SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
neoliberalism
Western Capitalist Societies Have Rolled Out the Red Carpet for Fascism
Sadly, it seems that humanity never learns lessons from its dark past.
Sep 28, 2026
How do we explain the rise and normalization of fascism in Germany and the United States? How important are the upcoming midterm elections? And what may happen if the Democrats sweep the midterm elections? Can the Democratic Party offer a vision for the future beyond a return to the pre-Trump status quo? Political scientist, political economist, author, and journalist C. J. Polychroniou shares provocative thoughts on these questions in an interview with French-Greek independent journalist and writer Alexandra Boutri.
Alexandra Boutri: In a recent essay on German state elections, you hinted that Germany, once considered the economic engine of Europe, is now in the midst of a systemic crisis. What’s going on there? How did fascism become normalized again in Germany?
C. J. Polychroniou: Let me start by briefly addressing the point you made about Germany’s status as the powerhouse of Europe because economics is a big part of the story behind the meteoric rise of the fascist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. Germany’s second so-called Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle), which kicked off in the early years of the new millennium, was aided by the creation of a currency regime that was “made in Germany.” The euro not only created stability for the German economy due to lack of exchange fluctuations but allowed it to gain huge competitiveness against other members of the eurozone. German competitiveness increased overnight by nearly 20 percent, while competitiveness in other European countries declined. Germany’s euro partners absorbed over 40 percent of its exports. In the process, huge imbalances emerged within the eurozone as Germany built an enormous trade surplus while individual countries within the EU, particularly the southern European nations, run huge deficits and saw their debt levels explode.
The situation in the US is even more dramatic because the fascists are already in power...
It’s important to remember that not only was Germany running a budget deficit prior to the implementation of the euro regime but was derided as the sick man of Europe because of its consistently sluggish economy. Nonetheless, it wasn’t just the new currency regime that greatly contributed to Germany’s economic recovery and subsequent emergence as Europe’s powerhouse. The Social Democratic government of Gerhard Schröder (1998-2005) implemented a series of major labor and welfare reforms inspired by the philosophy of austerity and fiscal conservatism in order to intensify Germany’s export-oriented growth model after reunification.
In sum, the so-called German economic miracle depended on the promotion of neoliberal policies (wage suppression and putting an end to the social market economy) and reliance on an export-led growth model. The primary beneficiaries of this “economic miracle” were German industrialists and financiers. Net real wages in Germany remained stagnant, poverty increased, and domestic investment collapsed.
Enter the AfD. It was founded in 2013 by some conservative German academics, journalists, and politicians who were concerned with the direction of their country’s economy. They were against the euro and opposed the bailout of European indebted countries such as Greece. Many years earlier, four renegade professors (Wilhelm Hankel, Karl Albrecht Schachtschneider, Joachim Starbatty, and Wilhelm Nolling) had actually launched a legal challenge in Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court against the adoption of the euro. I spoke to professor Joachim Starbatty at the start of the euro debt crisis. His position was clear and straightforward. Rightly or wrongly, he felt that a monetary union could survive only if economic competitiveness among all member states moved in the same direction and if the different governments implemented sustainable fiscal policies.
The AfD started out as a eurosceptic party but began campaigning on an anti-immigration platform soon after its founding, mainly in reaction to then Chancellor Merkel’s decision to open Germany’s borders and welcome more than 1 million refugees and asylum seekers. Its leaders realized that there were a lot of disgruntled voters out there who felt that the establishment parties are incapable of addressing the country’s many interlocking crises and that scapegoating can be used to bring people together from different socioeconomic groups by creating a common enemy.
The AfD capitalizes on economic and cultural anxieties, just like Hitler did in the 1930s. As a new report by legal experts has found, the AfD is a very extreme political party, “working systematically to undermine Germany’s free democratic order.” And what should be of particular concern is that the success this party is enjoying so far is indeed comparable to the rise of the Nazis. True enough, the AfD is particularly strong in the former east Germany which still lags behind west Germany, but it has already emerged as the most popular party in the country. Hence, to continue speaking of a surge on the part of fascism in Germany is an understatement.
Now, Germany’s export-oriented growth model seems to have run its course. It’s facing mounting pressure from China’s own export power. Growth has been stagnant for the past several years. The slight increase in domestic gross product that the German economy experienced in the second quarter of 2026 cannot conceal the fact that German trade deficit with China continues to grow. To turn things around, shockingly enough, Chancellor Merz, who is the most unpopular chancellor in the country’s postwar history, has called on Germans to work longer hours, citing Greece, a country whose labor market is characterized by low wages while employers can enforce 13-hour work days, a model. As far as the small wage increases that have taken place over the last few years are concerned, they are “simply too low” to keep pace with rising costs.
The question about how fascism became normalized again is not difficult to answer. It became normalized again in Germany and throughout Europe in the same way that Trump normalized racism and fascist tendencies in the United States, namely by integrating extremist rhetoric and policies into mainstream political culture. Harsh, inhumane immigration policies have become laws while the line between security and surveillance is gone in today’s so-called democratic societies. Laws are now used not for the purpose of defending democracy and freedom of speech but in order to suppress dissent. Genocide has unfolded before our eyes, but opposition to it can result in penalties, institutional punishment, and arrests. Even universities, allegedly a bedrock for democracy, are violating “basic free speech, association, and assembly rights.”
Western capitalist polities have rolled out the red carpet for fascism. Indeed, it would seem that humanity never learns lessons from its dark past. The far right has gone from antisemitism (it supports Israel but remains antisemitic) to Islamophobia and there is a significant rise in xenophobia not just throughout Europe but all across the world. Meanwhile, the president of the most powerful nation in history threatens another country (Iran) with total annihilation. The West has entered again the age of monsters.
Alexandra Boutri: With the 2026 midterm elections in the US fast approaching, and which may be the most consequential in the history of the country, isn’t it the case that the United States is also experiencing massive systemic failures?
C. J. Polychroniou: No question about it. While there are striking differences between Germany and the United States on many levels, both countries face enormous economic challenges and real threats from domestic political forces with extreme, anti-democratic beliefs. On that note, I would say that the situation in the US is even more dramatic because the fascists are already in power, you have a mentally militarized society, and the system of checks and balances simply isn’t working. Formally, AfD’s leaders reject political violence to attain the party’s goals, while Trump has repeatedly stoked violence. But here I should add that the MAGA crowd is even more extremist than AfD’s supporters. In the meantime, wealth inequality in the United States has reached an all-time high, and the tech giants are building a dystopia.
Alexandra Boutri: What’s your own sense about the upcoming midterms? How important are they, and what will they mean?
C. J. Polychroniou: As far as midterm elections go, I think you are absolutely right when you stated earlier that they may be the most consequential in the history of the country. The president’s party usually loses House seats in midterm elections, so there is a good chance that the Democrats will control the chamber come November. There are several key races that will determine who controls the Senate, but the Democrats are clear favorites. However, it may all come down to independent voters. Also, I hope that Hispanics will turn their backs on the GOP. One of the things that Democrats and progressives in general in the US have failed to realize is how socially conservative the new immigrants that have come to the United States are. Unlike the huge waves of European immigrants that arrived in the United States between the late 1890s and 1950s and led to support for the Democratic Party because they carried with them progressive and even radical ideas about politics and society, the new immigrants that have been coming to the US since the 1980s (over 80% are from Latin America and Asia) are overwhelmingly conservative and religious.
But there is a deeper concern here about the midterm elections, which is that Trump will interfere by trying to deny people their voting rights, having federal officials seize ballots, and even declaring results void with false allegations of voter fraud. It is also conceivable that he may demand from Republicans that they refuse to swear in newly elected Democrats in the House of Representatives.
Alexandra Boutri: As far as I can see, the problem is that the leadership of the Democratic Party lacks courage and has no vision for the future. For the establishment Democrats, the perfect outcome would be a return to the pre-Trump status quo. Am I wrong in thinking that way?
C. J. Polychroniou: No, you are not wrong. The current leadership of the Democratic Party is simply hopeless. As was the previous one, and the one before that, and so on. And the left-wing of the party can only do so much. The Democrats need bold, courageous, visionary leadership that is willing to embrace a truly progressive socioeconomic agenda and reject militarism. What is quite disconcerting about a party that claims to fight on behalf of American workers is how shallow and inconsistent its policy agenda is when it comes to meaningful change.
The current leadership of the Democratic Party is simply hopeless.
The ruling Labour Party under the leadership of Andy Burnham has promised a “new direction” for Britain by adopting bold reforms on key areas that affect the well-being of its citizens. They range from changes to economic policy, improving public services, transferring power from Westminster to communities, and combating the threats of global warming. I don’t know if Burnham will be able to deliver and restore Labour’s fortunes, but the early signs are quite encouraging. The Democrats should move in a similar direction if Trumpism is to be defeated.
