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The Right’s New Inflation Message: Let Them Eat Ramen>

Jeet Heer — Fri, 22 May 2020 05:47:57 EDT

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Militarists push for austerity to keep a disastrous war going.

Jeet Heer

Representative Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) leaves the US Capitol on Thursday, July 16, 2026.

(Tom Williams / CQ Roll Call via AP Images)

If the GOP gets wiped out in the midterms this fall, the biggest cause will likely be war-induced inflation, a double betrayal of the campaign promises that brought many new voters into the Republican fold in 2024.

After all, two of Donald Trump’s chief attack lines against Kamala Harris and Joe Biden were that they had let inflation run rampant and that they had plunged the United States into endless conflict in the Middle East and Europe. But with his bungled, inflation-spiking war against Iran, Trump has done exactly what he warned voters his opponents would do—and turned a wide swath of the public against him. According to a late-July poll by Marquette University Law School, 76 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of inflation, and 69 percent disapprove of his handling of the Iran War.

Writing in UnHerd last week, Sohrab Ahmari, a heterodox conservative, noted that the Iran War and the rise in inflation are deeply intertwined:

In June, inflation rose to 4.2%, nearly double where it stood just before Operation Epic Fury. Gas is a fungible global commodity. Thus, even though the United States is the world’s chief net energy exporter, the supply squeeze in the Strait of Hormuz puts inflationary pressure on gas prices in America. And it’s not just gas prices which are affected, but those in many other sectors, too—from transportation to agriculture to restaurants and hospitality.

It’s hardly surprising that affordability is becoming a proxy front in the larger conflict between hawks and military restrainers on the right. Revealingly, the battle lines in this conflict revolve around whether concerns about war-induced inflation are even legitimate. The most militarist wing of the right is taking the position that inflation either isn’t real or is something the public will just have to live with in order to pay for a necessary war.

On August 3, far-right pundit Matt Walsh (best known for his rabid anti-trans rants) tweeted,

Grocery prices are insane. They’re still rising. Addressing this problem should be the number one priority of every elected leader. End the stupid foreign wars and focus on this issue. It’s one of the main reasons socialists are gaining power.

Andrew Kolvet of Talking Points USA responded with an anecdote indicating that Walsh’s concerns were shared by some young right-wingers:

One of our TPUSA college students gave me his take on affordability: “A burrito shouldn’t cost $20.” Yeah, a lot of this is a hangover from Covid and Biden-era inflation, but the lived experience is the same: It just feels like basic things cost too much.

Kolvet’s story about a costly burrito might seem innocuous enough, but it provoked a major backlash on the right, with many leading figures adopting the tone of angry old men scolding the young for being soft. Texas Republican Representative Dan Crenshaw, a loud advocate for belligerent imperialism, responded with a snide and supercilious post that called to mind the apocryphal story of Marie Antoinette advising starving peasants to eat cake:

Just hearing about this dumb $20 burrito debate so just thought I’d make the losers on social media angry before going to bed. Stop whining, get a job, eat Ramen like the rest of us did in college, on a budget with 4 roommates. The market doesn’t care what you think something “should” cost. Only communists care (they set prices remember? Then everyone starves, remember?) Are you a communist? Or are you an American adult male capable of handling his own shit?

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The message of “let them eat Ramen” is surely as toxic as “let them eat cake.” One reason Crenshaw can afford to make it is that he is leaving politics after being soundly defeated in a March primary by an even more far-right candidate. But Crenshaw’s basic dismissal of inflation as a nonproblem was echoed by other hawkish Republicans, including Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen, who wrote, “Cry me a river. The burritos in the college cafeteria are included in your meal plan.” Vice President JD Vance, who has been trying to shore up the anti-establishment and anti-interventionist supporters that Trump won in 2024, took a potshot at the columnist by writing, “I’m surprised to hear Mark say this. If you’ve ever met him in person, it’s quite obvious the man has never missed a burrito.” Vance’s cruel jibe was personal and also irrelevant, since it ignores the fact that the administration Vance serves under has been shaped by pro-war voices such as Thiessen.

Two other pro-war pundits, Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin, took the same dismissive attitude as Crenshaw and Thiessen. Adopting the tone of a snotty teacher, Shapiro wrote, “Okay, young people: a burrito does not cost $20. If you’re paying $20 for a burrito and you’re not independently wealthy, you’re doing life wrong.” On his radio program, Levin spoke at enormous grandfatherly length about the suffering of earlier generations of Americans during the Great Depression and World War II to underscore the point that, “young people today do not have it as hard as young people had it 50, 60, 78 years ago.”

Levin’s invocation of World War II underscores the weakness of his own position. In the past, Americans were willing to undergo austerity and suffering for causes they deemed just: the American Revolution, the Civil War, and World War II. These were periods of conscription and rationing, where individual happiness was sacrificed for a collective good. But the Iran War doesn’t have anywhere near the popular support—or the existential stakes—of those earlier conflicts. If people are complaining about the price of gas and of burritos, that is not due to superficiality or softness. Rather, inflation bites even harder if it’s being caused by a war that makes no sense. Lecturing people on the nobility of belt-tightening is obnoxious behavior at the best of times, but even more offensive when done for a bad cause. Trump and allies such as Thiessen and Levin haven’t convinced anyone outside the hardcore MAGA cult that these sacrifices are worth it—and there’s no sign that that’s likely to change.

Otto von Bismarck once offered an unheeded warning against German meddling in other regions by saying the Balkans were “not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier.” One can update the Iron Chancellor’s sage advice by saying the Iran War is not worth the price of one burrito.

David Ellison’s Delusional Stab at Self-Justification>

Ben Schwartz — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 08:44:39 EDT

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While the Skydance–Warner Bros. merger is in legal limbo, the CEO seeking to pull it off makes a disingenuous case for it in the court of public opinion.

Ben Schwartz

Skydance CEO David Ellison attends a UFC bout in Las Vegas in January.

(Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC)

Now that the looming Paramount–Warner Bros merger is on hold until a lawsuit from nearly a dozen states to stop it is resolved in in an Oakland, California, courtroom next June, backers of the deal have renewed their efforts to sell it as a journalistic-creative breakthrough as well as an entertainment miracle. Former Fox and CNN anchor Chris Wallace, now an adviser to Redbird Capital, which has a major stake in the deal, wrote an op-ed hymning its genius for The Hollywood Reporter. Ari Emmanuel, brother of Rahm and CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship league, which has a $1.1 billion deal with Paramount-Skydance, echoed the same basic case in The Wall Street Journal. But it was the New York Times salvo from Paramount-Skydance’s chief executive, David Ellison, that drew the most attention, as he defended his bid to absorb Warner-Discovery into the maw of Skydance, as well as his checkered first year in journalism at CBS.

First and foremost, Ellison hoped to use his platform at the paper of record to take back the narrative from the hundreds of petition signers, film-industry critics, journalists, and politicians who have decried the bid from Paramount-Skydance to buy out Warner Bros. Discovery for $111 billion as a move to drastically narrow the independence of both filmmaking and news-gathering in the MAGA age. “When California’s attorney general, 11 other state attorneys general and, a day later, the Writers Guild of America sued to stop the deal, I stayed quiet,” Ellison wrote in a disingenuous show of humility. “I quickly learned such restraint has costs. While I was silent, others were happy to write my story for me. No more.”

The ensuing testimony was something well shy of the inspiring story of a scrappy young producer who arrived in Hollywood with nothing but a dream and his father’s Oracle fortune in his pocket. It was a list of talking points that relied more on familiar right-wing claims about the media industry than on a case to deliver even more corporate control and news-making influence into the hands of the Skydance conglomerate. Since a Warner Bros takeover would leave David Ellison, and more alarmingly, his MAGA-devoted father, tech billionaire Larry Ellison, exercising near-unprecedented control over the production of theatrical films, multiple cable networks, and both CBS and CNN, Ellison’s broadside offered little substantive response to the deal’s detractors in multiple industries, unions, and the sprawling global audience their platforms will reach.

Ellison pointedly disregarded such concerns, opting instead to defend his proposed stewardship of CNN in the wake of Bari Weiss’s controversial ideological makeover of his CBS News. “The issue is whether I can be trusted as a steward of Warner’s CNN. There has been speculation about my politics, my loyalties, my intentions.”

And with good reason. During the period of this deal and his buyout of Paramount and its properties, David Ellison was spotted at June’s White House UFC bout sitting next to President Trump. Ellison also attended the State of the Union address as the guest of the now-deceased Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and convened a dinner in Trump’s honor during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner weekend in April.

Trump has been clear in spelling out what he wants. “It’s imperative that CNN be sold,” he said at a cabinet meeting last December. When he’s not deriding network anchor Jake Tapper as “Fake Tapper,” he calls CNN a “disgrace.” He clearly wants some guarantees that the Ellisons will steer CNN into MAGA-friendly territory, in much the same way that Weiss has made CBS News an obliging outlet for Trumpian agitprop. Trump’s cabinet officials have fallen into line; during a Pentagon briefing this spring, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth whined about CNN’s coverage of his debacle in Iran, saying, “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.” (Ellison’s PR flacks immediately shot back, “Editorial independence will absolutely be maintained. It is maintained at CBS; it will be maintained at CNN.”)

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At a Simon Wiesenthal Center gala last December, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav accepted an award and recounted an earlier episode of government censorship—unrelated to CBS—in his acceptance speech. He drew a moral from the episode that seemed squarely aimed at David Ellison, who was in the crowd: “When the government controls the news, that is the end of democracy.”

Ellison’s op-ed sought to deflect attention from the prospect of journalistic interference from Trump’s White House and invoke the declining public trust in the media—a trend vastly accelerated by the MAGA movement’s demonization of the “fake news” industry and journalists as “enemies of the people.” The remedy for the media industry’s crisis in public confidence, Ellison advises is to redouble its commitment to impartial news-gathering. “Great news organizations like CNN and CBS News are here to tell it straight down the middle,” he writes. “That requires newsrooms that reflect the whole world, not one side of it. And it requires independence. Our journalists will continue to answer to the facts and to all the people they serve—not to any party or cause.”

There’s just one problem with this line of thinking: There is no “middle” in journalism—particularly when it comes to covering politics. Political parties are not stationary objects that a “straight down the middle” journalist can mathematically triangulate and break down into an easily digestible equation for public consumption. The GOP moves constantly to the pseudo-populist right. Recent primary elections have shown that the base of the Democratic Party is moving to the left. How do you find the middle with two moving targets? Ellison invokes the exhausted ghost of Edward R. Murrow as his supposed avatar of the endangered straight-news sensibility—but Murrow is best known today for his takedown of red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy and his stooge, lawyer Roy Cohn. Now Trump, Cohn’s best-known protégé, is keen to exploit his transactional leverage with the Ellisons, who need his approval for the deal to go through, to remake Murrow’s former network in his own image.

As for the entertainment industry, Ellison seeks to disarm his detractors by announcing that the industry they want to preserve is already dead. In assessing the antitrust actions now putting the merger on hold, he says that “the states claim this deal will give one company too much influence over theatrical releases and cable operators…while [the Writers Guild of America] argues that our combined market power will hurt writers. Both suits imagine a Hollywood that no longer exists—an industry ruled by a handful of legacy studios.”

One hundred and 11 billion dollars is a lot of money to pay for something that no longer exists. Currently in theaters, Disney’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day has generated $655 million in 10 days at the summer box office and Universal’s The Odyssey has grossed $461 million in 24 days. Ellison has promised that his proposed merger will put out 30 feature films a year. Like his promise of an unbiased and confidence-building news industry, that claim has met with skepticism, because no studio has done that in 25 years. What’s more, the newly merged Paramount-WB would set out to turbocharge its production arm, as the company would be saddled with a massive debt load.

When Ellison talks about “a Hollywood that no longer exists,” he’s gesturing toward the real quarry of the Warners deal—streaming and Netflix. During a quarterly-report call in March, Ellison made this objective plain to his investors: “We will combine the streaming portfolios of the two companies into one stronger platform over the coming years.” The same analysis held for Skydance’s earlier absorption of Paramount+ and HBO; Ellison sold that deal by observing that “there are more than 200 million [direct-to-consumer] subscribers today, and more than 100 countries and territories worldwide, positioning us to compete effectively with the leading streaming services in today’s marketplace.”

Competing with Netflix was also the prime directive behind the Disney company’s $71 billion takeover of Fox—a stand-alone legacy studio owned by Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp. “The opportunity to buy Fox first came up later that year,” Disney CEO Robert Iger said at the time of the 2019 buyout. “In fact, just a few months after the board approved us buying the majority share of BAMTech—which was done for one reason, to go into the direct-to-consumer business—Rupert and I sat down and talked about a transaction…. We would not have done that transaction had we not decided to go in this direction, because—if we hadn’t, we would have been looking at that business and through a traditional lens.”

Competing with Netflix and expanding Disney’s market share in streaming proved to be an impossible mission for the recombined Disney-Fox company. Since the merger, Disney has lost billions in streaming and only this year generated a profit with advertising and by raising subscription fees. The merger cost some 7,000 jobs in post-Covid downsizing. Disney and Fox’s combined film and television output shrank. Consumers now pay more for far less. This year, Disney’s ABC network lost the Oscar broadcast to Google as it aggressively expands its own streaming business. In a Disney quarterly call, Wells Fargo analyst Stephen Cahill argued that the company should phase out its streaming platform and return to only making and licensing content.

Seven years later, Paramount-Skydance wants to make the same mistake. Acquiring Warner Bros. means that the parent company will take on billions in debt while it reorganizes (read downsizes) the two giant media companies at the center of the deal. To get the takeover financed, Skydance has recruited three Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds, while also making itself available to a Trump White House keen to prosecute the president’s many vendettas against CNN.

Studios like Sony have done just fine without entering the streaming business and just producing movies and shows. Despite everything, the unchallenged faith of Hollywood takeover kings like Iger and the Ellisons is to become a Netflix—which in practice means warping and disappearing huge swaths of their own legacy-media world in a business model that’s a proven dead end. Perhaps it’s time to ditch that unsustainable goal and break up Netflix instead.

Certainly, that was the thinking of Paramount-Skydance when it looked like Netflix had won the bidding earlier this year for Warner Bros. and the word “antitrust” entered the chat. Suddenly, the free-market billionaires at Oracle and the Trump administration felt capitalism had gone too far (i.e., they were about to lose). The same issue came up during the 2023 labor strike by the WGA and Screen Actors Guild. Miles Mogulescu, a former business affairs VP for MGM/US and current labor union documentarian, argued in the Los Angeles Times that for Hollywood unions to be able to negotiate with the streaming giants, companies like Netflix, which produce their own content for their platforms, must be forced to separate their production arms from their distribution operations. As a precedent, he cited the Supreme Court’s Paramount Decrees of 1948, which required the studios to spin off their theater chains in order to reduce vertical integration in the industry. It forced the Hollywood studios to finally relinquish the deep reach of their chains that strangled competition at local levels—a move that notably broadened the range of films audiences saw.

The Right’s New Inflation Message: Let Them Eat Ramen The Right’s New Inflation Message: Let Them Eat Ramen

Jeet Heer
The Explosive Failures Fueling the Cyclospora Outbreak The Explosive Failures Fueling the Cyclospora Outbreak

Gregg Gonsalves
What Happened to the American University? What Happened to the American University?

