in contrast to a foreign policy that prioritizes bellicosity toward a set of adversaries, a different form of international engagement would emphasize international cooperation to address shared challenges. Notably, domestic policy can only address the United States’ outsize but minority share of global emissions. Comprehensively defending a safe climate will demand international action to ramp up climate finance and cooperation on decarbonization. Cross-border health threats like COVID-19 or the recent Ebola outbreak present similar dynamics. A progressive approach would not only bolster international disease surveillance systems but also strengthen basic health infrastructure in poor countries and take on intellectual property monopolies that limit the diffusion of vital health technology. Other notable global challenges include managing supply shocks and enabling a humane and orderly migration system.

It is fair to question whether a domestically troubled country that has just bankrolled a genocide can be a constructive actor in addressing these global challenges. But noninvolvement is not an option: the global economy runs on the dollar; the United States is the world’s largest consumer market; and it is a central hub of technological innovation. Further, as indicated by the funding crisis facing international organizations after Donald Trump slashed US support, international cooperation demands funding that is hard to come by without the world’s richest country pulling its weight. But as much as US involvement is needed to solve global challenges, so is China’s — and defusing tensions with China to a level that allows a working relationship is a core component of a less militaristic foreign policy.

Gaza also points to another lesson for foreign policy: the need for an international approach to counter oligarchy. The wave of antiestablishment Democrats has emphasized economic populism alongside Gaza, and there is a coherence between the two. Public funds were put toward unpopular support to Israel rather than meeting the needs of working-class Americans, elites from university leadership to legacy media closed ranks, and AIPAC poured huge sums of money into targeting critics of Israel.

However, policies to reorient the economy toward the interests of the many will struggle as long as the wealthy have an international escape valve on offer. The rich can shift money to tax havens to avoid increased taxes, corporations can dodge labor and environmental standards by moving operations to lax jurisdictions, and AI regulation may come to face similar arbitrage. Scaremongering can exaggerate these impacts of progressive policies — the US market has enough advantages that few will flee it entirely — but the global race to the bottom is a real challenge. The antidote is global cooperation to raise the floor, such as minimum corporate taxes or even a global minimum wealth tax.

Perhaps most profoundly, Gaza has exposed the ways the foreign policy blob can treat people in the Global South as subhuman and disposable, shredding the legitimacy of American claims to uphold human rights, international law, and democracy. Meaningfully living up to those commitments requires a much broader reorientation of US foreign policy — and crucially, one that extends beyond the realm of peace and security. Domestically, politicians increasingly understand that most Americans’ core concerns are economic: access to health care, affordable housing, good jobs. This holds true internationally too. Especially for the half of humanity living on under $4,000 per year, development is a chief concern.

In this light, excising the harms embedded in mainstream foreign policy is not only about cutting the flow of US-made bombs that fall on Gazan children. It is also about ensuring that money goes to nourishing the one-third of Ethiopian children whose growth is stunted and is not paying off high-interest debts to foreign financial institutions. Correcting an international economy stacked against development will require a new approach to US engagement at institutions like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization, ensuring that countries can affordably finance investment and have sufficient policy space and access to technology to move up global value chains. Well-designed international aid, too, has a role to play — and given the role of the world’s richest man in eviscerating aid to the world’s poorest people, reviving the United States Agency for International Development also aligns with the broader agenda of unwinding the influence of the superrich.

One advantage the establishment holds is that it is, well, established. There are relatively low barriers to entry to critiquing a palpably egregious status quo that lends a hand to a genocide. Developing a new, holistic foreign policy vision is a much harder task. Creating it will require a much more developed institutional infrastructure and set of personnel — a counter-blob, so to speak — that can seriously respond to the types of questions demanded of a sitting government.

What should security cooperation with countries like Finland and Djibouti look like? How should the United States balance broader left priorities in trade with keeping the price of imported goods low for consumers? What international reforms should be pursued through the more democratic UN versus potentially more agile multilateral groupings?

Right now, the main people offering up answers to questions like these are the foreign policy establishment that backed a catastrophically wrong policy in Gaza. The moment is ripe for the people who were right on Gaza to come up with their own set of answers, but they won’t get there unless they start asking the right questions.

But back to Young Washington, which is doing brisk business at the box office while its only competition in major release, the aggressively hyped Monsters & Minions, suffers from “franchises fatigue” and fading profits. It was canny to release Young Washington on the Fourth of July weekend during the notoriously uncelebrated 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. In fact, it’s downright amazing that the major Hollywood conglomerates could come up with nothing better than Monsters & Minions for a holiday weekend that used to be one of the most reliably profitable in the entire calendar.

