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socialism
Isn’t a Fascist Scarier Than a Vegan?
Local Colorado media should focus on how congressional candidates will improve people's lives now, not what they believed in college or their preferred diets.
Sep 16, 2026
We all had a lot to remember last week. The 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks seemed even more desperate and frightening in retrospect than perhaps they were on that day. We watched in horror all over again. Then sprinkled in between the remembrances of that terrible day were political commercials. And we voters in races across the country are being pushed to forget what our congressional representatives have done or not done for us in the last two or even four years. Then there was the promise from the current occupant of the White House that if we just retained Trumpublican control of Congress by voting as if President Donald Trump himself were on the ballot, then each of us would get a cool $5,000 in cash. How is that for a gotcha week?
In Colorado’s 8th Congressional District (CD8), we have a particularly perplexing race going on in which Trump groupie Rep. Gabe Evans is running against young Democratic state legislator Manny Rutinel. Both men appear in their commercials to be trying to appeal to a younger voter demographic. Perhaps on some of the deeper social media sites that we older voters don't visit as often both candidates may offer policy solutions that actually address the problems in a district that includes urban and rural areas.
Part of Colorado’s CD8 once even tried to organize to secede from the state because some voters felt as if their areas weren't quite Trumpy enough. Fortunately, for both candidates and for the residents of CD8, that secession effort failed. Yet, this district that was envisioned and created at least in part to help assure there would be better Latino representation from Colorado to the US House of Representatives has had some of the closest races since its creation, and this midterm election promises that same level of competition. The urban voters will more likely vote for Rutinel while the rural voters will likely cast their vote for Evans. Whoever wins this race will be the candidate who peels off the most significant number of votes from his opponent’s stronghold areas. So, Manny needs some of those rural voters to lean his way; Gabe needs more urban votes.
I just want to know what they're going to do to help, what they're going to do to stop the mess, and what they're going to do to help all constituents.
It distresses me as a voter that both candidates declined to meet in televised debates on a popular local news outlet, and yet the former journalist in me understands why the candidates would decline that debate moderated by perhaps our most watched local political newscaster. I'd challenge anyone in the state to know quite as much about us as Kyle Clark from 9News, our NBC affiliate. So here I am telling you I understand why Manny would not want to stand in front of Clark yet again. Manny was flat-footed when I watched him debate during the primary, and Kyle asked about his positions when he was in college on healthcare, on the environment, and even on his chosen dietary path. Manny's positions at that time are a little more (or a lot more in some cases) progressive than he wants himself to be viewed as in this race. Clark might even have him leaning towards the word socialist that 9News loves to put front and center (as does The Denver Post). I point this out because the national media is leaning into this as well—this drilling down to socialist or democratic socialist before saying the name of the candidate tells me that the corporate owners and advertisers are still at work too. Even this journalist I so respect wants to make sure everybody understands that socialism is on the rise and that progressivism is essentially another word for that scary stuff called socialism. All of that is a bunch of hooey.
What we see happening in CD1 in Colorado—where Melot Kiros defeated long-time incumbent Democrat Diana DeGette in the democratic primary in June—and in districts all over the country is a surge by voters in changing the generational layers in our government, and with younger leaders comes a changing of viewpoints about what it means to live in a society with one another. Young people in Colorado and throughout the nation supported and voted in huge numbers for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in his 2016 Democratic presidential primary bid and again in 2020. So did an awful lot of Boomers. Those young people carried with them much of the passion of that process and charge to get involved at every level—and so they are. Some are loyal Bernie-crats, and some are not.
I am concerned about the televised town hall (same affiliate) that's coming up in Greeley, in CD8, that will be moderated by Kyle Clark (and I would bet by his colleague Marshall Zelinger). I worry about the impartiality issues already breached between Clark and Rutinel. I say that with a deep respect for all journalists who work on election coverage—and in Denver, I am beyond grateful for the incredible work that Kyle, Marshall, and the whole 9News team has done to bring us information about our elections. Bravo.
And yet, Clark can be like a dog on a bone on an issue that to many of us seems irrelevant at this moment in history—and so he has been with Manny Rutinel, in my opinion. In some level of fairness, I have not seen Clark interview Gabe Evans very much. Commercials are not telling us much either. Do I really want to know how many people in Washington comment on Gabe’s boots? Gabe’s post Labor Day commercial just makes me want to gag. And I really loved the one (not) when a police officer told us to worry that Manny was a vegan. That one made me laugh because since when do we in Colorado vilify anyone who chooses to eat a vegan lifestyle? But Manny really goofed up his response on that one, I thought.
I'm going to take myself back to when I was the age that Kyle zeroes in on as he interrogates Manny’s background and beliefs, and I take myself back and think about what I thought was going to happen in 1972 or 73 when I was watching the Nixon garbage unfold with babes in my arms. I was raised in a Republican household, and I was a young person finally seeing someone held accountable for what they did. Nixon, my goodness, his crimes look like a spit in the ocean, as the saying goes, compared with what we've seen Trump and the Trumpublicans do together. That's what I want Kyle Clark to drill down on. That is what I want. To find out about policy—that is what I want to hear from my representatives. How will you as my representative stop the broken promises? And how will you recognize what happens when people don't have enough to eat or they don't have enough money for the rent? How about when they don't have enough money to send their kids to the best schools or when their skin isn't the right color? That's what I want my journalists to drill down on. How are you going to stop the cruelty unfolding around us all?
Just the other night, Kyle expressed his need to be straightforward in the face of a growing move toward fascism. It is time for a different kind of discussion among us. And I agree with Kyle, so why the heck do we care about prolonged discussions of college-level sorting through directions and beliefs? I do not think most voters care unless you rile them up to care about that. Could Manny say that he believes people have a right to healthcare? Of course he could. And there is no healthcare provider in CD8 in Colorado who wouldn't agree with that—imagine the health business activity. Instead of closing hospitals, we would be filling them with the people who need the care they have been delaying or not getting for years.
We are darned close to a constitutional crisis, if we are not in one already, and I quite honestly do not care about whatever was back in anybody’s youth unless crimes were committed. I do care that Gabe Evans has voted for the Trump agenda almost entirely and has never given a thought to protecting his constituents. He called those who lost Medicaid coverage “cost savings” after he voted enthusiastically for the Big, Beautiful Bill, HR1.
Local journalists, especially Kyle Clark and team, I love that you're speaking out and saying we have a problem moving toward fascism. I agree. Now please, please, if you believe that talk about the detention centers and the deplorable, unhealthy conditions inside them, talk about the things that are happening around us now. Talk about our food supplies not being inspected adequately and bacteria spreading in ways it never has before. Talk about the fact that people have lost their Medicaid benefits and can't get care for their disabled loved ones or their elderly loved ones. Talk about the cost of groceries, the cost of gasoline, and the damage to your lives during a time when Trump is playing the oil markets like a fiddle. Talk about the grift and ask them how we deal with it and then how do we make things better for all of us together. I don't want anybody to suffer for healthcare either, that's not what this is all about. I just want to know what they're going to do to help, what they're going to do to stop the mess, and what they're going to do to help all constituents.
Let's find out where the meat is on this bone or if there tofu in the bowl. CNN just reported that Latino voters are losing faith in Trump in CD8, and that’s telling. Now, will our local journalists continue to look backwards, or will they help us have what we need to know about what the heck is going on in CD8 in Colorado? Voting will start soon, and information is vital. Let’s get going on saving this democracy before it’s too late, and that requires a free press that does its job even more intently.