On that note, it is uplifting to see that the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst has launched Game Changers: Economic Policies for a Working America. The project is initiated and directed by PERI’s co-director Gerald Epstein and represents a bold intellectual undertaking for putting an end to the madness of free market fundamentalism by creating an alternative economic setting with “rules that first and foremost protect the well-being of American workers.”
Alexandra Boutri: You said above that this is the time of monsters. So, what is to be done?
C. J. Polychroniou: I said this is the age of monsters. “Now is the time of monsters” is a quote widely attributed to Italian Marxist intellectual Antonio Gramsci. The problem is that Gramsci never used those words in Prison Notebooks. What he actually wrote was “In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Moreover, and this is even less known, the statement had nothing to do with the rise of fascism but, rather, with developments inside the Italian Communist Party!
What is to be done in an age of monsters? I will paraphrase Albert Camus and say that “in a world of conflict, in a world of victims and executioners,” it is the moral duty of thinking and decent people everywhere, irrespective of their political preferences and ideological affiliations, race, ethnicity, and national origin, “not to be on the side of the executioners.”
Keep ReadingShow Less
The Power of the People Is Still the Most Important Power and Billionaires Know It
What kind of future can the people of Mexico, the US, and Canada build together now that the neoliberal architecture of unfair trade that got us to this bitter crossroads is visibly cracking up?
Sep 18, 2026
I have spent my life watching men in suits sign away things that were never theirs to sell. The North American Free Trade Agreement. Article 27 of Mexico’s Constitution. The land beneath the feet of the people who work it. Trade deals get written in rooms none of us are allowed into, then handed to us as done—take it, live with it, and don't ask who profited. That was the old playbook: theft dressed up as a benevolent "all boats rising" policy.
What's happening in 2026 is not quiet. Donald Trump is doing it all out loud, in broad daylight, on camera, daring anyone to stop him. And he's doing it right here in the USA.
Washington has long muted its professions of democratic faith whenever a compliant government was needed in Mexico or elsewhere around the world. Now, that corrosive indifference to core values is at work at home in the United States, with a terrifying array of targeted attacks on immigrant communities; judges stripped of the power to enforce basic civil procedure and defend what little protection people still have under this economic order; and the Orwellian vaporization of extensive scientific databases tracking climate change and other inconvenient truths.
The Trinational Peace Summit—The People Against Authoritarianism—it’s a regional gathering, but it isn't a rally. It's a rehearsal for the countries and regions we're trying to become.
And that's before we even consider this administration's aggressive support for unchecked AI dominance with no regard for what it costs humanity, or the foolishly criminal forever war he started with Iran last February.
In the USA, the machinery of electoral democracy is itself under direct assault: career officials who once safeguarded elections purged and replaced with loyalists who deny elections happen fairly at all; Immigration and Customs Enforcement turned into something even The Washington Post now calls a paramilitary force; and a Pentagon chain of command purged of those considered most likely to obey their oath to the US Constitution at a time of shameless presidential power grab.
The shamelessness makes clear what used to be hidden. In Mexico, NAFTA was imposed with a rewritten constitutional article here, a side agreement there, with no teeth—so boring that no one ever looked into it too closely. Today’s openly hostile power grab made it impossible to keep pretending the arrangement could ever be fair..
What kind of future can we build together now that the neoliberal architecture of unfair trade that got us to this bitter crossroads is visibly cracking up?
It is precisely this vital conversation about our future—between people from Canada, USA, and Mexico—that the US administration is trying to shatter. We intend to have it anyway.
To create peace among our people we must work on removing the causes of conflict. We see the contradictions: inequality versus greed, misery versus excess, haves versus have nots. These are the contradictions democracy is supposed to be able to overcome by dictating that majorities rule policy and that there are constitutional protections for all. These principles have never worked as well as promised, but they have endured. Now they are under unprecedented attack.
For too long history has underlined the difference between our countries, and politicians have benefited from promoting rivalry and inequality. But today, it is clear that we are a cross-border majority suffering the consequences of a handful of billionaires.
Peace power requires a refreshed regional majority with new voices and decision-makers. A big tent where Black communities, Indigenous peoples, gun violence survivors, workers, and migrants from the three countries are treated as the pillars of democracy they already are. All represent communities who've never had the luxury of walking away from struggle, which is exactly why their vision and strength are vital to uniting our majority in the pursuit of peace and freedom.
The power of the people is still the most important power, and the billionaires know it. That's why they invested so much in turning news and information into a circus of conflict for a doomscrolling public. They need our attention even more than they need our votes. Let's give them neither. Every hour they capture is an hour we don't spend building the unity that can defeat them. Our power relies on our strength of community and thrives in places where people can put the phone down and just make common cause with their fellow humans.
That's why people across Minnesota, California, Mexico City, Toronto, and New York are organizing from the neighborhood to the state: to resist authoritarianism and reclaim power back to the people. And that’s why, this September, we're throwing up a big tent in two cities that share two countries and one river. El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. The Trinational Peace Summit—The People Against Authoritarianism—it’s a regional gathering, but it isn't a rally. It's a rehearsal for the countries and regions we're trying to become: one where the future isn't handed down from a boardroom or negotiated in a room we're not allowed into, but built, plainly and stubbornly, by the people who actually have to live it. One where democratic dialogue and a radical democracy is protected as a sacred value.
The future is in our hands.
Keep ReadingShow Less
We Need a President Who Wants to Build a Better Country, Not a Bigger Ballroom
Trump understands how to wield power. His objectives and motivations are all wrong, but we need a president who will to exert executive authority in the name of the common good and a brighter future for our nation.
Sep 10, 2026
We are in a situation, as a country, and I think largely as the West generally, that only Trump can solve.
Now, I don’t mean specifically Donald J. Trump. I mean specifically a person who understands power in the same way Donald Trump understands power. He understands that the executive branch is enormous, that it works for the president, and that when all of that power is pointed toward a purpose it can push through a hell of a lot of blockades. Treasury, Labor, Commerce, Energy, Transportation, federal procurement, federal credit, federal land, regulatory agencies, it’s all power. A president can treat that machinery as something to politely administer, or decide the country needs to go somewhere and put it to work getting there.
Trump has done the second thing. He has pushed presidential authority on tariffs, executive control over the government, elections, executive orders, independent agencies and the courts. When one route gets blocked, he looks for another. His sweeping emergency tariffs were struck down, so the administration moved to other existing tariff authorities. His administration has tried to use federal power to change the rules around mail voting and has pushed a broad version of the unitary executive, the idea that a president elected to carry out a program must be able to control the executive branch charged with carrying it out. You can argue about the legality of any particular move, and the courts obviously have. The thing I am interested in is that he understands where the power is and is willing to use it.
The Democrats largely recoil from this idea. Part of that is their commitment to neoliberalism, and part of it is what I consider a perverted view of liberalism generally. There is this idea that the president should manage the government, send some proposals to Congress, wait for the courts, respect every inherited norm, avoid picking too many fights and explain to everybody that change takes time.
One of the most successful Democratic presidents in American history rejected that notion.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood power. He understood that the country had elected him to do something and that doing something meant fighting people who didn’t want it done. He named financial monopoly, reckless banking and organized money as enemies. He welcomed their hatred. He even went after incumbent Democrats who were standing in the way of the New Deal. His 1938 effort to knock off conservative Democrats mostly failed, but the important thing is that he tried. He wasn’t a “blue no matter who” president.
Roosevelt also understood something about checks and balances that party leaders ignore. Checks and balances are not just something that exists inside the government. There has to be a balance of power between markets, corporations, financial institutions and people. If, as they have now, corporations and the ultra wealthy have enough economic power, they can manage our lives without ever passing a law. Prices can control where we live. Employers control our healthcare options. Banks decide who gets credit. Utilities decide what electricity costs. A handful of companies control supply, wages, access and entire markets.
The only entity capable of balancing power away from the ultra wealthy and back toward ordinary people is us through our government. Roosevelt knew that market intervention was required, that the existing stranglehold of private power would prevent us from building the country we needed.
So he put the government to work producing.
The federal government directly hired people. It directly built things. It financed factories, built dams, generated electricity, expanded electric transmission, built public housing, roads, schools, parks and public buildings, financed rural electrification and created institutions that did not exist before. When millions of people needed work, programs like the WPA and CCC didn’t use tax credits or incentives to encourage private companies to do the work. The government hired them and put them to work building things the country needed.
TVA is probably the cleanest example. The government did not ask private utilities to please make electricity cheaper and more available across the Tennessee Valley. It built dams, generated power and created a public power system capable of transforming an entire region. That same capacity later helped power wartime industry and the Manhattan Project.
