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Opinion
We Can Save Ourselves From Nuclear Annihilation
We need an outright rejection of nuclear weapons by all parties, including the US and Iranian regimes and a meeting of Trump, Putin, and Xi to build an off-ramp from the path of war and nuclear war.
Nov 07, 2026
The 1984 British movie Threads opens with ordinary scenes in Sheffield, England, where a young couple learns they are expecting a baby. The story of their personal life is intertwined with the news of a growing conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, centered on Iran. We next learn that a nuclear weapon is used in an attack, followed by another. Before long, Sheffield itself is the site of hydrogen bomb detonations, with our protagonists either perishing in the explosions or subsisting under devastating conditions of starvation, civil unrest, radiation-induced and infectious diseases, and freezing temperatures over the coming days, weeks, months, and years. The film ends with the 13-year-old daughter of the young couple from the start of the film giving birth to a deformed clump of flesh months after being raped in a lawless and collapsed society.
Forty-two years after this brilliant movie first gave people in the UK and beyond just a glimpse of the unfathomable consequences of nuclear war, watching the opening scenes is even more grim than it has been in the intervening decades, given just how eerily similar they seem to be to our current moment. With the US and Israel continuing to wage war on Iran, and their respective leaders having been repudiated in public polls and elections, the prospect of nuclear weapon use and a wider nuclear war is seemingly more real than ever before. But unlike in the 1980s, when the general public was well aware of what was at stake, having been frightened by Ronald Reagan’s saber-rattling and educated about the dangers of nuclear weapons throughout the Cold War, including through cultural interventions like popular films, today, when President Donald Trump repeatedly threatens to annihilate Iran, the media and the general public seem to shrug and move on to other news of the day, checking perhaps on what Kim Kardashian had for breakfast.
The seriousness of Trump’s threats cannot be overstated. The two of us have been warning in Al Jazeera and other outlets that, sick and desperate as sucht be, it behooves the world to take them seriously and make sure a nuclear attack on Iran, or anywhere else for that matter, never happens. Recently, we have been joined by popular media figure Tucker Carlson and other commentators. The internet is abuzz with such warnings.
Ask yourself what Russia and China will think if the US and Israel use a nuclear weapon in Iran. Will they think that they are next?
The logic is simple. Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are both desperate to salvage what little credibility they may have with their publics by demonstrating that this war with Iran was not a total failure. If the purpose of the war had been to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon or weapons, then having Iran acquire a nuclear weapon or weapons would be the ultimate repudiation of their efforts and proof of their folly.
Both US and Israeli intelligence agencies report that Iran has shifted the locus of its nuclear enrichment from Fordow and Natanz to the Kuh-e Kolang underground complex widely known as Pickaxe Mountain. The complex is buried under 300 feet of granite, which makes it impenetrable for US or Israeli conventional weapons, including the Mother of All Bombs (MOAB), which Trump has threatened to use. Tucker Carlson shared that he had an “informed source” who told him, “Bibi calls Trump about it [a nuclear strike] every day.” Fortunately, Trump has not yet given the go-ahead.
The background to all this is that Iran has made clear that it will neither export its enriched uranium nor cease its enrichment activities, both of which it had done before Trump stupidly blew up former President Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal or JCPOA. With the deal in place, Iran had also mothballed most of its centrifuges and, according to the United Nation’s International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors, was only enriching to 3.67%—well below weapons grade. Ayatollah Khamenei had issued a fatwa against building an Iranian nuclear weapon, which remained in effect until he and other Iranian leaders were killed in a joint US-Israeli strike back in February. Now numerous Iranian leaders have publicly insisted that Iran needs a nuclear weapon as a deterrent against another US or Israeli attack. There is evidence that some leaders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have also adopted this view despite the fact that official Iranian government policy continues to reject such actions.
And then, there is Israel. Despite an official policy of “nuclear ambiguity” and refusal to acknowledge possessing a nuclear arsenal of between 90 and 250 nuclear weapons, Israel has long made known that there will be no constraints upon its actions if it faces what it considers an existential threat. Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders have stated unambiguously that Iran’s possession of a nuclear weapon would constitute such a threat. In an April exchange on Israeli television, Israeli journalist Shimon Rivkin declared, “Why aren’t we using what’s called a neutron bomb?” The host then turned to National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir who smiled and said, “Let him speak.” While Netanyahu has denied contemplating such an action, in late October he posted an AI-generated image of a nuclear weapon exploding over Tel Aviv, which he called a “second Holocaust.” He quoted right-wing commentator Yuval Blumberg, who wrote: “The state of Israel is in real and tangible existential danger. If the Iranians acquire nuclear weapons, nothing will ever be the same again.” Other Israelis have also bandied this idea about.
Trump has made clear that he is contemplating striking Iran after today’s midterms. Before having a stroke, Democratic Senator Chris Murphy from Connecticut said he had been briefed on Pentagon attack plans and they are “insane.” Carlson also indicated that Vice President JD Vance was urging restraint because a negotiated deal is still possible, but it was Vance himself who earlier claimed that the US possesses “tools in our toolkit that we so far haven’t decided to use.” We’ve also heard from others with strong White House connections that such steps are being contemplated. In recent months, Elbridge Colby, Pentagon policy chief, has been calling for the US to amend its nuclear policies to facilitate the use of tactical nuclear weapons should fighting break out in the Pacific.
No one can be certain how the use of a nuclear weapon or weapons against Iran would play out. A single strike on Pickaxe Mountain could in itself bring a huge humanitarian catastrophe to the city of Natanz and the broader region. Even if Tehran, some 220 kilometers away, would not find itself in the path of the fallout, a large portion of Iran and the broader region could end up covered in radioactive particles that would remain in the environment for days, weeks, months, years, and even thousands of years. The details would depend on how powerful the weapon that is used is and wind and weather patterns immediately following the explosion.
But beyond the specifics of what one nuclear weapon could do to Iran and the region, it is important to remember that this is not 1945; the explosion of a single nuclear weapon is widely expected to lead to a wider nuclear war. It may not be a matter of if, but when. Regardless of whether there is initial restraint, as world leaders are sobered up by the breaking of the nuclear taboo, or not, we can expect bombs to start flying everywhere soon enough. There are 12,200 of them, after all, in possession of nine nuclear-armed states. Ask yourself what Russia and China will think if the US and Israel use a nuclear weapon in Iran. Will they think that they are next?
And just like in Threads, human civilization will collapse, not just in the Sheffields of the world, but everywhere. As the American scientist Carl Sagan once said: “Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”
We need an outright rejection of nuclear weapons by all parties, including the US and Iranian regimes; a meeting of Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Chinese President Xi Jinping, to build an off-ramp from the path of war and nuclear war; and engagement of figures like Pope Leo XIV in matters of peace and existential risks to humanity, as we called for in our recent appeal to the good pope. We can save ourselves from ourselves.
This piece was first published in Arabic in Al Jazeera.
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Beware of JD Vance Changing His Tune
By criticizing the Iran War and touting affordability, Vance is not reconsidering the politics that produced the administration's failures; rather, he is signaling how the interests that control him intend to recover the political ground they have lost.
Nov 07, 2026
Following the supposed “blue wave,” marked by significant GOP midterm losses, JD Vance published an donald extended statement on X that some have interpreted as a meaningful admission of Republican failure, or even a rebuke of President Donald Trump. Vance seemed to offer an unusually candid explanation of why voters had abandoned the administration, citing a pollster's account of what might persuade disillusioned Trump 2024 voters to return to the Republican camp. The four leading responses, he explained, were:
- End the war;
- Focus on cost of living and inflation;
- Put America First; and
- Change our relationship to Israel.
While Vance's statement has ruffled feathers within the GOP, its implications, and the speed with which it was issued, deserve considerably closer scrutiny.
On the one hand, there is nothing revelatory about acknowledging that an increasingly unpopular, unprovoked war on Iran, mounting economic insecurity and crippling inflation, and the administration's unwavering support for the war-dependent, genocidal, apartheid state of Israel have alienated voters. Yet it is notable how readily Vance, a defender and principal contributor to these very ruinous policies and destructive conditions, has identified them, and how quickly that recognition is being read as evidence of political introspection, or even a “break” from Trump.