As many of the extremely mixed reviews will tell you, Young Washington is an earnest but dull and often ludicrous account of Washington’s ambitious early manhood that has the quality of many a stodgy “after-school special.” William Franklyn-Miller as Washington plays him as a stupendously handsome young supermodel making an arrogant idiot of himself on the battlefield but learning important lessons at the expense of his own slaughtered men. Once he figures out that he must fight for God and country (which is Virginia, in his view) as well as his suffering soldiers, rather than just to advance himself in the eyes of haughty British officers whose ranks he’s desperate to join, he becomes the legendary Washington, God’s chosen hunk, fearless and unkillable in battle, an inspiration to all.

To be fair, it’s rather commendable to make so much of the film about Washington’s frustrated ambitions and self-centered determination to climb the social ranks from obscure colonist to British officer at a time when the Brits regarded the colonists as lowly rustics. And to focus on Washington’s nadir, leading the Virginia militia to abject defeat in their attempt to force the French out of then-frontier territory in Ohio claimed by the British as well as the Shawnee and other Native American tribes. Washington’s rickety “Fort Necessity” was abandoned before it was fully built.

The reckless Washington was sent off on a suicidal mission by the Scottish Governor Robert Dinwiddie (Ben Kingsley), an administrator in charge of British forces in the colonies. Washington had only a ragtag, badly equipped colonial force. In the movie, it’s a little obscure why Dinwiddie does this, because the resulting debacle was bound to reflect badly on him. What’s left out of the narrative — and it’s a shame — was Dinwiddie’s hawkish warmongering reflecting an attitude among prominent Virginians that the Ohio Territory was rightfully theirs: “He had wanted a war over the Ohio valley,” according to historian David Stewart. “After Fort Necessity, he had one.”

Washington is forced to surrender to the sneering French and to rely on a British officer and translator to tell him what the treaty says. The loss of a proper aristocratic education in Great Britain when he was young, which would’ve included learning French, costs Washington dearly — because the translator doesn’t tell him when he signs the treaty that he’s also taking the blame for the killing of a French officer. A case can be made that George Washington started the French and Indian War by firing the first reckless shot that led to the disastrous battle. In the movie, he’s innocent of that blunder and demands to know who fired first, but according to some historical accounts, it may very well have been him.

In broad strokes anyway, much of the Young Washington narrative is true. Washington’s father died young, which meant a loss of fortune and status that prevented George from being sent to England to be educated in proper upper-class fashion as his older brothers had been. In the movie, he’s shown as a boy being denied an education at the local schoolhouse, because now he’s got to help his harassed mother (Mary-Louise Parker) run their mere tenant farm on the Mount Vernon property inherited by George’s half-brother Lawrence (John Foss). The suggestion in the film seems to be that they’re leading a hardscrabble life, but they’re really just socially demoted to a lower rank of gentry. And no amount of local schoolhouse education would’ve helped him much in Virginia high society.

George Washington didn’t recover his lost wealth and status until much later when Lawrence’s widow remarried and relocated, allowing him to take back control of the Mount Vernon plantation. That plus his rapid military advancement did much, but what really carried him to the top was marrying the vastly wealthy and aristocratic Martha Dandridge Custis, bringing him a 17,000-acre estate worked by hundreds of slaves. This will presumably be part of the Young Washington sequel already in the works. Though what part Washington’s slave ownership will play remains to be seen. It’s only vaguely touched on in Young Washington, with a few black actors playing slaves in the background and George Washington referring briefly to Mount Vernon’s slaves: “We have many of them.”

George Washington’s love life in this first film involves his heavy flirtation with Sally Fairfax (Mia Rodgers), which plays out like some absurd Bridgerton episode. She’s an unmarried Virginia belle who’s far above his station in life and bound to wed someone of equal rank. In real life, Washington’s fling with Sally, well-documented in letters, occurred after she was already married.

And Washington was by no means so friendly with Native Americans as he’s shown being with Tanacharison (Ryan Begay), Seneca chief and leader of one of the few tribes in the disputed territory that aligned with the British even briefly. The French were known to treat Native Americans better than the British, though you’d never guess it from the scowling cartoonish villain playing the French Canadian commanding officer Joseph Jumonville (Clement Toyon). He makes John Cleese’s inventively insulting French soldier guarding the fort in Monty Python and the Holy Grail seem well-mannered by comparison. (“I fart in your general direction! Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!”)