Then the war came and this way of thinking went into overdrive. The production requirements were absurd. We needed more planes, ships, tanks, trucks, engines, aluminum, rubber and ammunition than the existing industrial system could possibly produce. If Roosevelt had accepted the normal assumptions about how long factories took to build and how slowly markets adjusted, the answer would have been that it couldn’t be done. Europe would have lost the war.
Luckily for us FDR didn’t accept that answer.
Big Bill Knudsen, the former president of General Motors, became one of the people Roosevelt put to work organizing production. The government financed factories, built factories, owned factories, paid private companies to operate factories, allocated scarce materials, guaranteed demand and forced production priorities toward the things the country needed. The Detroit Arsenal is a perfect example. We needed tanks, so the government financed and built a giant tank plant and had Chrysler operate it. The point was not ideological purity about who owned what. We needed the factory, so we built the factory.
That is the part people leave out when they talk about American capitalism winning the war. The market didn’t wake up one morning, notice a profitable opportunity to defeat Hitler and organically produce the arsenal of democracy. The government decided what had to exist and then organized the public and private capacity needed to make it exist.
We did the same thing over and over again. We produced enough material to equip ourselves and supply the Allies. We built enough industrial capacity that after the war the United States could help rebuild Europe, build huge amounts of housing and infrastructure, expand electricity and create the material abundance people now look back on as if it somehow appeared naturally.
Donald Trump understands the power part. His problem is purpose.
He can point the executive branch toward immigrants, DEI, universities, the radical left, bureaucrats he considers disloyal, mail voting, allies, or whatever enemy is useful that week, and even if he defeated every one of them tomorrow, their houses would still cost too much, their healthcare would still cost too much, their electric bill would still be too high, childcare would still be too expensive, their town would still have too few doctors, their roads and bridges would still need work, their kids would still be wondering how the hell they are going to afford a house, and the country would still not have enough manufacturing capacity to make many of the things we depend on.
Roosevelt pointed power toward production. Electricity, jobs, housing, infrastructure, finance, labor power, factories, industrial capacity. If private capital would not build what was needed, government could build it. If private finance wouldn’t finance it, government would. If people needed jobs, government could hire them. If private utilities wouldn’t electrify poor communities at an affordable price, public power did.
This is the part modern Democrats seem determined to forget. They love storytelling. They love talking about fairness, dignity, community and opportunity. They seem much less interested in the fact that Roosevelt’s politics were believable because something existed underneath the story. People could see the dam. They could see the electric line. They could see the road. They could see the factory being built and their neighbor going to work.
The story worked because it was attached to a vision, a bold vision, and then that vision was attached to doing.
That is also what people misunderstand about vision. A vision does not become believable because it is small. Getting to the moon was ridiculous. Rebuilding the industrial base? Providing healthcare to every American? Building enough housing to make it affordable? Training hundreds of thousands of doctors, nurses, engineers, machinists and tradespeople? All quite ridiculous.
Until we start doing it.
If you say you are going to the moon and then build the rockets, launch facilities, factories, training programs and engineering teams, and start blowing shit up in Florida, people begin to believe you might actually be going to the moon.
The thing I hear over and over whenever we talk about rebuilding the country is that it takes time. Of course it takes time. A factory takes time to build. A doctor takes time to train. A power plant takes time to construct. The decision to start takes time. Starting doesn’t. The fact that a project takes six years to finish can’t require ten years of debate before the first shovel goes into the ground.
The executive branch is enormous, and when it is wielded toward a purpose it can coordinate agencies, use federal purchasing to create markets, use federal credit to finance capacity, use procurement to change what gets produced, direct departments to use old authorities in new ways, and force Congress and the courts to respond to a government that is already moving instead of spending years asking permission to imagine moving.
Trump understands that. Roosevelt understood it too.
The difference that matters is what the power is for.
If we want people to believe democratic government can solve their problems, democratic government is going to have to solve some fucking problems. It is going to have to build things again, produce things again, hire people, generate electricity, build transmission, build housing, expand medical capacity, build factories and create enough material abundance that ordinary people can see their lives getting better.
Then we can tell the story.
It’s time we find a president ready and willing to use executive power to build a better America, not a bigger ballroom.
Keep ReadingShow Less
The Consuming Contradictions of Trump's Iran War
It’s unclear how more temporary ceasefires in hostilities between the growing number of parties involved in the Iran-US war can solve problems such as the rise of gas prices and fall of spending on other commodities.
Jul 31, 2026
Getting a cup of complimentary coffee at my credit union recently, I glanced to the left and saw a younger woman with a mass of pennies placing them into a machine for conversion to cash. "The US Mint stopped producing pennies," I said to her. “They might be valuable.”
She quickly replied, "I need gas."
Rising gas prices are an outcome of the US war of aggression against Iran, begun five months ago. As a result, inflationary pressures are rising stateside.
One thing is plain as day. Ceasefires between Iran and the US are temporary and connect with fluctuations of oil prices, currently increasing. Rising prices of oil drive price increases at the gas pump.
The logic of military conflicts is one of unpredictable outcomes, economically and politically.
Meanwhile, this sentence in the recent Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation report stands out like a third thumb. “The index for energy increased 15.7% over the past 12 months due in large part to the index for gasoline rising 26.7% over the same period." That spike is despite presidential announcements about how well the war against Iran is going for the US to his dual audiences of MAGA voters and capitalist investors.
Apparently, repetition of a falsification has limitations. Don’t tell the president, though.
Inflation as a result of supply disruptions as we experienced with global value chains during the pandemic is a systemic contradiction. Global economic integration, e.g., the shift of US industry abroad that increases the distances of supply chains, is no risk-free strategy to increase profits and market share for corporate America.
We see in real time that the global economy which requires oil to operate feeds the imbalance between consumption, production, and distribution of commodities such as energy. The shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz and Red Sea with Yemen’s entry into the Iran-US war are driving the decrease in oil production and distribution, and therefore consumption.
Under the current phase of capitalism, or neoliberalism, the government shores up the weakening buying power of the working class with direct support of the corporations and the wealthy. In the case of the Iran-US war, despite the endless American taxpayer outlays for military spending with bipartisan support, the dwindling supply of energy from the Persian Gulf that businesses and consumers rely upon is driving inflationary pressures. The rise of gas prices is proof of that. There’s more.
Spending a bigger chunk of household income on gas means that working families spend less in other areas. Take fast food spending. Consumption of fast food is down 4% in May 2026 from its peak in September 2025, according to the US Bureau of Economic Affairs.
It’s unclear how more temporary ceasefires in hostilities between the growing number of parties involved in the Iran-US war, now including Saudi Arabia and Yemen, can solve problems such as the rise of gas prices and fall of spending on other commodities in the US. The logic of military conflicts is one of unpredictable outcomes, economically and politically. Claiming to know what's next is a fool's errand.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Working People Need Power, Not Promises
If we want the Democrats, or the Republicans, or any political party to enact a political agenda that effectively addresses the real concerns of working Americans, we must build a movement that enhances and applies the power of working Americans.
Jun 03, 2026
Democrats are eager to recapture the House, and perhaps even the Senate, in this November’s elections. They are banking in part on the customary midterm pendulum swing and in part on backlash against President Donald Trump’s unhinged, cult-like governing style (despite the ineffectiveness of this strategy throughout several election cycles). They also hope to reclaim their reputation as the party of the working class.
As a lifelong labor activist, I am gratified whenever people in electoral politics say they want to uplift the American worker. But I admit some skepticism—particularly since both major parties spent a generation or more embracing the neoliberal consensus that the government should surrender to giant multinational corporations and their wealthy executives and investors. Working people are not stupid; they know most prominent Democrats and all pre-MAGA Republicans advanced an agenda that eviscerated worker interests at home and sent tens of millions of jobs abroad. (Many unions, especially those in manufacturing, opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement when George H.W. Bush negotiated it and when William J. Clinton signed it.) Public frustration and outrage have shaken politicians’ commitment to neoliberalism (rhetorically, at least), but will it be replaced by a program that advances the real interests of the people who rely on their own labor to make ends meet?
Now that he is back in office, Trump has abandoned any pretense of being pro-worker. He has stripped a million federal employees of the right to bargain collectively, gutted overtime rules and other workplace protections, crippled the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), and deprived millions of working people of health and food benefits. He is proud and loud about protecting artificial intelligence from effective regulation just as employers start using it to mow down thousands—and ultimately millions—of jobs. Will the Democrats offer a real alternative for working people?