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GOP's Anti-Socialism Resolution Reveals the Party’s Ultra-Reactionary Nature
In essence, the resolution by Republicans denounces all policies seeking improvements in collective welfare.
Sep 02, 2026
On Tuesday, the US House of Representatives approved a resolution sponsored by Republican Study Committee Member Jeff Crank (R-Colo.) to condemn socialism “in all its forms.” Eight Democrats voted with Republicans in favor of this red scare tactic ahead of the November midterm elections, which accentuates the Democrat’s divide.
The ideological divide between the establishment and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is profound, and the resolution condemning socialism is indeed part of a concerted strategy on the part of the GOP to wreak further havoc on the Democratic Party.
It is also important to take note of the fact that the resolution does not merely condemn socialism but opposes the implementation of all socialist policies in the United States. In essence, it denounces all policies seeking improvements in collective welfare.
Policies seeking improvements in collective welfare cover a wide range of objectives, like addressing massive economic inequalities, offering all people access to high-quality healthcare services, providing free public services, supporting individuals who experience various forms of income loss, protecting the environment, and so on. These policies may or may not be part of a strictly socialist agenda, but they are designed to promote economic justice and to enhance social cohesion and social welfare.
The claim that socialism leads inevitably to totalitarianism and tyranny is pure propaganda to scare the ignorant.
Indeed, many European countries have been actively pursuing policies seeking to bring about improvements in collective welfare at least since the end of World War II. The scope of some of these policies has shrunk considerably in the age of predatory capitalism, which is what the GOP anti-socialism resolution stands for, but no political party of any ideological stripe in the rest of the western world espouses the myth of social Darwinism to attack policies seeking to improve collective welfare. In fact, Europe’s far-right parties and movements advocate a strong welfare state and promise more government spending on native-born citizens (while excluding immigrants), especially in light of the ongoing erosion of social programs under neoliberalism.
There are many different types of socialism. For instance, European socialism (otherwise known as social democracy) has nothing to do with communism as the world experienced with the founding of the Soviet Union and bears no resemblance whatsoever to certain authoritarian and self-proclaimed socialist regimes that flourished during the Cold War in certain parts of the non-western world (Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Libya under Muammar Gaddafi, among others). The claim that socialism leads inevitably to totalitarianism and tyranny is pure propaganda to scare the ignorant. Socialist parties have ruled for long periods of time in most northern European countries, with those societies ranking globally at the top of major indexes for economic stability and personal freedoms while experiencing low rates of crime.
The Republican Party is by far the most reactionary party in the western world.
If anything, the argument has been that European socialist parties haven’t been socialistic enough. They pursued policies that improved without a doubt the condition of working-class people by striking a greater balance between capital and labor but did not go far enough with the mission of egalitarianism. DSA itself has been critical of the actual accomplishments of European socialism as it envisions a socioeconomic order based on democratic planning and participation whose sole purpose would be “to meet human needs, rather than to make profits for a few.”
Naturally, the GOP’s anti-socialism resolution paid no attention to such ideological and empirical nuances. It denounced socialism “in all its forms” and, by doing so, signaled its full support for an economic system based on predatory capitalism and a social order that advocates the notion that only the fittest members of society deserve to survive.
Policies geared toward universal healthcare, housing decommodification, strong worker rights and protections, strict financial regulation, environmental protection, and social justice? That’s the road to totalitarianism and tyranny, according to GOP’s anti-socialism resolution.
But there should be nothing surprising about this. The Republican Party is by far the most reactionary party in the western world. Yet, it continues to assert with confidence--and measurable success, no doubt--that its political and ideological positions represent the values and principles of the American people.
It is Trump’s fascism and the system of predatory capitalism that need to be denounced, not socialism.
However, the tide is turning. Americans are not only fed up with rising costs but with the way “democracy” works in their country, as a Pew Research Center poll revealed earlier in the summer. Support for capitalism has rapidly declined, especially among young people. Less than 10 percent of people younger than 30 have a “very positive” view of capitalism, according to a recent CBS/YouGov poll.
The idea propounded by the likes of Milton Friedman and implemented by Ronald Reagan and virtually every other US administration since have created one of the most unequal societies in the world while plutocrats are in control of the political system. US democracy is essentially a sham. But Trump and company have gone even further by advancing a 21st century version of fascism. It is Trump’s fascism and the system of predatory capitalism that need to be denounced, not socialism. In one of the most unequal and brutally unjust societies in the world, policies geared toward the improvement of the collective welfare represent the only realistic and humane alternative. And it appears that more and more Americans are beginning to realize that socialism is the only way out. So much so, one might add, that if Vladimir Mayakovsky were alive today and living in the United States, he might conceivably have said “Socialism is the youth of the world.”
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Don't Let the Word 'Socialism' Scare You, Progressives Just Want a Country That Works for All
When someone brandishes the word “socialism” like it’s a stink bomb, take a courageous look at the actual ideas—higher taxes on the rich; Medicare for All; or a raise for working people—being proposed.
Aug 28, 2026
The debate over capitalism vs. socialism often looks like a battle of cartoon caricatures: Monopoly Man versus the Marx Monster.
Across the planet there are countless flavors of capitalism and socialism, unique mashups of free markets and government policies. Into this muddle wade the right-wing ideologues who fear the red “socialist” demon hiding in every corner.
If Fox News existed in the 1950s, they would’ve labeled Republican President Dwight Eisenhower a socialist for taxing the wealthy and making broad public investments to expand homeownership, enable debt-free higher education, and build infrastructure and technology that expanded the modern middle class.
Yet, what do these labelers call modern-day China, a country that mints hundreds of billionaires a year and dominates global markets with private production? Is it socialist or capitalist?
All generations now understand that the old American Dream has expired, with 7 in 10 experiencing economic insecurity.
Meanwhile, social democracies, like Canada and the northern European countries, have progressive tax systems and strong social safety nets. Sweden, with its generous welfare state, has higher rates of entrepreneurship than the United States.
These countries also have higher rates of social mobility than the United States—meaning it’s easier for lower-income people to escape poverty and become stable. The American Dream, apparently, has moved offshore.
These welfare states, with their higher taxes on the wealthy, exist comfortably alongside healthy market economies. However, in the United States, whenever a politician proposes that billionaires pay their fair share of taxes so we make public investments in opportunities for everyone else, they are labeled socialist or even communist.
These criticisms conflate a set of policy proposals, most of them quite popular, with an economic system where the government owns the means of production. However, this well-trod attack doesn’t seem to be working anymore, especially for younger generations.
Younger voters see the grotesque inequalities of wealth and power that distort the economy and block opportunity for the non-rich. They witness how large corporations have captured Congress and blocked popular reforms to defend consumers and counter monopolies.
They watch with alarm as billionaire-backed private equity firms buy up healthcare facilities and squeeze consumers in every corner of the economy. They see how both major political parties have been captured by the billionaire donor class and failed to address stagnant wages and rising basic costs.
All generations now understand that the old American Dream has expired, with 7 in 10 experiencing economic insecurity. These folks still hope hard work could lead to a decent life—to own a home, take a vacation, pass opportunities to their children, and retire before they die. They feel the constant stress of knowing they’re one job loss, illness, disability, or divorce away from living in their car.
Without a strong party representing working people’s concerns, political realignments are happening in both parties. A new generation of progressives and a handful of self-described democratic socialists argue the economy should work for everyone, not just the billionaire class.
They believe new technologies—such as AI—should serve everyone, not just billionaire tech bros and their global conglomerates. They believe the government has an important role in expanding healthcare, blocking oligarchy, and breaking up big corporations.