Books & the Arts / Daniel Bessner
David Ellison’s Delusional Stab at Self-Justification David Ellison’s Delusional Stab at Self-Justification

Ben Schwartz

In 2025, James Cameron waded into the long-simmering theaters debate between streamers and traditional studios over what metrics production companies should meet to have their films qualify for Oscar consideration. Cameron argued that the playing field should be leveled with a requirement that Netflix (and, one presumes, all streamers its size) release a film in at least 2,000 theaters for at least a month. Currently, the rule (meant for indie filmmakers) is to release a film seven consecutive days in brick-and-mortar theaters in designated cities for it to be eligible for nomination. That would secure the standing of independently produced films in Oscar competition, since those offerings can disappear quickly from movie screens but the Netflix movie sits on your Netflix home screen for months of in-house hype until Oscar night.

In all these areas—be it the specter of an omnivorous giant like Paramount-Skydance, threats to working conditions highlighted by Hollywood trade unions, or making the Oscars less skewed against independents—the same problem continually emerges as the central worry: Netflix is too big. At some point, we have to ask why we’re going to such enormous lengths to adapt an entire industry to one company’s model. If Netflix is too big to fail, that means it’s also too big for its competitors to have a fair shot at success.

There’s still ample time for the Warner merger to be stopped in court or simply collapse under its own rickety leviathan-scale debt load. When the Ellisons bought Paramount, the silver lining was that David Ellison is something the industry hasn’t seen in a half-century: a true producer-owner of a legacy studio. He came into the business as a filmmaker—that’s all he’s ever done, and that’s all he wants to do. It’s been 50 years since the last one, Jack Warner, retired to Palm Springs. Ellison still has the chance to be the owner of a great studio—but he shouldn’t be the CEO of two.

Reflecting on the Corruption of an Office>

Jeff Danziger — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 08:30:31 EDT

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

Centrist Democrats Are Rolling Up Their Sleeves and Punching Left>

Chris Lehmann — Fri, 22 May 2020 05:47:57 EDT

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The Third Way think tank is pouring millions of dollars into combatting not the GOP but the DSA.

Chris Lehmann

Matt Bennett, Jonathan Cowan, and Jim Kessler, three of the five cofounders of Third Way.

(Chris Maddaloni / Roll Call / Getty Images)

In the wake of Abdul El-Sayed’s insurgent victory in Michigan’s US Senate primary last week, the Democratic Party rallied to support its newly designated nominee in a striking show of unity, despite a singularly bitter and expensive establishment crusade to secure his defeat. El-Sayed’s chief rival for the nomination, Representative Haley Stevens, delivered a swift and gracious concession statement, and a clutch of big-name aspirants to the 2028 presidential descended on Detroit for an El-Sayed kickoff rally, further driving home the party’s determination to stand behind its nominee in the race to win a swing-state seat pivotal to its hopes for a Senate majority this November.

There was one countermovement seeking to squelch all this post-primary Kumbaya momentum, though: the centrist advocacy group Third Way, which seized on the victory of El-Sayed and two other left insurgent House candidates in the Michigan balloting to announce a new $15 million campaign to discredit democratic socialism in this midterm cycle and the 2028 national election. In touting this effort to New York Times political correspondent Shane Goldmacher, Third Way president Jonathan Cowan claimed that the group wouldn’t be targeting individual candidates but rather the Democratic Socialists of America, which he deemed “a mortal danger” to the Democratic Party, thanks to its hard-left positions on issues such as the Gaza war, crime and justice, and the top-heavy American political economy. Cowan also wasted little time in undermining his own above-the-fray messaging by citing the Michigan primary results as a call to centrist arms: “It is deeply troubling to see radical, far-left candidates winning in places that are potentially presidential swing states.” As Goldmacher writes, the new Third Way campaign will “include opposition research into D.S.A., polling, social media programs and educating Democratic activists and leaders. It would target both proud democratic socialists and those such as Dr. El-Sayed, whom he derided as performing the ‘D.S.A. dodge’—flirting with democratic socialists enough to get their organizing manpower and support while remaining distant enough to avoid the explicit label.”

It’s a novel strategy, to put things mildly, for a putatively Democratic think tank and advocacy group to devote such a massive outlay of resources to discrediting an ascendant popular movement in the Democratic Party during a high-stakes midterm cycle. But since its founding more than two decades ago, Third Way has hewed to the prime centrist directive encoded in its name, which stems from the 1990s conservative leadership putsches in the Democratic and British Labour Parties: Always punch left.

The organization actually began life as Americans for Gun Safety, a difference-trimming advocacy group financed by tech billionaire Andrew McKelvey; its chief objective was to discredit the long-standing, and legally sound, position that the Second Amendment doesn’t sanction individual gun ownership, and focus more on incremental measures like closing the gun-show loophole to instant unregulated firearms purchases. Americans for Gun Safety won the substantive policy debate in the Democratic Party in short order, and the US Supreme Court formalized its victory when it endorsed—or more accurately, fabricated—a right to individual gun ownership in the disastrous 2008 District of Columbia v. Heller ruling.

By then, Third Way was in full swing. Still captained by former Americans for Gun Safety President Cowan, the group swiftly set about foisting a structurally identical agenda of faux-savvy capitulation to the right on the Obama White House, offering up platitudinous defenses of the failed 2012 “grand bargain” to preserve regressive tax cuts and institute permanent austerity in social spending. When first-term Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren produced a plan to expand Social Security benefits the following year, Cowan and his Third Way colleague Jim Kessler howled (in The Wall Street Journal, of course) that the proposal was “disastrous” and “reckless,” a species of “populist political and economic fantasy.”

That would be the verdict from a group overwhelmingly funded by Wall Street bankers, healthcare companies, and DC lobbying clearinghouses. As Lee Fang reported for The Nation in 2013, Third Way relied on the fundraising prowess of the DC lobbying behemoth Peck, Madigan, Jones & Stewart as a sluice gate of corporate funding; its other marquee clients included Deutsche Bank, Intel, the Business Roundtable, the International Swaps & Derivatives Association, PhRMA, and the US Chamber of Commerce. As if that weren’t enough, the group’s board included Daniel Loeb and Berek Kaufman, two hedge-fund executives who were major donors to Mitt Romney’s 2012 Republican campaign for the presidency. As a dark-money political group, Third Way isn’t obliged to disclose its donors, but a recent RealSludge survey of its tax filings discloses the same basic plutocratic profile, with Bill Gates’s sustainability network Breakthrough Energy and the big-tech investment fund Arabella Advisors among the lead givers, alongside other corporate stalwarts such as the US Chamber of Commerce.

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These, in other words, are the same forces that have held socialism, and social democracy, to be anathema since the first Gilded Age. What’s striking, though, is that this time out, Cowan and his cronies are decidedly on the defensive. They’re no longer issuing disciplinary broadsides to freshman populist senators from the secure battlement of The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed section—they’re seeking to influence electoral outcomes in a political environment that’s shifted radically since Barack Obama’s second term.

A moderate agenda for the Democratic Party simply isn’t an electoral selling point any longer—that’s the key finding in a recent working paper by political scientists Jacob Grumbach and Adam Bonica, which finds that in an acutely polarized political climate, moderate appeals are less the campaign game-changers of Third Way’s fond imaginings than nonstarters. It’s true that “extreme” candidates don’t necessarily perform better, the authors note, but on balance, voters are more responsive to appeals within preexisting ideologies, which produce the dynamic that just played out in Michigan: “More progressive Democratic and more conservative Republican candidates increase the turnout of their respective partisan bases.” These shifts have also altered the ideological composition of both parties, as MSNow’s Zeeshan Aleem observes in his breakdown of Bonica and Grumbach’s research: “plunging trust in institutions and the collapse of the neoliberal consensus have made the banner of ‘anti-establishment’ and ‘populist’ positioning more salient than conventional ideology, as well as changed what constitutes ideological extremism.”

Since groups like Third Way represent the body and soul of the dying neoliberal consensus, they have little choice but to target DSA, which aspires to be their political undertaker. But another $15 million in tendentious attack ads and opposition research stands little chance of arresting the momentum of El Sayed, who has already overcome a nine-to-one spending disadvantage to secure his Senate nomination. In the face of a populist uprising on the left, all Jonathan Cowan and his Beltway colleagues can do is throw more money at what they imagine the problem to be. That’s why their response to the new insurgent politics in the Democratic Party is less telling than their prescription for a party revival in the wake of Kamala Harris’s crushing 2024 defeat: to scuttle the preferences of small donors in the party, and ensure that Democrats become more aggressively “pro-capitalist” and stop “demonizing wealth and corporations.” “GOP messaging suggests they want voters to be rich, while Democrats are seen as focusing on redistribution rather than wealth creation,” read one bullet point. “Have a prosperity gospel aimed at the working class,” went another.

The Clinton era version of third-way politics marketed itself as pragmatic and realistic above all things. Third Way’s think tank bromides today come across as nothing more than desperate plutocratic wish-fulfillment fantasies. To borrow the rhetoric of another prominent Democrat continually vilified by Wall Street for his anti-capitalist sympathies, the leaders of today’s resurgent Democratic left should welcome their hatred.

Insurgents Are Revitalizing the Democratic Party>

Katrina vanden Heuvel,John Nichols,The Nation — Fri, 22 May 2020 05:47:57 EDT

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And despite all the establishment pushback, voters know it.

Katrina vanden Heuvel, John Nichols for The Nation

Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed.(Jess Kowalsky / Getty)

To hear the DC insiders tell it, insurgent socialists and progressive firebrands are wrecking the Democratic Party. Don’t believe it. The insurgency that swept across the United States during the spring and summer of 2026, with its spike in voter turnouts and headline-grabbing primary results for young candidates who are challenging entrenched incumbents, is not, as some would have you believe, undermining the world’s oldest political party in this critical midterm-election year. The insurgency is revitalizing it. And if established party leaders don’t screw things up—by echoing Republican talking points about a “dangerous” left, or by opting for caution when the electorate is calling for action—this revitalization has the potential to build a vibrant coalition of Democratic base voters and legions of younger, more diverse, and newly registered ones. If it is sufficiently bold and innovative, strategic and inclusive, this coalition can do more than simply check and balance Donald Trump, by giving Democratic candidates and economic-populist independents control of the House and the Senate and key governorships nationwide. In the run-up to the 2028 presidential election, it can merge Democratic candidacies and movement energy into a political force capable of finally realizing the deferred dreams of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Economic Bill of Rights and the Freedom Budget for All Americans that A. Philip Randolph and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. advanced as an essential extension of the civil-rights revolution of the 1960s.

Too many Democratic Party leaders in recent years have complacently mounted campaigns that address legitimate fears of Republican hegemony, yet fail to offer a bolder vision that speaks to the most powerful of all incentives to vote: hope. We’re not talking about vapid “It’ll all work out in the end” optimism or, worse yet, the dismissive “Just trust us” messaging of old-school politicians. We’re talking about a radical hope that lives can be made dramatically better by movements that recognize and embrace Patti Smith’s promise that “people have the power…to dream, to rule, to wrestle the earth from fools.” This is the prospect that FDR entertained when he dramatically expanded the Democratic coalition by proposing a New Deal that pundits dismissed as extreme—even socialistic—but that the electorate embraced as essential. This is what Barack Obama understood when he had the audacity to call a divided nation to “come together as a single American family. ‘E pluribus unum.’ Out of many, one.” And this is what the Rev. Jesse Jackson was talking about four decades ago when he pleaded for a new Democratic politics based on the idea that “if you raise up truth, it’s magnetic. It has a way of drawing people.”

The progressive gospel that Jackson preached in his Rainbow Coalition campaigns of the 1980s, and that Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders outlined in his 2016 and 2020 presidential bids, laid the groundwork for what a new generation of candidates and activists propose today. They are speaking confidently about enacting Medicare for All, taxing the rich, ending poverty, protecting immigrants, and changing our foreign policy. They are remaking American politics and policymaking—as the July vote by 103 House Democrats (including former House speaker Nancy Pelosi) to end US aid to Israel demonstrated. What Politico described as a “seismic shift” in the party and in Congress is taking place because voters all over the country are demanding a new politics.

After a trio of insurgents—Democratic Socialists of America members Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier and veteran progressive Brad Lander—swept New York’s Democratic primaries in June, Mayor Zohran Mamdani was mocked for his claim that democratic socialists with working-class economics and values-driven agendas “can get elected anywhere across this country for any position.” Less than a week later, 29-year-old DSA member Melat Kiros defeated a 15-term incumbent in a Colorado House primary. That same day, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, who pledged to stand up to corporate monopolies on behalf of workers, farmers, and consumers, overcame a 30-point deficit in the polls to beat a sitting senator in the state’s primary for governor. Weiser’s win shocked the Democratic leadership and his own progressive supporters, whom he heard asking on primary night, “Can I really believe again?”

It’s not just that Democrats can believe again. They must.

The Democratic brand as it’s been defined by its congressional leaders is unpopular, even among Democrats. It doesn’t have to be that way. The party can become every bit as appealing, and electable, as it has ever been. But that won’t happen if control over its future remains in the hands of the people who spoiled the brand in the first place.

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Democratic voters know that the party needs a new direction, and they are forging it by nominating candidates such as US Representative Analilia Mejia, a key aide to Sanders during his 2020 presidential bid whose February special-election victory in a suburban New Jersey district shocked commentators. “People will say that this district is not the kind of district in which a progressive or a lefty could win. But it’s not about left/right,” Mejia, the sole candidate in a crowded Democratic-primary field to call Israel’s assault on Gaza a genocide, said on election night. “It’s about right and wrong.”

By choosing candidates like Mejia, who easily won her general election, Democratic-primary voters are charting a new course. They know—better than many party leaders, it seems—that it is necessary to remake the party as a popular movement for economic, social, and racial justice, for saving the planet, and for a foreign policy that chooses human rights and diplomacy over bloated Pentagon budgets and forever wars.

That gap between the electorate and party leaders has led to this dynamic and sometimes contentious moment. Media outlets are paying attention to Democratic primaries and scrutinizing the results from Maine to California, Pennsylvania to Texas. Right-wing publications like the New York Post run articles warning about dire consequences for Democrats as a result of a “socialist takeover.” Former Clinton-administration commerce secretary William Daley—whose centrist choice for Illinois’s March Senate primary got crushed by a progressive contender—complained that “this far-left socialist, some call ‘progressive,’ part of society [is] basically trying to take over the Democratic Party.” Leaders of Third Way, the DC think tank that puts a contemporary spin on the neoliberal agenda of the old Democratic Leadership Council (DLC)—which Jackson called “Democrats for the Leisure Class”—warn that “the DSA’s radicalism makes it not a faction to be appeased; it is a movement to be opposed.”

But voters don’t see it that way. They are open to candidates—be they democratic socialists such as Pennsylvania House nominee Chris Rabb, or progressives like Minnesota Senate candidate Peggy Flanagan, or old-school economic populists like Troy Jackson in Maine and Sherrod Brown in Ohio—who break with status quo politics. That’s not surprising. Remember: Bernie Sanders represents a rural state and was the first non-Republican to win his Vermont Senate seat since the 1850s; and some of the most progressive members of Congress, such as Wisconsin’s Mark Pocan, represent urban, suburban, and rural districts. And look at the polling analyses from groups like the Center for Working-Class Politics, which remind us that “championing progressive economic policies can reverse the exodus of blue-collar voters from the party” and that “contrary to what many might expect, the working class has become both more progressive on economic issues and less conservative on social issues in recent decades.”

Instead of getting distracted by the establishment’s hand-wringing, Democrats should recognize a moment of renewal and potential. The party suffered devastating defeats in 2024, in part because of an enthusiasm gap among its core constituencies, and in greater part because of its failure to engage with the disaffected potential voters who will be essential to a robust governing coalition. Yet now it is suddenly experiencing what the CNN data analyst Harry Enten describes as a “supercharging” moment. A July Washington Post/Ipsos poll, conducted amid the hype about upheaval in the party, found that Democrats had a 10-point advantage over Republicans when it came to voter enthusiasm. That was eight points better than in 2018—the “blue wave” midterm-election year that saw seven governorships and at least 40 House seats flip to the Democrats. “And,” the Post noted, “more than seven in 10 Democrats say it is ‘more important’ to vote in 2026 than in previous midterm elections, compared with just over half of Republicans.” Of course, voters are eager to cast ballots against Republicans who back Trump, but they’re also eager to cast them for a bolder, better Democratic Party.