The last section of the film involves Washington’s redemptive return to the fight against the French, which is all heroics on his part. The second time around, it’s the British General Braddock (Andy Serkis) in charge, with the demoted Washington as his mere aide-de-camp trying to make his commander see reason. It’s the general’s turn to screw everything up in the most mortifying way. All the famous British blunders we learned about in fourth grade — knowing nothing of the rough densely forested terrain, insisting on gentlemanly frontal charges, and those idiotic red coats like showy targets on every soldier’s back — are on display here. Braddock gets killed saying “Who would’ve believed it?” Washington takes command, and suddenly the rustic colonial fighting style is born.

This was indeed the battle that began to create Washington’s outsize military reputation for fearlessness, daring, and weird good fortune under fire, earning the admiration of his soldiers. He was unusually tall for his time, making him an excellent target on horseback, yet he reportedly came out of the battle with bullet holes in both his hat and his uniform, while he somehow emerged unscathed. His horses were not so lucky — two were shot out from under him, though these grim incidents aren’t depicted in the film. Instead, we get images of Washington standing godlike in misty light, and Native Americans affirming that he’s been chosen by “the Great Spirit” for some stupendous fate.

This finale accords with right-wing conservatives’ reverent view of the Founding Fathers as demigods that walked the earth in order to Make America Great the first time around, conforming to Angel Studios ideology. If you actually read a book by any sane historian, of course, it’s the overwhelming fallibility and often venality of almost everyone involved in the founding of the not-very-united United States, leading to corrupt dealmaking and every kind of compromise of the ideals of liberty and equality from the start, that makes it amazing any nation at all ever got pulled together out of such a hellish mess.

There is also a more specific reason why pasta mattered. Today pasta is treated as the most obvious symbol of Italian identity. But this was not always the case. Before the industrialization of food production after World War II, pasta was not consumed everywhere in Italy in the same way. In much of the North, polenta remained central; in the South, bread was often more important.

Fascism had an ambivalent, and often hostile, relationship to pasta. In the context of autarky, the regime wanted to reduce dependence on imported wheat. The fascist ideal of the “new Italian” was disciplined, rural, virile, and militarized. Pasta, especially in futurist rhetoric, was attacked as heavy, softening, sleep-inducing; an anti-modern food that supposedly weakened the national spirit. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s polemic against pasta expressed something real about fascism’s desire to regulate bodies, tastes, habits and everyday life.

In that context, a public distribution of pasta was, more than a meal, a challenge to fascist discipline. It was an action by civil society against the state’s attempt to control everyday life. It was a political gift, a way of saying: we are still here; we can still gather together; we can still share; we can still imagine life after fascism.

In Emilia-Romagna, pasta carried a different, quietly subversive significance. In many socialist families, cappelletti in brodo, traditionally eaten on May 1, became a symbol of community and political belonging. Cappelletti was never outlawed. Rather, what the fascist regime abolished in 1923 was May Day, erasing the workers’ holiday and suppressing its rituals. Yet the tradition endured behind closed doors: preparing and sharing cappelletti on May 1 became a subtle act of resistance, a way to keep alive a memory the regime sought to extinguish. In my family in Carpi, in the province of Modena, we have continued to eat cappelletti in brodo every May 1 ever since.

After the war, in the newly founded Italian Republic, the memory of the Cervi family did not remain politically neutral. The Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) turned the seven brothers into one of the great popular myths of the Resistance. If Antonio Gramsci became, in some ways, the foremost intellectual legend of Italian and global antifascism, the Cervis became one of its popular myths: peasants, martyrs, brothers, sons of the people.

For many years, the Cervis’ pasta remained primarily a local memory, in Reggio Emilia. It was only after the Cold War that it began to be revived as a broader antifascist celebration. In 1988, volunteers at the Museo Casa Cervi in Gattatico, a museum since 1974, organized a new Pastasciutta Antifascista, serving plates of pasta on July 25. From the mid-1990s onward, it became a regular event.

Today it takes place in many towns across Italy and abroad. It is present wherever Italian antifascist memory travels with migrants, associations, students, workers, political communities, and even university lecturers like me, in London organizing a plate of pasta and a glass of Lambrusco to talk a little about history and memory. In this sense, the pastasciutta has become a transnational antifascist ritual.

But what does it mean to celebrate antifascist pasta today?

Memory matters and is a part of civic life. But history is something more. To think historically means asking about causes, transformations, institutions, class relations, political languages, cultural hierarchies, and forms of domination. If memory can preserve, history must also unsettle. Memory says: do not forget. History asks: How was that possible, why did it happen, what has changed, and what has not?

