In the decades after 1945, European leftists disillusioned with workers’ parties created new protest movements and countercultures. Their efforts were boundlessly creative — but also reflected an erosion of the mass politics that had sustained the old left.
Democratic Party leaders want the benefits of an engaged activist base like the one currently challenging Donald Trump without actually having to listen to or engage with it.
In his new book, Believe, Ross Douthat contends that religious faith provides necessary social cohesion and personal meaning. But can a broad appeal to belief survive in an era of increasingly sectarian and politicized faith?
The immense power financial institutions wield over most aspects of our lives makes a mockery of democracy. To build a truly democratic society, we need to democratize finance.
Class dealignment perspectives tend to overstate the extent to which center-left parties can boost their fortunes today through a strict focus on pocketbook issues.
The detention and possible deportation of former Columbia University student and pro-Palestine organizer Mahmoud Khalil is the most serious attack on the First Amendment by any president in years.
Wars abroad, the affordability crisis, inflation, censorship of political speech — Donald Trump successfully exploited discontent with Joe Biden’s administration on all these issues and more. Trump is now making all of them far worse.
As he visits the US for the first time, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of La France Insoumise, writes about the collapse of triumphal capitalist narratives and sets out an alternative vision for humanity that can save us from a dystopian future.
Pope Francis brought a limited but desperately needed progressive spirit to the Catholic Church. Under his successor, that spirit is likely to wither.
Pope Francis, writes Marxist scholar Michael Löwy, demonstrated an uncharacteristic sympathy toward left-wing thought, even as his thinking owed far more to the non-Marxist “theology of the people” than liberation theology.
Of the 32 US states that forcibly sterilized people in the 20th century under the influence of eugenics, only three have taken accountability by compensating survivors. A group of researchers is trying to make Utah the next.
Ultranationalist Călin Georgescu was barred from Romania’s presidential election, but now another far-right candidate has taken over his poll lead. To defeat them requires real social policies, not just calls to stop extremism.
New York City’s mayoral race is in full swing. Yet the front-runner, disgraced former governor and champion of corporate interests Andrew Cuomo, is nowhere to be found.
On Sunday, Poland votes in the first round of presidential elections. The contest is dominated by various right-wingers, while small progressive forces speak mainly to the highly educated, professionals, and the downwardly mobile middle classes.
To win on social issues, the Left has to develop the cultural competence to connect progressive goals with working-class priorities. The gay marriage fight offers a formula for appealing to ordinary Americans’ values without giving up on social progress.
The irony of Democrats reducing their entire politics to reflexive opposition to Donald Trump is that, as a result, Trump now faces no credible opposition.
The latest work by renowned historian Diarmaid MacCulloch tackles Christian attitudes to sex over the centuries. Modern-day Christians who talk about traditional values usually don’t know how changeable their tradition has been.
Shulamith Firestone’s writing captured the utopian spirit of radical feminism. In her last published book, Airless Spaces, she took stock of that movement’s failures amid the crisis of care unleashed by the destruction of the welfare state.
French historian Jean-Pierre Filiu has visited Gaza many times — but he had to make his most recent visit in December in secret. Defying Israel’s attempt to control reporting, his latest book is a devastating account of the destruction of Gazan society.
Democrats appear incapable of mounting a real opposition to Donald Trump. Their weakness is the result of a decades-long hollowing out of the party, in which organized labor has been displaced by a panoply of interest groups and nonprofit organizations.