Vance’s X-essay is thus not a departure from the political project that brought Trump to power, but a swift, billionaire-backed exercise in working out how to repackage its promises and mobilize them again.
At first glance, Vance's statement reads almost like an exercise in democratic humility. He is “shocked,” apparently eager for an “honest conversation” about where the Republican Party goes from here, and graciously inviting voters to explain where his party went wrong. He writes as though GOP voters might actually be invited to participate in the democratic direction of their party:
I remain hopeful about our country. To the people who are pissed off and want to say, "I told you so," you're right, you did tell us so. Take that energy into electing Republicans who share your worldview.
The performance would be more convincing if Vance were not the vice president of the administration he is now diagnosing and a well-established political puppet of the PayPal Mafia.
It is no secret that Vance's political ascent has been financed and cultivated by Silicon Valley's billionaire class, whose personal and commercial interests and bizarre dystopian visions increasingly depend upon the expansion of the American war machine, the growing privatization of state power, and the accumulation of private wealth at the expense of public services. Most infamously, Peter Thiel was Vance's employer, mentor, political patron, and one of the principal architects of his political ascent.
It is almost too obvious to point out the absurdity of a man explaining to voters what went wrong when he is himself an instrument of the very oligarchs using the executive branch to secure lucrative markets for their data and AI infrastructure, and the development and deployment of autonomous weapons systems. Their fortunes are precisely tied to the expansion of state violence and surveillance at home and abroad. They are the vanguard of a class exploiting public resources, evading taxation, and extracting billions in government contracts.
But exposing Vance's hypocrisy, or reading his statement as a thinly veiled repudiation of Trump, misses the more consequential calculation. Vance is not reconsidering the politics that produced the administration's failures. Rather, he is signaling how the interests that control him intend to recover the political ground they have lost.
It is hardly surprising that Republicans may once again co-opt anti-war and economic populist rhetoric without attempting to deliver on the demands behind it. Trump has demonstrated, in both terms, how readily campaign promises for “peace” and measures to alleviate the cost-of-living squeeze can be altogether abandoned once political power is secured. More consequential is the speed with which the Republican establishment seems to be taking stock of its electoral failures, calculating how to win back the constituencies it has alienated, and laying the groundwork for another political cycle.
Vance's 2028 ambitions offer an important window into the recalibration. His ideological moderation signals no shift in political direction, but rather is a more sophisticated effort to reposition the Republican Party without relinquishing its underlying commitments. Vance and his backers understand that reclaiming their political and electoral appeal requires more than simply appropriating the language of popular demands. The longer-term objective is to accommodate popular discontent rhetorically while severing it from the structural changes necessary to address its underlying causes.
The Republican establishment does not need to defeat anti-war politics if it can detach opposition to a particular war from opposition to American imperialism. It does not need to defeat economic populism if it can detach economic discontent from a critique of corporate ownership and concentrated wealth—narrowing the narrative to prices at the pump or the cost of groceries. Nor does it need to abandon its relationship with Israel if it can present a revised relationship—including through changes to the National Defense Authorization Act—as evidence that it has listened to voters, without challenging the military and financial arrangements that sustain Israeli occupation of Palestine and its broader expansionist project.
The grievances can be acknowledged, the language adopted, and the constituencies courted, without conceding anything to the structural changes those demands might ultimately entail.
The comparison with the Democratic establishment is equally telling. While Republicans are already calculating how to win back voters alienated by their own policies, Democrats seem perfectly ready to mistake another rejection of Trump for an endorsement of their own. The establishment is potentially preparing to restore Zionist PAC-funded, Big Pharma-defending mouthpieces Sen. Chuck Schumer (NY) and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (NY) to positions of leadership. The same politicians who have spent years rebuking their progressive wing, dismissing its demands, working only in the interests of their corporate backers, and insisting that voters have nowhere else to go. The establishment seems perfectly content to congratulate themselves on their return.
The same tendency to mistake political repositioning for political change extends beyond the establishment, as some sections of the liberal and supposed left have greeted Vance's statement with enthusiasm or credulity. Liberals eager to find signs of moderation within the Republican Party are helping launder a calculated political maneuver into something resembling introspection. Others, celebrating the “blue wave” and desperate for evidence that electoral politics can still produce a meaningful rupture, seem ready to declare a discursive victory for the movements fighting for economic justice and against militarism. For some, Vance's tweet becomes a kind of political talisman: proof that the administration has been wounded, that voters have rejected its agenda, that the contradictions are finally catching up with it.
In other words, those on the left may see their own demands reflected in Vance's rhetoric and mistake such appropriation for a political victory.
This is the mythology of hope at its most politically debilitating, the naive compulsion to find redemption in a political establishment whose interests remain fundamentally unchanged. The election does not resolve the political and moral incoherence that Vance embodies, just as it does nothing to dislodge the ruling class.
Vance’s X-essay is thus not a departure from the political project that brought Trump to power, but a swift, billionaire-backed exercise in working out how to repackage its promises and mobilize them again.
Trump's bombastic circus, his criminality, his revolving cast of cronies, and his particular brand of reactionary politics are not, in themselves, the full expression of the GOP elite's political project. To mistake the current face of the administration for the true cohort of interests it serves is to misunderstand the political coalition that brought Trump to power and continues to benefit from controlling the presidency, most obviously to inflate their members’ stock portfolios.
The current GOP elite’s chauvinist politics—which combine white nationalism, anti-immigrant, and anti-Black reaction; the expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the machinery of mass detention and deportation; and an increasingly normalized use and threat of state violence at home and abroad—are still not bound by a unified ideological movement with a consistent conservative program. It is their shared appetite for power, accumulation, deregulation, and coercion that binds them.
Trumpism has provided a vehicle through which an increasingly volatile coalition of competing capital interests, billionaire networks, military and intelligence contractors, private surveillance interests, religious reactionaries, and political operators can consolidate power. Their political alliances are contingent, perhaps even sustained by blackmail. Their rhetoric is just as expendable. Trump's second administration has made this especially visible, as competing egos often collide despite shared pursuits of industry-wide deregulation and unfettered access to the institutions through which wealth and power are accumulated.
So Vance's apparent signal of a “2028 GOP showdown” are entirely consistent with this world of self-interested networks and political theater. There is no reason to assume that Trump himself must remain the vehicle through which the ultrarich, the Epstein class, and their affiliates pursue their ambitions and interests, including Trump's own.
In other words, Vance et al. are moving fast to preserve their hold on power while shedding the liabilities that have made the current administration increasingly difficult to sustain. Technology and security interests that profit from the expansion of state coercion can back a politician speaking of economic relief and an end to war. There is no contradiction here from the standpoint of capital. The political presentation can change without any corresponding change in the interests being served.
Vance's statement is then worth taking seriously, as it demonstrates that even the techno-utopian, reality-detached oligarchs are capable of explicitly recognizing the political grievances they manufacture and considering how to bring those voters back into the fold. This is a form of political intelligence that the Democratic establishment has repeatedly proven itself incapable of, or deliberately unwilling to, exercise, even when it is deployed, as it is here, in the service of preserving the very arrangements responsible for producing those grievances.
Neither party's electoral fortunes should be mistaken for a transfer of political power to the people whose grievances they claim to represent.
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Palestinian Voters Have Given Arab Parties a Chance to Disrupt Israel's Genocide
By uniting around a political program capable of defeating Netanyahu's far-right agenda, and setting aside their factional interests, Arab politicians could achieve something their previous parliamentary efforts failed to accomplish.
Nov 07, 2026
The results of Israel's October 27 elections were welcomed by Palestinian Arab communities in Israel and millions of Palestinians worldwide.
Neither Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing bloc nor that of his rival, former military chief Gadi Eisenkot, secured the 61 seats required to form a government. This made the 19 seats won by Arab parties all the more consequential.