That distinction is important because the question of fascism is today often badly posed. If memory is detached from history, antifascism can become merely ritual. Today antifascism can seem “cool” again. The symbols circulate easily: songs, slogans, T-shirts, posters, social media posts, red scarves, vintage graphics, partisan aesthetics. This isn’t a bad thing. Political cultures need their rituals and pathos. But there is also a risk of using antifascist symbols as a moral decoration, emptied of their context and political substance. There’s a risk that antifascism becomes a mere brand, reduced to a lifestyle or a gesture of cultural distinction rather than something really practiced.

One of the sharpest definitions of fascism was given by Vittorio Foa, a socialist partisan who became a member of parliament in Italy’s postwar republic. Responding to a senator elected for the postfascist Movimento Sociale Italiano, Foa replied: “If you had won, I would be in prison. Since we won, you are a senator.” He suggested that antifascism is not the suppression of disagreement but the condition that makes democratic disagreement possible.

There is, of course, still a nostalgic fascism, especially in Italy: pilgrimages to Mussolini’s hometown of Predappio, Roman salutes, Fascist memorabilia, and the grotesque cult of the Duce.

Yet the more serious danger lies in the hollowing out of democracy, the erosion of rights, the normalization of political violence, and the return of political languages that turn social problems into enemies to be expelled. This does not always look like fascism; it may operate within the formal boundaries of liberal democracy. It may speak the language of security, tradition, nation, religion, the natural family, or common sense. It may not present itself as dictatorship; it may present itself as “the people” against its enemies, be they migrants, artists, feminists, workers, intellectuals, judges, the LGBTQ movement, or journalists.

The real threat is not that fascism is returning. Rather, today the danger is that fascism is dehistoricized, turned into one opinion among others, one side of an allegedly eternal fracture in the national story. Too often, Fascism is presented not as a regime with its causes, institutions, violence, class alliances, colonial wars, and racial laws but a temperamental expression of “Italian culture.” Fascism becomes one more story in the national photo album, one more supposed identity available for political performance.

The Pastasciutta Antifascista resists this. It asks us to make history public again, to bring people together not only to celebrate but also to discuss, argue, understand, and organize. The point is not nostalgia for the Resistance of World War II but to recover the popular, material, and collective dimension of antifascism.

Obviously, a plate of overcooked pasta did not defeat fascism. But it announced, publicly and collectively, that fascism could be defeated. It turned the end of a regime — or what people hoped was the end — into a shared act of liberation.

For this reason, the Pastasciutta Antifascista still matters. We need occasions to think historically together. To remember the Cervi is not only to say that they were killed by fascists. It is to ask what kind of world made fascism possible, what forms of solidarity made resistance possible, and what forms of indifference might make authoritarianism possible again.

Antifascism, after all, is not only the memory of those who died. It is something practiced by those who live.

The Baltic states present an interesting case due to their widely acclaimed patriotism and European identity, which at least initially extended to powerful solidarity with Ukraine.

Take Estonia’s Reform Party, formerly led by Kaja Kallas — Estonian prime minister in 2021–24 and today the European Union’s chief diplomat. The country’s dominant liberal force, under Kallas the Reform Party won 31 percent of the vote in the 2023 parliamentary elections. She personally received a record-breaking number of votes, and her party took thirty-seven of 101 seats in parliament.

This success rested on a clear opposition to the country’s conservative bloc — an opposition that the right-wing populist Conservative People’s Party (EKRE) inadvertently reinforced by campaigning to halt further support for Ukrainian refugees (Estonia has hosted approximately 71,000 war refugees from Ukraine) and criticizing the scale of Kallas’s arms shipments to Kyiv. That position was perceived as pro-Russian by the wider public, and EKRE paid for it at the polls.

Latvia’s elections a year earlier had told a similar story. In 2022, the New Unity party of incumbent Prime Minister Krišjānis Kariņš won the largest vote share, 19 percent, and the most seats, twenty-six, on a platform built around support for Ukraine and vocal opposition to Russia. Similarly to Estonia, Latvia has had around 50,000 war refugees from Ukraine.

In both countries, the liberal center did not so much transcend the right-wing populist challenge as contain it, through moral appeals and what amounted to a permanent politics of emergency. Yet that containment has proven temporary.

As living standards stagnate and wealth inequality deepens, the same liberal parties that consolidated power around wartime solidarity are now rapidly losing legitimacy. Reform’s support in Estonia has more than halved since 2024. In Latvia, disputes over austerity this spring culminated in the prime minister’s resignation. Security policy detached from social equality, it turns out, hollows out the democratic consensus it claims to defend.

The European Defence Agency estimates that EU defense investment more than doubled between 2015 and 2025, from €189 billion to €381 billion — a catch-up made necessary, defense analyst Daniel Fiott argued, by years of free riding on American military power. The Kiel Institute for the World Economy puts Europe’s direct military assistance to Ukraine at €35.1 billion, some €4.4 billion more than the United States’ contribution. According to Estonia’s national broadcaster, the country has given Ukraine more than €1.1 billion in aid. Between 2022 and 2025, Latvia’s military aid to Ukraine reached approximately €665 million.