Some Democrats seem to be focused on the performative—searching for candidates who project non-elite “authenticity.” You know, candidates who know how to operate power tools and who drink beer from plastic cups. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great to run candidates who actually work for a living, but that’s not a comprehensive strategy. Working people want—and demand—actual change in how our leaders govern, not just how they look on TV (or TikTok). If the Democrats fail to articulate and deliver a legitimately pro-worker agenda, working people will continue to look elsewhere—perhaps voting for “none of the above.” (Note that, although the 2024 presidential election was proclaimed to be about the survival of our nation and its sacred values, more eligible voters stayed home than voted for either Trump or former Vice President Kamala Harris.)
Congress has failed to adopt legislation to enable workers to build their own power because workers do not have enough power to force Congress to do so.
Just as slick candidate packaging is not enough, the same is true of hollow “messaging.” Working people—like most voters—are tired of promises that bloom just before Election Day and wither right after. To represent workers effectively, elected officials will have to take political risks and challenge the power of the corporate elite, fighting for measures that tackle unaffordable healthcare, the housing crisis, and the vast (and growing) inequalities of wealth and income.
This seems so obvious it raises the question of why elected officials have ignored working voters’ real interests for so long. Here’s the key: Politicians will only stand up to corporate interests and press for meaningful pro-worker change if working people have enough leverage to force them to do so. For the past several decades our elected leaders chose a neoliberal path because the giant multinational companies and the ultra wealthy had the power to demand it—and working people did not have the countervailing power to resist it and to advance their own interests. It is no coincidence that the pro-corporate political consensus arose at precisely the same time that union membership plummeted in the United States. Although public approval of unions is as high as it has been in decades, the percentage of working people who are actually represented by unions is near an all-time low: about 10% of all workers and less than 6% in the private sector.
As the great United Auto Workers union leader Walter Reuther said, no one gives you anything you’re not strong enough to take for yourself. Working people need to build, or rebuild, the power to insist that politicians act in their interests, not just those of the corporate elite. Here’s a concrete example at the heart of building worker power: One of the reasons unions are so small now is that federal labor law has failed to protect workers’ right to organize and to engage in collective bargaining. There are plenty of great ideas for reforming US labor law. The Employee Free Choice Act, first introduced in 2006, would have streamlined the way the NLRB governs union organizing efforts. Opposition from pro-business senators (including some Democrats), together with the threat of a GOP filibuster, doomed it—even when Barack Obama was in the White House and the Democrats controlled both chambers. The Protect the Right to Organize Act, or “PRO Act,” would have addressed a whole range of structural and substantive problems with US labor law. It did not make it to full floor votes even when the Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate in 2021.
Why did Congress fail to adopt either of these essential bills, even when Democrats were in power? Because elected leaders—including Democrats—did not feel political pressure or fear political fallout. It’s like a Zen koan: Congress has failed to adopt legislation to enable workers to build their own power because workers do not have enough power to force Congress to do so.
Bottom line: If we want the Democrats, or the Republicans, or any political party to enact a political agenda that effectively addresses the real concerns of working Americans, we must build a movement that enhances and applies the power of working Americans. Unless and until we create a larger, stronger labor movement, politicians will not feel enough pressure to do the right thing for working people. Leverage is how politics work, and we should act accordingly. We should roll up our sleeves and get busy organizing in the workplace so we can assert real influence in the halls of government.
Keep ReadingShow Less
California’s Choice: The Progressive Path or Centrist Stagnation
Today June 2, 2026, in California, voters have an opportunity to alter American history by electing progressives up and down the ballot.
Jun 02, 2026
Within national mythology, California is understood to be a progressive haven—with a ruling Democratic Party passing strong regulations, ever-higher taxes on the wealthy, and supporting unions to its heart’s desire.
Unfortunately, this is far from accurate. The Democratic Party may dominate California politics, but the wealthiest state in the union no longer leads the way with innovative laws and regulations, let alone serving the interests of working people, the poor, and the middle class.
Yes, California still has a progressive income tax, the nation’s highest gas taxes, relatively strong environmental regulations, and the world’s greatest public university system—but these are legacies of bygone eras. The story of the last 20 years of single-party Democratic rule is far less inspiring (unless you’re a Silicon Valley oligarch).
Now, as progressives are making significant gains across the country, revitalizing the Democratic Party in the process, the California party remains dominated by a caste of perennial incumbents committed to neoliberal centrism that, at best, generates incremental change.
Rest assured that progressives on the ballot are part of a national movement that understands that the Democratic Party has bifurcated into a vibrant progressive wing and an increasingly sclerotic moderate establishment.
Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising. Once Democrats started winning supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature, corporations and big money interests stopped wasting their time courting Republicans. They focused their lobbying on Democrats, and to great effect. California’s Democratic Party, and its leading figures, are more beholden to big business and wealthy donors than almost any state Democratic Party. This, in turn, means Democratic incumbents accrue huge campaign war chests for their re-election.
The result is a more conservative party, one that is out of sync with the electorate. Want evidence? Ask yourself how many members of the Squad have come from California? The answer, of course, is zero. Yet all public opinion polling shows that the California electorate is decisively more progressive than the national average.
It’s true that Reps. Ro Khanna and Lateefah Simon are Squad adjacent, and a few others are solid progressives—but given that California represents about 20% of the Democratic Caucus in the US House, the state’s delegation is on balance middle-of-the-road.
This disconnect—between the political beliefs of Californians and the policies supported by their elected representatives at the national, state, and even local levels—is a major barrier to the necessary transformation of the Democratic Party into a force able to vanquish the fascist-authoritarian GOP before it consolidates power and brings down the curtain on American democracy.
Simply put, the American public increasingly understands that the status quo ante of neoliberal policy, which has organized the country’s economy since the 1980s, produces one result: ever-increasing wealth inequality. The Democratic Party must break from the economics of the Clinton and Obama administrations. The Democratic base and the general public want policies that boost the lives of working Americans, just as they want a sane foreign policy and an honest democracy. They want progressive policies.
Today June 2, 2026, in California, voters have an opportunity to alter American history by electing progressives up and down the ballot. This will transform the largest state Democratic Party, bringing it back in sync with the sentiment of the state’s population so that it can lead in the development of a new 21st century social justice compact.
There are many progressive champions with a real chance of victory today—and in the general election runoff on November 3. To start, there is a clear choice at the top of the ticket: Tom Steyer for governor.
Steyer is one of three viable candidates, two of which will make the runoff. In the best circumstance, the two democrats, Steyer and Xaiver Beccera, will take first and second—a result that will translate into more Democratic victories across the state in November. However, MAGA-supporting Republican Steve Hilton still looks likely to disrupt that result. So, it’s essential to vote, and get everyone you know to vote for Steyer by 8:00 pm PT today.
Admittedly, it sticks in the throat to be supporting a billionaire, but the simple truth is that Steyer will pursue a transformative progressive policy agenda. In contrast, Xavier Beccera, who 20 years ago seemed a sincere progressive, long ago redefined himself as an establishment Democrat. Becerra is committed to maintaining Gov. Gavin Newsom’s policies that have left California stranded with the nation’s co-equal highest poverty rate, an affordability crisis that makes New York City residents blush, and a pronounced failure to lead on environmental and social policies in the manner the world expects of California.
Tom Steyer, by contrast, supports a billionaire’s tax, meaningful living wage legislation, aggressive incentives to re-boost green energy production (and film production too), and, most tellingly, a single-payer universal healthcare system for everyone in the state. A top-two finish by Steyer will guarantee a powerful debate about the direction of the state over the next five months
Beyond the governor’s race, in nearly every US house district, state assembly, and senate race, and significant city and local elections, there are strong progressive candidates challenging the dominant California Democratic Party mainstream—many of whom are poised to advance to the November runoff. Still, it’s worth noting that this has been a very confusing election season due to redistricting (and the chaos of the governor’s race), such that down-ballot candidates have had a difficult time attracting adequate attention. But rest assured that progressives on the ballot are part of a national movement that understands that the Democratic Party has bifurcated into a vibrant progressive wing and an increasingly sclerotic moderate establishment. Please do the necessary research to learn who the progressives are in your district.
So far, it’s been a very good year for progressives—let’s continue the momentum tomorrow in New Jersey, Montana, Iowa, New Mexico, South Carolina, and the largest state and soon-to-be truest bastion of progressive public policy, California.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Electile Dysfunction—Why Can’t the Dems Get Their Polls Up?
The Democratic Party cannot afford to attend to the material needs of its traditional popular base because it is terrified of offending its donor class.
