For a good while into the second Donald Trump presidency, centrist Democrats were nowhere to be found. Their strategy was, in the immortal words of former Bill Clinton campaign strategist James Carville, to “roll over and play dead” and simply wait and hope that the Trump administration would collapse in popularity without them having to do anything.

A year and a half later, Trump’s approval rating is in the toilet, some of the most divisive primary contests are over, and there are only three months to go until the midterm elections that may well decide not just the future of Trump’s presidency but the entire country’s political trajectory. So the average Democratic voter will be heartened to learn that — as the smoke clears after the bitter Michigan primary contest and its two rival Democratic candidates make up and vow to join forces for the general election — centrist Democrats have suddenly come back to life, gearing up to wage relentless war against their political opponents to the tune of $15 million.

No, not Republicans. The political opponents that have the centrist Democrats newly energized and willing to fight like hell are the democratic socialists who have become a powerful organizing force within their party and some of its most popular national figures.

That’s according to the New York Times, which reported yesterday that the centrist organization Third Way, in concert with unnamed “moderates,” plan to launch a “discrediting campaign” lasting from now until 2028 that takes aim at the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the group whose members include Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and that is a key part of the coalition behind the party’s Senate candidate in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed. That campaign will see Third Way not just do opposition research into DSA and target its elected officials but also go after politicians like El-Sayed, who don’t identify as socialists but make common cause with the group.

Capitalism isn’t working. In The Blueprint, Jacobin founding editor Bhaskar Sunkara and longtime Jacobin contributors Ben Burgis and Mike Beggs outline a plausible alternative: a system in which workers control every lever of production and competitive markets and state planning coexist side by side.

Drawing on the history of socialist experiments and the economic debate over planning and markets, The Blueprint confronts the hardest questions about what went wrong in the past — and why socialism can still work in the future. The result is a plan for socialism that is up to the task of overcoming the challenges facing workers in the twenty-first century.

Note: Copies will ship in late September.

Over the last couple of years, media coverage of China has focused on the trade war launched by the Trump administration. While Trump and his tariffs have been grabbing the headlines, there have been some major developments in China’s domestic political economy.

So far this year, the Chinese authorities have announced plans to reform the hukou system that controls the movement of workers around the country. They’ve also published their latest five-year plan setting out development goals for the rest of the decade.

Eli Friedman joins Long Reads to talk about what’s been happening in China.

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