Both countries, like other NATO members, have aimed to fix defense spending at 5 percent of GDP. Both countries, alongside Lithuania and Poland, have increased this spending faster than any of their NATO allies: in 2025, Latvia spent 3.8 percent (€668 per resident) and Estonia 3.42 percent (€796 per resident) of GDP on the military. But how do liberal-democratic governments go about finding this money?

In 2025, Estonia’s then-governing coalition, including Reform, the also liberal Eesti 200, and the Social Democrats, initially floated a defense tax to run from 2026 to 2028. One component of this was a 2 percent tax on corporate profits — a notable proposal in a country that has never taxed such profits directly. Yet the proposal was scrapped, and in March 2025 the Social Democrats were pushed out of the coalition for, in effect, disrupting it with overly left-wing demands. Instead, the government raised the value-added tax (VAT) and the income tax from 20 to 24 percent, permanently. Because VAT is a regressive tax, its burden falls hardest on those who spend the largest share of their income on consumption — that is, people on lower incomes.

Hence, although Estonia’s economy has now slowly turned to growth, ordinary people’s living standards have started to worsen. Inflation has only recently eased from roughly 20 percent in 2022 to under 4 percent in 2024. According to the World Inequality Report, Estonia is the most unequal state in all of Europe. It can also no longer boast of its competitiveness: the Centre for Eastern Studies wrote recently that “the long-standing view of Estonia as the fastest-growing and most advanced Baltic economy is gradually becoming outdated.” Yet right-wing policies have favored the relative position of Estonia’s capitalists, whose living standards haven’t been hit by increased defense spending. Instead, the effect falls on lower-income households.

This has political consequences, as the social base of the governing parties withers. According to Norstat, around the last elections the highest support for the main liberal party was 34 percent. Today, three years later, it is 12 percent, 1 percent lower than the far-right EKRE. The second liberal party, Eesti 200, has fallen from 18 percent to 1.5 percent. The most-supported force (with 24 percent) is now Isamaa (Fatherland) — as the name suggests, a conservative, right-wing party.

To ensure an increase in defense spending to 5 percent of GDP, significant additional state budget funding will be required in the coming years. According to the Latvian Ministry of Finance’s opinion — submitted to the parliament’s budgetary committee in response to the amendment to a funding bill proposed by President Edgars Rinkēvičs — far more money is needed annually: €92.1 million in 2027, €181.1 million in 2028, €258 million in 2029, and more than €1.12 billion by 2030.

The financial tools used so far for defense, like borrowing, will — given Latvia’s regressive tax system — contribute to the already rising rate of inequality. In 2024, monthly income per household member among the poorest one-fifth of households amounted to €317 while among the richest quintile it was €2,084. The income gap between them widened from 6.3 times in 2023 to 6.7 times in 2024. The number of Latvians at risk of poverty has also risen. Even in times of crisis, the usual business of favoring businesses goes on.

This past May, Prime Minister Evika Silina resigned after Ukrainian drones headed for Russia instead strayed into Latvian territory. No one was injured, but residents told local media that the official response had been slow and inadequate. The operative word is, indeed, inadequate. It captures a broader public sense that the state cannot deliver, whether on security or on meeting the problems of everyday life. That sense is now curdling into both nationalism and political disengagement.

According to Politico, the recently resigned Premier Silina’s economically liberal, socially conservative New Unity has fallen to 7 percent support, while today the top-ranked force is Latvia First, a Trumpist formation at 16 percent in the polls. According to the latest surveys, not far from half of Latvian voters say they do not know whom to vote for or do not intend to vote at all. This is not simply a swing toward the far right; it is a broader exit from electoral politics, born of a sense that liberal politics have nothing left to offer. A democracy resting on such disengagement stands on thin legs.

Taking a slightly different path, Lithuania’s defense funding mechanism is a dedicated fund drawing on corporate income tax, rising from 1.9 percent in 2025 to 8 percent in 2026 and 11.2 percent from 2027, alongside excise duties and a standard corporate tax increase from 16 to 17 percent. This is a meaningfully more progressive instrument than Estonia’s and Latvia’s VAT hikes, and it has coincided with a different economic trajectory: uninterrupted growth and a small fall in income inequality. Correlation is not causation, but these are telling developments.