May 27, 2026
“The Republicans go for the jugular; the Democrats go for the capillaries,”—Kevin Phillips
With the recent release of the long-withheld, but little anticipated Democratic National Committee “autopsy” of the 2024 presidential electoral loss, we’re back to the perennial questions of which issues should receive priority; how should messaging and narrative around those issues be crafted; which wing(s) of the party should be amputated before their rot infects the entire organism, suburban soccer moms or inner city youth; and on and on. All good questions, but ultimately, in present circumstances, unanswerable except in the most platitudinous, hand-waving ways. The most fundamental dilemma resides in the Faustian bargain the party entered beginning in the 1970s, and the result of that bargain is neatly captured in Sheldon Wolin’s 2010 coinage “the inauthentic opposition”:
While the transformed Republican Party reveals what a “party of government” might look like under inverted totalitarianism, the Democrats reveal the fate of opposition politics under inverted totalitarianism. The Democrats’ politics might be described as inauthentic opposition in the era of Superpower [i.e., the US after the fall of the Soviet Union]. Having fended off its reformist elements and disclaimed the label of liberal, it is trapped by new rules of the game which dictate that a party exists to win elections rather than to promote a vision of the good society… Accordingly, the party competes for an apolitical segment of the electorate, “the undecided,” and puzzles how best to woo religious zealots. Should Democrats somehow be elected, corporate sponsors make it politically impossible for the new officeholders to alter significantly the direction of society. [This point is exquisitely exemplified by the first couple of years of the Obama administration, when they held the federal trifecta and still managed to privilege the kleptocratic banksters of the housing crisis and the war criminal gangsters of the W. Bush regime.] The timidity of a Democratic Party mesmerized by centrist precepts points to the crucial fact that, for the poor, minorities, the working class, anticorporatists, pro-environmentalists, and anti-imperialists, there is no opposition party working actively on their behalf.
The origins of this current malaise date back to the mid 1970s, and followed the actions taken by business class elites responding to the exhortations contained in the now-famous Powell Memorandum. This was a secret 1971 memo from then-corporate lawyer Lewis Powell to the Secretary of the US Chamber of Commerce. The memo wasn’t revealed to the public until well after Powell had been appointed to the Supreme Court, where he continued to wage his ideological battle in defense of capitalism and corporate power (including, of course, free speech rights articulated in cash). In the memo Powell argued that:
The US Chamber of Commerce should lead an assault upon the major institutions, universities, schools, the media, publishing, the courts, in order to change how individuals think about the corporation, the law, culture, and the individual.
US businesses, Powell suggested, did not lack the resources for such an effort, particularly if they were pooled. That is, if people started to think together as a class rather than as individual firms and corporations. The US Chamber of Commerce took up this challenge in a very dramatic way. It expanded its base from around 60,000 firms in 1972 to about a quarter of a million just a decade later. Other elite organizational forms also began to coalesce around this core following the advice of the memo. These included think tanks (e.g., the Heritage Foundation, established 1973 by Adolph Coors), as well as corporate money pumps to operationalize the memo’s chief objectives.
One of the most prominent of these organizations was the Business Roundtable, founded in 1972, and comprising CEOs whose corporations at the time accounted for about half of the US gross national product. During this period, through political action committees, the Roundtable was spending about $900 million annually on political matters, a very significant sum at the time. These newly emerging entities provided a mechanism for corporations to contribute substantial funds to political campaigns and candidates, authorized in large measure through a number of Supreme Court rulings, several written by Powell himself.
These PACs, which were just beginning to have a political presence (there were 89 PACs in 1974, and around 1,500 by 1982) gave to both parties largely in equal measure in the 70s, but began leaning heavily toward the Republicans, who had little difficulty aligning their platforms with capital corporate interests. This was also the moment that the traditional political base of the Republican Party began to merge with the Christian Right and with white working classes, who were persuaded that they had been left behind by affirmative action and other “illegitimate” policies (now, of course, cloaked as DEI and “wokeness”).
The problem for anyone struggling to get by, as this alliance portrayed it, was not capitalism and the neoliberalization of the society and economy. The real problem was liberals, who had used excessive state power to provide for special groups. The prevalent narrative, more pertinent now than ever, was the idea of unworthy “others” cutting in line ahead of worthy citizens: “You've worked hard. You've played by the rules. You're not getting ahead. Well, it's not that the system is stacked against you. It's that these people, who are undeserving, are getting more advantages than you get.” The Republican political base (and now most particularly MAGAnites) could be energized through positive mobilizations of things like religion and cultural nationalism, but it could also be turned out through very negative, though coded, though I would say increasingly less coded if not blatant, racism (e.g., President Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy”), xenophobia, homophobia, and anti-feminism.
Democrats, seemingly, were more conflicted, at least at that time, between support for their base and the need to pursue big money. That ambivalence, at least within the ranks of the Democratic Party establishment in its current manifestation, has now all but disappeared and constitutes the irreconcilable contradiction that plagues the party now. To return for a moment to Wolin:
By ignoring dissent and by assuming that the dissenters have no alternative, the party serves an important, if ironical, stabilizing function and in effect marginalizes any possible threat to the corporate allies of the Republicans.
According to critical geographer David Harvey, the structure that emerged out of this political realignment was as simple as it was predictable and durable. The Republican Party could, and still can, marshal massive financial resources and mobilize its popular base to vote against its own material interests on cultural or religious grounds, while simultaneously advancing the capital accumulation policies (ongoing war and arms sales, lowered taxation, massive deregulation, privatization of public goods and services) of their elite masters.
The Democratic Party, conversely, could not, and still cannot, afford to attend to the material needs (e.g., a national healthcare system, affordable housing, environmental and consumer protection, financial and anti-trust regulation, a peace dividend) of its traditional popular base because it was and is terrified of offending its donor class. Given the asymmetry, the political hegemony of the Republican Party became more sure over this period, and has relegated the Democrats, even when in power, to their current position of inauthenticity. If and until this most fundamental contradiction can be resolved, the policies and messaging will remain flaccid, impotent, and unsatisfying. Under these circumstances we can aptly paraphrase Phillips, to wit: So now the Democrats also go for the jugular. Unfortunately, it’s too often their own.
Keep ReadingShow Less
The Promise of Radical Municipalism in New York City
What kind of power and solidarity is built and transformed in New York City’s municipalist moment will depend on whether or not the remaking of public and civic infrastructures is guided by participatory democracy.
May 15, 2026
It is an inspiring time to be a New Yorker. Over the last year, thousands have been mobilized by a vision for a more just city, where the interests of the people, not the 1%, are at the center of social and economic policies. Driving this vision is a city that is affordable, one where public infrastructures are not indicative of neglect, exclusion or harm, but are life-affirming institutions grounded in principles of participatory democracy: where everyday residents have a direct say over the public policies that govern their lives.
It is a beautiful vision, especially in a city that has long been plagued by corporate and private interests, and one that draws from models of what is termed new or radical municipalism and experiments with mass and co-governance in cities including Barcelona, Jackson, and Porto Alegre, among others.
Distinguishing New York City’s municipalist moment is its political geography: It is a global city, a center of global finance; a metropole in the Global North, at the center of the imperialist core, and the home of Wall Street; and it is an urban center long defined by uneven development and inequity. The city with the highest concentration of wealth in the world runs on a workforce where only 33% of workers have “good jobs” (qualified by living wage pay, full-time, and year-round employment, employer sponsored health insurance, and safe working conditions). Over one-quarter of New Yorkers struggle with poverty, and nearly two-thirds are economically precarious. Adding to this context is intensified fascism, integral to which has been the bipartisan project of what Ruth Wilson Gilmore has termed the anti-state state: The structured expansion of corporate interests and privatization schemes coupled with the shrinkage of the public infrastructures, entitlements, and services alongside the increased entanglement of policing, surveillance, and punishment into nearly every vestige of the public that remains.
Transforming Public and Civic Infrastructures
On one hand, the renewed interest in public infrastructures grounding radical municipalism signals an important turn from neoliberal consumer citizenship, exemplified recently by former New York City Public Schools Chancellor Carmen Farina’s description of parents as the Department of Education’s “clients.” On the other hand, New York’s wealth, part and parcel of its long-standing and structured class- and race-based inequity, presents a real challenge to the reinvigoration of civic and public life, to what kind of power, what kind of public, will be built and transformed—and to what ends. How do we ensure that the promise of a more just city is truly and actively guided (not just informed) by New Yorkers whose experience of the public has long been shaped by histories of organized abandonment (or the intentional divestment of state and private capital that shape particular places), by the harm, exclusion, and violence of the anti-state state?
Often, what people are fighting for is not a “failing school” but rather, a place through which they have grown community and practiced care, where they have made meaning and collective life despite and within state divestment.