Jesse Jackson saw this moment coming. “If we lift up a program to feed the hungry, they’ll come running. If we lift up a program to study war no more, our youth will come running,” he declared as he sought to forge a new Democratic politics. “If we lift up a program to put America back to work, and an alternative to welfare and despair, they will come working.”

In 1984, Jackson surmised that the people have the power to change a party and a nation. In 2026, a new Democratic coalition—fueled by the energy of a dynamic multiracial, multiethnic progressive insurgency—can prove him right.

The Explosive Failures Fueling the Cyclospora Outbreak>

Gregg Gonsalves — Fri, 22 May 2020 05:47:57 EDT

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We’re getting a stark reminder of what happens when you gut a public-health system.

Gregg Gonsalves

Packages of Taylor Farms salad greens are displayed at a Safeway store on July 16, 2026, in Kings Beach, California.(Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)

Should you worry about cyclospora? Emily Oster doesn’t think so. Writing in The New York Times in July, Oster, the economist and self-appointed health guru, told readers that the nationwide spread of the cyclospora parasite, which causes watery, sometimes “explosive” diarrhea, was no grave concern. After all, she noted, the infection is treatable, rarely causes serious injury or death, and is not transmissible from person to person.

All of this is true enough—and if, like Oster, you view health as a private family matter, you might draw comfort from her words. But if you think that the Trump administration’s devastating ongoing attack on public health in America is important, the cyclospora outbreak, which investigators think was caused by tainted produce, should matter very much to you.

First, this is the largest outbreak of the protozoal disease since 2019, with more than 11,500 cases confirmed or under investigation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as of late July. This doesn’t come anywhere near the prevalence of other diarrheal diseases like norovirus. But the point isn’t that cyclospora is not as bad as norovirus; it’s that our food supply shouldn’t be making us sick.

Yet the federal agencies responsible for monitoring foodborne diseases, like the Food and Drug Administration and the CDC, have been decimated by staffing cuts in Trump’s second term. The FDA was already having difficulties in inspecting foreign food facilities before Trump 2.0; now, as Brian Ronholm of Consumer Reports told the Times, these cuts have “really put [the FDA] further behind to the point where it’s virtually nonexistent.”

Meanwhile, the CDC last year gutted its food-surveillance program, cutting the number of monitored pathogens from eight to two. One of the pathogens dropped from the list? Cyclospora.

The Trump administration also shut down two Department of Agriculture food-safety committees in 2025 and closed two food-safety labs, only reopening them after a public outcry. Finally, new FDA food-traceability rules, which would have dramatically expedited the search for the infectious culprit in this outbreak, have been pushed back to 2028. At the local and state levels, public-health departments are struggling to survive after multiple rounds of budget cuts by the federal government. The Associated Press reported that “the cuts are reducing the entire system to a shadow of what it once was, threatening to undermine even routine work,” let alone dealing with outbreaks that threaten our communities.

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The Trump administration’s endemic corruption is also making it impossible to trust the government’s public-health decisions. The FDA initially suggested that the culprit in the outbreak may be lettuce sold to Taco Bell restaurants by Taylor Farms, a huge national produce supplier. Taylor Farms’ produce is everywhere; as the Times reported, the company “said it made more than 40 percent of all salad kits sold in American groceries” in 2025.

Taylor Farms has been cited for food-safety violations related to previous cyclospora, E. coli, and salmonella outbreaks. It has also donated to pro-Trump super PACS, and its executives met with government officials in the White House amid the latest outbreak. Days after the meeting, the FDA pulled back and said the tests on Taylor Farms’ products were a series of false positives, while insisting that the company is still a focus of its investigations. Are these things connected? The fact that this is even a question says it all.

The conclusion that emerges from all these events is that the United States’ food-safety system is in deep trouble—and it’s just one of the many serious public-health crises we are facing, all as a result of the Trump administration’s relentless assault on the institutions that protect us.

The Emily Osters of the world seem oblivious to all of this. In her Times column, Oster called for wastewater testing and investing in better risk communication, better disease surveillance, and better-funded local health departments, which makes me think she just awoke from an 18-month sleep like Rip Van Winkle and believes Joe Biden is still president and someone in the White House still cares about public health.

We cannot afford to be comfortably numb, wrongheadedly certain in our own safety at this moment, but this is the gospel that Oster and her ilk preach. It is rooted in a selfishness that says no one matters outside “the family firm,” to borrow the title of one of Oster’s books. Just when we need to be thinking about the public good, we have prominent pundits telling us, in so many words, that the answer is to maximize our personal effectiveness and minimize our own anxiety about the world around us.

The cyclospora outbreak may be affecting only a few thousand people in the US right now, but basic human decency should move us to care about them. Absent that, basic self-interest should spur us to recognize that this outbreak is a harbinger of even greater danger ahead, as our public-health system starts to buckle and break, leaving all of us more vulnerable in the years to come.

What Happened to the American University?>

Daniel Bessner — Fri, 22 May 2020 05:47:57 EDT

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Once the envy of the world, higher education in the United States is now in a state of endless crisis.

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Columbia University, March 2025.(Kena Betancur/Getty)

The American university is in crisis. Neither the public, the students, nor even the faculty believe in a system that was once the envy of the world.

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The lack of faith in universities is striking. According to Gallup, the portion of Americans who were “confident” in American higher education dropped from 57 percent to 42 percent between 2015 and 2025. Moreover, only 35 percent of US adults now say that college is “very important,” down from 70 percent in 2013. A poll by Pew likewise found that “7 in 10 Americans now say U.S. higher education is going in the wrong direction.”

Behind this general loss of confidence lie misgivings about specific issues. Pollsters for Pew have discovered that 79 percent of adults “say colleges are doing a fair or poor job of keeping tuition costs affordable,” while “about half or more give colleges and universities fair or poor ratings on preparing students for well-paying jobs in today’s economy (55%), providing financial help to students who need it (52%), and developing students’ critical-thinking and problem-solving skills (49%).”

Faculty morale is no better: As anyone employed at a US university will readily acknowledge, depression, even nihilism, among professors is real. It’s not for nothing that it is faculty themselves who have published books about higher education with titles like The Great Mistake and Poison Ivy. Both the public and the professors are convinced that something has gone terribly wrong with the American university.

There are various sources of this discontent. First, the labor structure of universities has been transformed from one defined by stable employment to one defined by gig work. A 2023 survey by the American Association of University Professors revealed that almost 70 percent of all US faculty held “contingent”—that is, part-time or adjunct—positions, up from 47 percent in 1987. Then there are the millions of former students who are struggling to pay back the debt they incurred while attending college or graduate school. As of early 2026, the total student-loan debt held by those educated at US universities was $1.833 trillion, with the “average public university student” borrowing $31,960 to get their degree. Finally, universities have become key sites in our never-ending culture war, which has made campuses hostile places for faculty and students, with the general public increasingly viewing them with suspicion. Even on the lists that American university administrators have long sought to dominate, US higher education is in decline. According to the 2025 Leiden Ranking, which rates universities by the number of publications they produced between 2020 and 2023, only one US university—Harvard—ranks in the global top 10. Among the rest, eight are Chinese universities and one is Canadian.

Having long sought to destroy the “radical” and “liberal” university, the right wing now smells blood. In the first year of his second term, President Donald Trump launched an attack on universities. On January 20, 2025—his first day in office—he signed Executive Order 14151, which focused on “ending radical and wasteful government DEI programs and preferencing.” On March 20 of the same year, he signed Executive Order 14242, which instructed Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.” Beyond these executive orders, the Trump administration also unilaterally eliminated billions of dollars in research grants that the federal government had earmarked for universities; deployed Immigration and Customs Enforcement to seize and arrest numerous student activists; revoked the visas of more than 8,000 international students, focusing especially on those connected to pro-Palestine protest movements; demanded that Columbia University place its Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department under academic receivership; and, in exchange for federal funding, offered nine universities the opportunity to sign a “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” that promoted the teaching and research of identifiably “conservative ideas.” The modern American university system, which emerged in the period following World War II and was responsible for educating and uplifting millions of people, has never faced such a concerted assault.

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Into this breach steps Lee C. Bollinger, a former president of Columbia University and the lawyer renowned for winning Grutter v. Bollinger, the 2003 Supreme Court case that upheld the affirmative-action admissions policy of the University of Michigan Law School until the court declared affirmative action illegal in 2023. Bollinger understands that US universities are in serious trouble, and his new book, University: A Reckoning, is his attempt to save them. But while the book contains numerous compelling ideas, it is limited by its author’s faith in a liberal center that no longer exists.

Bollinger wrote University: A Reckoning because he was aghast at the feeble way that universities have responded to the Trump administration’s assaults. He was especially disappointed by Columbia, which paid the federal government $221 million in settlements and agreed to implement the various reforms that Trump demanded. In effect, he hopes University: A Reckoning will provide the intellectual basis on which the managers of higher education can “confront the crisis and reimagine who we are now and for the future.” According to Bollinger, “the fundamental purpose of the university” is “to preserve and advance human knowledge about the human condition, about life and about the natural world, and to pass human knowledge and the capacities to pursue it on to succeeding generations.”

Already with this statement, fundamental problems with Bollinger’s rescue mission begin to emerge. His identification of higher education with the modern research university ignores the millions of students who attend non-research institutions, such as community and other two-year colleges. Furthermore, Bollinger’s framing completely ignores the degree to which the university system has essentially become a credentialing mechanism geared toward producing workers for the American market and, at its most rarefied levels, reproducing the extant—and increasingly oligarchical—class structure.

In the contemporary United States, wealth inequality is the worst it’s been in over a century. According to a recent report by Oxfam, “the richest 0.0001 percent control a greater share of wealth than in the Gilded Age.” Indeed, the report notes, “between 1989 and 2022, the increase in wealth of a household at the top 1 percent cutoff was 101 times bigger than the increase in wealth for the median household, and 987 times bigger than the increase in wealth of the household at the 20th percentile.” It is no exaggeration to say that the United States is now ruled by an oligarchy.

Though elite colleges profess a faith in meritocracy and insist that they are engines of class mobility, in practice they reward the already rewarded. A recent study by the economists Raj Chetty, David J. Deming, and John N. Friedman, for instance, revealed that “children from families in the top 1 percent are more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college as those from middle-class families with comparable SAT/ACT scores.” As The Harvard Crimson likewise noted some years ago, “roughly 26 percent of members of the Class of 2025 who answered a question about parental income in TheCrimson’s annual freshman survey said their families make $250,000 or more per year—earnings higher than 94 percent of American households.” If Bollinger hopes to engender a consensus in favor of research universities, it is unlikely to be built without the support of the many Americans who attend two-year and non-research institutions and who rightly understand elite colleges as gatekeepers of class privilege.

But even when it comes to the research university, Bollinger’s understanding is woefully out of date. For instance, he insists that it is “expected of a professor…that their scholarship must be made fully available to the public.” However, as anyone who isn’t employed by or enrolled at a university is aware, most scholarly material is not available to the public but instead is available only to those who pay significant access fees to various, oftentimes for-profit organizations. In fact, some of those who have tried to skirt these paywalls have suffered serious penalties. The activist Aaron Swartz, to take the most egregious example, was hounded by the government for downloading and making available millions of academic articles from JSTOR, one of a number of groups that belong to an oligopolistic infrastructure whose business model relies on the free labor of scholars.

This is just one of several instances in which Bollinger ignores the actually existing political economy of the modern research university. Most galling for a history PhD like myself, he makes only passing reference to the jobs crisis that has beset so many disciplines within the humanities and social sciences. In Bollinger’s vision, everyone is either tenured or tenure-track, working on behalf of advancing public knowledge—an untenable position in an environment in which the tenure-track researcher is more the exception than the rule.

Bollinger has for decades been ensconced in hyper-elite universities that, until recently, were able to shield themselves from the degradation of the higher-education system as a whole. He imagines a university defined by “gatherings in the faculty commons, workshops over drafts, formal lectures to attend, and shared social events.” But this world doesn’t exist—indeed, it can’t exist in a context in which the disciplines are failing to reproduce themselves. In the past, even when a wider public audience was often prevented from accessing most scholarly production, professors could assume that there would at least be an academic audience for their work. This audience might have been small, but there was a promise that it would continue to exist in the future. Today, that promise has dissipated, which naturally affects how scholars approach their research. It’s not for nothing that a prominent scholar recently joked to me that “podcasts are the new journal articles.”

That Bollinger does not reckon with the reality of what it means to be an academic in the mid-2020s underlines a key feature of his work: While he has much to say about the glories of scholarship, he is ultimately not interested in the people who produce it. This is a serious problem for his program, because at the end of the day, universities are above all else workplaces, and their defense requires a buy-in from the workers who make them what they are.

The most innovative part of University: A Reckoning is not Bollinger’s analysis of the current state of the American university, but rather his legal arguments about how to protect the university from state interference in the future. Working through a century of First Amendment jurisprudence, he argues that “the constitutional principles of freedom of speech and press” can be used to protect universities from government intrusion.

To understand Bollinger’s position, one must run through a potted history of the First Amendment, which he ably provides. The Supreme Court, he notes, started hearing First Amendment cases only in 1919, when numerous radicals—including the Socialist Party leader and presidential candidate Eugene Debs—were prosecuted under the Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917 and 1918 for inveighing against US participation in World War I. The cases against Debs and others eventually made their way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the radicals’ speech was not protected by the First Amendment. By the end of 1919, however, the court had significantly changed course: Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. issued an opinion in which he argued that, first, freedom of speech was necessary to improve knowledge; and second, truth could be discovered only when all ideas were allowed to compete in the marketplace; and third, the Constitution itself was an “experiment” that could function only if ideas were freely exchanged. Thus, Holmes declared, the government could limit free speech only when there was a “clear and present danger” that would be addressed by doing so.

While there were moments in the 20th century when freedom of speech wasn’t respected—Bollinger highlights the McCarthy-era prosecution of Communist Party leaders—he contends that, in general, Holmes’s pro-free-speech perspective carried the day. This was true even in situations that offended many Americans, such as in 1969, when the Supreme Court ruled that it was legal for Ku Klux Klan members in Ohio to openly wield weapons and threaten Blacks and Jews so long as the Klan’s speech wasn’t, as Bollinger puts it, “directed at inciting imminent lawless action.” With this ruling, he notes, the court made it clear that Americans were expected to “live with the most reprehensible ideas, really until they are about to become action.”

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Bollinger cites another case that he argues also has relevance to protecting universities. In 1960, L.B. Sullivan, the city commissioner of Montgomery, Alabama—a hot spot of anti-Black racism and civil-rights resistance—sued The New York Times for running an advertisement that criticized the city’s police force for committing numerous injustices. After hearing this case, the Supreme Court ruled that the Times had not committed any violation because, Bollinger explains, the Constitution assumed “that sovereignty resided with the citizenry and not with the government itself.”

In Bollinger’s telling, this ruling indicated that “the authority and responsibility of citizens to exercise self-government meant that public officials could not be permitted to sue citizens for damages or damaging falsehoods about them absent truly extraordinary circumstances.” If public officials were allowed to sue the press and ordinary people, the Supreme Court warned, Americans might become wary of engaging in public debate, which would undermine the foundations of American democracy.

