
The Right Way to Politicize This
Yes, after the Donald Trump shooting, now is a good time to talk about the need for better gun laws.

Yes, after the Donald Trump shooting, now is a good time to talk about the need for better gun laws.

The story that is about to be pushed hard is that Kamala Harris lost because she was too far left. It will be pushed because this is the Democratic establishment’s go-to explanation for all its failures.

Costa Rica’s surge in violent crime should have been a liability for President Rodrigo Chaves’s right-wing party. Instead, his handpicked successor, Laura Fernández, won resoundingly by promising law-and-order policy unencumbered by democratic institutions.

Wesley Bell, who’s challenging Cori Bush in Missouri, dropped out of a race against Republican Josh Hawley to take on the Democratic congresswoman. Apparently, punching left with AIPAC’s support is a more appealing career booster than challenging the Right.

The Democratic establishment has been fretting about Joe Biden’s fitness for years behind closed doors, while misleading and dissembling about it in public. Last night’s presidential debate shattered the facade.

This month, Poland’s liberal opposition mobilized hundreds of thousands of people to protest the ruling party’s attacks on the rule of law. But it’s less clear that it’s winning over the government’s supporters, who remain wedded to its social programs.

At the VP debate, Tim Walz offered lessons for how progressives can communicate their ideas to ordinary Americans. Unfortunately, it’s all in the service of Kamala Harris’s unambitious, corporate-friendly campaign.

Some observers are hoping that Tulsi Gabbard, as Donald Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence, will be a counterweight to warmongering “neocons” in his administration. But a sober look at her record doesn’t inspire much confidence.

Trump’s appointees hold us all in contempt.

We went to the Republican National Convention to better understand the strangest mainstream party in the world.

The global right today excels at leveraging nostalgia for reactionary ends. Yet memories of periods of revolutionary hope and collective victories can provide the materials for a form of nostalgia that the Left can use.

Earlier this month, presidential centers representing 13 former presidents put out a letter calling for Americans to “protect democracy,” in an implicit rebuke of Donald Trump. Given past presidents’ own assaults on democracy, it’s a hard pill to swallow.

Across Europe, the Right has taken a pronatalist turn. Despite claiming to support mothers, its initiatives — largely ineffectual, according to many studies — serve to reinforce patriarchal gender roles and protect the interests of employers.

A new lawsuit backed by Trump-linked operatives seeks to make dark money donations tax-deductible. The rich already face no spending limits on influencing elections and, if successful, the suit could turbocharge dark money in politics.

We are about to be in for a long period of suffering in American and global politics at the hands of a deranged, reactionary president who will be up against little in the way of an opposition party.

In assessing Donald Trump’s victory, pundits have claimed the country turned right, the Harris campaign was too far left and woke, Biden’s presidency was robustly populist, and racism and sexism made the result inevitable. Those claims are all wrong.

Yesterday, Bernie Sanders tore into the Democratic Party’s “big money interests and well-paid consultants” who abandoned working-class voters. Bernie was stating an obvious truth — one that Democratic leaders seem hell-bent on ignoring.

The Democratic Party has become, improbably, the preferred party of American capital. But in doing so, it’s lost more and more of its working-class base.

August Bebel was the most important leader of German socialism in the period before World War I. Bebel championed the cause of women’s liberation in his book Women and Socialism, one of the most important and influential socialist texts of its day.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has resulted in a proxy war between the Korean states as they supply arms for both sides. Now that Kim Jong-un has sent troops to take a direct role in the fighting, South Korea could respond by escalating its own involvement.