After Trump’s 2017 inauguration, the meme saturating our political discourse was neo-Nazi Richard Spencer getting punched in the head. Today, it’s Bernie Sanders in mittens, dutifully but joylessly sitting through Biden’s inauguration. It’s a marker of our new political context: white nationalists thankfully don’t occupy the White House anymore, but nobody should cheer the neoliberal status quo.
For organizers in Central Pennsylvania, the Bernie Sanders campaign was an opportunity to build social-democratic politics in conservative territory. As Pennsylvanians go to the polls today, those organizers emphasize that Sanders’s unprecedented campaign was a success in putting left politics on the map in rural regions like theirs.
After Bernie Sanders, democratic socialists in America face a vital strategic dilemma. Do we go the Justice Democrats route of winning gains as the junior partner in a progressive coalition, or do we take a gamble on more independent class organization and struggle?
Joe Biden may indeed win in November. But he has run an inconsequential and pathetic campaign — one that could pose enormous dangers in the coming years.
As Joe Biden faces an enthusiasm gap in the polls, raising a very serious possibility of Donald Trump winning reelection, the campaign’s field operation appears to be lagging.
The Biden administration’s preemptive surrender on the $15 minimum wage is nothing like its guns-blazing approach to getting union-buster Neera Tanden confirmed for a White House job. The contrast demonstrates Biden’s lack of sincerity when he claims to be a working-class fighter.
Three former Bernie Sanders field organizers argue that the campaign’s internal structures and lack of accountability hurt its chances and undermined Bernie’s theory of political change.
Ross Douthat wants to tempt socialists with his argument that this wave of racial justice protest is hopelessly in thrall to the logic of woke capitalism. Don’t take the bait.
Joe Biden is signaling he has no intention of offering cabinet slots to Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. Despite spin to the contrary, it's the latest sign that the Biden team is planning to govern from the extreme center — and that we'll have to push him to win any progressive gains.
Joe Biden told us there was an easy path. Reality will soon catch up to that fantasy.
The welfare state isn’t enough. A future Bernie Sanders government needs to pursue policies that diminish the power of capital and radically democratize the economy.
Donald Trump didn’t get the figure of $2,000 from nowhere. Since the start of the pandemic, monthly direct payments worth that amount have been a core demand of democratic-socialist politicians like Bernie Sanders, Rashida Tlaib, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
For years now, fact-checking has been wielded by mainstream journalists against Bernie Sanders’s left agenda. Case in point: Jeff Bezos’s newspaper’s recent attacks on Sanders for telling the truth about how the Republican tax cuts benefited the rich like Bezos.
From 1933 to 1942, FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps put more than 3 million jobless young people to work on nature restoration projects all across the country. It was possibly the most popular of all the New Deal programs and a spectacular conservation success — one that a Green New Deal can replicate.
As Secretary of Labor, Bernie Sanders could do a lot to empower American workers. But the working class might be better served with Bernie pushing for pro-labor legislation outside the Biden administration rather than inside it.
It hasn’t taken long for Joe Biden to get down to the business of preparing to assume the presidency — by drawing staff from hawkish think tanks financed by arms companies.
With the Trump presidency thankfully in its death throes, Joe Biden and the Democratic leadership are in thrall to a dangerous illusion that they can take the country back to the political world of 2015 as if nothing happened. They’re about to learn that they’ve won a Pyrrhic victory.
According to centrists, the “blue wave” didn’t materialize because of the Left. That’s nonsense — and in at least one crucial swing state, Joe Biden rode to victory because of the organizing of progressives and leftists.
Economist Larry Summers helped Bill Clinton deregulate finance in the ’90s and pushed Barack Obama to scale back economic stimulus after 2008. Now he’s unhappy with Bernie Sanders’s championing of a $2,000 stimulus check. It’s a useful reminder of how destructive Democratic Party neoliberalism can be.
The US political system was intentionally set up to thwart popular democracy. To win Medicare for All or any other transformative measures, we’ll need to push for radical political reform that finally democratizes the country’s institutions.