They advocate for expanding affordable housing to aid people struggling to find decent housing in a hyper-speculative market. Instead of subsidizing private developers, they advocate for housing owned by nonprofit organizations, resident cooperatives, and—egads!—government entities, like housing authorities.
These progressives believe we should stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industry and end tax breaks to the Jeffrey Epstein class. They support investments to help us transition to sustainable energy, lower energy costs, and reduce climate disruption.
The right-wing pundits—and some so-called moderates, too—are hoping that when they trot out the “socialist” bugaboo, your mind will freeze and you’ll start frothing at the mouth. They’re afraid that you will ask why the current system isn’t working and wonder if there are alternatives. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!
When someone brandishes the word “socialism” like it’s a stink bomb, take a courageous look at the actual ideas—higher taxes on the rich? Medicare for All? A raise for working people?—being proposed. There might be more common sense than you thought.
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Actually Michael Harrington Would Probably Love Today’s DSA – and Hate It Too
The "big tent" of the Democratic Socialists of America has its drawbacks too.
Aug 07, 2026
Kirkpatrick Sale has it half right in his lament over today’s Democratic Socialists of America, “Michael Harrington is Spinning in His Grave.” The imagined spinning stems from post-mortem distress at what its founding leader would make of the organization today. Sale—best remembered for SDS, his history of Students for a Democratic Society, the seminal 1960s “New Left” organization—calls himself Harrington’s “close friend and traveling companion,” and feels that today’s DSA “has stood on its head the principles that Mike and his colleagues stood for.”
While I cannot claim to have been Harrington’s friend, I did know him and arguably qualify as one of his colleagues, in that I was a member of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, his prior organization whose 1982 merger with the New American Movement created DSA. I remain a member of the organization to this day, and when serving in the Massachusetts House of Representatives was once one of DSOC/DSA’s handful of public elected officials. From my vantage point, while I understand Sale’s real–and Harrington’s imagined–distress at some of what he sees in today’s DSA, not only does he ignore developments that would have made Harrington proud, but I also think his take on Harrington’s politics is not quite right.
As a flat statement, Sale’s contention that DSA “is no longer anything that could be called democratic or socialist” is wrong, but he is not wrong in identifying parts of 2026 DSA that would seem unlikely to have appealed to Harrington. Sale clearly recognizes that the roots of the organization’s dramatic changes—its 20-fold inflation from the 6,000 member group of the 90's—lie in Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. He errs, though, in calling Sanders “a leading DSA figure and its only representative in Congress.” Sanders actually was not then, is not now, and so far as I know has never been an actual member of DSA—counterintuitive as that may seem.
After Sanders introduced “democratic socialism” to millions of American living rooms in his debates with Hillary Clinton and politically “lived to talk about it,” a whole lot of people who’d also been thinking about the idea googled the term and found DSA; some joined. They were then followed by some who indeed did not identify with the democratic socialist tradition but recognized that this was now where the action was—the hazard of success.
The result is generally understood as a “big tent” organization—a tent thus far large enough to contain both US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Democratic New York City Mayor Zoran Mamdani—figures for whom I cannot imagine Harrington having anything but admiration—along with caucuses by no means committed to that approach, groups that Harrington would consider bizarre and out of place (as does this writer.) It contains serious divergences between local chapters and a tenuous national organization. How long this tent holds up is anyone’s guess. As for Sale, if he would actually consider the entirety of organization (the best description of which I’ve seen was recently published in a German Left Party newspaper—"Von Degrowth bis ML" Jungle World, July 30, 2026) he might well see similarities with the late years of SDS (an organization Harrington subsequently regretted having failed to productively engage with.)
Among those similarities is a certain not-ready-for-prime-time quality common in organizations trying to cope with the increased glare of the public attention spotlight. Foibles and foolish statements surface from the past. My personal nomination for the dumbest left slogan of recent years is “Defund the police”—its rational kernel of re-evaluating government’s approach to certain types of public safety situations smothered in a seemingly naive call for an end to law enforcement. And yet, even someone like Mamdani who is generally considered to possess masterful political skills—correctly, I think—has had to walk that one back.
On some points of his critique of current DSA, Sale seems perhaps frozen in time, such as his noting that “Mike was an outspoken champion of the new Israel.” That “new Israel” has changed quite a bit in the thirty-seven years since Harrington has been gone. Would he remain a champion of a nation now planning a prison for Palestinians that includes a moat stocked with crocodiles – a proposal temporarily stalled by consideration of the animals’ subsequently repealed protected status? Sure hope not.
But where I really think Sale is just wrong is in essentially arguing that Harrington was not actually a socialist. Yes, Harrington did talk of being “the left wing of the possible,” and that “generally meant working within the Democratic Party”—as do most current DSAers running campaigns to do something for the American working class in the here-and-now. And while Sale is accurate in saying that the DSA of Harrington’s day “put forth a vision of a democratically elected government that would be like those of the Scandinavian countries, providing state services in health, education, housing and the like,” his contention that back then there was “Nowhere stuff about ending capitalism” makes it sound like Sale missed a lot of meetings—and maybe didn’t keep up on his reading so well either. Even the small DSA had differing strands of thinking. One major one was all about imagining how to reach a genuinely democratically controlled economy beyond the “welfare state” and capitalism, something you will find reflected in Harrington’s writing.
So would the imagined Harrington be troubled by some of what he’d see in today’s DSA? Yes, I’m sure he would. And would he be positively thrilled by some of what he found in today’s DSA? Yes, I’m sure he would.
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Is the US Ready for Radical Change?
Political scientist, political economist, author, and journalist C. J. Polychroniou believes that radical change is difficult but still possible in today's United States, even though he realizes there is a strong anti-democratic tradition standing in the way.
Jul 28, 2026
The US is the richest country in the world, yet an international outlier on many measures. Among industrialized nations, the US spends a lower percentage of its GDP on public social expenditure, has no universal healthcare system, union density is at an all-time low, and the average American's standard of living is in decline, as "nearly half of US households can't make ends meet." Of course, delusional President Donald Trump continues to say that the US is the "hottest country in the world." Is the US, however, ready for radical change? After all, isn't there evidence that Americans are losing faith in capitalism and that socialism is gaining ground among voters?
Political scientist, political economist, author, and journalist C. J. Polychroniou shares provocative thoughts on these issues in an interview with the French-Greek writer and journalist Alexandra Boutri. Polychroniou believes that radical change is difficult but still possible in today's United States, even though he realizes there is a strong anti-democratic tradition standing in the way and regards the Democratic Party itself as the graveyard of radical change undertakings.
Alexandra Boutri: Recent polls indicate that capitalism is in trouble in the US, as there is a growing loss of faith in the system, apparently even among Republicans, while socialism is gaining mainstream appeal. So, I want to start this interview by inquiring about your own impression regarding political and ideological trends in the United States. Indeed, is the country on the verge of radical change?
C. J. Polychroniou: I am now old enough to take any talk of radical political change with a grain of salt. That being said, there is no doubt that the US version of capitalism has been an utter failure for the majority of Americans. In contrast to European or Asian versions of capitalism, capitalism in the US has always been structured around what we might call the Sopranos version of doing business, which is the Trump administration’s way of actually running the whole country today. But Trump aside, what kind of civilized society denies its citizens access to universal healthcare, tuition-free higher education, guaranteed long-term parental leave, 4-6 weeks of guaranteed paid vacation, and robust unemployment benefits? The US does!
Only the pathetic leadership of the Democratic Party stands in the way of Trump’s inevitable fall and disgrace.