In the fall 2024 election, the Social Democrats were the largest party and have since headed two governments. This month, the ruling coalition has nominated Social Democratic Party leader Mindaugas Sinkevičius as the next prime minister in a reshuffle that President Gitanas Nausėda hopes will be the last this legislature. Lithuanian governments have turned over roughly every eight months during the current term, but this political instability is not a direct product of economic turmoil and, indeed, now seems to have come to an end.

The scholarly literature on the economic effects of military spending is genuinely divided. Some finds that it reduces inequality by stimulating aggregate demand; other studies find that defense spending bids up wages for skilled labor and leaves the rest behind; others find no consistent effect. A recent panel study by Ourania Dimitraki and Kyriakos Emmanouilidis looking at postsocialist Eastern Europe from 1990 to 2023 finds a nonlinear relationship: a moderate degree of increases in military spending may decrease inequality up to a certain threshold but exacerbates it beyond that point. It seems that each of Estonia and Latvia have gone past that limit without offsetting it with social policy measures.

Scholars of democratic backsliding, like Licia Cianetti and her fellow researchers, have noted that Estonia and Latvia, for all their success in implementing EU-mandated institutional reforms like guaranteeing the rule of law, did so partly at the cost of limiting genuine democratic contestation over economic policy. These democracies were “born hollow” in the sense that economic policy was substantially set in advance and left largely outside democratic dispute focusing solely on the entrenchment of private interests in the state and in party politics. The Baltic case shows how security policy, detached from social equality, risks hollowing out the democratic consensus it claims to defend when it appeals to patriotism and resisting authoritarianism.

It was to be expected that the Baltic states would heighten their rearmament in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But this still poses the question of how money could be found and who would pay for it. In Estonia and Latvia, the answer is consistent: through regressive taxes, through spending patterns that burden the poor most, and through political choices that do away with any kind of redistributive aims.

This is not an incidental feature of the Baltic rearmament story. For all the patriotic language, when a crisis arrives and a liberal democratic government must find new money quickly, the working class pays first. It is a fairly precise description of whose interests liberal democracy, under fiscal pressure, actually protects.

This experience inspired Aleksi to found Canada’s Vote16 organization, focused on extending the right to vote to sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds. His organization was part of a movement that had established a foothold in countries across the world. The UK government recently introduced legislation to change the voting age to sixteen for all elections, following the passage of such laws in Wales and Scotland in Britain, as well as in Austria, Brazil, and parts of Germany.

In many of these countries, such legislation was controversial. Skeptics asked: Are sixteen-year-olds mature enough to vote? Are they too easily influenced by their parents or by social media propaganda? Will they disproportionately vote for “radical” politicians? When the policy was proposed in Scotland, Jan Eichhorn, associate professor of social policy at the University of Edinburgh, had the same questions. Eichhorn has since become a leading researcher on the topic, attempting to answer the questions the policy raises.

A decade of research has led Eichhorn to a solid conclusion: “In no context has anything negative happened.” Research generally suggests that there’s no difference in the quality of the vote between the youth and their older counterparts. Sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds are as knowledgeable on politics as adults, vote in an ideologically coherent manner, and are not disproportionately influenced by their parents’ votes.

On the other hand, expanding the vote to younger people has plenty of upsides. For one thing, decreasing the voting age to sixteen may lead political parties to pay more attention to the concerns of young voters. Vote16 may be the solution to this lack of attention from politicians, as Eichhorn has found that, when the voting age is lowered, “politicians become more responsive to young people . . .  [making] them more visible in the political process.”

When given the opportunity, research suggests, sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds vote at higher rates than adults and use their newfound political power to exert influence outside of simply voting. As a result, a study in Latin America found that satisfaction with democracy and trust in national institutions increase once the voting age is lowered.

Eichhorn has observed these young people advocating for their interests within political parties, pushing politicians to shift policies on issues like climate change to address the needs of the youth. In Germany, he found that lowering the voting age helped move young people past issue-based politics and into positions of power within political parties. As younger voters were paid more attention by their politicians, they began engaging in debates over policy. Not only did the Green Party in Germany begin advocating for more radical climate change reform, but the Conservative Party also began taking climate change more seriously for a time.

Changing the voting age will not solve the problems young people face today, as Aleksi admits: “No policy is a panacea. No policy is a silver bullet.” However, lessons from Canada suggest that giving young people the right to vote has impacts beyond elections. Since Aleksi founded Vote16 Canada, the organization has expanded to become a movement that has passed motions in twenty-two municipal councils and school boards, with progress across every province in Canada. After introducing Bill S-222 in Canada’s Senate, Vote16 expanded their fight for democracy: they’ve won the ability to vote in neighborhood referenda in Toronto and have started pushing for youth seats on advisory councils in Port Hope. Progress has continued with M-99, in which a Senate committee has committed to studying broadening democratic inclusion, including youth voting rights.