In a political system structured to marginalize its Arab minority, the electoral achievement of the Joint List and Ra'am cannot be overstated. Through their relative unity and an extraordinary convergence of political circumstances, Palestinian voters have seemingly managed to beat the system at its own game.
The choice now is not between purity and betrayal, but between paralysis, allowing Netanyahu's wars to continue unchecked, and strategic disruption.
The achievement came despite fearmongering and outright racist rhetoric by mainstream Jewish political parties, including Eisenkot himself.
Netanyahu built much of his campaign around the specter of an Arab political takeover. On election day, he warned, “If we don't wake up now, we'll find ourselves with a government of Mansour Abbas and Ahmed Tibi.”
Far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir employed similar rhetoric. Alarmed by Arab turnout, he declared, “If you want this country to be Jewish and Zionist, you must go out and vote,” before warning his supporters, “Don't let them win.”
Even Eisenkot, often portrayed in Western media as a more amiable and less hawkish alternative to Netanyahu, rejected the prospect of governing with Arab parties, declaring, “I do not see an Arab party that accepts my principles.”
Whether the electoral deadlock forces him to reconsider that position is another matter. The point is that Eisenkot and his potential allies, including Naftali Bennett and Yisrael Beiteinu leader Avigdor Lieberman, have rejected Arab participation in governing coalitions.
Imagine this happening in a true democracy, where an entire political community is excluded from government because its members are Black, Irish, or Christian.
This is the crux of Israel's democracy problem. While presenting itself as democratic, Israel has waged political, legal, and constitutional wars against its Palestinian citizens, treating their very identity as a threat to the Jewish character of the state.
Historically, this has been the central point of contention among Palestinian communities in Israel: Why should Arabs participate in elections that validate a system constructed, from its very foundation, to entrench Jewish supremacy and persecute its Palestinian minority?
Consider the Knesset itself. Section 7A of its Basic Law allows electoral lists and candidates to be disqualified for rejecting Israel's existence as a Jewish and democratic state.
Imagine Black American politicians being required to recognize the United States as a white state before being permitted to contest elections.
In 2018, Israel went further, passing the Nation-State Basic Law, which declares that the right to national self-determination in Israel is “unique to the Jewish people.”
It is therefore hardly surprising that some Palestinian political movements have refused to participate in what they regard as a political charade, choosing instead to defend their communities' rights outside a fundamentally rigged parliamentary system.
One example is Abnaa al-Balad, which has long advocated boycotting Knesset elections rather than granting legitimacy to the Israeli political order.
This debate resembles the historical disagreement between revolutionary abstentionism, which rejects participation in institutions deemed illegitimate, and socialist parliamentary participation, which argues that refusing parliamentary engagement should not become an absolute principle.
Vladimir Lenin addressed this argument in his 1920 work "Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder," rejecting the notion that revolutionary movements should abandon parliamentary participation under all circumstances.
Israel's latest elections have given this debate renewed urgency.
To be clear, although some Arab parties have roots in leftist traditions, none can simply be described as revolutionary.
Ra'am, led by Mansour Abbas, participated in the Zionist coalition government headed by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid in June 2021. Abbas effectively sidelined broader Palestinian national aspirations in favor of municipal budgets, socioeconomic equality, and combating crime within Arab communities in Israel.
Ra'am has now won eight seats, and Abbas has made clear his willingness to pursue the same coalition strategy.
The Joint List, on the other hand, secured 11 seats. Its priorities include removing Netanyahu, defending Palestinian national rights, and advancing social justice for Palestinian citizens of Israel.
Now, more than ever, Palestinians need unity. All are facing extraordinary threats: the ongoing genocide in Gaza, accelerating annexation and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, and further suppression of Palestinian communities inside Israel.
By uniting around a political program capable of defeating Netanyahu's far-right agenda, and setting aside their factional interests, Arab politicians could achieve something their previous parliamentary efforts failed to accomplish: Force Israel to change direction, slow down its machinery of death, and remove the wanted war criminal Netanyahu from power.
While one may insist, on principle, that participating in a corrupt political system validates that very system, history occasionally produces moments so dangerous that even such morally defensible positions must be reconsidered, however temporarily.
The choice now is not between purity and betrayal, but between paralysis, allowing Netanyahu's wars to continue unchecked, and strategic disruption.
Certain distinctions, however, must remain absolutely clear. Replacing Netanyahu is not liberation. Eisenkot is no peacemaker, but a committed Zionist whose military record and political positions offer Palestinians little reason to expect justice. A new Israeli government will not erase the crimes of the state or fundamentally dismantle its apartheid system.
What such a change might offer is a disruption of the alliance through which Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich have pursued their agenda of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and annexation, potentially slowing Israel's capacity to inflict violence on the current scale.
Real change, on the other hand, can only be achieved through genuine Palestinian unity and resistance on all fronts, sustained global solidarity, legal accountability, and meaningful political action.
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Unless Democratic Leaders Buck Their Corporate Masters, Nothing Will Fundamentally Change
So long as lawmakers remain more loyal to their Wall Street donors than to working-class, don't expect even this Blue Tsunami to alter their political leanings very much.
Nov 07, 2026
As the November 3 euphoria fades, the grim reality remains: Trump and his lawless regime, along with Corporatist Democratic leaders Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, still hold the reins of power. Granted, the Democrats now have a comfortable majority in the House and Senate and will hold many investigative hearings into the Trump rein of corruption, cruelty, violence, mass lawbreaking and Elon Musk’s DOGE crimes. However, the grim prospect is that they will mostly produce few results.
Why? First, they have to clear the corporatist Democratic Committee Chairs (more about that later) and then clear Speaker Hakeem Jeffries and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. Jeffries and Schumer take large amounts of Wall Street campaign money. They take money from the big weapons manufacturers, and they are first in line for AIPAC-related campaign bucks.
Second, they show few signs of heeding the anger of their Democratic voters—90% of whom want Trump impeached. Voters also want Congress to give big corporations a heavy dose of “law and order,” restore taxes on them, and take these corporate giants and the super-rich owners off welfare.
In short, the New York-based Democratic leadership in Congress remains very supportive of the Wall Streeters, the bloated military budget, corporate welfare, and the Netanyahu-AIPAC lobby, backing Netanyahu’s genocide in Palestine.
There are exceptions in Congress—Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) will become the chair of the Senate Banking Committee, and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is expected to chair the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee. But then what? Their legislation is up against both the Democratic and Republican leadership. Schumer will let these two progressive Democrats provide red meat to the masses, but progressives will likely be marginalized, as has happened so often under party leaders who are cowards and corporatists.
Recall the Obama-led Democratic landslide in 2008. Obama who had an even larger Democratic majority in the House and Senate, mostly punted, enacting a watered-down Obamacare, without a public option. (Obama pushed legislation including the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, and the Credit CARD Act, that established a “bill of rights” for credit cardholders, placing new restrictions on arbitrary interest rate hikes, hidden fees, and marketing to young consumers—but he should have done much more.) A historic loss of major opportunities for a just society.
Two years later, the Democrats had their heads handed to them by voters rejecting their do-nothing-ism. It can happen again.
In August of 2026, Jeffries placed hard-line pro-Netanyahu Democrats in critical positions on the Foreign Relations Committee. He will likely install corporatist Democrats as chairs of powerful committees or loyalists who, if not beholden to corporate lobbies, will do his bidding.
Exhibit One is the longtime, corporate cash register Congressman Richard Neal from a “safe seat” in Massachusetts. Trump must love him. When he became chair of the House Ways and Means Committee in January 2019, he said he would NOT revisit the horrendous tax escapes Trump enacted in 2017 for his super-rich buddies and giant corporations. What?!
Just last September 15, Neal joined a minority of House Democrats headed by Hakeem Jeffries and, with 46 other Democrats, voted “Present,” effectively—along with the Republicans obviously—refusing to vote for Rep. Al Green’s Impeachment Resolution, which received 146 votes, a majority of House Democrats. During his campaign for re-election, Neal declined to say he would vote for Impeachment of Donald J. Trump, the violent, cruel, self-enriching, corrupt, warmongering, bigoted Outlaw. Dictator Donald must be delighted that Richard Neal supports so many Trump positions.