The younger generations in the US seem to have awakened to the realization that the US economic system is brutal and thus detrimental to their well-being, even if they may not have an alternative socioeconomic system in mind that they would like to see instituted. They have indeed taken notice of the fact that the US is the only industrialized nation in the world without a universal healthcare system and that the standard of living has declined to the level of developing countries. Truth be told, even if North America remains the wealthiest on average, the quality of life in many European countries, which are, of course, still fully capitalistic, is superior to the US. There are stronger social safety nets and greater work-life balance in capitalist Europe than there are in the capitalist United States of America.
Which countries are best on women’s well-being? According to the latest Women, Peace and Security Index, European countries occupy all nine of the top positions while the US ranks 31st, below countries like Serbia and Malta. So, we do need to take into account different versions of capitalism. In that context, it is safe to say that many Americans have finally awakened to the realization that the US version of capitalism sucks! Anything more than that, however, is open to speculation. Socialism is gaining ground, but the challenges of building a unified socialist movement on a national scale and having a socialist political party that can contest power at the federal level are enormous in the United States of America.
Alexandra Boutri: Is the rise of socialism in the US the reason why Trump is reviving the boogeyman of communism?
C. J. Polychroniou: Absolutely. However much of a shallow man Trump happens to be, he is nonetheless a mastermind politician who has the pulse of today’s Republican voters. He is the greatest bullshitter of the modern age, but that’s only because of his audience. He knows how to stir fear. He also knows that he can normalize cruelty because his fanatical and racist fanbase simply loves it. Have his policies worsened economic conditions in the country to the point that even some of his own followers are beginning to doubt him? He only has to raise the volume on culture wars and then becomes again, in the eyes of his own supporters, the nation’s savior. Of course, such tactics have an expiration date even for the most popular authoritarian leaders. Look, for example, at what happened to Viktor Orbán in Hungary. After 16 years in power, even his own core supporters grew tired of his cronyism and corruption. I believe we will see something similar happen to Donald Trump and to the Republican Party, perhaps as soon as this coming November, in spite of how deeply the anti-democratic tradition has entrenched itself in all branches of government. In the end, only the pathetic leadership of the Democratic Party stands in the way of Trump’s inevitable fall and disgrace.
Alexandra Boutri: Are you also saying that the Democrats have been responsible for Trump’s rise to power?
C J. Polychroniou: Of course, and it was the Democrats, with their ability to destroy trust in government by siding themselves utterly and shamelessly with major corporate and financial interests, that rolled out the red carpet for Trump’s arrival on the nation’s political scene. The country had been moving further and further to the right since the early 1980s. In fact, the percentage of Americans identifying themselves as moderates had been declining since the Clinton years. Democrats still talk about Bill Clinton’s achievements, such as turning deficits into surpluses and making the economy more globalized, but his policies ushered in a new era of inequality while he transformed the welfare state by ending social policy. Essentially, the welfare state was dismantled under the Clinton presidency and was largely replaced in turn by volunteerism.
Neoliberalism (embraced by both parties in the US) and cultural relativism (a late obsession of liberals and segments of the left) have been at the core of the political turn to the far right in the US. The main point, though, is that the Democrats failed to advance a meaningful alternative whenever they found themselves in power. The Obama administration also had the chance to make a meaningful impact on the future of the country but opted, instead, to align itself with the status quo on all major issues, both on the domestic and foreign front. The Biden administration did make some progress on economic policy, mainly thanks to pressures from the progressive wing of the party, but failed miserably on foreign policy. As to why Kamala Harris lost to Trump, that's an issue that will forever be debated.
Alexandra Boutri: In a recent campaign speech in Michigan, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said that the Trump administration is “hellbent on tearing down in four years what it took this country 250 years to build.” What did she mean by that, and how likely is it that she will be the Democratic 2028 nominee?
C. J. Polychroniou: Naturally, the country has made progress over the past 250 years. Don’t you think it would have been unnatural if it hadn’t done so? But how do we measure progress? Wars existed in the past, and it appears that war will never end. By the same token, we have taken major steps toward protecting individuals against discrimination on the basis of sex or gender, but economic inequality is greater today than it has ever been in the modern era, while women, people of color, and minorities continue to face economic disadvantages. In any case, it is beyond dispute that Trump is destroying whatever social and economic progress has been made so far. He is a wrecking ball, an unhinged sociopath, but one who is still being treated as America's savior by something like close to 40% of voters. That’s simply mind-boggling, but it says something noteworthy about the persistence of a particular component of American political culture—one that rests on possessive individualism, anti-intellectualism, and the paranoid style. Richard Hofstadter addressed some of those aspects of American political life long before the rise of Trumpism. But we need to add racism, as it also remains a profound component of American political culture.
If popular struggles succeeded in introducing a universal healthcare system in the US, well, that would definitely constitute radical change in terms of how the nation has decided to deal with the well-being of its citizens.
I don’t know if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will decide to run for president in 2028. I hope she does. Recent polls indicate that she is more popular with Democratic voters than the likes of Pete Buttigieg, Gavin Newsom, and Kamala Harris, none of whom offers hope for a brighter future, although any one of them would be an improvement over Trump. What I do know, though, is that if AOC does decide to run for president in 2028, not only will she have at least half of the country react with extreme fear and paranoia attacks, but she will encounter massive opposition from the Democratic establishment itself. In 2016, the Democratic National Committee derided the Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) campaign. I expect something similar will happen to AOC. The current leadership of the Democratic Party is the graveyard of radical change in the US.
Alexandra Boutri: What would constitute radical change in today’s United States?
C. J. Polychroniou: That’s a very important question, and I’m glad you raised it. Political, economic, and even sociocultural settings must be taken into account whenever we speak of demands for radical change. Take something like universal healthcare. Almost every country in Europe has universal coverage, and it can also be found in many countries around the world. But in the US there has always been staunch opposition to universal healthcare policies by powerful private entities like the health and insurance industries. If popular struggles succeeded in introducing a universal healthcare system in the US, well, that would definitely constitute radical change in terms of how the nation has decided to deal with the well-being of its citizens. No question about it. Radical change should not imply the transformation of a country’s entire system of government. That would constitute a revolution. Even then, we would need to distinguish between a political revolution and a social revolution. For instance, the American Revolution was a political, not social revolution. It did not alter the fabric of society; it did not change wealth distribution and left the class system intact. On the other hand, the French Revolution that began in 1789 and the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia were truly social revolutions in that they transformed property relations and changed radically the class systems in both countries.
Alexandra Boutri: Today’s left focuses too much on cultural issues without really challenging capitalism. Indeed, in the recent past, issues like multiculturalism and even certain variants of feminism have functioned like ideologies of capitalism. In addition, some segments of the left have a knack for spreading ideas that are either not well thought out or simply impractical. For instance, and I believe this also captures your own sentiments, I find talk about “degrowth” and “wealth tax” schemes that fail to address the dynamics of unfettered capital accumulation while making in addition ludicrous claims that their implementation would solve the climate crisis as rather wishy-washy responses to capitalist crises and thus by no means game-changing strategies. My question then is this: What sort of new ideas would qualify, in your view, as game changers for the contemporary capitalist environment in the United States?
C. J. Polychroniou: I have already mentioned universal healthcare. In any case, it would be rather easy for anyone, I think, to simply suggest ideas to improve the state of the US economy and to create a better society but that would be meaningless if the ideas themselves weren't accompanied by concrete steps and specific policy proposals on how to erect alternative socioeconomic arrangements. But we need expertise for that to happen. That being said, a new project has been launched by the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst called Game Changers: Economic Policies for a Working America. It’s a project that was conceived of and is being directed by Gerald Epstein, a world-leading progressive economist who also happens to be PERI’s co-director. The issues addressed range from health and the environment to trade and finance. The policy briefs produced by different economists contain the sort of policy proposals that are desperately needed for rewriting the rules of the US economy in a manner that caters first and foremost to the needs and interests of American workers. I recommend everyone interested in progressive ideas on how to create a fairer, greener, and sustainable US economy to study some of the policy briefs that have been posted on PERI's website.