This all makes for interesting reading, but how does it relate to American universities? For Bollinger, these cases, and much of First Amendment jurisprudence, establish a clear reason why universities need to exist—and to be free of government interference. Since there are “no legal checks on speech that disrespects others, urges violence, revels in misinformation and falsehoods, propagates stupidity, or forsakes ideas and norms we all should value,” the university, he argues, has a critical social function: It can serve as a “moderator” able to “help lead and guide the discussion.”

Bollinger contends that this role has traditionally fallen to the press. But today, he notes, the professionalized press, dedicated to disseminating facts about the world, has been supplanted by social-media companies that have little interest in the truth as such. In Bollinger’s view, “this is where the university comes in.” He insists that “universities are a version of the press [that] offer deeper inquiry into public issues and are always on call to serve as a check on government and society.” Therefore, similar to the press, they should be conceived as an additional, and protected, estate—“a fifth branch” of democratic government “as essential as the press to our collective life and success.”

Bollinger’s case for the university is essentially a functionalist one: that universities should be protected from government intrusion because they serve a crucial, moderating function in a society defined by very permissive First Amendment jurisprudence.

There are several significant problems with this argument. For starters, the First Amendment has nothing to say about higher education, and no amount of legal reasoning will change that. Therefore, any First Amendment–based case for the university will have significant limits and will likely face severe pushback. Second, the labor of journalists and of academics are in practice quite dissimilar. In an ideal world, journalists check government and private power through the rapid and timely exposure of information and behavior. Academics, by contrast, engage in years-long research projects that are concerned primarily—as Bollinger well knows—with expanding our knowledge in particular areas of inquiry. Such work might check state and corporate power, but that is not its primary function, nor should it be. Finally, even if universities were reformed to become the referees of public speech, it is by no means clear that this would engender a better, let alone more moderate, society. If the past several decades have revealed anything, it’s that experts often get things wrong—just look at the Iraq War or the 2008 financial crisis. In both of these cases, experts failed to check power and contributed to policies that actively made the world worse.

Bollinger’s program embodies the liberal faith in expertise. Like many liberals, Bollinger assumes that the “correct” ideas, developed, articulated, and promoted by an educated elite–cum–expert class, can impel and preserve good governance. It’s an ahistorical perspective that refuses to take seriously the many failures of expertise that have shaped the 20th and 21st centuries. After all, it was the experts who advanced the arguments that brought us deregulation, financialization, and endless war. Many Americans have thus lost faith in the experts. To paraphrase Anton Chigurh, if the experts we followed brought us here, of what use were the experts?

This leads to the fundamental problem with University: A Reckoning. Bollinger premises his book on defending a liberal “center”—a center defined by its belief that a college-educated elite should make the most consequential political, economic, and social decisions—that has lost its legitimacy. Indeed, his inability or unwillingness to accept this new reality leads him to have little interest in those who could actually defend the university from Trump: the professors, graduate students, and staff who ensure that the university works.

Bollinger, in fact, might be among the most unsuitable people to offer a defense of the university in the present moment. During his 21 years as president of Columbia, Bollinger witnessed multiple graduate-student strikes, one of which was caused by his administration’s unwillingness to recognize their union. Workers, it seems, don’t occupy much space in his imagination, or for that matter in the imagination of most university administrators. In recent years, for instance, administrators at Harvard, Brown, the University of Pennsylvania, and elsewhere have shown significant unwillingness to recognize, bargain with, or offer concessions to the workers attempting to unionize their workplaces.

Administrators’ hostility to unionization is unfortunate, because if faculty and graduate students don’t organize with one another and with staff across campus, the American university will continue to decline. One only wishes that Bollinger, when he had the power to do so, had aided instead of impeded the workers who made his university what it was. They are, after all, the people on whom any defense, let alone a remaking, of the university will rely.

Do Epics Need Heroes?>

Orlando Reade — Fri, 22 May 2020 05:47:57 EDT

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In recent years, the online right has contested adaptations of epic in order to make an argument about masculinity. The Odyssey is their latest target.

Orlando Reade

Still from The Odyssey.(Universal Pictures)

As the credits rolled at the end of The Odyssey, the Long Island cinema burst into applause. This struck me as strange: The hero had just confessed his guilt for the trick at Troy, disguising a weapon as a gift to the gods—a transgression that would lead to the collapse of his world. There seemed little cause for celebration. Was the audience cheering the hero’s victory over the bad guys, or were they taking a side in an ongoing culture war?

When Christopher Nolan adapted Homer’s epic to speak to a world where American power is being challenged in new ways, it was inevitable that it would provoke the right. Even before the film came out, the casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen launched a thousand tweets, and Elon Musk threatened to use Grok to make another version with ethnically Greek (though AI-generated) actors. But it’s not only the casting that made Nolan’s film controversial. It’s also, I think, a more general debate over the genre of epic.

Epics are long narrative poems telling of the most consequential acts by the most powerful people. Different ancient epics treat their protagonists in different ways, and they’re not always straightforwardly heroic. The Iliad tells of Greece’s victory in the semi-historical Trojan War; The Odyssey follows one of the victors, Odysseus, in his meandering return home. The great Latin epic, Virgil’s Aeneid, follows another Trojan soldier, Aeneas, who later became the founder of Roman civilization; by contrast, Lucan’s epic, The Pharsalia, describes Caesar’s triumph in the Roman Civil War only to grotesquely ironize him.

In recent years, the online right has contested adaptations of epic in order to make an argument about masculinity. This was visible in the 2024 campaign against Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey—which Nolan relied on at least in part for his writing of this film—which refers to its hero as “a complicated man.” This choice of words was contested by right-wing commentator Maxwell Meyer, who admitted to having had only one semester of Ancient Greek. Likewise, the podcaster Matt Walsh criticized Nolan’s Odysseus (Matt Damon) as “an anachronistic whiney solemn shell of a man.” Apparently abandoning his earlier plan, Elon Musk offered to fund another adaptation directed by Mel Gibson.

There are many valid criticisms to be made of Nolan’s film (as in the excellent review by Christian Lorentzen), but the decision to make the hero relatively unheroic has precedent in a long line of epics: Dante put Odysseus among the pagan heroes in the first circle of Hell. Shakespeare, who never wrote an epic poem, gave his tragic heroes an unrivalled psychological complexity. Milton’s Paradise Lost casts Satan as a figure of Odysseus-like cunning, and heroizes Adam and Eve’s struggle to accomplish the quieter virtues of humility, forgiveness, and love. Wordsworth’s The Prelude strays even further from martial valor, describing the development of an individual mind in moments of solitude and joy.

In America, epic has had a complicated history. Some years ago, I was teaching a class in a New Jersey prison and found that none of my students knew what “epic” meant. As I tried to define it, I thought of a huge flag I had seen towering over a highway in Washington, DC, taller than Satan’s spear in Paradise Lost, which Milton compares to the tallest Norwegian pine. One difficulty in explaining the genre was that so much about American culture is epic—the love of bigness, the deep respect for the military, the obsession with superhero movies—yet there wasn’t a single famous American epic poem to point to.

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Since epic was considered a jewel in the crown of empire, numerous American poets tried and failed to write a good one. In 1787, after a French critic said the USA hadn’t produced a good poet, an insulted Thomas Jefferson said this would be a valid reproach only when the new nation had “existed as a people as long as the Greeks did before they produced a Homer, the Romans a Virgil, the French a Racine and Voltaire, the English a Shakespeare and Milton.” In short, after about 500–1,000 years. Jefferson wasn’t wrong: Over 400 years since the Mayflower, there have been many good American poets but not a single great epic.

That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is an extended lyric poem that attempts to encompass the whole cosmos in its egalitarian, if presumptuous embrace. Whitman declared the American people were “the greatest poem,” and one that didn’t need the outdated grandiosity of epic. Other American epics have been written since then, though the most obviously Homeric one, Derek Walcott’s Omeros, is from the Caribbean and celebrates a life of quiet survival.

These humble virtues have found a home in the bourgeois novel, which 20th-century critics like György Lukács argued had superseded epic. From Don Quixote onward, the great literary novels have rarely been straightforward celebrations of heroism: Vanity Fair, subtitled “A Novel Without A Hero,” describes the barbarity of the Napoleonic Wars; Moby-Dick is a delusional revenge quest; Middlemarch follows a provincial woman who might have lived an “epic life” if she hadn’t had to inhabit a domestic realm of “unhistoric acts”; James Joyce’s own Ulysses is about a long night of drinking.

As Joyce’s use of a Homer title suggests, epic has retained its cultural importance. In the 20th century, so many Hollywood films, from Citizen Kane to Titanic, flooded America with the epic tales that poets hadn’t been able to supply. This has not abated in our century, but the casting of heroes in video games, Marvel movies, and Disney franchises has increasingly been challenged by right-wing commentators. It was in this context that Jordan Peterson called Disney’s Frozen “dismal, wretched, and pure ideology.”

Right-wing commentators believe that fictional heroes should be admirable in order for men to imitate them, but films made along those lines are often kitsch, unrealistic, and unsatisfying. See, for example, John Aglialoro’s wooden three-part adaptation of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, which failed to retain the same Aryan actors for each installment. Or war films like 12 Strong, which offer more idealized portraits of veterans than Homer, whose hero returns home and massacres the slave girls in a bloody frenzy.

If it seems odd to want a protagonist to be less complex than one Homer invented 3,000 years ago, parts of the online right have been trying to revive a pre-Homeric worldview. Their Bible is Costin Alamariu’s 2018 Bronze Age Mindset, a polemic that celebrates the prehistoric period (3300 BCE–1200 BCE) as one where Nietzschean supermen still roamed the shores of the Mediterranean. That time had already passed when Homer composed his poem, around the 8th century BCE. To revive the Bronze Age mindset, Alamariu advised making movies more heroic, declaring, “What Mel Gibson does is worth a thousand books.”

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Meanwhile, a more communitarian section of the right values ancient epics because they see them as the symbol of a closed community with stable beliefs; the kind of place they want America to become. Whether Homer’s Greece was that stable is debatable, to say the least, but it’s an even more improbable ideal for a multicultural nation in a hyper-networked, multipolar world. Ironically, even as people like JD Vance propose to rebirth a more communitarian nation, his own government has undermined the Declaration of Independence—the closest thing the US has to a collectively held, memorized epic text.

When they cheered at the end of the film, the Long Island audience may have just been acknowledging the end of a blockbuster that had been more serious and edifying than the usual summer fare. As Emily Wilson pointed out in her review of The Odyssey, sales of Homer translations have soared in recent weeks. This is no bad thing in a nation where 40–50 percent of adults no longer read a single book per year.

The revival of interest in epic can do more than fuel a tedious culture war. Epics should encourage us to think more deeply and expansively: As Aristotle said, they are stories about the most consequential human actions. This aspect of the genre doesn’t require the powerful to be admirable, nor ordinary people abject. Shakespeare adapted Homer’s story for Troilus and Cressida, a play about a world made cynical by war. None of its characters are heroic.

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Steve Brodner — Fri, 22 May 2020 05:47:57 EDT

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Todd Blanche Wants to Finish What “Dobbs” Started>

Rachel Rebouché — Fri, 22 May 2020 05:47:57 EDT

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In a private call before his confirmation vote, the acting AG said Trump officials aim to make the decision ending the national right to abortion “permanent in every single state.”

Rachel Rebouché

Todd Blanche during a news conference at the Department of Justice in Washington, DC, on August 5, 2026.

(Aaron Schwartz / Bloomberg)

When the Supreme Court handed down Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022, overturning Roe v. Wade, its defenders insisted the ruling was an act of judicial restraint and a decision that returned the question of abortion to democratic majorities in each state. The United States’ top lawyer, Todd Blanche, apparently has other ideas.

On a July 30 conference call hosted by the White House Faith Office —not meant for public ears, though the audio later surfaced on YouTube—the acting attorney general told religious leaders that the administration is working to ensure that the Dobbs decision “becomes permanent in every single state.” He acknowledged that “we don’t have complete victory yet,” but promised the faithful, “Victory will be soon and it will be permanent.”

Blanche seems to have in mind a project that goes far beyond enforcing existing federal law or upholding current state abortion laws. Trump’s pick to lead the Justice Department could use the agency as a tool to impose abortion restrictions on all states, even those that protect reproductive rights through their own democratic processes and state Constitutions.

The primary tool Blanche has signaled deploying is the Comstock Act, an archaic federal law passed in 1873 that made it a federal crime to mail any “thing” to “procure an abortion,” including pills but also any article used in abortion care. For most of the 20th century, the anti-obscenity law lay dormant, superseded by Roe and regarded as an artifact of a bygone and unfortunate era. After Roe was overturned, Biden’s Justice Department issued a formal opinion concluding that the Comstock Act could not be used to impose a blanket ban on mailing abortion medications, so long as the sender did not intend the drug to be used unlawfully, which could be almost impossible to prove.

During his confirmation hearing in July, Blanche, Trump’s nominee and former criminal defense attorney, agreed under questioning from Senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn to order a review of that Biden-era interpretation. If the Trump DOJ rescinds the opinion, it may be the first step in the agency’s attempting to enforce the Comstock Act’s abortion provisions after 100 years of disuse.

Under Blanche’s leadership, mailing or receiving mifepristone and misoprostol, the two drugs in medication abortions, could result in federal criminal charges. That would not just affect patients in Texas or Alabama. It would affect patients and providers in California, Colorado, New York, Illinois—states that have not only protected abortion but also have expanded access to it. Comstock would apply nationwide, with no exceptions carved out by the act’s text and with a five-year prison sentence for the first offense.

Medication abortion now accounts for the majority of all abortions in the United States. Since Dobbs, mail-order access to abortion pills, dispensed via telehealth providers operating in states with legal protections (“shield” laws), has become a lifeline for patients in states with bans and the predominant way in which they end pregnancies. Shield statutes, now passed in 18 states and Washington, DC, seek to protect providers from out-of-state criminal, civil, and professional attack; eight shield states extend those protections to telehealth for mailed medication abortion. To be clear, no shield law dictates what any other state does regarding its own abortion laws. But Blanche, on the July 30 call, signaled his DOJ also would target those shield laws, particularly those with telehealth protections.

The DOJ, for its part, has tried to walk back the most alarming reading of Blanche’s remarks on the covertly recorded conference call. A spokesperson said his comments about making Dobbs permanent in every state were “mischaracterized” and concerned only mail-order abortion drugs and not, the agency implied, a broader federal takeover of abortion policy.

That clarification raises more questions than it answers. Dobbs said nothing about mailed abortion pills or how states might regulate them. If Blanche’s purpose was to apply existing law, there would be no need for a DOJ review reversing the prior administration’s opinion. The Biden-era opinion is the status quo based on century-old cases interpreting the act; rescinding or revising it is a new policy choice.

His own words on the faith leaders’ call—promising that the administration is “putting practices and policies in place so that other states and other organizations can’t attack” the choices of states with abortion bans—suggests an agenda that sees state-level abortion protections, like shield laws, as threats to be neutralized and a de facto national abortion ban as the outcome to achieve.

This week, the Senate Judiciary Committee advanced his nomination on a party-line vote. Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska announced that they would vote against him, with Collins directly citing his pledge to anti-abortion groups to prohibit the mailing of abortion medication nationwide, while Murkowski similarly cited “statements that have been made to anti-abortion groups.” But Senator Bill Cassidy effectively sealed his confirmation by announcing shortly after Murkowski’s statement on Friday that he would support Blanche’s nomination.

The confirmation of Todd Blanche as attorney general will represent a new facet of the post-Dobbs landscape. The debate over abortion access has been primarily a story of state-level politics: ballot measures, state constitutional amendments, legislative sessions, and court challenges fought state by state and county by county. That landscape could change.