“I think one of the main things that this campaign has taught me is the value of . . .  local democratic innovations,” says Aleksi. These innovations can go beyond youth-related issues to policies such as ranked-choice voting or increasing transparency in municipal politics.

Local changes that increase democratic control by the youth also affect school curricula, where discussions about democracy become more consequential. Eichhorn found that when Scotland changed their voting age, “the role of schools is really important in terms of enhancing these positive effects,” because they allow young people to debate politics with classmates in a safe environment. “Research suggests [increased civic education doesn’t] bias young people, but [helps] them become interested and seek out more information.”

The movement for a lower voting age in the United States has not achieved the same size or influence it has in other countries. The last US constitutional amendment was passed in 1992, and a lower voting age is unlikely to be the next one. Instead, the United States’ Vote16 organization has adopted a decentralized approach, targeting policy on a city-by-city basis.

While changing the voting age to sixteen is not officially supported by any major party, legislation in numerous municipalities in Maryland, New Jersey, and Vermont has extended the right to vote to sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds in local elections, and Berkeley and Oakland, California, have given sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds the right to vote in school board elections. These policy changes reflect the work of thousands of high schoolers creating campaigns in over twenty-five states. While roles in policymaking are generally reserved for experts with greater experience, high schoolers themselves hold key leadership roles in Vote16 USA, testifying in local committees, conducting academic research, and mobilizing campaigns of other students. Young people want to be heard, and once they win the right to vote, we can expect their voices to get louder.

Vote16’s municipal strategy aligns well with the American left’s recent focus on municipal politics. Zohran Mamdani became mayor of New York City advocating for local reforms such as rent freezes and citywide free childcare. Socialists on the whole have been building power across the country, winning local elections from New York to Atlanta, Minneapolis, Detroit, and elsewhere. Socialist organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America, incorporating Vote16 policies into their platform, could bring more young people into left-wing politics — not simply gaining their votes but encouraging them to lead their own movements and gain experience in local government.

In the United States, the youth is politically frustrated with both parties. Beyond simply being more likely to talk about politics, as the 2015 study in Canada found, one in every five young people have attended a protest, and high schoolers consistently draw headlines by leading school walkouts, encampments, and other forms of protest. This outrage is not simply directed at the current presidential administration but expresses discontent with our current system and its inability to make real progress on the existential crises facing our young people.

But this frustration does not necessarily translate into a coherent political strategy. In 2024, Gen Z swung strongly toward the “protest candidate” Donald Trump. After seeing Trump fail to deliver the change they desired, young people have returned to heavily favoring the Democratic Party. For young people to become coherent political actors, rather than simply reactive protest voters, early education about democracy is key. Having the right to vote while still in high school can lead to better civic education, as observed in Scotland by Eichhorn, and even ultimately result in youth being more involved with politics within the party, as observed in Germany. By gaining the right to vote, young people can lead the change they wish to see within their parties.

In the United States, students are lobbying policymakers directly at the local level and seeing their voices transformed into an actual policy change. By learning that their opinion matters, young people learn to demand more from the system and can continue to be at the forefront of demanding reform.

Lowering the voting age is no panacea. And there is some worrying evidence from Austria that the boost in election turnout associated with expanding the franchise may be short-lived. Changing the voting age can be a tool to engage the younger generation and place political power in an oft-overlooked demographic. Keeping young people involved in politics and increasing public participation in the democratic process more broadly, however, requires political parties and politicians to offer voters substantive agendas that speak to their material interests and deepest aspirations. Politicians cannot simply lower the voting age and continue to ignore the youth. But socialists are well positioned to offer a substantive vision that appeals to voters across generations — and if they can link up ambitious Mamdani-style governance projects with efforts to bring younger people into politics, they may both expand the electorate and grow their own base.

In an era of increasing political nihilism, changing the voting age may be a first step to break through the political frustration. Advocating for a lower voting age in municipal councils throughout the country can reinvigorate a new generation of activists and elevate young people to positions of leadership in which they’re taken seriously. This simple change of an eight to a six can be a boost in the fight to expand democracy at a time when antidemocratic forces are on the rise.

There are even more compelling reasons to justify shared ownership. AI models are cocreated by the many and then monetized by the few. The very conception of AI models and their underlying technologies rely on a global network of scientists and engineers based at universities, public research organizations, and thousands of companies at least partially funded by taxpayers’ money. These actors profit very little, if they profit at all, and have virtually no say in what models are developed or how.