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My Conversation With Karl Marx About Donald Trump
The struggle between classes might seem an antiquated concept, but nonetheless it is the main factor that undergirds history, past, present and future.
Jul 06, 2026
The following invented interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Norman Solomon: You’ve downplayed the importance of the individual in history. But the United States now has as president an individual who transformed power relations and the political landscape.
Karl Marx: I can assure you that he did not do that by himself. Power relations are class relations. And by the way, I never said individuals are irrelevant to history. I exhorted individuals to get involved in changing history.
NS: President Trump has rolled back gains from the last hundred years and more. Also, he’s mentally unstable, to put it mildly.
KM: The basics still hold. As I wrote in 1869 about a situation in France where a cult existed around a tyrant, the class struggle “created circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero’s part.”
NS: But now one highly dangerous and unhinged person has taken control of the U.S. government. And he got there with a majority of votes of the working class. It’s been a huge shock to have a virtual psychopath as president.
KM: Those you would call liberals like to disconnect such poisoned flowers from their historic roots. Victor Hugo was like that, as with so many commentators in your day, endlessly heaping their derision on the despicable despot. Hugo excelled at bitter and witty invective against Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte after the coup d’etat. As I pointed out, “The event itself appears in his work like a bolt from the blue. He sees in it only the violent act of a single individual. He does not notice that he makes this individual great instead of little by ascribing to him a personal power of initiative unparalleled in world history.”
NS: Actually, Trump does seem to insanely wield destructive power in ways unparalleled in world history.
KM: But he did not obtain that power through his own will. If you fixate on an individual personality, you’ve lost the historical plot.
NS: One sociologist, Dylan Riley, recently commented: “From a Marxist perspective, much of the left-liberal critique of contemporary American politics can be viewed as essentially petty bourgeois. It revolves around moral arguments advocating for equal opportunities and less social division and conflict.” And he added: “I think that Marx’s central point on this is to emphasize the importance of class struggle as the mechanism through which any class compromise is actually imposed. And if you miss that point then your politics are disabled from the get-go.”
KM: First, I’m glad to say that I am not a “Marxist,” given how much idiotic rubbish has been babbled by some who so label themselves. You can look it up, “Ce qu'il y a de certain, c'est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste.” But that aside – yes, certainly, there is just no way to reasonably talk oneself around the primacy of class struggle. The phrase might sound overly polemical to petty-bourgeois ears in the America of the 21st century, but that’s the most powerful engine driving history. You can deny or evade it, but you can’t really avoid it.
NS: Trump is a voraciously narcissistic capitalist, but he’s also flagrantly racist and misogynist.
KM: Of course, capitalism functions to oppress and divide the working class. Systems of racism mean more profits for the few. Likewise, women are exploited and underpaid for their labor. I wrote about this extensively.
NS: The horrible fact remains that we are now oppressed by an extremely reactionary vicious president aspiring to become an unlimited tyrant. And he harbors special hatred for women and people of color, with horrendous social impacts.
KM: Class struggle failed to result in the needed remedies to appalling human conditions, with some special victimizations within the working class. On this point, we could leave the last words to my comrade Friedrich Engels, who wrote in 1890: “The ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure – political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas – also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form.”
NS: So, you and Engels agreed that many different forces shape history, yet one individual can conceivably make all the difference at certain junctures?
KM: Fred clarified his point further this way: “We make our history ourselves, but, in the first place, under very definite assumptions and conditions. Among these the economic ones are ultimately decisive. But the political ones, etc., and indeed even the traditions which haunt human minds also play a part, although not the decisive one.” And he went on: “There are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant – the historical event.”
NS: Well, right now the historical event that keeps happening often seems to be dominated one way or another by Donald Trump.
KM: Even if it seems that way, the main propellant of a current event can often look obvious while unfolding as optical illusion. As I noted back in 1843, “The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition that needs illusions.” Never forget that a few live in obscene luxury while billions live in immiseration and billions of others are barely able to scrape together the essentials of life. The struggle between classes might seem an antiquated concept, but nonetheless it is the main factor that undergirds history, past, present and future.
NS: Some people complain that’s what you always say.
KM: That’s because it’s always true.
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No, Socialism Won't Kill the Democratic Party
The democratic socialists are fighting the battles the Democratic Party have refused to wage. This is the way.
Jun 28, 2026
Maybe you’ve heard the phrase means of production and maybe you haven’t. It basically means the tools, land, factories, machines, infrastructure, and systems a society uses to make the material stuff of life. Who owns those means, who controls them, and who benefits from them is one of the oldest fights in politics.
The communists, at their extreme, think the state should own and control all of it. The capitalists, at their extreme, think it should be completely in private hands. Socialists like me think there ought to be a blend of public and private ownership, that capitalism and socialism work best when paired. The neoliberals, which is mostly what we’ve got now, think our future should be in private control but paid for by the people, maybe with a guardrail or two set up between the people and the private sector’s insatiable desire for profit.
We fought about this hard in the early 1900s. There was a big movement around labor and organizers and workers, and a lot of those folks were actual communists. The communists were fighting for the means of production and the capitalists were fighting for it too, and they fought tooth and nail. The workers were unionizing and fighting for better rights and better conditions, and these were actual fights, with guns and sticks and knives, and people got killed, mostly workers. They fought for more rights. They fought for the 40-hour week. They fought for overtime. They fought for working conditions that were safe and not deadly, and in a lot of cases they won. They won those fights with blood. They won those fights with effort. They won those fights by putting things on the line.
You might have heard of something called the weekend. Not the singer, though I love him. The idea that Monday through Friday is the work week and the weekend is for your life. You might have heard of the eight-hour day, that anything over eight hours is overtime. Both of those were brought to you by the labor movement, a labor movement that at one point was empowered not to fight for the members of its own labor union but empowered to fight for people who worked for a living. That was their mantra. That was their goal.
Then came the New Deal in the 30s, the people injecting themselves into the production of the things we needed to rebuild the country after the Great Depression. We did it through the Civilian Conservation Corps. We trained workers, we provided health care, and during the war we even created daycare centers so women could go into the factories. It was a real rebalancing of our economy between capital and labor, with the state taking part of the means of production, engineers and scientists doing the work for the people, paid for by the people, and then used by the people. Corporations got brought to heel for a while.
Then we beat the fascists, the Nazis in Germany and Italy and the imperialists in Japan, and right after that the Americans decided the biggest scourge, the biggest fear they had, was communism and socialism. Because we’d gotten a taste through the New Deal and the Arsenal of Democracy of what it was like to share in the growth, to share in the fruits of our own labor, and there was a fear that if we kept tasting it we’d decide we too deserved more, and that would mean the Vanderbilts and the railroad tycoons and the shipping barons and the oilmen would have less and the people who did the work would have more. So we fought it. We fought it through the McCarthy era, with propaganda, with all sorts of ideological battles. The idea of socialism and the idea of communism both lost. And the Democratic Party started moving away from its socialist roots and its socialist ideas toward what would ultimately become neoliberalism, the system we’ve got now.