An attorney general committed to enforcing the Comstock Act would shift the battleground to federal law enforcement, a domain where neither state legislatures nor state courts have the final word. And a DOJ that treats the interstate shipment of abortion pills as a federal crime would, in effect, impose the most restrictive state-level standards on the entire country. A patient in Minnesota whose doctor prescribes pills via telehealth could find that avenue cut off even though abortion remains legal in the state. A physician in Massachusetts, acting under Massachusetts’s shield law, who prescribes remotely to a patient in Idaho could face federal prosecution and jail time.

The elected representatives of states like Michigan, Arizona, and Nevada have chosen to protect abortion access, as have the voters in Kansas, Montana, Kentucky, Ohio, and Vermont. An attorney general armed with the Comstock Act and the resources of the Justice Department could attempt to override every one of those choices.

Whatever one’s view on abortion, enforcing Comstock would be an alarming exercise of federal power against the backdrop of unprecedented executive overreach.

The path for Comstock enforcement is not straightforward, however. No doubt the DOJ will be sued if it tries to revive the act for criminal prosecutions. Searching through the mail for abortion “things” will be expensive, intrusive, and unpopular. And the reproductive rights movement, as it has done since Dobbs, will advance other means to put pills in the hands of people. Still, the reality that abortion cannot be stopped should not distract from why Blanche made his statements in the first place: to find solidarity with, and ultimately direct federal resources toward, an anti-abortion movement that seeks to end abortion everywhere, no matter the costs.

The Musicians Taking the Fight for Trans Lives to Church>

Max Keller — Fri, 22 May 2020 05:47:57 EDT

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The story behind “Trans Requiem.”

Max Keller

Andrew Yee performing at the premiere of Trans Requiem at NYC’s Trinity Church on September 18, 2025.

(Trinity Church / YouTube)

In the moments before the September premiere of composer-cellist Andrew Yee’s Trans Requiem (a recording of which was just released on New Amsterdam Records), the sanctuary of New York City’s Trinity Church was resonant with tuning instruments—interspersed with a beeping metal detector. That sound felt, to me, like a reminder both of relative safety and potential danger.

Earlier, when I arrived at the church, I had felt relieved to see no protesters. But then I felt silly. Surely, I thought, a classical concert would be niche enough to go under the radar. Still, I reminded myself, this was a large gathering centering trans experience in a place of worship. With each beep, I couldn’t help but imagine the worst: What if someone had a weapon?

I wish I could say that, with the first chords of Trans Requiem, these anxieties dissipated. But that wouldn’t be entirely true. Trans Requiem doesn’t distract from current realities. It mourns them in real time.

A requiem is traditionally a musical setting of the Catholic funeral mass. However, Yee considers Trans Requiem to be “more of a secular-style mass, even though the location is in a church.” Nevertheless, she said, “if people want to accept this mass in a religious manner, they’re welcome.”

Considering the fraught relationship that the trans community often has with Christian institutions, it is especially moving that Trinity Wall Street commissioned Trans Requiem. Before the September concert, Trinity vicar Michael Bird said that he has many times been asked why an Episcopal church would put on such a piece, to which he always replied, “How could we not?”

Yee’s Requiem is scored for string orchestra, choir, and two vocal soloists, in this case, soprano Breanna Sinclairé and tenor Katherine Goforth—both trans women, “one with a high voice and one with a lower voice,” said Yee.

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At the September performance, two cello sections sat on either side of the stage, an arrangement that produced a dark, bass-heavy sound in contrast to the silvery voices in the choir. Yee led from one of the cello sections, providing back-up for conductor Melissa Attebury.

Yee, who is the founding cellist of the Attacca Quartet, turned to composition relatively recently. Two years ago, the Queer Urban Orchestra premiered Yee’s Briefly Gorgeous for chamber orchestra, based on the novel by Ocean Vuong. More recently, Or, The Whale, a co-composition with Caroline Shaw based on Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, was released on Platoon. At around 40 minutes, Trans Requiem is Yee’s most ambitious work to date.

It is especially ambitious considering that, by writing a requiem, Yee situates herself in terms of a canon that includes Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Giuseppe Verdi, Johannes Brahms, Gabriel Fauré, and Benjamin Britten.

In terms of other requiems, Yee feels most connected to Brahms’s A German Requiem, which Brahms once said could have easily been titled “a human requiem” because of its universality. But Brahms’s Requiem was also deeply personal, written after the death of his mother and of his mentor Robert Schumann. Handpicking from the Lutheran Bible, Brahms created a text in vernacular German that remained spiritual but didn’t mention an afterlife, instead providing solace for the living.

“I don’t want to compare my piece to his,” said Yee, “but in the same way that Brahms wrote A German Requiem, this is A Trans Requiem. This is my experience.” Trans Requiem is also “a human requiem” in that it shows the humanity of a group that is being increasingly dehumanized.

However, while composing, Yee tried not to listen to other requiems, as she didn’t want their earworms influencing her unconsciously. “I’m just not going to write a ‘Dies Irae’ better than Verdi’s,” she said.

Though Trans Requiem doesn’t include a “Dies Irae,” it does include a “Requiem,” “Kyrie,” “Lux Aeterna,” “Libera Me,” and “In Paradisum.” These Latin texts are interspersed with English ones, mostly written by Yee herself, except for “Death Before Detransition,” which sets a poem by J. Jennifer Espinoza.

“Death Before Detransition” starts, spitting and spinning, in the lower strings. It is as if the underworld has opened up. You might not realize, at first, that the choir is singing in English: “You will have to pry /my gender from my cold /dead hands /and even then /all you will hold / is an idea I carved / into the side of the world / with fire.” It’s a rare moment in Trans Requiem when grief turns, briefly, to anger.

Yee, who began composing the Requiem after Trump’s reelection, said that she was “literally mourning those we’ve lost in the trans community.” However, the piece is “also mourning the loss of protections and support that we had not that long ago.”

In “Light,” which precedes the “Lux Aeterna,” Yee was inspired by “three-sentence obituaries on social media for trans folks.” These made her think about who gets to be grieved in a traditional manner. Primarily, “Light” honors Cecilia Gentili, the late trans activist, whom Yee describes as “a hero and a friend.” In this movement, avalanches of sound interrupt Yee’s speaking voice, like a life cut short.

In “Lux Aeterna,” Sinclairé’s voice is bright and buzzy, like a high-efficiency bulb, whereas Goforth’s voice is round and rich, like candlelight.

The loss of legal protections is alluded to in “I Am Afraid,” which, sung by Sinclairé, is about fearing for one’s physical safety. “I Am Afraid” is Yee’s take on the “Libera Me,” which, she notes, is “the only text from the traditional mass that was written in first person.” The Latin text reads “full of terror am I, and trembling.”

Another source of mourning suggested by Trans Requiem is the “social death,” or dehumanization, of trans people. Yee’s “Would You Have Mercy?” reinterprets the “Kyrie eleison” text as begging for understanding from a hateful stranger on the street. As the orchestra retreats, Yee accompanies herself on cello: “If I promised to pretend to be a boy again…”

Now, nearly a year later, listening to New Amsterdam’s recording of Trans Requiem’s premiere brings to mind new losses such as that of Juniper Blessing, as well as countless trans women of color whose deaths have gone unreported. In March, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention issued its latest warning about anti-transgender laws and rhetoric in the United States as being indicative of the early stages of a genocide.

One comment on a YouTube video of Trans Requiem reads: “I listened to part of it when you first performed it, then I listened again after Kansas came out with its horrible act towards trans people.” By the time this article goes to print, there will be something new to grieve.

But “a requiem for transness isn’t necessarily one that is only about sorrow,” said Yee. Indeed, there is something like redemption in “In Paradisum,” the final movement. “In Paradisums are usually sung by a crystal-clear high voice,” said Yee. “But people with lower voices deserve paradise as well.”

Though the word “angelic” is usually reserved for those with high voices, Goforth embodies it in this movement, intoning the final word “Requiem” like a hum.

By coincidence, the same September night as Trans Requiem premiered—perhaps as Goforth’s note was still hanging in the air—the New York Philharmonic was playing a different kind of elegy: Symphony No. 1 by John Corigliano.

Though Corigliano’s Symphony is not technically a requiem, as it does not follow the structure, it is easily the most-played composition memorializing AIDS. (There are a handful of true AIDS requiems, including James Adler’s Memento Mori.)

The movements of Corigliano’s symphony honor friends who died of AIDS. But because the piece is wordless, a listener might not realize this without looking at the program. By writing in mostly-tonal style that appeals to the emotions, Corigliano implores listeners to care about the plight of people with AIDS.

In a 1993 article on “AIDS & Classical Music,” the journalist K. Robert Schwarz quotes Corigliano as saying, “Music’s greatest gift is that it is non-verbal, and so it can also be totally non-threatening to people who could be threatened by this sort of thing.”

Trans Requiem is doing something similar, though not identical, with regards to trans lives. Yee’s Requiem, like Corigliano’s, is tuneful and accessible. But Trans Requiem also has words—pointed and powerful ones, at that.

What also differentiates Yee’s Requiem are the moments, such as in “Would You Have Mercy?” that almost resemble indie folk. These code-switches, at first jarring, are actually the most daring. Here, Yee is, like Brahms, speaking to us in the vernacular.

Schwarz, who would later die of AIDS in 1999, wrote in his article that the classical music world was relatively slow to respond to the disease, even though it ravaged the community as much as any other. It wasn’t until the 1990s, well into the epidemic, that composers began writing music about AIDS.

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By contrast, Trans Requiem is a musical response to a catastrophe that is still in its earlier stages. But what happens when you take classical music—a medium that some might argue can have limited relevance—and use it to make a statement of the utmost relevance?

First of all, classical’s music’s ability to stay under the radar could be a strength in terms of resistance. Yee’s concert didn’t get targeted or shut down, whereas a more popular concert might have.

Second, by using the medium of classical music, Yee is historicizing. She is saying that this moment, and that trans people, are historically important. It is through the requiem’s form and musical language that Yee is able to achieve such a level of emotionality.

In her Vogue opinion piece “Trans Lives Should Matter While We’re Still Here,” Grace Byron quotes Douglas Crimp’s call for both “mourning and militancy” when it came to AIDS activism in 1989. Byron writes, regarding trans rights, that “Even as we keep fighting…we have to let ourselves grieve.”

For the trans people that are listening, Trans Requiem creates a space for mourning so that we may keep fighting for our lives. And for others listening, Yee makes a plea for her own humanity, as well as for the humanity of trans people everywhere.

In her liner notes, Trinity’s director Melissa Baker calls Trans Requiem an “act of musical testimony.” If Trans Requiem is “testimony,” what is it saying? Perhaps something like what Yee said in our interview: “I want to be with my family. I want to play music. I want my life to be blissfully uneventful. I’m not trying to do anything radical. I’m just trying to live my life.”

Trump’s Deregulation of Head Start Would Lead to Bigger Class Sizes, Lower Quality>

Bryce Covert — Fri, 22 May 2020 05:47:57 EDT

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The administration has now made public a proposed rule to eliminate critical standards for services in the free preschool program.

Bryce Covert

Children at a Head Start program in

(Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

On Thursday, the Trump administration released a proposed rule that would eliminate hundreds of regulations that set safety, quality, and other standards for Head Start, the nation’s free preschool program for low-income children, deleting the entire 133-page set of standards and replacing them with a far more slimmed-down version that eliminates numerous health and safety requirements.

What would be left is “a really watered-down Head Start program that removes a lot of the health and safety requirements, quality standards, and comprehensive services,” Katie Hamm, who served as deputy assistant secretary for early childhood development at the Office for the Administration for Children & Families under President Joe Biden, told The Nation.

Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose uncle Sargent Shriver helped create Head Start in 1965, said in a press release that the rule is “removing unnecessary bureaucracy, strengthening nutrition and physical health, trusting parents and local communities, and opening Head Start to hundreds of thousands more children. That’s how we renew the promise of Head Start for the next generation.”

A New Trump Rule Would Lower Standards at Head Start and Exclude Immigrants From the Program
Bryce Covert

The proposed rule eliminates the requirements that limit Head Start class sizes and mandate a minimum number of adults to care for young children. Instead, programs are instructed to follow state rules, but no state has staff-to-child ratio regulations for all age groups that are at least as good as Head Start’s; following state ratios will worsen the minimum requirement for 97 percent of 2-year-olds in Head Start, 93 percent of 3-year-olds, and 71 percent of 4-year-olds, a report from Arizona State University’s Children’s Equity Project found. In its proposed rule, the administration estimates that Head Start teachers would be able to serve between 16 and 32 percent more children in their classrooms if the rule is finalized and that it will “preserve or expand” as many as 236,000 Head Start slots.

But Head Start program directors have told Jennie Mauer, executive director of the Wisconsin Head Start Association, that they have a “deep fear about a requirement to serve more children,” she told The Nation. Some are already operating at lower ratios than required in order to meet the significant needs of the children they serve. More children are coming into Head Start with emotional and developmental issues; for young children, she pointed out, that often means behaviors like biting or throwing that require intensive, hands-on supervision. It’s not that programs don’t want to serve more kids; “they want to serve children in their care in ways that really meet their needs,” she said. If the administration puts pressure on them to serve more children, staff may quit and programs may just have to close, Hamm noted.

The proposed rule also gets rid of a requirement to have at least one bus monitor on all buses, with more as necessary. Programs are concerned about what that will mean when 3- and 4-year-old are put on buses by themselves. “I am really worried about safety,” said Lori Pittman, a former Head Start parent who works at a Head Start program in Washington State, on a press call on held on Thursday.

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It also eliminates curriculum requirements that guide the commercial educational materials that programs can buy and implement. Currently, the rules say that curricula must be scientifically valid, aligned with the program’s outcomes framework, and have standardized materials and training procedures. Head Start is such a big purchaser of these materials that these rules have driven up quality across these companies’ products. But “the accountability and the monitoring comes from what’s in the standards,” Hamm said.

It also gets rid of the requirement that Head Start programs be open for a certain number of hours each year, instead saying they have to be open a minimum of just three hours a day, seven days a week.

Gone, too, are guidelines on when and how children can be suspended or expelled and a ban on corporal punishment. For many other standards—those outlining when and how to give all children developmental screenings, provide medical and dental care supports, serve children with disabilities, and include vulnerable families like those who are homeless or in the foster care system—the proposed rule deletes the current guidelines and instead tells programs to follow what’s in the Head Start Act. But the act designated the 133-page guidelines as the place where its requirements would actually be spelled out. “What the act says is that the standards are supposed to tell programs how to implement these things, so it becomes quite circular,” Hamm said. “It leaves programs without clear instructions about when and how to implement things.” For developmental screenings, for example, programs are currently required to do them within 45 days of enrollment and then follow up to make sure children are getting the necessary services; those requirements would all be erased.

Layoffs will be the likely result of these changes, Lauri Morrison-Frichtl, executive director of the Illinois Head Start Association, said on Thursday’s press call, particularly of the staff who currently offer the mental health and disability services that will no longer be required. Pittman said her program will likely have to do the same. “It will have a drastic impact on children and families,” Morrison-Frichtl said.

“This rule would make Head Start classrooms less safe, weaken standards for critical screenings and health services, strip away support that helps families access care, and deny children the strong start they deserve,” Representative Summer Lee (D-PA), said in a statement to The Nation. “The administration could strengthen Head Start, expand it, and invest in the educators who make it work, but instead they are deliberately hollowing out one of our nation’s most successful anti-poverty programs.”