The promise of radical municipalism to enliven deliberative spaces that build capacity for protagonism and expand practices of citizenship needs to be guided by what Celina Su understands as epistemic justice, “actively questioning what bodies of knowledge are counted as expert, rational, and valuable.” More than an advisory role, epistemic justice must actively structure deliberative spaces. In its absence, Su notes, deliberative spaces run the risk of perpetuating already existing inequities. The urgency of this approach is captured by the now infamous New York City District 3 CEC (Community Education Council) meeting, when City University of New York Professor Allyson Friedman’s racist remarks, in response to an eighth grade student who was speaking out against their school being closed, were captured by an open mic. As many recognize, Friedman’s remarks are not a unique case, but emblematic of the changing same in the district.
The district, among the most segregated and unequal in the city, is where I have worked with others to build power, organizing, and leadership among low-income families of color for just and equitable public schools. There have been countless occasions in which “concerned parents” broadcast their racism sometimes in official testimony, sometimes in unofficial remarks. Most often, these remarks have not captured headlines. And in that mix (which included CEC, district, Community Board, and school-site meetings) poor and working class families of color were regularly told that they didn’t “understand” or might be “confused” by their own experiences—their own stories—and dismissed. Friedman’s comments implied the same: that the student speaking out against their school being closed simply did not understand (and, according to Friedman’s racist analysis, could not understand) their own circumstances or the value of their school community. Yet students, teachers, parents, and school workers have long recognized and resisted school closures as a mechanism of dispossession, racist violence, encroachment, and displacement. Often, what people are fighting for is not a “failing school” but rather, a place through which they have grown community and practiced care, where they have made meaning and collective life despite and within state divestment.
In our municipalist moment, deliberative spaces need to be reinvigorated and also reassessed. Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Sumathy Kumar, and Celina Su write that New York City has an extensive infrastructure for civic participation (which includes CECs, community boards, the Civic Engagement Commission, and more). However, they assess, “much of it is shallow, uncoordinated, fragmented, and symbolic. New Yorkers are rightly skeptical of consultations that go nowhere.” They note the need for an audit of such structures with a goal of repurposing and revitalization, guided by the knowledge and experience of community organizers and organizations. As such, the question raised by the winter meeting that went viral is not only if such remarks should be tolerated, but rather, how to intentionally transform the CEC and other infrastructures that are supposed to enliven participatory democracy from places that too often confirm and perpetuate inequity into places where the long-standing violence enacted by austerity and mechanized through school closures is interrupted. To do so, the voices, experiences, and analyses of those who have experienced such violence need to be active, understood as credible, and prioritized.
Epistemic Justice, The Presence of Abolition, and the Remaking of Social Relations
The transformation of our public and civic infrastructures requires both deep local knowledge and an understanding that such spaces are not static. Bonnie Honig reminds us that public things—libraries, schools, healthcare, and housing—as well as civic infrastructures through which they are governed, are “holding environments.” That is, they are simultaneously containers through which life is reproduced in the everyday (including making sure that all students have warm winter coats, that access to ultrasound mammograms is universal, and that lighting and heat work in public and subsidized housing) and spaces of contestation over what democracy, citizenship, and our social relations—not yet determined—might be.
These holding environments have been contradictory at best. More often, they have been vehicles through which the silencing, exclusion, and disenfranchisement that liberalism relies upon are administered, and where scarcity engenders social relations of competition and individuation, where it is assumed that one’s needs are only confirmed in opposition to the security of others.
Radical municipalism offers the promise to shift that configuration, and actualize Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s insight that “abolition is not absence, it is presence.” This insight directs us to the need not just to dismantle, but to build practices, structures, institutions, and experiments that affirm life. The perspectives of structurally marginalized communities are essential to determining what kind of presence is necessary: to mapping not only how harm works, but also to what kinds of alternatives are needed and might be capable of transforming our social relations.
A good example of why this is true comes from Communities United for Police Reform (CPR) and the Public Science Project’s (CUNY) report, We Deserve to Be Safe. Rooted in Participatory Action-Research (PAR), the project’s leadership team included CPR member-led organizations in over-policed communities, was grounded in long-standing relationships and an understanding of the multi-layered harms of policing, and anchored by the shared principle that highly policed communities need to be at the center of how safety and harm are understood and re-imagined. As they note:
Our findings illuminate that people in highly policed New York neighborhoods often hold deeply complex beliefs, attitudes and proposals for community safety, supporting this report’s approach of presenting data about the multiple truths that communities hold. Notably, our findings suggest that while police officers have provided moments of successful intervention and important services for New Yorkers, for many respondents the police are also a constant threat to safety.
The perspectives and findings outlined by the report provide insight that, as the authors note, reach beyond an “overly simplistic duality of either decreased policing and lawlessness or increased policing and safety.” The stories and experiences outlined make painfully clear the violence of policing while also centering participants' complex personhood not simply as anecdote, but as analysis and insight to understanding what kinds of alternatives to policing—informed by place-based histories and realities—might actually be transformative. Bound up in the stories that the report documents is the sobering reality that understanding what “successful interventions and important services” have actually meant is integral to disentangling policing with the provision of social services.
Examples of radical municipalism in other cities show the meeting of our material and everyday needs is deeply connected to the transformation of our social relations, rooted in structures and practices that expand (rather than shrink) how we understand ourselves in relationship to one another, and how we value life, its reproduction, and sustainability. Drawing on her work with the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra or Landless Workers' Movement (MST), Rebecca Tarlau terms this process contentious co-governance which “is not simply [about] more resources or policy changes but, rather, the prefiguration of alternative social and economic relations within… public institutions.” Importantly, in the case of the MST, Tarlau finds that prefiguration need not be outside of the state and that participation is not simply a means to an end, but rather invokes practices that expand and transform social relations through and within public and civic infrastructures, while also strengthening social movements.
New York City’s political geography—as a global city, as a metropole in the Global North and center of the imperialist core, and as an urban center long defined by uneven development and inequity—matters to how we navigate our current conjuncture. Chaumtoli Haq reminds us that in the context of the global city, radical municipalism presents a “powerful strategy for change… [that] enables communities, given their proximity to local governance, to mobilize for changes in law and policy.”
The strength of this strategy has already been demonstrated by the historic campaign to elect Zohran Mamdani as mayor. Rooted in strong partnerships with grassroots organizations including CAAAV Voice, DRUM Beats, and New York City Communities for Change, the material conditions of these organizations’ members shaped the policy platforms of the campaign. What kind of power and solidarity is built and transformed in New York City’s municipalist moment will depend on whether or not the remaking of public and civic infrastructures is guided by participatory democracy and deliberative spaces that are grounded in epistemic justice and contentious cogovernance: whose knowledge, experience, and know-how actively shapes those processes; what kind of protagonism and popular shared analysis propels momentum and movement; and what kinds of social relations are enlivened to expand political horizons and protracted struggle.
Keep ReadingShow Less
It Falls Upon the Left to Defeat Fascism Once Again
Neofascism is on the rise and the neoliberal establishment is a big part of the problem and very much the opposite of the solution.
May 11, 2026
The world is at a precipice, facing existential threats while fascism is on the rise. Yet we lack the proper governance structures to address global challenges, and it also seems that it falls upon the left to defeat fascism once again. So argues political scientist/political economist, author and journalist C. J. Polychroniou in the interview that follows with the French-Greek journalist Alexandra Boutri.
Alexandra Boutri: We live in a time of great uncertainty and profound disillusionment. We see a global escalation of violence and a lack of accountability. Even Israel’s genocide goes unpunished, which speaks volumes of the hypocrisy of western governments with regard to human rights and international law. There is a global wave of democratic backsliding, massive amounts of inequality by design, and extreme power concentration. Am I painting too bleak of a picture for the current state of the world?
C. J. Polychroniou: No, you are not exaggerating the current state of the world. The truth is that it is far worse than that. We are witnessing the resurgence of naked imperialism and the emergence of a new world of spheres of influence and, concomitantly, the death of international peacemaking institutions. The continued existence of nuclear weapons, which today are far more powerful than ever before, poses an existential threat to humanity while at the same time human beings are on a collision course with the natural world. To be sure, not only do we live in an era of polycrisis but in one in which developments are occurring at an increasingly rapid pace. We need polysolutions, yet neither the mechanisms are in place nor is there any detectable willingness on the part of current world leaders to pull humanity back from the precipice.
Political hypocrisy per se is not the major issue here. Pathological hypocrisy is a constant in the behavior of western governments. What I find most disconcerting is the sharp decline of rational thinking in contemporary society. Misinformation is spreading faster than facts and trust in science has virtually collapsed, especially in the United States. For example, scientific studies have concluded that climate change is mainly caused by human activity and scientists have documented the dangerous disruptions in nature. Yet you have the president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, calling climate change “con job” and “scam.” Trust in healthcare and public institutions has also declined in recent years, and it is not a coincidence that these trends occur with the political ascendancy of right-wing extremism. Fascism is organized mass irrationality and leaders like Trump have been doing their best to design a society sustained by ignorance while at the same time normalizing cruelty and destruction. So, yes, we live in a world of increasing uncertainty, profound confusion, and maybe even civilizational decline. We are in the midst of a whirlpool of events and developments that are eroding our ability to manage human affairs in a way that is conducive to the attainment of a good and just world order. That being said, the world is not coming to an end any time soon, and we actually know that there are solutions for the world’s biggest problems. But paradigm shifts in political, social, and moral thinking are urgently needed for a sustainable future.