Neal has long opposed full Medicare for All or single-payer, everybody in, nobody out, preferring to go with a very limited, high-priced Obamacare. He takes abundant campaign money from the corporate health insurance and healthcare PACs.
Delivering for his paymasters, Neal goes along with the bloated military budget, vast corporate welfare giveaways, and blocked “surprise medical billing” legislation in 2019 that made private equity firms and other corporate beneficiaries happy to contribute to his campaign war chest.
The big drug companies are also happy with Neal—and are filling his campaign coffers—because he has worked to limit drug-pricing legislation, restrict Medicare’s authority to negotiate prices, and keep lower prices from being extended to uninsured individuals.
Neal had the support of his dittoheads on the Committee and the backing of the “bought and sold” Republican Committee members to deliver these favors for the few at the expense of the many defenseless consumers and people opposed to Trump. He went all the way, running Committee markups dictatorially, and obstructing votes on amendments by progressive Committee members such as Representatives Lloyd Doggett and Gwen Moore designed to hold corporations accountable.
In 2022, despite the support of 200 House Democrats for Subcommittee Chair John Larson’s bill to increase Social Security benefits, frozen since 1971, and pay for it by taxing wages above $400,000, Neal supported Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s keeping the bill from a vote on the House floor.
Blocking it helped the Republicans take the House from Speaker Pelosi. And, Democrats forfeited an opportunity to campaign on expanding Social Security (See The American Prospect: House Leadership Delays Social Security Expansion While Crafting Tax Breaks for Rich Retirees.)
This bill would have helped 60 million retirees.
Neal is a clever politician who talks a good game on slam-dunk reversals of Trump’s restrictions of Medicaid and food stamps. But, when it comes to delivering the big honeypots and immunities big business wants, he is pretty much a corporate toady. Right after taking the Chair of the Ways and Means Committee in 2019, he convened high-dollar fundraisers, spending some of these donations on what Politico reporter Danny Nguyen called, “upscale restaurants, hotels and entertainment to court elite donors and lobbyists with businesses before his committees.”
There is still time to make Richard Neal persona non grata with the tens of millions of voters who want a Peoples’ Congress and fighters for them in Washington. Neal is unpopular with most members of the Progressive Caucus led by the refreshing young Congressman Greg Casar from Texas. Other groups like RootsAction led by Norman Solomon and Progressive Democrats of America led by Alan Minsky, as well as major anti-poverty, tax reform and many anti-Trump organizations, could combine to challenge his selection by Jeffries as the Ways and Means committee chair. There are any number of qualified and willing House candidates for this powerful position.
Earlier this year, Neal, with his 38 years of absentee incumbency in the House, had a paltry 25% approval rating from his District. Loaded with corporate dollars and not being challenged by the Republicans or seriously challenged in the Democratic primaries until this year, he cruises to re-election from his nice mansion on Cape Cod, rejecting in-person town meetings and a presence in his District beyond ribbon-cutting ceremonies.
This year, he fought off an Independent candidate challenge from Nadia Milleron (my niece) by pumping over four million dollars in corporate donations into a Trump-like “Big Lie” smear campaign. This will not be lost on his expanding detractors. (See The Berkshire Eagle article “Ralph Nader blasts Rep. Richard Neal in letter backing niece’s challenge”).
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Watch Out, Billionaires! These 6 Candidates Won by Promising to Fight Inequality
None of these candidates went into Election Day with a “solid Democrat” or even a “likely Democrat” rating from the Cook Political Report; their hard-fought victories are a signal that American voters are ready for inequality-fighting, transformative change.
Nov 07, 2026
The “affordability crisis” ranked as the top issue for every Democrat in this election. But candidates’ solutions to this crisis varied widely. Some seemed to think a bit of tinkering to lower prices, plus a dab of deregulation, would do the trick.
We highlight here six candidates who won tough races by offering a much bolder vision of an economy that works for all. These candidates promised to build working families’ power to tackle the extreme wealth concentrations that are driving up housing and healthcare costs, suppressing wages, squeezing consumers and small businesses, and distorting our democracy.
None of these candidates went into Election Day with a “solid Democrat” or even a “likely Democrat” rating from the Cook Political Report. Their hard-fought victories are a signal that American voters are ready for inequality-fighting, transformative change.
House Seats
Brian Poindexter (Ohio-7)
Poindexter crushed Republican incumbent Max Miller by nearly 10 points, becoming the first non-Republican to represent Ohio’s 7th District since 1939. The union organizer and ironworker won over Rust Belt voters with a strong pro-worker agenda.
“When tax cuts are debated in Washington, they seem to flow easily to the wealthiest and most powerful,” Poindexter wrote in his economic platform. “When subsidies are discussed, large corporations are first in line. But when the conversation turns to deficits, debt, or ‘tough choices,’ it’s working families who are asked to give more, wait longer, or accept less.”
Drawing on his 20-plus years in the labor movement, Poindexter is vowing to strengthen collective bargaining rights so workers can fight for better wages and benefits. He also aims to increase the minimum wage and expand access to affordable healthcare.
Will Lawrence (Michigan-7)
Lawrence’s race was closely watched because it was seen as a test of whether campaigning against Big Tech and unregulated AI could be a vote-getter in a red district. Turns out it was.
Lawrence ran ads denouncing the tech billionaires driving the AI data center boom, vowed to put a pause on advanced AI development, and blasted privacy-invading surveillance technologies like Flock cameras.
A co-founder of a youth-led climate group called the Sunrise Movement, Lawrence also mobilized huge support from Michigan State University students. His campus rallies drew large crowds to discuss his proposals to get money out of politics, increase taxes on the wealthy, end corporate landlord price gouging, and guarantee universal healthcare.
Last night the millennial activist garnered 51% of the vote to oust Republican incumbent Tom Barrett.
Rebecca Cooke (Wisconsin-3)
Cooke grew up on a Wisconsin dairy farm that has suffered the same fate as thousands of others in the state. Because of unfair competition with large corporate producers, her family has had to sell their cows.
“I want to take on the corporate monopolies that have robbed us of our farming traditions and our heritage,” Cooke said in a campaign trail interview with More Perfect Union. On top of breaking up Big Ag, she wants to pass the PRO Act to strengthen union rights, raise the minimum wage, and protect communities from “unchecked hyperscale data centers.”
In between waitressing at two Eau Claire restaurants, Cooke ran a grassroots-powered campaign that beat incumbent Republican Derrick Van Orden by a four-point margin.
Senate Seats
Peggy Flanagan (Minnesota)
Flanagan wasn’t expected to have a tough race after winning the primary to replace Democrat Tina Smith. But she wound up with a “vulnerable” rating in the face of rampant disinformation about welfare fraud during her time as the state’s lieutenant governor and an opponent who happened to be a smooth-talking former TV sportscaster.
As someone who grew up in poverty, Flanagan prevailed by drawing on that experience to deliver a compelling vision of an economy in which everyone can thrive—not just the ultra wealthy. She vowed to work for inequality-fighting policies such as Medicare for All, scrapping the income cap on Social Security contributions, and banning large corporate landlords from purchasing single-family homes.
Flanagan refused corporate PAC money and called for banning all corporate and “dark” money in future elections. In the end, she won by double digits. And when she enters the US Senate in January, she’ll be making history. That body has never had a Native American woman member, and Flanagan belongs to the White Earth Band of Ojibwe.
Troy Jackson (Maine)
After the flameout of the first Democratic nominee, Jackson entered the race with only three months to campaign against teflon Republican Susan Collins.
Growing up, Jackson had formative experiences watching his dad and other loggers stand up to wealthy landowners to demand basic fairness. He carried that working class fight into his own logging career and then into Maine’s state legislature.