We went through all of those fights, the prisons, the violations of the Constitution. We perverted ourselves in order to fight off socialism, to keep the means of production in the hands of the capitalists, because they alone were able to properly guide our system. And then what did they do with our productive capacity? What did they do with it through the 70s and 80s and 90s and 2000s and right up to today? They shipped it off to Mexico and China and Brazil. They gave away the very thing we fought over. And why? Because it was cheaper, more profitable, and they figured they could do it with impunity.
But when you take away people’s means of production, you also take away their means of making a living, their power and their value in life, economically and socially and every other way, and then you’ve got people fighting over what little is left, and it turns ugly and it turns dirty. Look at January 6th. Look at the riots and the protests during the Black Lives Matter movement. What you end up with is a police force that has to oppress, and private prisons that have to fill up, and a military-industrial complex that doesn’t care whether it’s participating in a genocide or not, because it’s about money and power. And ultimately what you end up with is a country that can’t defend itself or provide for itself, a giant welfare state leaning on the Chinese to make our goods and to buy our debt. A nation that no longer holds its own means of production, no longer holds its own means of making a living, no longer holds its independence, not in energy production, not in the ability to build housing or infrastructure or the things that make our lives better. We import all of it, because all we need is money, we can just make more money.
And that only works as long as the money stays in the hands of a few. All that money creation, all that expansion of wealth, would lead to massive inflation if it weren’t held by a few, and you can already see what it does, because it’s caused massive inflation in indexes and in asset prices. Bitcoin and Apple and the stock market have risen to unreasonable heights, heights that are detached from any reality. Tesla is worth more than the next 30 car companies combined, even though it doesn’t produce as much as any of the top ten and doesn’t make more profit than any of the top ten, and yet somehow it’s worth more. Why? Because the money that’s been created has caused that inflation, and the inflation stays at the top. It makes trillionaires and centibillionaires. If that same money had been shared with the rest of America without creating more productive capacity, without the ability to build more housing or train more doctors or build more hospitals, it would create massive inflation everywhere, because you’d have more money chasing fewer goods in a system that can’t produce the things anymore and just imports them. The inflation is real. It just stays at the top, in asset prices, instead of showing up at the grocery store.
So the means of production was a fight that working people lost and the capitalists won. And then the winners gave away the spoils of their own victory to other nations, because they aren’t patriots and they aren’t citizens of this country. They’re citizens of the world. They’re detached and untethered, private jets and private islands and private security forces, and at that level of wealth they don’t need this country to succeed.
But here’s the thing. The elite, for now, do need us more than we need them. We’re the ones propping them up right now.
The question with AI and robotics is not whether the machines will be powerful. They will be. The question is whether they become another offshore factory, another private island, another asset owned by people who do not need us, or whether they become part of a shared American capacity again.
We lost the last fight over the means of production, and then the winners gave it away. We should not let them do it twice.
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Named for Mamdani, GOP Bill Would Strip Citizenship From People Who Advocate for Socialism
History tells us, over and over again, that once you give the government the power to disappear people for what they read, write, believe, or advocate that power never stays trained just on the original targets.
Apr 21, 2026
Republicans are at it again, and it’s hard to overstate how chilling this is and what it tells you about the direction people in this Party want to take America.
Texas Congressman Chip Roy is preparing to introduce legislation he’s calling the “MAMDANI Act,” named after Zohran Mamdani, the recently elected democratic socialist mayor of New York City, that would let the federal government bar entry to, deport, and strip naturalized citizenship from any person who advocates for or is “affiliated with” what Roy calls “totalitarian” movements. The list includes, from Rep. Roy’s webpage:
“[A] socialist party, a communist party, the Chinese Communist Party, or Islamic fundamentalist party, or advocates for socialism, communism, Marxism, or Islamic fundamentalism.”
The bill targets people who “write, distribute, circulate, print, display, possess, or publish” material supporting socialism or any of those other ideas.
“Possess?” That single word means that owning a copy of Marx’s Das Kapital, or a pamphlet from a Palestinian solidarity group, or a battered paperback of Howard Zinn — or maybe even one of my books on the New Deal — would be enough to make a green-card holder or a naturalized citizen “inadmissible or deportable.”
“Affiliated with?” That would prevent anybody who’s ever affiliated themselves with the Democratic Socialist Party in New York that Mamdami ran on behalf of (along with the normal Democratic Party; New York has fusion voting so you can run on two parties simultaneously) from staying in America. Gone to a meeting, rally, or put yourself on their mailing list? You’re toast.
“Write?” That means they’re coming for me, and for you if you’ve ever echoed in writing the kind of sentiments that Republicans call socialism, including food stamps and school lunches, free college, public libraries, a national healthcare system, police and fire, and highways that don’t have tolls. (When billionaire David Koch ran for vice president in 1980 on an antisocialism agenda, he called for the end of all these forms of “socialism”.)
“Distribute?” And they’d be coming for Substack, too, it appears. Along with your local bookstore or library.
We haven’t seen anything this sweeping since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, when then-President John Adams had roughly 30 newspaper editors and publishers thrown in prison for attacking him. Ben Franklin’s grandson was arrested for publishing an op-ed calling the president “old, querulous, Bald, blind, crippled, Toothless Adams.” A town drunk in New Jersey was arrested for criticizing him while imbibing in a bar. Adams’ overreach lost him the election of 1800 to his then-political enemy Thomas Jefferson, who openly opposed the Acts.
But here we are again, and here’s another dangerous overreach on the GOP’s part in this legislation: Roy’s bill explicitly forbids judicial review of any inadmissibility, deportation, or denaturalization decision made under it.
In other words, if this law passes then no court can stop or second-guess the government: no habeas corpus, no meaningful appeals; just an order from the Attorney General or some twit at ICE or Homeland Security and you’re on a plane or stuck in a hellhole “detention facility,” possibly for the rest of your life.
That’s not immigration policy, that’s the architecture of a police state, and it’s modeled on how the Nazis stripped citizenship from German Jews and political dissidents in 1935 under the Reich Citizenship Laws.
I’ve walked through Berlin’s Topography of Terror museum, and the documents on display tell the horrific story of how that the lawyers who drafted those Nazi laws studied America’s own racial and political exclusion laws for inspiration.
Now Republican Chip Roy wants to bring them back to America as Republicans try to reinvent or country in the image of Trump’s mentor Putin’s Russia or — as the authors of Project 2025 openly suggest — Orbán’s Hungary.
The bill’s namesake, Mayor Mamdani, became a U.S. citizen in 2018 after moving here from Uganda as a child. He hasn’t been credibly accused of any crime, and as the Brennan Center for Justice meticulously documents, the Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected the use of stripping people of their citizenship as a political weapon like Putin now routinely does and Trump loves to threaten.
That goes all the way back to trying to overturn the 1943 Schneiderman Supreme Court ruling, which held the government must prove “lack of attachment” to the Constitution by “clear, unequivocal, and convincing” evidence. Disagreeing with someone’s politics doesn’t cut it by a long shot. But Roy and his allies aren’t interested in the existing jurisprudence; they want to write new laws that nullify that decision (and common decency) altogether.
Roy told Breitbart his target is what he calls a “Red-Green Alliance” of socialists and Islamists, and a summary from his office goes further, claiming current immigration policies — echoing Clarence Thomas‘ recent speech that I wrote about yesterday — have produced “dangerous levels of opposition to classical American political doctrines, like free-market capitalism.”
That’s an extraordinary admission, because Roy isn’t proposing to deport people who commit crimes, or who support terrorism, or even who lied on their citizenship applications. He wants, instead, to strip of citizenship and then deport people who don’t sufficiently believe in the unregulated, low-tax version of the so-called free market capitalism advocated by the rightwing billionaires who now own the GOP.