Alexandra Boutri: Is the nation-state at the present historical juncture a hindrance to the realization of a sustainable future for humanity?
C. J. Polychroniou: The general consensus among scholars about the nation-state is that it was a consequence of modernity and that it represents a progressive development in the course of human political history. It was an invention designed to unify people, the state, and the country. The Peace of Westphalia (1648), which marked the end of the Thirty Years’ War in Europe, established a new system of political order based upon the idea of co-existing sovereign states. Subsequently, the norm of Westphalian sovereignty became central to international law and world order. It shifted the balance of power, but it did not end conflicts. The nation-state sparked nationalism across Europe, and war over resources, driven by capitalist modes of production, remained predominant in the modern world. In fact, nationalism and capitalism have worked in tandem to make war a permanent feature of the modern world system. In any case, whatever benefits have accrued over the centuries because of the emergence of the nation-state (social solidarity, human rights, and democracy), it has become increasingly clear that the nation-state is not capable of managing, on its own, the globalized forces. And collective institutions in general have suffered a severe blow from the wrecking ball of neoliberalism. The climate crisis is a case in point.
Actions taken so far to combat climate change are insufficient. Moreover, while local and national climate policy efforts are important, the new energy infrastructure needed for establishing a zero emissions global economy must be global in scope. Economist Robert Pollin, who has done extensive work on building a green economy, has made a compelling case for the necessity of implementing a Global Green New Deal (GGND). Pollin has described in fine detail the impact of a GGND on economic growth and how it can be financed. But we are nowhere near to achieving such a goal. The problem is political in nature, not economic. Are nation-states capable of the type of international collaboration needed to secure a global green transition in order to save the planet? Are capitalist nation-states even able to sacrifice short-term interests for long-term benefits?
My own view is that the nation-state is indeed a hindrance to a sustainable future for humanity, but that doesn’t mean that the global governance structures needed to ensure that human civilization will endure despite the many existential threats it faces will inevitably happen. Such an outcome requires imagination, courage, and bold action. But it is not inconceivable that an alternative world order may emerge at some point in the future. After all, as sociologist Andreas Wimmer has convincingly shown, the creation of nation-states was mainly the result of external circumstances (geopolitical factors) rather than internal processes (ethnic homogeneity or nationalism). The climate crisis might very well become at a certain juncture a turning point for the emergence of new global governance structures. Hopefully, it won't be too late by then.
Alexandra Boutri: Where does the Left stand on the question of universalism and the nation-state?
C. J. Polychroniou: This is a very complicated issue, especially since the Left is not monolithic. Generally speaking, however, the traditional Left has always held internationalist principles and viewed the nation-state as a modern phenomenon tied to the emergence of the capitalist mode of production. That was pretty much Marx’s own view on the subject. Lenin also argued that Marxism cannot be reconciled with nationalism. Communists and revolutionary socialists opposed World War I as an imperialist war. But most socialist parties and trade unions abandoned the internationalist vision and backed their respective governments. On the other hand, communists defended their own countries during World War II. This is because they came to view World War II as a “people’s war” against fascism. Communists fought heroically in World War II but also against fascism everywhere. The International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War represented a remarkable expression of international solidarity, a response of anti-fascists to the emergence of a new tyranny.
In the contemporary period, a significant segment of the Left has been critical, even dismissal, of the nation-state but has also championed self-determination. Yet the question of how to circumvent the nation-state remains. The neoliberal hyper-globalization wave of the 1990s that envisioned the world becoming a global village transcended the boundaries of nation-states, but the new rules were made possible only through enforcement from the capitalist state itself. In fact, there was/is a symbiotic relationship between capitalist states and neoliberal globalization.
The Left is obligated to advance an alternative vision of a world order beyond capitalism and the nation-state. It must envision and fight for a world where the rights of labor reign supreme and the means of production are collectively owned by workers. There can be no socialism without collective ownership and democratic management of the means of production. The former USSR took a major step in the direction of collective ownership but a bureaucratic elite controlled the state and drained life out of society. Socialism in the twentieth-first century must be democratic, put average people at the center of society, and give priority to sustainability. And the rise of the socialist state must be of such socio-cultural nature that it inaugurates an authentic cosmopolitan horizon.
Alexandra Boutri: Today, the Left is in disarray while the far right is surging all over the world. Hard-right parties are most popular in many parts of Europe, although there is a ray of hope for reversing the trend on account of Viktor Orbán’s crushing defeat in last month’s Hungarian election. Why is the western left weak and disoriented when the problems caused to society by the policies of neoliberal capitalism are so destructive?
C. J. Polychroniou: There are no definite answers to that question. Moreover, the problematic of the political condition of the left in western societies is not new. The weakening of the western left has been long in the making. The traditional left undergoes a major ideological and political crisis with the collapse of communism in eastern Europe. Yet its decline had started as early as the mid-1970s and the 1980s. Take for instance the case of the Italian Communist Party (PCI). From the beginning of the 1960s to the end of the 1970s, the PCI was the largest communist party in western Europe, gaining a historic 34.4% of the vote in the 1976 parliamentary elections. Under the leadership of Enrico Berlinguer, the PCI had distanced itself from the Soviet Union and promoted “Eurocommunism,” an attempt on the part of certain western communist party leaders to reconcile parliamentary democracy with the transition to socialism and overcome the constrains of the Cold War. To further enhance the image of the PCI as a non-revolutionary party, Berlinguer also introduced the compromesso storico (the historic compromise), a proposal of an agreement between the Communist and Christian Democratic parties, for reforming the economy along capitalist lines and proclaimed his support for NATO.
Obviously, the leadership of the PCI felt that breaking away from the tradition of revolutionary socialism was the surest and safest path to power. But the experiment failed miserably. By the time of Berlinguer’s death, in 1984, the PCI was already losing support among the industrial working class and was officially dissolved in 1991 and then transformed into the Democratic Party of the Left. From the 1990s onward, left parties and conservative parties in western Europe became virtually indistinguishable. This is a key factor in explaining the decline of the western left. But this doesn’t mean that if the left had not become reformist and still clung to forms of socialism associated with the Soviet experience or with revolutionary Marxism that it would have become a hegemonic political power in advanced capitalist societies. Clearly, the western left needs to challenge capitalist social relations and hegemony but must also offer to the masses a convincing vision for an alternative socioeconomic order. It has yet to do so.
We must also recognize the fact that advanced capitalist societies are complex, multilayered systems, divided into several different classes. Class matters as much as ever, even if neoliberalism has reshaped the working class internationally. Moreover, while there is a widening social class divide, the class of the exploited remains fragmented. There is indeed a difference between a class “in itself” and a class “for itself.” In that regard, there can be no denying that the left has changed the way people think about exploitation, human rights, freedom, and personal identity, and has indeed “a great story to share about alternatives to capitalism.” But for various reasons, which include major structural factors, the ideological battle over capitalism and alternative worldviews has yet to be won. As Frederick Jameson once remarked, it appears that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”
Alexandra Boutri: What does the end of Viktor Orbán’s reign in Hungary mean for Trump and the far right in the US and globally?
C. J. Polychroniou: I do not wish to downplay the significance of this development but, at the same time, it is politically naive to think that it will have an impact on the way the Trump administration behaves. It is true of course that Hungary under Orbán provided inspiration for the MAGA movement and the far right across Europe. In fact, Orbán’s anti-immigrant ideology and immigration policy became the norms across Europe. But I would argue that Trump is far more dangerous than Orbán ever was. Orbán never denied election results, nor did he engage in acts of state-led violence. Orbán eroded the rule of law in Hungary and, for that, Trump thought he was a “fantastic man” and once even praised him as the “great leader” of Turkey. But Trump has already caused far more damage to US society than Orban caused to Hungary with his political shenanigans, and Hungary’s new prime minister is not a liberal. Nor do I think that Orbán’s defeat will have any impact on the political fortunes of the far right elsewhere. In Germany, the far right AfD has become the country’s strongest party. In France, Marine Le Pen’s far-right The National Rally (RN) is “already the biggest single opposition party in parliament” and its rise to power seems unstoppable.