The administration claimed in its press release that the proposed rule “recognizes parents as children’s primary teachers” and retains rules that programs must engage with them. But “it actually takes away power from parents,” Pittman argued, who currently vote on everything from programs’ budgets to curriculum. Parent committees that weigh in on programs’ policies and services become voluntary under the proposed rule, while current procedures that guide what happens when a program’s board and parent council disagree would be eliminated, tipping the scales away from parents. “This was one government program that really did include parents as equal partners, giving them a space at the table to make decisions about their child, their program,” she said. “That is now being removed.”

The proposed rule also reduces a cap on how much grant funding Head Start programs can spend on administrative overhead from the current 15 percent to 5 percent. “At 5 percent, I don’t know how you could produce quality services,” Pittman said. “That’s like building a house without the framing.” Programs use that money for everything from buses to staff background checks to replacing broken refrigerators. The spending is closely audited, not just by the federal government but by parent councils and governing boards. “Every penny is allocated,” Pittman said. “Everyone I know, including myself, has never become rich from being a Head Start employee.”

The proposed rule says it will free up $2.2 billion by 2031, which it claims is “the largest known reinvestment in the program since its creation.” But the Trump administration is not offering any new funding; it bases those savings on looser child-to-staff ratios, the reduction in mandatory hours of operation, the lower cap on administrative costs, and reduced spending on services like teacher coaching, mental and health services, and home visiting. “They’re assuming that a lot disappears,” Hamm noted.

HHS’s press release claimed, “Nothing in the rule requires Head Start providers to change their current program parameters if they are working for their community.” But given its cost-savings projections, it is clearly anticipating that programs will decide not to offer many services that are currently mandatory. “It feels really disingenuous,” Mauer said. “Programs are going to have to reallocate resources to care for more kids. Things aren’t adding up here.”

“This proposed rule is a mandate to do more with less,” Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) said in a statement to The Nation.

The administration claims in its press release that the rule “restores flexibility to programs to meet local needs.” But Morrison-Frichtl says the existing standards allowed flexibility already. She oversees 54 Head Start grantees across Illinois, and “each one looks different, they reflect their community.” The standards are “not simply red tape,” she said. They “ensure that children are safe, healthy, supported, and prepared to learn.”

“Children should not pay the price of deregulation,” she added.

Last week, The Nation reported on an earlier version of the proposed rule that included a new and troubling change to eligibility that would have shut out a number of immigrants, and potentially children who are American citizens, by only allowing those who have at least one parent who is a citizen, US national, or “qualified alien” to enroll. That restriction doesn’t appear in the proposed rule. Last year, the administration attempted to block immigrants from enrolling in Head Start, a move that a judge put on hold as a lawsuit plays out. On Wednesday, the administration sent an additional new proposed rule to review called “Ensuring Program Integrity for Head Start Programs,” the contents of which aren’t yet public.

What did stay in the proposed rule released on Thursday, however, is a mandate to teach children only in English and not their family languages. That would severely disrupt many Head Start teachers’ work. Morrison-Frichtl recently spoke to a teacher in Illinois, most of whose students are dual-language learners. “She said she would be devastated,” she said. Even on a practical level, Mauer pointed out, how will teachers help children, say, put on all of their snow pants in the winter if the kids speak Spanish but teachers can’t? “It appears that the people writing these rules have not met children,” she said. “This is just not based on the evidence that we know about learning [nor] on the practical realities of how you support kids in the classroom.”

Advocates have warned that some of the rule’s changes may contradict the Head Start Act or other laws, which could leave the proposed rule vulnerable to litigation. There’s a requirement in the statute to provide services to dual-language learners, which Hamm sees as contradicting the English-only instruction requirement, as does the lower cap on administrative spending, she said. In addition, the law’s reauthorization in 2007 stated that the performance standards can’t reduce the quality and scope of services provided. When asked whether it would bring a lawsuit against the proposed or final rule, the American Civil Liberties Union, which brought the lawsuit against the administration’s attempt to block immigrants from enrolling in Head Start, said in a statement to The Nation, “We’re closely reviewing the proposed rule and evaluating all available legal options.”

For its part, the administration disagrees. “Nothing in this proposed rule alters or waives statutory obligations; rather, it aligns regulatory text more closely with governing law,” it said in its press release.

The proposed rule does not represent the administration’s first attack on Head Start. After Project 2025, an agenda crafted by conservative Trump allies to guide the next Republican president, called for eliminating Head Start, a leaked draft of Trump’s first budget called for doing just that. The administration has fired huge numbers of federal Head Start employees and closed regional Head Start offices. It refused to dole out money to programs that Congress had already appropriated, leading some to briefly close. In May, the administration proposed rolling back higher wage and benefit levels for teachers set by the Biden administration.

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“The Trump administration wanted to eliminate Head Start entirely but backed down after outcry from parents, providers, and Congress,” DeLauro said. “Now they seek to hollow out the program through rule-making.”

Democratic Senator Patty Murray agreed. “After Congress and the nation forcefully rejected Trump’s efforts to destroy Head Start, this administration now wants to quietly gut Head Start by eliminating the basic health and safety standards our kids rely on,” she said in a statement, calling it a “travesty.” The rule will be open to public comment for 60 days, and Murray urged parents and teachers to weigh in. “I have seen what happens when enough ordinary people refuse to let something get ripped away from them,” she said.

Morrison-Frichtl and Mauer pointed out that the administration did not talk to program directors or Head Start grantees directly about how it could make running Head Start programs easier. Now they’ll be weighing in after the rule has already been drafted.

“I’m alarmed,” Mauer said. “It’s really demonstrating a profound misunderstanding of the role that the standards have played and are playing in our programs.”

No Hospital Workers for You>

Bill Bramhall — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 08:30:19 EDT

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Don’t Believe the Gadi Eisenkot Hype>

Séamus Malekafzali — Fri, 22 May 2020 05:47:57 EDT

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The former IDF leader is being touted as the “anti-Netanyahu” in Israel’s upcoming elections. But in the ways that matter most, he’s more of the same.

Séamus Malekafzali

Former Israeli army chief of staff Gadi Eizenkot speaks during the launch of the Yashar party’s election campaign in Hod Aharon, Israel on June 30, 2026.

(Jack Guez / AFP via Getty Images)

On October 27, Israel will hold its first legislative elections since the start of the war against Gaza and the wider regional conflict it has sparked. Despite this having been the first time since 1988 that an Israeli government has served out its full term, a sign that in any other state would be taken as a signal of sustainability, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in trouble.

Already Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, having served for nearly 19 years out of the last 30, the 76-year-old leader of Likud is gunning for another term in office. This, despite a widely publicized bribery trial against him and his wife, unending controversy over the issue of conscription of the Haredim into the military, and a war with Iran that remains without an end in sight and has left its greatest adversary in control of arguably the world’s most important waterway. (The genocide and subjugation of Palestinians, something supported by Jewish Israelis across the spectrum, is not one of the major political problems Netanyahu is contending with.)

Many politicians, such as former prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, and longtime former minister Avigdor Lieberman, are looking to succeed Netanyahu, to dispense with his legacy, and to bring Israel back into the good graces of the world. But for an increasing segment of the anti-Netanyahu crowd, there is one truly formidable candidate emerging to take his place: former Chief of the General Staff of the Israel Defense Forces Gadi Eisenkot.

Eisenkot’s party Yashar (Hebrew for “Honest”) has skyrocketed in the polls since April, and is now neck and neck with Likud as the country’s most popular political force. Eisenkot has been sold to the Israeli public as the “complete opposite” of Netanyahu, with commentator Raviv Drucker writing in Haaretz in June, “His honesty, thoroughness and seriousness would be the ultimate remedy for us.”

Some outside Israel are beginning to take notice as well. A recent David Remnick profile of Eisenkot in The New Yorker presents the former IDF leader as the “anti-Bibi” in both “manner and character”—a “humble soldier” fighting for a “Jewish, democratic, progressive, and liberal state.”

Heavily downplayed amid these sanguine thoughts about what kind of leader Eisenkot could be is the issue of the kind of military leader he has already been. While this may be of little concern to the Israelis, to the Arabs who have been on the bombarded side, Eisenkot is primarily known as the architect of the strategy of collective civilian punishment known as the Dahieh Doctrine.

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Before becoming chief of the General Staff, Eisenkot was the leader of the IDF’s Operations Directorate during the 2006 Lebanon War, and believed that the only way to effectively achieve deterrence against Hezbollah was to heavily bombard Dahieh, the southern suburbs of Beirut. In a 2008 interview, Eisenkot acknowledged that this policy deliberately used disproportionate force against the civilian population, “causing great damage and destruction.” The goal was to make the threat of extraordinary harm to the local population a deterrent against future attacks, and to send a message to other countries that the same could be done to them.

It was not the first time that the IDF had carpet-bombed cities or even aimed to demolish neighborhoods, but Eisenkot worked to bring the doctrine out of the shadows and into mainstream discourse. He succeeded; the Dahieh Doctrine would be utilized again and again with even greater intensity, destroying entire communities that the IDF now declared to be instead “surface-to-surface rocket villages” and “military bases.”

The regional conflict that came in the aftermath of October 7 has seen the Dahieh Doctrine used not only on a massive scale in Gaza, where critical infrastructure and civilian dwellings have been endlessly targeted. It has also been utilized yet again in both Dahieh itself and across Lebanon’s south. Still unsatisfied, calls have emerged from the Israeli right to apply the doctrine to Yemen as well as Iran. During the most recent outbreak of war in Lebanon in March, Eisenkot declared that the “Dahieh Doctrine has never been more relevant…and it must be implemented,” and that the Israeli war that had demolished wide swathes of southern Lebanon had not been powerful enough.

Eisenkot has differentiated himself by arguing for what he deems a much more cautious approach in conflict, an end to the endless wars without objectives that Netanyahu has been engaging in. Eisenkot had advocated against a unilateral strike against Hezbollah early on in the war, arguing that Gaza was supposed to be the primary focus and that Lebanon could wait. Eisenkot has placed particular criticism on Netanyahu’s handling of the war on Iran, saying that its main objectives could have been achieved “in the shadows,” and that overthrowing the Islamic Republic was not possible.

But Eisenkot has still lavished praise on other aspects of the destructive wars Netanyahu’s government has waged, such as unilaterally assassinating Hassan Nasrallah and Ali Khamenei and imposing military dominance over Gaza. In some respects, Eisenkot has gone even further than Netanyahu. He criticized the original ceasefire agreement in Lebanon that still allowed Israel almost total freedom of action, and in March, advocated “maximum force in minimum time,” hoping to cause religious strife in Lebanon by “humiliating” the Shia population by forcing them into Christian areas.

With regards to the Palestinians, Eisenkot has done the minimum in acknowledging Arabs within Israel’s borders are indeed citizens of the state. But he has said he will only accept Arabs into his governing coalition if they support the nature of Israel as a Jewish ethnostate, as well as the forced conscription of Palestinian citizens of Israel, something no Arab party has officially agreed to. Eisenkot has also reiterated his opposition to a Palestinian state and his support for maintaining settlements in the West Bank, opposing full annexation not because it is against international law or morally wrong, but because the new Arab population would endanger the Jewish majority in Israel. When Trump proposed the “Gaza Riviera” plan that would see the entire population expelled, Eisenkot called it a “blessing for Israel,” but only if the national leadership “knows how to make use” of it.

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Eisenkot’s focus, in a dynamic perhaps familiar to Americans, has been on advocating a return to norms and restoring Israel’s international image. Eisenkot may differ from Netanyahu on some domestic matters, but on the issues that are central to Israel’s identity and place in the world—namely, the continuation of apartheid and genocide against Palestinians and constant wars in the Middle East—there is no functional difference between him and his opponent. Instead, he promises only that the execution of the wars he launches, their displacement of populations and annihilation of societies, will simply be done with more thought and long-term planning.

Eisenkot believes that after opening Pandora’s box, he can wrangle Israel back from the brink, easily managing all that has spewed out from within it—that a state bent on subjugating the region can in fact conduct that subjugation with honor, respect, and the approval of the world, if only it tried. With the approval of the domestic liberal commentariat and, if he continues to gain momentum, the inevitable hopeful hearts of Americans looking to fall back in love with Israel, Gadi Eisenkot may attempt to do just that.

The Right-Wing Terrorism Miller and Rubio Conveniently Neglected to Mention at Their DC Summit>

Sasha Abramsky — Fri, 22 May 2020 05:47:57 EDT

Politics / Authoritarian Watch /

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At their July event on “The Resurgence of Political Terrorism,” the secretary of state and the White House deputy chief of staff selectively presented information to malign the left.

Sasha Abramsky

People enter before US Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivers opening remarks during the Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism at the State Department on July 16, 2026, in Washington, DC.

(Finn Gomez / Getty Images)

A couple weeks back, I wrote briefly about the stench of fascism that accompanied efforts by Stephen Miller and Marco Rubio, at the international security conference in Washington, DC, that they strong-armed representatives from dozens of countries from around the world into attending, to whip up a frenzy about left-wing political parties, movements, and individuals.

As I have traveled for the past two weeks around Argentina, a country filled with the ghosts of those who were tortured and disappeared during the 1976–83 dictatorship, the Miller-Rubio double-act has struck an ever-rawer nerve.

Both men gave a master class in selective presentation of information. They zeroed in on a few, admittedly horrifying, examples of recent political violence perpetrated by ideological left-wingers, while neglecting a slew of attacks around the world carried out by those with white nationalist or Christian nationalist worldviews, who were seemingly egged on by Donald Trump and his allies.

There was mention of a 72-year-old Greek woman who was burned to death by “far-left and anarchist actors,” but no mention of the 2011 massacre of more than 70 people, mostly teenagers, killed by far-right terrorist Anders Breivik, whose theory of a Great Replacement destroying Western culture has been all but explicitly embraced by Miller. There was mention of assassination attempts against Trump, but no acknowledgement of the deadly neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville, or at the US Capitol, no mention of the murder of the speaker of the Minnesota House by a right-wing fanatic, no mention of the attempted assassination of Nancy Pelosi’s husband, which the Trumps (senior and junior) subsequently mocked. Nor was there mention of the racist mobs, which many critics argue have been urged on by Elon Musk, that have, in recent months, burned asylum seekers out of their homes in one country after another in Europe. Going further back in time, there was mention of Cold War–era attacks in Europe by the Red Brigade, but no mention of the 85 people killed in a bombing of the Bologna train station in 1980 by Italian neofascists who likely had links to both NATO and the CIA. There was mention of academics and political leaders supposedly giving a nod and a wink to left-wing violence, but no mention of the assassinations, on US streets, of American citizens and undocumented residents by federal agents who have been promised immunity by Trump and others in the top echelons of American leadership.

These speeches were truly malignant, seeking to tar any-and-all-progressives with the vicious, bloody, legacy of some far-left movements from times past and places distant.

Marco Rubio’s cherry-picked reading of history demonstrated his extreme willingness to massage facts to fit a MAGA agenda. “Far-left political terrorism is not a recent-day, modern novelty. It is not a fiction manufactured by conservative politicians. For most of the modern era, it was, in fact, the dominant form of political violence,” he said, conveniently overlooking systemic acts of terror from far-right forces such as, to take the most obvious and extreme example, the Holocaust. “Every one of our friends here from the nations of the Western Hemisphere remember—remember the decades of kidnappings and bombings and assassinations and executions, the violent terror of the Tupamaros, of the Montoneros, of the FARC, of the ELN. You remember the inhuman savagery of Peru’s Shining Path, the Maoist fanatics who massacred the peasant villages of Peru, hacking pregnant women and newborn infants to death with axes and machetes. You remember the tens of thousands of Marxist guerrillas trained to kill in Castro’s terrorist camps.” All true, but no mention of the tens of thousands of people tortured, raped, driven off of ancestral lands, in many instances killed by government troops and right-wing paramilitary death squads in those same countries during those same years.