Elsewhere, I have shown how Microsoft and Google dictate the agenda of the frontier AI research global community. These and other giants like Meta do open-source-washing. They open-source strategic software pieces — sometimes using a form of pseudo-open-source — to turn them into de facto standards. Massive adoption leads to a captured user base, one that will more easily consume other bits of their technology — these kept as proprietary software. Big Tech companies’ additional strategy to control technology and other organizations beyond ownership has made the headlines. They are the largest corporate venture capitalists, investing in thousands of start-ups to get access to and steer their developments. This is how companies like OpenAI and Anthropic came to be.

Bernie’s diagnosis is correct: AI is indeed a product of humanity ripped off by a few corporate giants. But he falls into a nationalist trap that has even led the Financial Times to associate him with Donald Trump when suggesting that Americans should own half of AI companies’ stocks. The creative products used for training, as well as researchers, developers, and start-ups integrating Big Tech’s controlled networks are not only American. They come from around the world. The AI sovereign wealth fund should thus belong to the true public, to the world’s population.

Geography is only one of the reasons why the scope of Bernie’s proposal matters. If the aim is to grant humanity both ownership of benefits and control over the development of AI models, getting a cut of the AI companies going for initial public offerings this year would be far from enough. The ultimate AI steersmen and main beneficiaries are Nvidia and the cloud giants. Every single AI model can be used as a service on at least one of the world’s largest tech supermarkets, aka Amazon, Microsoft, and Google clouds. Using AI means using their clouds. AI adoption takes place through their clouds. The more models are released, the more cloud giants’ predatory ecosystems expand. And while cloud giants also develop their own models, start-ups depend on Amazon, Microsoft, and Google infrastructures and cloud marketplaces. From known dependencies, like OpenAI’s reliance on Microsoft Azure, to DeepSeek and xAI’s Grok.

And it is precisely their clouds’ data centers that complete the spoilage. This represents an extraction of nature that compounds the appropriation of data and knowledge. Their expansion should be regulated, and society should also be compensated for their use of land, energy, and drinking water. An international AI sovereign wealth fund could compensate for this twin extractivism of nature and human creations. Still, it would not grant humanity the decision-making power.

At its debut, individual investors — meaning laypeople instead of institutional investors such as hedge funds or asset managers — were allocated between 20 and 25 percent of SpaceX stock. The illusion of distributed ownership begins to fade when compared with Musk’s 42 percent, resulting in 80 to 85 percent voting rights. Ownership does not equal control. Like Meta, Alphabet, and Palantir, SpaceX went public offering different classes of stocks. Each class has different voting rights, preserving control in the hands of founders and CEOs. Musk’s shares have ten times more voting power.

Concretely, even if Bernie’s proposal succeeds, Musk would still retain the control over what SpaceX does and how it operates. For one thing, it would be unlikely for the AI sovereign wealth fund to block SpaceX from building extraterritorial data centers, regardless of their environmental impact. Likewise, the public will have zero bargaining power to prevent a company like OpenAI from selling its advanced models to the military; deter Palantir from working side by side with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and, again, the military; or convincing Anthropic to stop developing models that could induce a cybersecurity catastrophe.

Society cannot trust the willingness of a few CEOs and founders to halt the development of AI that can be used as an autonomous weapon, as a tool to expand control in the workplace, or as a school assistant that spoon-feeds students and does their homework. By themselves, these people will never slow the pace at which their own companies develop technology and expand scale. Scaling up — concentrating more data to train ever larger models in massive data centers with greater numbers of processors — is strategic for cloud giants and AI companies. It is an exclusionary system by design that ensures their lead.

Scale enables control without ownership across the networks of organizations described above. Thousands of actors integrate innovation systems dictated by a few tech giants. Following the latter’s research and development and business priorities, these ecosystems also contribute to developing technologies that reinforce military and workplace control, exacerbate disinformation, and undermine people’s capacity to think. These are not inevitable or accidental outcomes. Big Tech companies plan science and technology aiming to produce AI that renders users dependent, and that advances the corporate and political interests of those with the money to afford it.

Another AI agenda cannot wait. To prioritize communities and the planet, the public must be in control. International democratic control over the AI ecosystem is at least as urgent as redistributing its benefits. It would require creating public institutions that are both independent from corporate power and autonomous from the whims of individual governments.

An AI sovereign wealth fund could thus only be celebrated as part of a broader international strategy. As a stand-alone initiative, it risks backfiring. Just as sovereign oil funds can dampen popular enthusiasm for a renewable energy transition, a sovereign AI fund could bolster the adoption of today’s AI, the world’s largest control technology. A just society is not only one in which wealth is redistributed. Control, thus decision-making power, and knowledge should be equally shared.