On the campaign trail, Jackson signed a “Pledge to Working Mainers” demanding a billionaire tax, a congressional stock trading ban, and a ban on AI surveillance to prevent “robots deciding your paycheck, hiring and firing you, or monitoring your work.”
Heading into Election Night, the Cook Political Report had the Jackson-Collins race as a total “toss-up.” In the end, Jackson ousted the 30-year incumbent by an eight-point margin.
Abdul El-Sayed (Michigan)
Ending with a big one here. El-Sayed had to put up with grotesque racism and Islamophobia throughout his campaign. He prevailed with one of the strongest inequality-fighting economic platforms of any candidate in 2026.
The native Michigander boiled his agenda down to three alliterative pledges: money in your pocket, money out of politics, and Medicare for All.
With his medical degree and public health experience, El-Sayed projected a particularly strong vision of guaranteed healthcare for every American, regardless of what they do for work. He also called for abolishing medical debt, banning the use of AI to allow health insurers to second-guess doctors’ decisions, and preventing Medicare privatization.
El Sayed did not shy away from overtly arguing for wealth distribution.
“I’d rather have an economy that makes 1,000 millionaires than one billionaire,” El-Sayed said in a social media clip. “If you’re serious about building the most productive possible economy, take that excess money that would have been parked into the S&P 500 and invest it in good schools, good infrastructure, healthcare, childcare, which by the way, all make jobs, a ton of jobs, most of which are very difficult to automate,” El-Sayed argued.
Last night, El-Sayed demolished Republican opponent Mike Rogers by an eight-point margin. As he heads to Washington, he is vowing to “fight against corporate tax breaks and the capture of our economy by billionaires and wanna-be oligarchs.”
Look out.
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How Shorter Workweeks Shaped Lula’s Comeback
Lula's comeback offers a powerful lesson: Ambitious economic policies can capture voters' imaginations when they promise tangible improvements in everyday life and win their hearts when you can deliver on that vision.
Nov 07, 2026
In just three weeks last month, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva turned a 2.2-million-vote deficit in the first round into a 4.4-million-vote victory in the runoff. He won 52% to 48%. The six-point reversal made him the first candidate in Brazil's modern presidential history to win a runoff after being down in the first round. He increased turnout and appears to have converted voters who didn’t initially vote for him.
Much has been written about the organizing mechanics of this remarkable turnaround and the revitalization of "Lula's Army." While these explanations tell us how Lula’s campaign mobilized voters, they don’t tell us why voters mobilized. The contrasts between Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro were of course already stark, but if they were so stark, the changing of the tides wouldn’t have been so dramatic over three weeks. That emphasis on organizing mechanics overlooks strategic policy decisions Lula made those final weeks to deliver concrete victories for Brazilian workers.
And the most powerful of those decisions? In October, Lula successfully fought for the passage of a constitutional amendment to shorten the workweek from six days to five days, which had been one of his main campaign pledges. This was one of the most meaningful Brazilian labor reforms in decades. By the end of 2027, workers will have 10% of their time back and an additional day of rest. So many voters are used to politicians making promises but not delivering on them. Lula made sure workers knew he had their back by delivering real policy change in a critical period of the election. And this policy was not a niche policy change impacting small segments of the population. It’s estimated it would concretely touch the lives of over 30 million Brazilian workers by giving them their time back.
The Political Power of Giving Workers Their Time Back
For millions of Brazilian workers, they’ve had a “6x1” schedule their entire lives: working six days every week with just a single day to recover. Burnout, unsurprisingly, had become epidemic. Shortening the Brazilian workweek had been advanced by unionists in Brazil for decades, but had taken on newfound pressure from a grassroots campaign called Vida Além do Trabalho (Life Beyond Work). This campaign, founded in 2023 by worker-turned-politician Rick Azevedo, helped turn growing frustration into a real political movement. From 2023 to 2026, workers and politicians worked together to steadily build support in Congress, organizing demonstrations, running for office on a shorter workweek agenda, collecting millions of signatures, and incorporating the demand into campaign rallies. This culminated in Lula focusing on shortening the workweek in his May Day 2025 rally and sending a bill to Congress in April 2026, bringing this issue into the forefront of the presidential election.
The grassroots campaign also helped seed widespread support for shorter workweeks across the political spectrum, helped in part by the fact that shorter workweeks intuitively connected to workers’ material self-interest. In March 2026, a Datafolha poll showed that 71% of Brazilians supported ending the six-day workweek, including 77% of women.
Lula recognized the opportunity. Just days after his first-round defeat in October, he publicly challenged Bolsonaro to support the reform. Simultaneously in October, University of Brasilia’s student union held a 50,000-person rally with the slogan “Bolsonaro never again, and end the 6x1 now.” This bottom-up and top-down approach worked. Bolsonaro and his opposition party initially opposed the proposal. But amid widespread backlash, they quickly backed down. They agreed to a special Senate session to ensure the passage of a constitutional amendment which would result in a 10% reduction of workers’ workweeks (from 44 hours to 40 hours) and two guaranteed days of rest by the end of 2027, with no loss in pay. The public hunger for this change was so deep that the amendment passed 75-1 in the Senate and Congress passed it two days later.
Time Is a Cost-of-Living Issue
Lula's comeback offers a powerful lesson. Ambitious economic policies can (1) capture voters' imaginations when they promise tangible improvements in everyday life, and (2) win their hearts when you can deliver on that vision. And few promises are more meaningful than giving workers back the one thing they can never earn more of: their time.
The cost-of-living crisis is a global issue: When you hear the struggles of Brazilian workers, they’re not too different from those of American workers. Just as in Brazil, there’s an epidemic of burnout and widespread frustration that the American dream has just resulted in being overworked and tired. Brazilian politicians and movement leaders savvily recognized that cost-of-living and affordability is about prices and wages, but also about time.
American politicians should start paying attention. The United States established the 40-hour workweek nearly 90 years ago. Despite massive changes in who works, how we work, where we work, and when we work, that workweek has stayed at approximately 40 hours at the individual level, and we work more household hours than we did 60 years ago. With AI on the horizon, even more could change rapidly with work.
American politicians should keep in mind that the shorter workweek offers an opportunity to translate this burgeoning coalition for shorter workweeks into meaningful policy change.
In this moment of burgeoning economic populism, shorter workweeks could be a policy that helps politicians deliver real widespread change that is also immensely popular. The Brazil example is instructive. Any shorter workweek bill deserves to be passed merely for the sake of giving time back to workers, but it also holds real electoral fruits. As in Brazil, approximately 7 in 10 Americans support shorter workweeks. After all, a better economy shouldn't just mean having more money in your pocket. It should mean having more life outside of work.
Similar to Brazil in 2023, we’re seeing small scale progress in the last few years. At the federal level, 32-hour workweek bills have been introduced in both houses of Congress from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.). At the state and local level, policymakers as wide-ranging as a Republican in Maine, Rick Bennett, and a DSA NY Member in NYC, Phara Souffrant Forrest, have advanced shorter workweek legislation. Both unions have advocated for this and hundreds of companies have adopted it.
The dust will soon settle on the 2026 midterms, and campaigns will start prepping for the 2027 and 2028 elections. American politicians should keep in mind that the shorter workweek offers an opportunity to translate this burgeoning coalition for shorter workweeks into meaningful policy change. Lula's comeback shows what can happen when politicians give workers something worth fighting for, and then deliver on that idea.
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Are the Corporate Democrats Gonna Blow This Again?
How Democrats choose to deal with Musk, Trump, and other morbidly rich American oligarchs and their monopolistic empires may be the most important set of decisions party leaders have made in 50 years or more. We can't allow them to mess it up.
Nov 06, 2026
Elon Musk spent almost a half-billion traceable dollars (and we have no idea how much “dark money” that’s not traceable but legalized by corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court) to try to help rightwing politicians win this week’s election. As the old joke goes, that’s both the good and the bad news.
Given how severely great wealth has distorted our republic—from buying elections and legislation to putting judges on the Supreme Court—Democrats now face some serious decisions about how to proceed.