He continued with a litany of Cold War–era leftist terror attacks in Europe and in the United States, from the Weather Underground to the Red Army, and then made the inevitable pivot: “Today, we face a new wave of this old evil. Here in the United States, the share of left-wing terrorist attacks and plots has risen to levels not seen in decades.” Rubio went on to list a number of statistics to underscore his point about the purported rising levels of left-wing violence, before explaining why these “architects of revolutionary violence” are committing political acts, like attacking pipelines, railroads, and power grids: “They despise the West because the West is great.”

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Stephen Miller, the man most responsible for America’s despicable war on immigrants and for the massively expanded network of immigrant detention camps proliferating across the US, picked up where Rubio left off, conjuring up ever-darker visions of a hate-filled, even physically deformed left. “The leftist is fundamentally motivated by envy, by hatred, by jealousy. The leftist looks at what is beautiful and what is good and what is natural and is filled with envy and hatred. The leftist looks at a perfect family with a perfect life and a perfect job and perfect kids that goes to church every Sunday and is filled with a feeling of inadequacy and jealousy, and they covet. And they turn those emotions ultimately into a desire to subjugate, to oppress, and to inflict pain and suffering.” Once started, Miller simply couldn’t stop. “It’s not a coincidence that when you look at these violent antifa demonstrations and you see any photograph of those who were assembled—to be blunt, not one of the people that is demonstrating looks like a normal person. Not one looks normal. They’re all deformed in some way—in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerism.”

If this hadn’t been one of the most influential people in Washington speaking, one might have been excused for thinking it was the fevered, hallucinogenic, vision of an apocalyptic preacher. “Trust your instincts to all people and across all civilizations. You know what normal is. You know what beautiful is. You know what good is. You know that families are right. You know that children are precious and beautiful and must be protected. You know that the criminal and the junkie and the predator is a threat to normal, healthy living.”

Online, there were all the predictable jokes about how these dictatorial, ironfisted speeches sounded so much better in the original German. But having spent much of a day last week at the devastating Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Buenos Aires, in the naval-barracks-cum-torture-chamber-cum-execution-center through which thousands of designated enemies of the state were processed before being liquidated, I fear that the jokesters got the language wrong. What Miller and Rubio were arguing for was an all-encompassing domestic counterinsurgency strategy taken straight out of the US-sponsored School of the Americas playbook from the dirtiest days of the Cold War, a playbook that reached its logical, most savage, endpoint with the dictatorships of Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s; the wholesale kidnapping and disappearance of left-wing “terrorists”; and, at the urging of Chile’s Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the creation of an international assassination syndicate under Operation Condor, by which the juntas of the region shared out their assassination dirty work with each other, as Peter Kornbluh recently wrote about in devastating detail in The Nation.

By this logic, Miller and Rubio’s chilling, dehumanizing words would have sounded far better in the original Spanish—the clipped, military Spanish used by junta leaders to justify their brutality: kidnapping people off of city streets and out of their homes; subjecting them to unendurable pain and torture at concentration camp–like sites such as the Naval Academy on a main avenue in Buenos Aires—in the basement of which, where victims were electroshocked, beaten, and otherwise subjected to unendurable pain, one can still see the rust-colored stains of old blood on the marble floors; used to rationalize the drugging of these victims once they had been tortured into spilling every bean they could spill, before they were thrown out of airplanes into the ocean below; used to declare entire political movements and parties to be terroristic and thus to justify hurling the full, unaccountable, force of the state against their members.

Miller and Rubio’s words were redolent of those spoken and written in Spanish a half century ago to explain away the kidnapping of the children of the disappeared so that they could then be adopted by good, solid, “normal” Christian family-values types in the military and business elites. They contained echoes of the rhetoric used to defend Western civilization against the Marxist barbarian political hordes clamoring at the gates; the Spanish used by the ironfisted and jackbooted caudillos and their oligarchic pals to denounce homegrown academics, human rights advocates, and economic justice campaigners who dared to dream of a slightly fairer, kinder, gentler world.

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Even today, 50 years after the first spate of disappearances under the Argentinian dictatorship, surviving family members still demonstrate in the Plaza de Mayo, the political heart of Buenos Aires adjacent to the Casa Rosada, the presidential palace. Originally, the mothers who came out to protest every Thursday afternoon, at a time when protesting could all too easily result in one’s death, wore white cloth diapers folded as headscarves to symbolize their missing children. These days most of the original mothers, the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, are long dead—though a handful, now in their 90s and beyond, still show up in wheelchairs each Thursday. It is through their decades-long movement that the memory of the disappeared has been kept alive. It is in tribute to them that in working-class neighborhoods such as La Boca huge murals paint the stories of those disappeared victims. It is through their insistence on accountability that, after the dictatorship ended, and despite the best attempts of the political leadership to enforce an amnesty that would forgive-and-forget the torturers and executioners—and, more importantly, those who ordered the torture and the executions—many of these ironfist acolytes were tried and sentenced for their crimes against humanity.

The Madres’ protest movement is brave, magnificent. It speaks to what ordinary people can do even in the most extreme of circumstances. And it speaks to the need to always call the powerful to account, even when those powerful nebulously claim to be acting to defend civilization against the so-called left-wing barbarians who would, they confidently tell the world, burn it all to the ground.

Texas’s DNA Doesn’t Run As Red as the Right Wants You to Think>

Lajward Zahra — Fri, 22 May 2020 05:47:57 EDT

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David Griscom’s new book “The Myth of Red Texas” undoes the idea of Texas as a place with conservatism inherent to its political bloodline.

Lajward Zahra

A scene from the film The Rare Breed showing James Stewart cutting a barbed-wire fence in 1880s Texas.

(Universal Pictures / Getty Images)

David Griscom is a sixth-generation Texan, political commentator, and host of The Jacobin Show, a weekly political analysis broadcast. In his new book, The Myth of Red Texas: Cowboys, Populism, and Class War in the Radical South, he undoes the idea of Texas as a place with conservatism inherent to its political bloodline.

I have lived in Texas for almost my entire life, and the El Pasoans and Houstonians I have known do not easily surrender to the conservative oil-and-cattle caricature of Texas.

Griscom breaks past exactly that caricature. The book recovers a Texas whose radical past speaks directly to what still feels possible here: one filled with striking cowboys, tenant farmers, fence cutters, socialists, and Populists fighting landowners, debt, and corporate power. I sat down with him to talk about that political inheritance and what it means to remember it now, as Texas heads into a statewide Senate race in which James Talarico is trying to prove that politics for working people can actually win here.

—Lajward Zahra

Lajward Zahra: One of the first histories you return to is the Fence Cutting Wars of the 1880s, when landless cattlemen cut through the barbed-wire fences that large ranchers erected to control open-range pastures. What made you want to begin with these disputes? Were you imagining the book mainly for Texans, as a way of offering them a different political legacy, or also for the rest of the country?

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David Griscom: The book really started when I began researching the story of the fence cutters a few years ago for Jacobin. The way that story is often presented in Texas history is as a story of how law and order came to Texas. But if you are a sixth-generation Texan, you are much more likely to be related to a fence cutter than to the Texas Rangers who put down that revolt.

That is really where the idea started. Both with this book and with my other work on Left Reckoning, I have wanted to encourage people to look into the radical history of the United States. A lot of the other work I have done has been around places like Louisiana and Arkansas, and they also have these very rich traditions that I think are either purposefully hidden or just understudied.

I think it is a two-way street. The right has a very active political movement trying to deny and discredit these moments. I think that on the left, while we are very good at debunking the myths of the right, we sometimes forget that it is also important to root ourselves in a tradition of resistance to dominant power.

LZ: In 1883, cowboys in the Texas Panhandle went on strike against large ranches, demanding higher wages at a moment when corporate owners were tightening control over cattle work. The usual version of the story is that the cowboys lost, but you write that the strike still set a new wage standard and showed that solidarity was there from the beginning of Texas’s cattle economy. What changes when we remember cowboys not as symbols of rugged individualism or as figures placed next to the Rangers, but as workers with shared material interests who organized against cattle barons?

DG: The history of the cowboy strike is really fascinating. Every year around May Day, some newspaper writer will write a quick essay about the cowboy strike, and the story usually goes, “Oh, this is interesting, but the cowboys all got drunk in the saloon and lost the strike.”

I am indebted to Mark Lause for [debunking this narrative] in his book on the cowboy strike for Verso. It is fascinating to go back and see the cliché in action—how the victor writes history. Almost all the records of the strike are taken either directly from spokespeople for the major ranches or from the memoirs of the daughters or grandsons of ranchers. A certain version of the story was presented, and that was the version a lot of Texas historians in the first half of the 20th century were looking at. It became one of those things that gets repeated enough that most people do not go back and look at the original government documents or the sourcing.

As I write in the book, the strike not only happened, but was incredibly successful because of the strategic and deeply wise decision by the cowboys to strike strategically when they were needed for the spring roundup.

I think this myth is especially important for them to uphold. I respond in the book to a writer who basically denies the history of the cowboy strike through a very cultural lens, as if cowboys are individualistic and the West is where solidarity goes to die. But if you look at the actual work of cowboying, it was very communal. These workers understood that they were part of a class, and that they were on the opposite side of the big landowners.

It is important to reclaim that history because the right is trying to define Texans and Texan-ness in a very particular way. We need our own version, but not only as a debunking of the right. We also need to be able to say that we have cowboys and workers throughout our history who we can look toward as models.

LZ: Populism is in the title of, and woven throughout, the book. Today, the term “populist” is often used as a pejorative, denoting the crude, reactionary, or anti-intellectual. What do we overlook when we talk about rural populism with condescension, rather than as a tradition of class consciousness and self-respect? And how does that complicate the way rural populism is discussed today, when the word is often treated as almost synonymous with Donald Trump and right-wing grievance?

DG: At the end of the day, I think it is a fight for dignity. “Populism” is probably one of the most abused terms in American politics today. It usually means a rhetorical style of us-versus-them. And do not get me wrong, the Populists certainly used that kind of style. But when they invoked “the people,” everybody knew exactly who the people were.

One thing that has been lost in the historical record is that when people hear “populism,” they think of people using fiery, inspirational language with a clear enemy. But they also had very specific plans for how they were going to improve people’s lives.

This idea that populism is just about rallying around a demagogue is something that actually existing Texas populism disproves. After Thomas Lewis Nugent, the great leader of the Texas Populist movement, died, the movement achieved some of its most meaningful results under a completely different leader. Usually, movements like that struggle with any transfer of power or leadership. But Texas populism did something different.

That is because this was not a top-down movement. It was very much grassroots. It came out of the Southern Farmers Alliance, labor, and all these economic organizations of everyday people. That was the source of American populism, and of Texas populism in particular.

I think there is a lot to learn from it. It discredits the idea of populism as a top-down movement, and it also helps us think about how to build something like that again today.

Rural America is suffering. If we can look at the major crises people are experiencing in rural America, organize people around those economic conditions, and then bring that into politics, that is very different from making a political argument after the fact about how supporting this or that politician will improve their lives.

What made populism stick was that everyone in the community was participating in it. They were investigating the problems themselves, so when they made political demands, they understood that those demands were in their own best interest. That is very different from the top-down approaches, like you see with Donald Trump, that people mislabel as populist today.

LZ: If Texas populism was rooted in farmers’ alliances, labor organizations, radical newspapers, traveling lecturers, and communities studying their own conditions, what happened to it? How did a movement with such a robust social base get buried so deeply that Texans are surprised to hear this history at all?

DG: I think a few things happened. The Democratic Party made itself hostile to the Populist movement, but the Populists’ power came from the fact that they had an organized working-class movement of farmers and laborers behind them. When they threatened to create a schism and leave for another political movement, they actually had a social base as leverage. We do not have that in the same way today.

Race was also central. There were real efforts to bring Black Texans into the Populist movement, and Black labor leaders helped accelerate its success. That threatened the ruling class in Texas. In Grimes County, a white Populist sheriff appointed Black deputies, provoking white supremacists in the community to organize a “white man’s union” to take power back. More broadly, the implementation of Jim Crow and the restriction of the vote in Texas, which also targeted poor whites, was a direct response to the success of the Populists.

That is important to remember because these movements were not put down because they were unpopular or because people thought they were not Texan. They were met with white supremacist backlash, voter suppression, violence, and electoral fraud. Later, the right in Texas built a whole project around presenting a very specific view of who Texans are.

LZ: I want to go back to what you call the “California hypothesis,” the idea that Texas’s problems can be blamed on liberal newcomers from California, who supposedly bring Democratic politics with them and threaten the state’s conservative identity. You connect that story to the long Democratic electoral drought in Texas. But one of the paradoxes you point to is that many Republican voters in Texas are themselves recent arrivals, while native-born Texans are often less uniformly conservative than the myth suggests.

What does that reveal about Texas politics now, and about the way ideas of who counts as “really Texan” get used politically?

DG: I come from Austin, and you will see bumper stickers that say things like “Don’t LA My Austin” or “Don’t California My Texas.” I have seen them in Lockhart, too, where they say, “Don’t Austin My Lockhart.”

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There is a lot of anxiety in Texas about what is happening to the culture of the state. That mixes with the fact that Texas is becoming more unaffordable. People are having a harder and harder time staying in their communities. Beloved businesses, restaurants, and activities are closing. I think that is a direct result of Republican mismanagement of the state, which has been a boon for the wealthiest Texans and very difficult for everyday Texans. Texas continues to lead the country in some of the most humiliating and devastating poverty statistics, particularly for young people and women.

The California hypothesis is a perfect way for Republicans to do what they are good at, which is culture war. They are able to speak to that anxiety: “Texas is changing, and I feel like I cannot afford it.” But instead of pointing the finger at Republican economic policies, they turn it into a cultural argument. They say Californians have come in and pushed all of this.

But the idea that Californians are moving to Texas and becoming Democratic voters is not accurate to the data we have. The original Republican takeover of Texas was built, in part, on recruiting Republicans who were moving here because of corporate relocation. Today, Texas is seeing a massive influx of people from outside the state who often move to cities like Austin, Dallas, or Houston, which are run by Democrats, but many of them are Republican voters.

In 2018, if the vote had been restricted to native-born Texans, Beto O’Rourke would have won the Senate seat. These new voters are very important to the Republican Party.

That is another part of the California hypothesis that is interesting to me. For people coming here who do not have deep roots in the state, the best way to become a “true Texan” is to vote for the Republican Party. If Texas means conservative politics, then you can become Texan by supporting conservative politics. It works on many levels for them, and I would argue that it is fairly effective.

You can see this in the way people are surprised by this book and this history. That surprise is the product of a long right-wing project to present a very specific view of Texas. One quick example is Dan Patrick, who is from Maryland and is now the lieutenant governor of one of the largest economies in the world. He regularly attacks the Alamo Museum for its programming, to the point of getting leaders at the Alamo fired over museum programming. It is amazing to watch someone in that position get so worked up over whether the Alamo mentions Native Americans.

The Anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Have Special Meaning in a World Out of Control>

William D. Hartung,Mari Faines — Fri, 22 May 2020 05:47:57 EDT

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As the last US-Russia nuclear arms control treaty expires, the anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki carry renewed urgency for a world edging toward a new arms race.

William D. Hartung and Mari Faines

Demonstrators displaying signs in German, French, English, and Russian near a future rocket range in Bavaria, Germany, 1961.(Lindlar / AP Photo)

This August marks yet another anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but 2026 carries a special weight—for the first time since the Cold War, the United States has no active nuclear arms control treaty with Russia, following the expiration of the New START nuclear arms reduction agreement.