This is a loyalty test for an ideology rather than a country, and, as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, it’s the kind of legislation the robber barons of the 1920s and the John Birchers and McCarthy movement of the 1950s dreamed of but could never ram through Congress and neither Taft nor Eisenhower would ever have signed.
We’ve actually run a smaller, more local version of this experiment before, and it ended in disgrace. The Palmer Raids of 1919 and 1920 saw roughly 10,000 immigrants rounded up without warrants and 556 of them deported, including the anarchist Emma Goldman, all for the crime of holding the wrong politics.
The Communist Control Act of 1954 put into law by Republicans at the height of McCarthyism, was eventually declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1973 and most of its provisions repealed. Each time we’ve tried this sort of neofascist thing the country looked back in shame, having relearned that the First Amendment doesn’t have an exception for people who say we should tax the morbidly rich to build and support a middle class.
History tells us, over and over again, that once you give the government the power to disappear people for what they read, write, believe, or advocate that power never stays trained just on the original targets.
There are nearly 25 million naturalized citizens and 12.8 million green-card holders living in the United States today, and every single one of them would, under Roy’s bill, be subject to having their citizenship reviewed and potentially revoked based on some rightwinger complaining about them to a federal bureaucrat or police agency or the discovery of a book in their house.
It would threaten millions of legal permanent residents and visa holders working in our hospitals, building our houses, teaching our children, designing our electronics, and even farming our food. The fear alone is the point: if you’re a naturalized citizen or green-card or visa holder and you want to attend a Free Palestine rally, a labor union meeting, or a tenants’ rights organizing session, you’d now have to ask yourself whether some aide in Stephen Miller’s office might decide that constitutes “advocacy for socialism.”
And it’s one of dozens of similar laws that have been proposed by Republicans in recent years.
Presumably, this is the sort of thing that the billionaire who funded JD Vance’s rise to the Senate and vice presidency meant when he famously said, “I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible.” That’s the billionaire whose company now compiles information on Americans on behalf of the Trump regime.
Call your member of Congress through the Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and tell them you oppose the MAMDANI Act and any legislation that creates thought, publishing, and speech crimes, then use the ACLU’s action tool to make sure your senators hear from you, too.
Support the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which has been on the front lines fighting Roy’s earlier “Sharia-Free America Act,” and back the American Immigration Council as it readies the inevitable legal challenges. Get involved with Indivisible and your local Democratic Party to make sure the 2026 midterms send Roy and every co-sponsor of this bill back home permanently.
The Constitution doesn’t defend itself and neither does freedom; that work belongs to us, and the time to engage with it is right now.
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US Corporate Media Seems Very Afraid of Democracy
Maybe mild forms of socialism is not what they fear most.
Jan 18, 2026
Much as they did back in 2018, when New Yorkers stunned the political establishment by electing a little-known former bartender named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Congress, the corporate political press covered the most thrilling Democratic victories of 2025 as if they were largely inexplicable, semi-miraculous flukes. While breathlessly covering the tweets, styles, preferred lipstick brands and personal qualities of individual politicians, establishment media outlets mostly ignored the organizing efforts led by ordinary people that put representatives like Ocasio-Cortez in positions of power.
In the view of these publications, recently sworn-in New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani wasn’t a movement candidate who emerged after years of working on other insurgent campaigns and organizing with groups like the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), of which I am a member, but a slick young upstart whose campaign was “built from nothing in a matter of months” (New York Times, 6/29/25).
After the general election, the New York Times (11/4/25) wrote that while Mamdani had won the primary by uniting “a new coalition of Brooklyn gentrifiers and Queens cabbies,” he triumphed in the general by running an “improbable backroom campaign” that “wooed, charmed and delicately disarmed some of the most powerful people in America.” This framing, by New York politics reporter Nicholas Fandos, suggested that Mamdani—undeniably a “megawatt talent”—had blandished his way into the mayoralty virtually singlehandedly.
NBC News (11/4/25) wrote of his “meteoric rise” from a “virtually unknown state assemblyman who barely registered in polling” to the mayor of America’s largest city without substantially analyzing how that came about.
‘Building civic architecture’
This framing obscures both the crucial role that ordinary people played in these campaigns, and the potential they have to organize and win even political changes the rich and powerful bitterly oppose. And it misses the real story of Mamdani’s win: the unprecedented army of volunteers, young people and first-time voters who propelled him to victory. That story was mostly covered by left-wing outlets like Dissent (11/25/25) and Jacobin (7/15/25), which put out sharp analyses of how campaigns like Mamdani’s were structured and organized, and how they were able to succeed against such long odds.
Grassroots formations that provided crucial support to Mamdani’s campaign, such as DSA and DRUM Beats, which organizes working-class Indo-Caribbean and South Asian communities, are membership-based organizations. They differ in structure and strengths from the top-down, consultant-driven campaign model corporate political outlets see as the norm.
These groups also spent years planting the seeds of victory by organizing people who had long been overlooked, ignored or shut out of conventional politics to participate in local elections. In other words, Mamdani’s campaign was the opposite of the Times‘ characterization as being “built from nothing in a matter of months.”
As Chris Maisano explained in Dissent, “people on the ground have been quietly building civic infrastructure” in neighborhoods Mamdani won. The mobilization of these communities “transformed the electorate and helped Mamdani offset Cuomo’s strength in neighborhoods that shifted sharply to the former governor in the general election.”
Establishment media’s obsession with portraying democratic socialism as divisive and/or fatally alienating to voters blinded it to what was truly radical about Mamdani’s campaign: It empowered ordinary people to lead, changing individual lives and history. What most scares the establishment isn’t socialism; it’s people-powered democracy.
Discouraging mass political participation is not new—in a 2019 Politico article (4/25/19) headlined “Politics Is Not the Answer,” Matthew Continetti suggested that “we might begin to see ourselves, and all of our virtues and our vices, more clearly” if we would only lower our expectations “of what politics can achieve”—but it’s newly salient in the run-up to the 2026 midterms.
‘Too much emphasis’ on ‘far-left positions’
One function of the corporate political press is to funnel popular energy and outrage into what its backers see as the proper channels: lawsuits, think tanks and voting for establishment-backed candidates. This is reflected in how these outlets are covering contemporary opposition to Donald Trump.
The New York Times (9/17/25) wrote about a new Democratic think tank, the Searchlight Institute, that attributes the party’s recent losses to “too much emphasis on issues like climate change and LGBTQ rights…at the expense, some argue, of appealing to voters in battleground states.”
Paraphrasing the think tank’s founder, Adam Jentleson, the paper’s Reid J. Epstein noted that
organizations focused on climate change, gun control and LGBTQ rights have all managed to get Democratic presidential hopefuls on the record taking far-left positions to the detriment of their general election performance.
The Times quoted operatives who disagreed with Jentleson, but didn’t bother to analyze his essential claims: Were those positions really “far left” and alienating to the party’s base? What evidence is there that candidates who took certain positions on climate change and/or LGBTQ rights underperformed in general elections as a result of those positions?
To the Times, the needs and preferences of the party’s “liberal base” are inscrutable and beside the point; what matters is the guidance of self-appointed experts like Jentleson, whose think tank is “subsidized by a roster of billionaire donors,” including prominent hedge fund managers and real estate investors.
‘A lot of compromise’
In a New York Times column (4/17/25) calling for a “national civic uprising” against Trump, David Brooks argued that the mass rallies Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders led in 2025 were “ineffective” because they were “partisan,” and made opposition to Trump “seem like a normal contest between Democrats and Republicans.”