Who should lead the Party’s efforts both in and outside of Congress? Should the Party embrace its progressive base and push policies like Medicare for All and free college, or stay with Clinton-style “moderate” positions as we move into the next Congress? Impeach Trump or, as Schumer suggested yesterday, “work with him”?
As more and more of the nation’s wealth is stolen from the bottom and middle and transferred to the top one percent, the nation’s people lose confidence in the institutions that should have been defending, protecting, and supporting them.
Corporate Democrat Claire McCaskill suggested on MS NOW recently that Democrats must embrace “moderate” positions because those are the ones most likely to be looked upon favorably by “independent” voters, but is that true?
Those same voters swung toward Trump several times recently because, instead of being “moderate,” he was proposing radical change in government policies.
Support for genuinely progressive policies like free college, Medicare for All, taxing the morbidly rich and big corporations, and aggressive actions to mitigate climate change with green energy actually poll very strongly with so-called independent voters.
And there’s something eerily familiar about today that people who’ve read histories of the 1930s and the Roosevelt administration’s New Deal recognize. It’s as if history is repeating itself.
And if that’s actually the case, the choices congressional Democrats make now about how to deal with Musk, Trump, and other morbidly rich American oligarchs and their monopolistic empires (including media monopolies) may be the most important decisions Democrats have made in 50 years or more.
And the stakes are huge: in actual, historical fact, those wielding great wealth have been responsible for the failure or near-failure of pretty much every republic that’s failed since the days of ancient Greece and Rome.
In modern times they’ve provoked the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the American Civil War, the Russian Revolution, and the downfall of dozens of smaller once-democratic or partially-democratic states from Chile in the 1960s to Egypt, Hungary, and Turkey in the last few decades. It’s also happening to Russia as you read these words, although that’s another article altogether.
And now the morbidly rich are screwing up America again, much as they did in the 1920s and the 1850s. If they succeed and enough “moderate” Democrats continue to get into bed with them, it will be both disastrous and perhaps bloody, a word that Trump himself has recently used to describe his plans for the next two years.
America has been through three great cycles since our founding, as brilliantly explained by Neil Howe in The Fourth Turning Is Here and Peter Turchin in Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration. Turchin also summarized his thesis in a tight but concerning article for The Guardian two years ago titled “The deep historical forces that explain Trump’s win.”
(I’ve also written about these cycles of history multiple times over the years, here, here, here, here, here, etc., but it deserves a fresh examination in the light of the election and the crucial decisions now facing the Democratic Party.)
Howe explains how every 80 years or so (as our elders die out) we lose access to the lessons our grandparents learned, particularly those about the importance—nay, the necessity—of regulating great wealth so it doesn’t turn government into a vehicle to exclusively serve the morbidly rich.
When the morbidly rich take over, he notes, bad things happen: it was 73 years from the Constitution’s ratification until the oligarchs in the South started the Civil War, exactly 80 years from the end of the Civil War to the end of World War II (caused by greedy oligarchs on Wall Street kicking off the Republican Great Depression), and today we’re exactly 81 years out from the end of World War II.
Turchin breaks those 80-year cycles into 40-year segments. He points out how, in back-to-back 40-year blocks of time, the obscenely rich are brought to heel over four decades, but then rise up and take over again during the next forty years. Over and over again throughout American history.
Support for genuinely progressive policies like free college, Medicare for All, taxing the morbidly rich and big corporations, and aggressive actions to mitigate climate change with green energy actually poll very strongly with so-called independent voters.
The cover of his book Ages of Discord provides a graphic that visually explains his hypothesis, showing a red line for the accumulation of great wealth from 1780 to 2020 and working class wealth with the blue lines.
Today, we’re overdue for one of his generational flips: we are 45 years from Reagan’s counter-revolution against the New Deal, a program FDR put into place in 1933 that saved America and created the largest middle class the world had ever seen. (I’m radically simplifying both of these scholar’s works: I recommend you buy and read their books for more detail.)
In summary, Trump’s election and re-election were reflections of the success of the anti-New Deal counter-revolution launched with the Reagan Revolution in 1981, in which America’s most wealthy men essentially took back control of our government from the “New Dealers.”
Much of this was accomplished through a process of destroying unions, cutting taxes on the rich while borrowing from the future to fund them, and allowing corporations to search the world for the cheapest labor and least regulation (“free trade”). While it’s rarely mentioned in our increasingly-oligarch-captured media, they called this “neoliberalism” (as I detail in my book The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America).
FDR’s New Deal created massive prosperity for the American working class, lifting us from 15 percent of Americans being in the middle class in 1933 to 65 percent of us at that status with a single paycheck when Reagan took office in 1981. (Today, we’re well below 50 percent and it takes two paychecks to get there.)
Because of roughly 40 years of success during FDR’s New Deal (1933-1981), a third of American workers had the protections of a union when Reagan took office, brand-spanking-new schools dotted the countryside, college was so cheap as to be virtually free, hospitals and health insurance companies were required to be nonprofit so healthcare was easily affordable, and housing supports meant that the cost of the average home was about twice the average annual income.
The main beneficiaries were my generation, the boomers, who came of age at the peak of the New Deal’s effects, before Reaganism bit hard into American workers, with Republicans and their morbidly rich stealing over $79 trillion of our wealth in just 45 years and handing it off to the Epstein/Musk/Bezos/Zuckerberg class.
As I point out in The Hidden History of the American Dream, when my generation was in our 30s, we controlled about 21 percent of the nation’s wealth; today people in their thirties only control 4.6 percent of America’s wealth. Average home prices today are ten times average annual income today. College is unaffordable, as is healthcare.
Forty-five years of Reaganism, embraced by both parties until 2021, have wiped out the middle class while making the rich into the super-rich. When Reagan came to office, billionaires were a rarity (there were only 7 of them) and they were constrained by law from owning judges and politicians or having an outsize influence in elections.
And then Republicans took over in 1981 and began their war on the American Dream.
In this week’s election—thanks to corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court with their Citizens United decision—several hundred American and foreign billionaires, Elon Musk, and Israel’s AIPAC largely funded GOP campaigns, massively outspending progressive Democrats through PACs and dark money SuperPACS.
The most visible examples were the billionaire-funded campaigns against James Tallarico and Abdul El-Sayed, who were outspent by over $248 million dollars. That money, though, could not overcome the trends of history and America’s outrage at the GOP’s turn toward naked fascism.
Peter Turchin identifies a three-step process that leads to revolutionary outcomes: “popular immiseration, elite overproduction and state breakdown.”
First, the rich get control of the political system and change the tax code and regulatory state to gut worker income and union-organizing power, “immiserating” (impoverishing) the middle class.
We saw this with Reagan and corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court dismantling union rights and workers’ power, followed by the passage of “Right To Work For Less” anti-union laws in state after Republican-controlled state.
The rich then redirect the government’s efforts away from supporting working class people to redirecting the wealth of the nation into their own money bins.
The most obvious example of this are the “tax cuts”—cumulatively totaling over $35 trillion—put into place by Reagan, Bush, and Trump.
Up next are efforts to destroy the programs supporting the middle class, as we saw with the Big Beautiful Billionaire’s Bill gutting food stamps (SNAP), Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act (among other supports to the middle class).
Average working people know they’ve been screwed; they just don’t realize it’s the morbidly rich who did it to them unless there’s an outspoken class warrior like FDR or Bernie Sanders calling it out.
I put “tax cuts” in quotation marks, by the way, because they’re really not tax cuts: those taxes will eventually be paid. Just not by the people who should have paid them; they succeeded in pushing them out decades into the future with the assumption they’ll be paid for either by raising taxes on working people, cutting benefits to the middle class and poor, or both. Instead of “tax cuts,” we should rightly call them “tax deferrals” or “tax redistributions.”
Finally, as more and more of the nation’s wealth is stolen from the bottom and middle and transferred to the top one percent, the nation’s people lose confidence in the institutions that should have been defending, protecting, and supporting them. They see that no matter how they vote, no matter what they do, no matter how loud they protest, they’re still being screwed and the morbidly rich are still getting richer every single day.