Neofascism is on the rise, and the conservative/liberal/neoliberal establishment does not know what it will take to defeat it. It won't even address the very structural factors that gave rise to the far right. So far, the establishment in both France and Germany has confined itself to labeling RN and AfD respectively as “extremist” entities as if that will deter voters from casting a ballot for those parties. As far as I can see, it falls upon the left to defeat the rising tide of fascism once again.
Keep ReadingShow Less
If We Want a Different Future, We Have to (Literally) Build It
We have a power imbalance in this country and a big part of that is that we no longer believe that we can demand a better life and it's a serious problem that we have too little skill in organizing ourselves and constructing the future we deserve.
May 02, 2026
When you grow up in this country one thing that’s wired into you early is that the government can’t do anything right. The free market is the only way things get done. Public is a dirty word. By the time you’re an adult, it sits in your head like it’s always been there. You don’t question it any more than you question gravity.
The problem is that it puts so many solutions out of reach and out of our imagination.
If we look around at the things that make our society work and our lives better, we can see we’ve been duped from the start. This didn’t all come from some pure, untouched version of the free market. Our roads, our bridges, libraries, fire departments, the internet, Social Security. All of these things happened because we came together as people and decided we wanted them.
These weren’t accidents. They weren’t side effects of private competition. They came out of a period when ordinary people had power. Real power. Power to demand that the systems they paid for actually delivered. The government was the instrument of that power. Not a side player. Not a check writer. Not a referee. A doer. A builder of things, on behalf of the people who built it.
In 1981, more than 40% of the hospitals in this country were owned by federal, state, or local government. Cities and counties ran their own hospitals.
That’s the idea we don’t name anymore. The idea that the public has the right to organize, to own, and to demand. That’s the competing idea. And without it, the system has no counterweight.
That tension mattered. It forced decisions. It forced investment. It forced the country to build.
Now that pressure is gone. Not completely, but enough that it doesn’t function anymore. There’s no real counterweight shaping outcomes. And what you’re left with is a system that just expands in the direction of profit. Profit over efficiency. Profit over outcomes. Profit over people.
You can see it most clearly in healthcare. We spend nearly six trillion dollars a year on it. Six trillion. And we are not the healthiest country on earth. We are not even close. We are paying the most and getting the least. That’s not an efficiency problem. That’s a power problem.
We’ve run this experiment for decades now. Consolidation, extraction, pricing that has no relationship to reality. It’s not competitive in any meaningful sense. It’s a closed loop. The product isn’t working. People feel it every day. They don’t need a study to tell them.
And here’s the thing nobody remembers. We used to own a lot of this. In 1981, more than 40% of the hospitals in this country were owned by federal, state, or local government. Cities and counties ran their own hospitals. States ran academic medical centers. The federal government ran the VA, military hospitals, the Indian Health Service. We the people owned the means of caring for ourselves.
That’s what made the whole system function. Not the charity of it. The leverage of it. We knew what it cost to set a bone. We knew what it cost to do a bypass. We knew what it cost to deliver a baby. Because we ran the hospitals where it happened. We paid the salaries. We bought the supplies. The numbers were public and the numbers were real.
You can’t lie to someone about the price of something they already produce. Public ownership wasn’t an alternative to the market. It was the thing that kept the market honest. It was the public’s seat at the table. It was the public’s power over the price. Strip it out and the private side stops competing and starts extracting. That’s not a hypothetical. That’s what happened. We sold the seat. We lost the power. The bills came due.
There was a time when we knew certain things were too important to leave entirely to the market. We didn’t let private companies own nuclear weapons.
Today that public share is closer to 15%. Most of the rest has been sold off, shut down, or absorbed into chains. What’s left is doing the hardest work the private system refuses to do. Public hospitals still handle most of the trauma care and most of the burn care in this country’s cities. They are the safety net. They are also the proof that we know how to do this. We just decided to stop.
Same thing starting to happen with AI. Something as transformative as the Industrial Revolution, arguably bigger, is being built and controlled by a handful of private actors. Massive margins. Massive control. No real public stake. No real competition in the way we used to understand it. No seat at the table for the rest of us.
There was a time when we knew certain things were too important to leave entirely to the market. We didn’t let private companies own nuclear weapons. We didn’t let them build private armies with that kind of power. We understood the scale of the risk. The consequence of getting it wrong.
AI sits in that category. Healthcare sits in that category. These are not normal sectors. They shape everything else. And the question of who owns them is the question of who has power in the country that comes next.
It’s not about fairness. Fuck fairness. This is about power. About whether ordinary people have any leverage left in a system that has spent forty years stripping it from them. About whether the country we live in is something we shape or something that happens to us.
Here are the numbers. The top 20% of earners in this country now account for nearly 60% of all consumer spending. Consumer spending is about two-thirds of GDP. So a small slice of households is propping up the entire economy. And the jobs most exposed to AI displacement, finance, law, software, analysis, corporate work, are concentrated in exactly that slice.
The same people whose spending holds the economy up are the ones whose work is about to be automated.
That’s not a labor problem. That’s a structural problem. You can’t retrain your way out of it. You can’t UBI your way out of it at the scale required. The CEOs warning you about 20-30% unemployment are running companies with 40% margins. They’re not wrong about the disruption. They’re wrong about it being something the private sector can absorb.
The market is facing a situation it cannot handle.
The market is the thing that brought us here.
Here’s the part people don’t say out loud. A future of plenty is possible. Not in some abstract, theoretical way. In a very real, material sense.
Health. Wellness. Safety. Time. Travel. Freedom. Education. Meaning. Food. Clothing. Shelter. All high quality and abundant. Enough for everyone.
Most people want that. You can feel it when you talk to them. But they don’t say it plainly because it sounds naive. It sounds like something you’re supposed to grow out of. Like if you take it seriously, you won’t be taken seriously.
Here’s the part people don’t say out loud. A future of plenty is possible. Not in some abstract, theoretical way. In a very real, material sense.
It reminds me a little of The Matrix. The idea that a version of the world that actually worked for people would be rejected because it didn’t match what they believed was real or possible. So instead, we settle into something worse and call it reality.
I grew up in East Tennessee, in the Bible Belt. And one of the things that always stuck with me was how religion was used. Not as a mission to improve people’s lives through effort and sacrifice, but as a way to sort people. To rank them. To separate. To justify who had what and why.
That same instinct shows up here. The idea that wanting a system that delivers for everyone is childish. That building something better is unrealistic. That you’re supposed to accept what exists and work within it, even if it’s clearly failing.
Here’s what gets forgotten. This country has done it before. Not once. Many times.
The New York City subway was built and is owned by the public. The interstate highway system is public. The Hoover Dam, the TVA, every river dam that powers the South and the West, public. The arsenal that won the Second World War was organized and largely paid for by the federal government. Rural electrification was a public project because no private company would run wire to a farmhouse for a price the farmer could pay. The internet started as a public research program. Public universities trained the engineers and doctors and scientists who built the modern American economy. Medicare is a public health insurance program that works better and costs less than what the private market offers people under 65.
Every one of those is a story about power. The public looked at a sector that mattered too much to leave to private capital, and the public took it. Owned it. Ran it. Set the terms. Made it deliver.
This is not foreign. This is not theoretical. This is the history of our country.
What comes next has to be built in public, owned in public, and run in public. The market had its turn at healthcare. The market is having its turn at AI. We’ve seen how this ends.
If we want a different future, we have to build it.
That’s not a metaphor.
We need hospitals, clinics, wellness centers. That means training tens of thousands of doctors, nurses, mental health professionals, dentists, physical trainers. Not hoping the market decides to produce them. Deciding to produce them. Owning them. Running them. Setting the price by knowing the cost.
What comes next has to be built in public, owned in public, and run in public. The market had its turn at healthcare. The market is having its turn at AI. We’ve seen how this ends.
We need millions of homes. New cities. New towns. That means builders, electricians, plumbers, framers, engineers. It means supply chains based in America that can deliver materials at scale. It means breaking the leverage that landlords and developers have spent decades accumulating.
We need to transition energy. Renewable generation. Storage. Transmission. A modern grid that can handle it. High-speed rail. A competitive EV industry that isn’t just a handful of companies protected by scale and capital. Independence from utilities that have spent a century turning a public good into a private toll booth.
Every one of these is a sector where the public used to have power and gave it up. Every one is a sector where the public can take that power back, if it decides to.
There is more to build in this country than we currently have people trained to build it. The bottleneck is not technology. It is not money. It is the decision to organize the effort. Those decisions will never be made by the market.
Solutions are going to take public action and competition. A new way of thinking.
Real work. Coordination. Training. Time. Effort. Change.
It’s a shame but nobody is coming to do this for us.
Keep ReadingShow Less
See More
Most Popular
To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good.
News & Opinion
Trending
Common Dreams, Inc. Founded 1997. Registered 501(c3) Non-Profit
Privacy Policy