Yet one day earlier, the Times (4/16/25) reported that the Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez rallies had “drawn enormous crowds” and were “energizing a beaten-down Democratic Party.” And according to a Sanders adviser, the paper noted, “21% of those who signed up to attend Mr. Sanders’ events reported that they were independents, and 8% said they were Republicans.”
Organizing mass rallies that expose thousands of listeners in conservative areas to critiques, not just of Trump, but of oligarchy in general, seems like an effective means of diluting right-wing power and demonstrating that leading Democrats and their allies care about Americans throughout the country, not just in blue states. But to those in corporate media, the point of politics is not to inspire regular people to organize and win broadly popular demands, but to “build power” and “do good things” by, as the New York Times’ Ezra Klein suggested in a recent interview with the New Yorker’s David Remnick (9/29/25), engaging in “a lot of compromise and a lot of working with people who we have very, very deep disagreements with.”
Klein is far from the only Democrat who believes we should take “an approach to politics that we think will expand our coalition such that we are not always within two points of losing to Donald Trump or the people around him.” But to Klein, that means penning paeans to hatemongers like the late Charlie Kirk (New York Times, 9/11/25), not standing up to plutocrats.
‘A better story’
Despite evidence that mass issue-based organizing campaigns can and do politicize people, bring them into effective coalitions and achieve significant victories, corporate media outlets and establishment leaders remain laser-focused on encouraging the rank and file to elect centrists rather than build mass movements.
As CBS News (12/16/25) recently reported, former President Barack Obama—still one of the Democratic Party’s most popular figures—is urging Democrats to “focus on winning the midterms and developing ‘a better story’ to tell voters, rather than on ‘nerdy’ internal disagreements.” The man once touted as the nation’s “organizer in chief” has long since abandoned encouraging Americans to organize, fight for and win life-changing policies; he is advising them to focus on winning the midterms by burnishing their brand.
The endurance of Trump, who won more votes than Kamala Harris in 2024 but has never won the consistent support of a majority of Americans, revealed to many that they cannot trust US political leaders to protect the rights and interests of ordinary people. Campaigns like Mamdani’s in New York, and recently elected Mayor Katie Wilson’s in Seattle, have shown people around the world that they have the power to win the policies and elect the leaders they want, without top-down instruction or management from—and despite interference by—elites.
To pundits and corporate media outlets, this is a dangerous lesson: If everyday people realize they don’t need overpaid consultants or self-declared experts to win real change, how long can the status quo be maintained by its beneficiaries?
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Whatever Socialism's Sins, It's Capitalism That Threatens Life on Earth
The question is no longer whether this system is failing us, but whether we are willing to confront the power structures that depend on that failure.
Jan 11, 2026
Socialism destroyed Venezuela. This is the claim being made by many. According to the Manhattan Institute, corruption was not to blame, mismanagement was not to blame, falling oil prices were not to blame, and US sanctions were also not to blame. No—they argue the single cause of Venezuela’s plight was socialism. The big bad bogeyman we have all been taught to fear.
It is widely argued that growth in socialist economies is lower than in capitalist economies. This argument dominates mainstream economic discourse. We can see it with our own eyes. Of course, the citizens of the capitalist United States have higher standards of living. Of course the citizens of Europe have more cars, and Chinese citizens have more gadgets. We know all this. But we no longer live solely in capitalist economies. Today we are living under the machinations of the billionaire class. We live in a rampant capitalist fever dream that is doing so much more damage than socialism ever will.
While socialism, in a few nations on Earth, has lowered the standard of living for a few hundred million human beings, capitalism is destroying any chance of a peaceful and abundant future for all species on our incredible planet. Our atmosphere is full of carbon dioxide that is in geological terms warming our home at an unprecedented rate that threatens the very survival of our species. Every year, 7 million people die from breathing polluted air. I say “murdered” is the better word—because we could stop it. We know it is happening, and we know the cause, so manslaughter doesn’t do it justice. And what we see is only the smoke; the real fire is much larger.
Since the industrial revolution we have destroyed 1.5 billion hectares of forest. This is an area 1.5 times the size of the US. In the last 10 years alone, we have cleared an area of land equal to that of Central America. Animal populations have declined by 73% since the 1970s. Our rivers are full of shit, yet void of life. Our oceans will soon be home to more plastic than fish. Humans and the animals we breed to kill make up 95% of the world’s mammalian biomass. Around 70% of the world’s bird biomass is now made up of domesticated poultry bred for human consumption.
The leader of Venezuela was just hauled out of bed and jailed for failing his people. Well, I would suggest that the leaders of the “free” world are also failing their people, but who is going to haul President Donald Trump out of his gold-plated corporate-sponsored bed?
Due to climate change, primarily driven by the burning of fossil fuels for economic growth and animal agriculture, which reduces our ability to draw down carbon naturally, we are beginning to see the outcomes of unregulated growth. Erratic weather conditions in Russia, Ukraine, the UK, China, Mozambique, Pakistan, Canada, and Iran resulted in reduced harvests of key staples in 2025. This is just the beginning.
Our soils have been so degraded by intensive agriculture that the United Nations has warned that much of the world’s remaining topsoil could be severely degraded by 2074 if current practices continue. On top of that, we are hurtling rapidly toward a future of widespread water shortages. In just four years, demand for freshwater is projected to outstrip supply by 40% and half the world’s population could suffer severe water stress. This includes the now free and prosperous people of Venezuela, where much of the country could be uninhabitable by 2070. Without water, there is no food. Scientists have been warning us for decades that food production will be impacted greatly by climate chaos. They forecast that the chance of simultaneous areas suffering crop failure increases from 7% at 2°C (3.6°F) to a staggering 86% if we allow the billionaire class to push us to 4°C (7.2°F).
A lack of food and water, extreme heat, and sea-level rise will certainly make our planet more volatile and conflict ridden. Report after report state that we are heading toward societal collapse—a term used to describe the systematic breakdown of the core social, economic, and political institutions that sustain societies. A consequence of this will be the erosion of international laws and human rights. Does this ring any bells?
As destabilizing as climate chaos already is, an even more profound disruption is now being layered on top of it: artificial intelligence (AI). Beyond its enormous energy and water demands, which promise to exacerbate the problems outlined above, AI threatens the very fabric of society. It threatens vast swathes with employment. It threatens to fundamentally destabilize the conditions that make human societies possible. And it is all being foisted on us without our consent in order to increase profits. This is capitalism in its purest form—where profitability outweighs every other consideration, including life itself.
If we are going to blame socialism for the problems in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, communism for the problems in North Korea, then surely, with everything stated above, we must blame capitalism for the complete breakdown of ecosystems, never-ending wars, climate chaos, and a potential AI takeover. And the scale of destruction wrought by Jeff Bezos and his billionaire brethren is gargantuan when compared to anything caused by socialism. Let’s please put things in perspective.
The leader of Venezuela was just hauled out of bed and jailed for failing his people. Well, I would suggest that the leaders of the “free” world are also failing their people, but who is going to haul President Donald Trump out of his gold-plated corporate-sponsored bed? It is only the people of the most powerful nation on Earth that can do that. It should always be down to the citizens of a country to bring about change. It should never be the responsibility of a golden elite that has no interest in improving lives, but simply improving bank balances. They say you get the government you deserve. Well then, we currently have the governments we deserve. What are we going to do about it?
The question is no longer whether this system is failing us, but whether we are willing to confront the power structures that depend on that failure. We need to be honest with ourselves: We are in a class war. A small number of billionaires are grinding all Earthlings into the ground. We are losing on every battlefield. Until we start acting like we are being erased systematically, we will continue to be erased systematically.
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