This leads to Turchin’s “state breakdown,” which we’ve been witnessing in real time since Trump’s inauguration and the full-on implementation of the billionaire’s Project 2025, kicked off on January 20th, 2025. Step-by-step, those parts of the state that work for and protect the middle class and poor have been taken apart, while those parts that protect the rich (prisons, police, ICE, the military) have gotten trillions.
Average working people know they’ve been screwed; they just don’t realize it’s the morbidly rich who did it to them unless there’s an outspoken class warrior like FDR or Bernie Sanders calling it out.
Thus, they voted for whoever they perceive as most likely to “shake things up,” “destroy the deep state,” or “make the country great again” by restoring the wealth of the middle class.
Sometimes we choose right, as Americans did in 1860 with the election of Lincoln, and in 1932 by choosing FDR. The country was on the brink of disaster with massive fascist movements growing during each era; Lincoln and FDR defeated them and saved our nation’s democracy.
In 2024, though, the billionaires had such a grip on the media and the message, much of it through their ownership of media (Xitter, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Washington Post, LA Times, Fox “News,” massively subsidized podcasts, rightwing radio, etc.) and also with a tsunami of advertising cash that they convinced Americans that Trump—a billionaire rapist and convicted criminal who had promised to again cut taxes for his billionaire buddies—was the champion of the little guy.
As Trump, Vance, and Musk celebrated their 2024 election, their toast had to include the word “suckers.”
The result of this choice that put Project 2025 front-and-center has been the further disintegration of government’s protective ability for working class and poor people, turning it instead toward the wish-lists of billionaires, tech bros, and massive corporate monopolies and oligopolies.
As Turchin noted in The Guardian:
“One result of all this political dysfunction is an inability to agree on how the federal budget should be balanced. Together with the loss of trust and legitimacy, that accelerates the breakdown of state capacity.
“It’s notable that a collapse in state finances is often the triggering event for a revolution: this is what happened in France before 1789 and in the runup to the English civil war.”
If both Turchin and Howe are right and we’re now in the Fourth Turning or something like it, that explains much of the results of this week’s election. It should also give Democrats a clear vision of how to move forward.
We’re departing, in other words, the 45-year-long neoliberal/conservative/austerity part of the cycle that Reagan started and shifting into the next ~40-year cycle of progressive renewal of both our democracy and our economy.
For its own survival and that of our republic—and the success of our 2028 candidate for president—the Democratic Party must now reject the neoliberals within its own ranks.
Which means the Democratic Party and individual Democratic politicians should be embracing AOC, Bernie, Ro Khanna, Mark Pocan, Al-Sayed, and every other genuinely progressive politician as hard as they can, and push their policies to the fore.
To do anything less is to squander this moment and risk another rightwing reactionary backlash and loss of middle-class voters like we saw in the reaction to Clinton in 2016 and Harris in 2024.
For its own survival and that of our republic—and the success of our 2028 candidate for president—the Democratic Party must now reject the neoliberals within its own ranks and makes a forceful argument for returning to the systems of Reconstruction, the New Deal, and the Great Society that protected and enriched working class people in the previous cycles.
If Democrats again embrace neoliberals like Rahm Emmanuel (who’s pretty much openly campaigning for the 2028 presidential election), they’ll fail at this critical work and messaging: that could well doom our American experiment in liberal democracy.
If Democrats succeed at finding their voice, however, America may get the second chance to rebuild both our middle class and our democracy, a chance we ultimately won at the beginning of each of the past two 80-year cycles with Abraham Lincoln and FDR.
Thus, the policy and “holding Trump accountable” choices Democrats make for how they’ll proceed in the first 100 days of next year may well decide the fate of our American democracy.
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The Voters Have Spoken—And Now Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries Must Go
Democrats have said loudly and clearly that they want new leadership. Unfortunately, too many of the people in Washington aren’t listening.
Nov 06, 2026
On Tuesday, Democratic voters, independent voters, and even some Republican voters spoke loudly and clearly: they want this country to go in a different direction.
This is an amazing, unprecedented moment in my lifetime. I’m 46 years old, and this is the most hopeful political moment I’ve ever experienced.
However, the Democratic leadership we have today is completely ill-suited for this moment. They do not have the vision for what it’s going to take to rebuild the trust the American people have lost in their government, their institutions, and the Democratic Party itself.
Democrats have spoken loudly and clearly that they want new leadership. Unfortunately, too many of the people in Washington aren’t listening.
We’re going to do our dead-level best to make sure they hear us and make sure they see the names. We’re going to start sending text messages, running ads, and getting loud. We’re going to get in their faces and make it impossible to ignore what Democrats, independents, and the voters who delivered this Democratic tsunami are demanding: new leadership.
Chuck Schumer is bad at his job. Hakeem Jeffries is not ready for this moment. He is not the leader we need.
It's time for them to go.
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The Midterms Weren’t Red vs. Blue, They Were Bought vs. Not Bought
The 2028 lesson is not to find the most “electable,” most “moderate,” or most anti-MAGA Democrat. It’s to nominate one who is boldly and proudly against corporate money.
Nov 06, 2026
This week, voters in red and purple states sent Democrats to the Senate who ran against corporate money. James Talarico won in Texas. Annie Andrews won in South Carolina. Adam Hamilton won in Kansas. All three took $0 in corporate PAC money.
More than 16 years after Citizens United gave corporations a free speech right to unlimited political spending, I believe Americans have reached a breaking point. A fundamental realignment is underway, and the midterms are the clearest evidence yet. The 2028 lesson is not to find the most “electable,” most “moderate,” or most anti-MAGA Democrat. It’s to nominate one who is boldly and proudly against corporate money. A candidate who is not bought.
I know because I’ve spent years reporting on it. I was the fifth hire at More Perfect Union, a news start-up that would focus on the working class issues the mainstream media so often ignored. We told working-class stories across all 50 states: minor league ballplayers living in abject poverty, corporate chains flagrantly breaking the law, baristas organizing their Starbucks one store at a time, each inspired by a video of the last. We filmed factory workers at Kellogg’s and John Deere, resident doctors, Hollywood writers. The struggle was the same in every state and county, and in every workplace. It wasn’t a blue one or a red one. It was a working-class one.
Abdul El Sayed’s slogan, “Money out of politics, money in your pocket, and medicare for all” is the blueprint, and we must follow it.
It came into focus covering freight rail. In 2022, rail workers nearly shut down the US economy by refusing a contract with zero guaranteed sick days. President Joe Biden, the self-proclaimed “Union President,” brokered the deal rail workers had just rejected, then asked Congress to impose it on the 125,000 workers anyway. The Congress that did so had taken millions from the same railroads. In the 2020 cycle alone, rail PACs gave $3.7 million to congressional candidates.
That was the corporate Democrat playbook in one decision: Say you stand with workers, then side with the people who fund you when it counts. That’s the Democratic Party voters have been rejecting, and it’s the one we have to leave behind.
Now look at the midterms. Abdul El-Sayed won in Michigan, Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota, Josh Turek in Iowa, and Jon Ossoff in Georgia, all at $0 in corporate PAC money. Mary Peltola in Alaska and Scott Colom in Mississippi, whose races are too close to call as I write, fit the same mold. Angie Nixon took no corporate money and came within 200,000 votes in Florida, a state considered solidly red. Roy Cooper and Sherrod Brown won without this message, but I believe they’re the exceptions to the rule.
Abdul El Sayed’s slogan, “Money out of politics, money in your pocket, and medicare for all” is the blueprint, and we must follow it.
Talarico, the first Democrat to win a Senate seat in Texas since 1988, pointed out over and over in his campaign that "in America, we have an affordability crisis because we have a corruption crisis." Andrews was proud to say that "I don't take a dime of corporate PAC money.” and differentiated herself from her opponent by saying, "Unlike Senator Graham, I will not sell out to big money or take any corporate PAC money." This is the same anti-swamp, outsider message President Donald Trump won on, only this one has spine.