Over 80 years ago, the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The uranium bomb detonated over Hiroshima on August 6 destroyed an estimated 70 percent of the city’s buildings and roughly 140,000 lost their lives. Less than five days later, a plutonium bomb was dropped on the nearby city of Nagasaki, killing an additional 74,000 people, triggering radioactive rain, and driving ground temperatures above 4,000°C. In the years and decades that followed, the few survivors who lived faced immense health complications including leukemia, cancer, deformities, and other devastating health impacts from radiation—impacts those communities are still living with today.

New START itself can be traced back to the Soviet era, when the United States and Russia first launched the SALT negotiations that eventually produced the Treaty on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms: a heralded treaty, that went through multiple iterations, that many subsequently considered the last bastion constraining a renewed global nuclear arms race. That treaty expired on February 5, 2026.

In addition to the dangerous dismantling of the modest controls on nuclear escalation that had existed for decades, there has been a systematic effort to erase the devastation of the communities that have been hurt most by the development, production, and testing of nuclear weapons from our memories, and our history books. The combination of an absence of guardrails and an attempt to induce historical amnesia about the true human costs of developing and maintaining vast nuclear arsenals is a volatile mix that increases the risks that nuclear weapons might be used again, despite the lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The story of nuclear weapons is more than just the story of scientists working away in secrecy at Los Alamos, or leaders wielding nuclear threats—and, in the case of the Cuban missile crisis, bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war. It is the story of devastation, disease, and death caused by the development and deployment of those weapons, even if they are never used again in warfare. The deadly consequences of nuclear development have fallen most heavily on communities of color, from the dire health consequences of mining uranium in the Congo and the American Southwest, to the generational cancers in communities downwind from nuclear tests, from the Marshall Islands to the American West; communities of color have been disproportionately affected by nuclear testing and warfare.

These consequences did not start with the bombings in Hiroshima or Nagasaki. The testing caused a reckoning that also reached into the scientific community itself, made famous by Robert Oppenheimer’s words after the Trinity test, when he said the world would not be the same, and later invoked the line “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Historians still debate the racialized dimensions of why the bomb was used on Japan; questions of who counts as human, who is deemed worthy of safety, and how ideas of supremacy shape militarization remain unresolved eight decades later. That choice—its weight—also strained the diplomatic relationship between the United States and Japan, raising a question that still lingers: How does a nation set norms it did not itself follow?

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The stories of the civilian victims of nuclear arms racing are increasingly at risk of being rewritten, sanitized, or erased from official histories altogether. The risks posed by the lack of arms control measures and the concerted effort to whitewash the dangers of possessing nuclear weapons, as well as the catastrophe that would come from using them, make nuclear use at some future date more likely. With no treaty framework in place, active global conflicts like the runaway wars in the Middle East and the ongoing war in Ukraine, and coordinated efforts to erase the history of nuclear dangers, we need to treat this anniversary as more than a commemoration or an expression of regret. We need to treat it as a turning point for humanity.

We need not just a moment of mourning but a call to chart a new path forward that recognizes the dreadful toll nuclear weapons have imposed, and takes fundamental steps toward reducing nuclear dangers once and for all. As the US has reached its 250th birthday, it is long past time for some truth-telling about communities harmed by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and about countries all over the world harmed by nuclear weapons.

Abdul El-Sayed’s Win Is a Landmark. But the Fight Is Far From Over.>

Iman Abid — Fri, 22 May 2020 05:47:57 EDT

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Even though the Palestine movement is on the march, we can’t afford any complacency.

Iman Abid

Abdul El-Sayed speaks at an election night watch party in Detroit, Michigan, on August 4, 2026.

(Andrew Roth / Sipa USA via AP)

Abdul El-Sayed’s Democratic primary win in Michigan is a watershed moment for the Palestine movement in the United States. El-Sayed ran on a platform that consistently centered Palestinian humanity and an end to US military funding to Israel—principled positions that his opponents viciously attacked him for. He faced over $60 million in outside spending for his chief rival, Haley Stevens—including around $30 million from AIPAC alone—and he triumphed.

Polling had predicted that El-Sayed would sweep the race by a wide margin; in the end, he won by under a percentage point. This is a reminder that challenging the status quo is an uphill battle, particularly when the stakes are as high as they are in the Michigan Senate race, and that the unprecedented levels of money our opponents are pouring into these campaigns are a serious threat. So we cannot let up.

We have to keep organizing and turning out our communities to vote in November. Luckily, our movement has shown that we know how to do that. This year, USCPR Action, the political arm of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, where I am the political director, endorsed our first slate of 16 federal and local candidates, each of whom committed to reject AIPAC and end US military funding to Israel. As of this writing, 14 of those candidates have gone through their primary elections—and 11 of them have won. From New York to Pennsylvania to Texas to Michigan, pro-Palestine candidates like Chris Rabb, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Dr. Adam Hamawy have broken new ground for our movement.

If you had told me that this is what the 2026 midterm cycle would look like in October 2023, I wouldn’t have believed you. If you had told me an Egyptian Muslim Michigander running on a pro-Palestine platform would be the Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan, I’d be in even more disbelief.

None of these wins would be possible without the relentless grassroots activism for Palestinian liberation over the past few years—and that work hasn’t been easy, to say the least. After October 7, 2023, Congress, which was already in AIPAC’s choke hold, became even more vehemently supportive of Israel and its genocide against the Palestinian people. In the immediate aftermath, senior Democrats like Chuck Schumer, Jacky Rosen, and Mark Kelly visited Israel. President Joe Biden refused to condemn any of Israel’s heinous massacres of Palestinians in Gaza, and instead gave Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a bear hug and an unrestricted supply of weaponry.

Congressional Democrats spent most of 2023 and ’24 coming up with new ways to justify genocide and attacking their colleagues who were courageous enough to remind them that Palestinian lives are precious. Rashida Tlaib was censured by the House, with 22 Democrats joining Republicans to rebuke her for daring to speak for her people as the only Palestinian member of Congress. Cori Bush introduced the Ceasefire Now resolution with only 13 cosponsors, facing similar accusations as Tlaib. Things in the Senate were even more dismal; even the most progressive senators like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren had to be pressured by their staff and alumni to support a ceasefire in Gaza.

I watched all of these events unfold through my many identities: as a Palestinian American, a new mother, and my work at USCPR. In between trying to organize protests to push members of Congress to support a ceasefire, I watched the mass murder of my people livestreamed hour after hour, day after day. I will never forget the press conferences held by Palestinian children, or the days in which Dr. Ghassan Abu Sitta stood over the dead bodies of people whom he and so many others had tried to save. Instead of blocking the bombs used to commit these heinous crimes, members of my own government tried to silence and criminalize our movement.

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While I had one foot in navigating establishment politics, my other foot (and my whole heart) were with the grassroots activists fighting courageously for my people. These ordinary people sacrificed their jobs, degrees, and, in some cases, their freedom to end the genocide. Student organizers occupied their campuses to end their university’s investments in Israel. Union dockworkers refused to load ships that carried weapons supplies for Israel. Flotilla activists risked their lives trying to carry aid to Gaza. People confronted their elected officials, protested in mass actions across the country, and participated in boycotts and other BDS tactics.

My organization worked closely with this wave of new activists. We did rapid-response and skills trainings to channel their righteous anger into political action. We supported the launch of legislation like the Block the Bombs Act, which has reached 81 cosponsors as more congressional Democrats wake up to reality. We launched initiatives like Not My Tax Dollars to expose how American taxpayers’ money fuels genocide instead of funding care for our communities—a framing that is now widely used by progressive candidates like El-Sayed and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

This message deeply resonates with American voters who cannot reconcile paying $5 a gallon for gas and $6 for a loaf of bread while the US government spends $12 billion to arm and bankroll Israel. Voters want healthcare, affordability, and childcare at home—not money directed toward Israel’s murder of families in Palestine, Lebanon, and Iran. Nor do they want foreign influence in elections or dark money buying political seats.

The Democratic establishment often tries to frame the issue of Palestine as unrelated to domestic concerns. But voters clearly understand that all of our lives are connected. This was clear in Michigan; as a Detroit community leader and soccer coach told Haley Stevens, “It’s not a candidate issue, it’s a human rights issue.… those 6-year-olds that I coach here, they’re just as precious as the 6-year-olds in Palestine.” Maybe this is why support for Israel is at a historic low in the US, as 68 percent of Democratic voters recognize that Israel is committing genocide.

A new theory of change in American politics has emerged, as AIPAC’s influence is dying, and unapologetic support of Palestinian liberation is proven to win again and again. Taking a cent of AIPAC money has become a political liability.

As Abdul El-Sayed eloquently said, “This is a moral Rorschach test. If you can’t identify the systematic murder of tens of thousands of kids as a genocide and then you wanna say you’re a fighter for human rights and dignity, that’s just hypocrisy.”

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The grassroots activism that has changed the American political landscape needs to keep doing what we do best. We cannot back down just because the political status quo has begun to crumble before our eyes. El-Sayed will need help from all of us to win in November. AIPAC has already said they will oppose him, meaning their misinformation machine will be on overdrive. All of this is preparation for the 2028 presidential election, where it will take our collective activism to make sure that Palestine is a litmus test for Democratic candidates, and a moral compass to guide voter decisions. We will need our legions of grassroots activists to keep reminding them that moral ambiguity on Palestine is no longer acceptable.

Palestinian activists often say that our collective liberation is intertwined, and that none of us will be truly free until Palestine is free. I believe that, and I want us to usher in a new politics rooted in humanism and collective liberation. One that is refreshingly honest and aspirational about who we could be collectively, if we were free of ethnonationalist, corporatist, and antidemocratic influences, and if our government funded care for our communities instead of killing.

Will El-Sayed’s Centrist Opponents “Vote Blue No Matter Who”?>

Aaron Regunberg — Fri, 22 May 2020 05:47:57 EDT

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It’s time for the Democratic establishment to take its own medicine.

Aaron Regunberg

Democratic Senate primary winner Abdul El-Sayed and Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow on August 5, 2026, in Detroit, Michigan

(Finn Gomez / Getty Images)

Call it a sweep. On Tuesday, progressives ran the table in the Michigan Democratic primary, with Donovan McKinney, Will Lawrence, and Abdul El-Sayed each dispatching their corporate-backed opponents despite a barrage of dark-money-funded attack ads against them—including $70 million spent against El-Sayed, whose campaign overcame an 11-to-one spending disadvantage to secure his remarkable victory.

The big question, now, is whether the Democratic establishment that opposed these candidates so vehemently in the primary will rally around the nominees their voters elected—particularly El-Sayed, whose race is a must-win for Democrats if they are going to take back the Senate.

Fortunately, a number of major party leaders have already announced their endorsement of El-Sayed. Representative Haley Stevens released a classy concession statement saying she is “proud to offer” her support in the general election against Mike Rogers. Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who backed Stevens in the primary, also endorsed El-Sayed, saying, “We’re all united by our shared goal of getting things done for the people in Michigan.” Kamala Harris sent out a fundraising e-mail for him. And the machinery of the party is kicking into gear—the Democrats’ Senate Majority PAC has already put out a genuinely moving ad for El-Sayed, set to Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing.”

This shows how far the center of gravity in the party has shifted—and quickly. After all, it was only last year when a number of centrist leaders, including Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, refused to endorse Zohran Mamdani after Democratic voters in New York City decisively chose him as their mayoral nominee. Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand even went on to falsely claim that Mamdani supported “global jihad,” a message echoed by Democratic Representatives Tom Suozzi and Laura Gillen. Today, of course, Mamdani is one of the most popular Democrats in the country.

And yet, despite all this progress, it’s clear that we still have a long way to go until the left flank of the Democratic Party is broadly accepted as a legitimate, equal partner—and potentially a future senior partner—in the Democratic coalition, as evidenced by the significant array of party leaders who have not been so forthcoming in their support for the newly minted Michigan Senate nominee.

When asked, prior to Tuesday, if she would back the Muslim-American El-Sayed if he won the primary, Michigan Democratic Representative Hillary Scholten said, “I will not stand beside someone who has allowed distinctly anti-American sentiment to enter our public dialogue.” Since then, she’s refused to respond to a request about whether she would be endorsing him. Michael LaRosa, who served as press secretary for first lady Jill Biden and special assistant to President Joe Biden, went further. “If [El-Sayed] wins, I will do everything I can to make sure he loses,” he posted before the primary, a position he’s doubled down on since. Other right-leaning Democratic influencers have shared similar sentiments. Then there’s Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress—ostensibly the leading establishment think tank of the Democratic Party—who spent the last month relentlessly attacking El-Sayed on social media. So far, she has not changed her tune, offering no public statements of support for the Democratic nominee—just a bunch of posts implying that he lacks backing from the working class. Meanwhile the corporatist think tank Third Way responded to El-Sayed’s win not with a call to unify against the MAGA right but with the announcement of a $15 million campaign to “discredit” democratic socialism, despite concerns, as The New York Times put it, of “potentially undercutting Democratic nominees in swing-state races and undermining the party’s chances of retaking Congress.”

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This refusal—whether real or threatened—to, in centrist parlance, “Vote Blue No Matter Who,” is particularly ironic given that it’s the very crime many of these same establishment figures spent months accusing El-Sayed of committing. The difference is that, in contrast to today’s centrist threats, El-Sayed never betrayed the Democratic Party. The attacks from the right focused on El-Sayed’s support of the Uncommitted movement, an attempt to push Biden on his disastrous Gaza policy during the 2024 primaries—and only during the primaries. As Waleed Shahid, an Uncommitted organizer, explained, “We weren’t trying to blow up the coalition. We were trying to keep it alive.” Indeed, El-Sayed endorsed Kamala Harris the morning after she launched her 2024 campaign.

It seems, then, that we will soon see what counts as a greater betrayal among certain members of the Democratic establishment: using your primary vote to try to persuade a presumptive Democratic nominee to change course on an issue that was (empirically) an electoral catastrophe, or actively undermining the general election campaign of your party’s confirmed nominee in a must-win battleground seat.

Just the fact that this is a question demonstrates the hypocrisy behind some centrists’ past evocation of “Vote Blue No Matter Who,” a line that’s long been used to discipline progressives. What made those admonitions so galling was that progressive Democrats have been overwhelmingly voting blue no matter who, election after election. A higher percentage of Bernie’s voters backed Hillary Clinton in 2016 than Clinton’s supporters in the 2008 presidential primary backed Barack Obama’s general election campaign. The same is true of the 2020 election, when progressives aggressively rallied behind Biden, and the 2024 election, when they did the same for Harris (as I can attest to firsthand, as one of the organizers of the “Progressives for Harris” effort).

The truth is, it’s very easy to say “Vote Blue No Matter Who” when that means voting for your own worldview and interests. It’s a lot harder when it requires supporting someone who is on the opposite side of issues that are deeply important to you. Progressives spend their entire lives swallowing their feelings to do the latter and still get attacked by the establishment for disloyalty. But the moment this dynamic flips—as occurred in Michigan this week, thanks to an array of superior candidates running superior campaigns with a superior capacity to meet this moment—key members of the centrist establishment have shown that their loyalty is not to the Democratic Party but to their side’s control of the party.

Hopefully, this time around, these figures will choose to act with more grace. Hopefully, Democratic elected officials like Scholten will put aside their factional grievances and join the majority of their party’s voters and leaders in helping Democratic nominees defeat the Republicans rubber-stamping Trump’s authoritarian power grabs. Hopefully, centrists can start taking a page from the most committed base of the Democratic coalition—the progressives who have again and again shifted gears from disappointing primary losses to supporting the Democratic nominees in the general election, the ones they had, at one point, campaigned against. If nothing else, hopefully the “Vote Blue No Matter Who” Democrats can muster the basic wherewithal to actually vote blue no matter who.

America Gets to Choose>

Michael James Schneider — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 08:30:32 EDT

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