Voters are sick of watching the cost of everything rise while we send billions overseas for new wars. They’re sick of being forced to work longer hours, adopt AI without guardrails, and produce more without seeing their paychecks go up, all while the US produces its first trillionaire.
Campaign finance is public record. Tools like the Political Integrity Index let anyone see which candidates are selling out to corporations and which have taken an integrity pledge to the people who elected them. To win the presidency in 2028, Democrats must take a bold stand against corporate influence over politicians and campaigns. To save our democracy, we must do as much.
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The People Voted to End the War on Immigrants—Now Democrats Must Act
Latino voters stood by their immigrant families and neighbors on Tuesday, and Democrats need to remember that. Remember the families who remain separated. The imprisoned and the dead. And those who stood with immigrants at the risk of their own lives.
Nov 06, 2026
Yes, Election Day was a day of hope and victory. From coast to coast—and especially among Latino communities in key states like Texas—voters overwhelmingly rejected Immigration and Customs Enforcement violence, President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign, and billionaire-backed scapegoating. People saw through the lie that immigrants drive up the cost of living and chose a future focused on real economic relief. The future is suddenly looking brighter.
For an immigrant like me who came to this country and still has no ability to vote, there’s so much hope coming from Houston, where Latino voters turned out in record numbers and dedicated their vote to Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, the immigrant father who was killed by ICE. There’s hope coming from young first- and second-generation Latinos like my nephews and nieces who dedicated their votes to their immigrant family members and friends.
This message from voters is very clear for the newly elected candidates celebrating this week—everyone who won on the promise to fight back against Trumpism. Tuesday’s vote was a clear rejection of the war on immigrants. Let it also mark an end to Democratic cowardice, and the end of putting corporate interests over people.
Democrats, you had the Latino vote before and lost it. Now you have it back—don't mess this up.
It's time to act on the mandate that voters just delivered—especially the millions of Latino voters, horrified by the last two years, who just swung hard away from Trump.
Democrats, you had the Latino vote before and lost it. Now you have it back—don't mess this up. History in California, Arizona, and Texas shows that while Latino voters will reject mass deportation campaigns, failing to deliver on promises made to our communities causes that support to slip. You cannot take us for granted. You need a positive, pro-working-class, pro-immigrant agenda, and you need to compete for our votes. You can start by showing true political courage by protecting our families and neighbors.
Getting ICE out of our communities is no longer just an immigration issue—it is a safety issue for us.
That courage starts with stopping ICE. Get those violent criminals out of our communities and make sure they can never terrorize us or anyone else again. Stop ICE and Border Patrol and all the other corrupted parts of the Department of Homeland Security. Bring to justice everyone in this government responsible for so many crimes and terrors against immigrants.
Inspect detention centers and enforce real congressional oversight. Shut off the pipeline that feeds from streets and sidewalks of immigrant communities into for-profit torture prisons where neglect and abuse have led to a rising toll of sickness, injury, and death.
At the local level, you can stand up for immigrants by fiercely defending sanctuary laws, cities, and states. Keep federal agents and anti-immigrant operatives out of our homes, schools, and churches. Stop ICE’s local enablers by ending 287(g) programs that turn local police into immigration enforcers. We cannot let local law enforcement take federal dollars to racially profile and target brown communities. Put an end to the abuse now.
Latino voters stood by their immigrant families and neighbors on Tuesday, and Democrats need to remember that. Remember the families who remain separated. The imprisoned and the dead. And those who stood with immigrants at the risk of their own lives.
Remember the deaths of Renee Good, Alex Pretti. Carlos Roberto Montoya, and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. The unconstitutional and unlawful deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. The detention of 5-year-old Liam Cornejo Ramos. The brave people of Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and Chicago.
I'm grateful for everyone who voted on Tuesday for decency, humanity, and the Constitution. I'm also grateful for the courageous people, immigrants and allies, who took to the streets in the last two years, like ambulance crews rushing to the scene of an emergency or firefighters to an out-of-control blaze.
Election Day gave us many victories, but organizing gives us power—so let’s turn this mandate into action, hit the streets, hold our leaders accountable, and build the safe, just future our families deserve.
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Will the Blue Tsunami Bring a New Deal for Unions?
What American workers—and American democracy—need most is a larger, more powerful labor movement. Unions should take advantage of this moment to build one.
Nov 06, 2026
Union activists like me can be forgiven a certain degree of giddiness after Donald J. Trump’s agenda got walloped in the midterm election. After all, Trump has been one of the most anti-worker presidents in history. He stripped millions of federal employees of the right to bargain collectively, he gutted the National Labor Relations Board, and he sliced back regulations that gave overtime to millions of employees and that protected people from being improperly classified as independent contractors without labor rights. He cut taxes for corporations and billionaires and slashed food and medical benefits for working Americans.
Congress is now in the hands of Democrats, including many who trend younger and more progressive, and even more who proclaim themselves to be the friend of the working person (some even say “working class”). Alas, Trump remains in place. It would take some extraordinary parliamentary maneuvering to undo all—or perhaps any—of Trump’s anti-worker policies. There is no reason to shy away from uphill battles, but we cannot expect complete victory in the next two years.
Anyway, the agenda is broader than a few immediate policy initiatives. As I argue in my upcoming book, Building Power: Collective Action, the Writers’ Strike Against Hollywood, and Organizing for the Future (Cornell University Press), what American workers—and American democracy—need most is a larger, more powerful labor movement. That is the key to making sure the federal government acts in the interest of working people over the long haul. (By “working people” I mean everyone who earns a living by their own labor, whether by putting up buildings or tending to patients or teaching kids or writing software or working on the assembly line.)
If unions and their members (and potential members) want to make meaningful, sustainable advances, now is the time to commit to doing the hard work of organizing.
Here is the painful truth: Only about 10% of American workers are represented by unions. In the private sector, it’s closer to 6%. It is difficult to get corporate chieftains and elected politicians to fight for working people in the face of corporate opposition when union density is such a small fraction of the overall labor force and economy.
Things were this bad when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected. Union density was about 11% in 1934. The New Deal transformed federal labor law, FDR proclaimed that every worker should join a union, and the labor movement got to work organizing the unorganized. By 1945, density skyrocketed to nearly 35%.
Union density remained between 30-35% for decades, and tens of millions of union members won a measure of economic security. Wages and productivity increased at about the same rate, roughly doubling from 1948 to 1973 (Sven Beckert, Capital: A Global History (Penguin Press 2025) at p. 949). In other words, working people won a reasonable share of the wealth they created.
Union density nosedived after the early 1970s, and economic inequality exploded. From 1980 to 2020 income gains for the top 1% were more than triple those in the middle. The gap became even larger between the truly wealthy and the less well-off; the top 0.1% saw gains 12 times as large as those of the lowest 20% between 1979 and 2022.
A recent Economic Policy Institute study estimated the gains working people would make if union membership tripled to about 30%: $1.2 trillion a year, or about a third of the increase in economic inequality since 1979. Thus, if union density returned to where it was during the New Deal, this would put a serious dent in the economic inequality that has roiled American politics and ruined household finances. It is difficult to imagine a more powerful outcome for the Blue Tsunami than a New Deal for unions.
However (and sorry, this is a distinctly non-giddy point), one midterm election does not lock in a long-term political realignment. We need politicians to support pro-worker legislation for as long as it takes—decades, not years. The first legislative step would be to transform federal labor law to support, rather than hinder, unionization. That would make it vastly less difficult to increase union density.
None of this will happen by itself. Political candidates and consultants do not build movements. Organizers and leaders and activists and members do. Political winds shift and elections swing like pendulums. More important, politicians respond to leverage, not good vibes. They will only adopt labor law reforms if they feel sustained pressure to do so. If unions and their members (and potential members) want to make meaningful, sustainable advances, now is the time to commit to doing the hard work of organizing and bargaining, of engaging working people directly, of building their power in a sustainable way. They can use that power to exert leverage on whichever politicians seek their support. That is the surest way to capitalize on the gains that working people made in the midterm elections.
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