From Working Class to Professional Class

"Put these three factors together—the declining effectiveness of the social democratic economic model, the diminution of the social democratic base, and the profound weakening of social democratic influence within the left—and you have the recipe for the long, slow death of social democracy. "

At WelcomeStack, Ruy Teixeria asks, "What was social democracy?"

"Fiscal Capacity and Democratic Capacity Are Mutually Constitutive"

"Throughout American history, conflicts over taxation have reflected enduring struggles over power, citizenship, and the meaning of self-government. Progressive reformers have deployed the taxing power not merely to raise revenue, but to sustain democratic ideals such as representation, accountability, equality and civic participation. Tax protestors, by contrast, have often challenged both the reach of the state and the use of tax revenues to fund particular public goods and services. By recovering this long history, Williamson compels us to take seriously the wisdom captured in the IRS building's epigraph and Justice Holmes's statement.  If taxes are indeed the price we pay for a civilized society, Williamson's sweeping history shows that they are also the price we pay to build, sustain, and constantly redefine democracy."

Ajay K. Mehrotra of The Society for U.S. Intellectual History reviews Vanessa Williamson's The Price of Democracy: The Revolutionary Power of Taxation in American History.

"One of America's Great Critics of Plutocracy"

"Eugene Debs was, as the abolitionist Horace Greeley once referred to Abe Lincoln, a 'growing man.' More than previous biographers, Gude illuminates the ways Debs never stopped learning, sharpening his socialist perspective, or recalibrating and expanding his conception of solidarity. From hard compromises within the ARU to his cofounding of the IWW to pondering the formation of an 'American Labor Party,' Debs pursued a never-ending quest of how best to empower workers and win socialism."

Matthew E. Stanley at Jacobin reviews Shawn Gude's American Socialist: The Life and Legacy of Eugene V. Debs.

"A Document of Our Times"

"In the latest film, we learn that Symon and his wife became foster parents, not just once or twice but, over the decades, to a staggering 130 children. As Symon said of his own children when he was 28, 'They've got everything. They've got a father.' The animating premise of each of the Up films was the old Jesuit saying: 'Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man.' There turns out to be great truth in that, a truth far more profound than the political point the film-makers first set out to prove."

Jonathan Freedland at The Guardian marks the debut of 70 Up.

"On This Anniversary, We Should Not Forget This"

"And so, on this twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11, older people need to be reminded of—and younger readers told for perhaps the first time—how the Republican Party of that era used that tragedy to impose its worldview on a confused and malleable populace and to browbeat the political opposition (and how, tragically, said opposition largely complied in ways that resonate loudly today). Superficial reminiscences published this week will bemoan the 'fact' that we were a country united then, and look how far we've fallen. It sounds soothing. But nothing could be further from the more forensically examined truth."

Michael Tomasky at The New Republic recalls 9/11.

"So Much Fantasizing That Was Meant to Provoke Horror Now Seems to Be Regarded as a Wellspring of Good Ideas"

"This misreading, and the yearning it reveals, would be amusing if it didn't have such potentially dire consequences, fueling the minds of the people with the most resources and power to turn, as Lepore puts it, 'a science-fiction dystopia into a fully functioning infrastructure.' What stayed with the Silicon Valley magnates was the idea of abandoning our bodies and the messiness of other people, leaving behind our finitude for an infinity of stars and self-coding machines. But this is actually a nightmare, a false escape, as the source material hints at without much subtlety. What happens next may depend on whether these boys grow up and finally recognize what they failed to see before."

Gal Beckerman at The Atlantic reviews Jill Lepore's The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State.

"Good Societies Need Good Social Critics; but They Are Not Made of Critics Alone"

"It also leaves a lot out. In any survey text there are inevitable absences. But, for example, A People's History makes virtually no mention of religion—surely an important part of the national experience. It doesn't discuss conservatism in any serious way. Geopolitics is scarce. Zinn's Nye-inflected explanation for World War I, for example, replaces ideology with interests, and assumes them to be the same. If the goal is to understand Woodrow Wilson's thinking about entry into World War I, for example, A People's History is a very poor guide."

Patrick Iber at The New Republic reviews Dave Zirin's The People's Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn.

As does Heath W. Carter at The Atlantic.

Always on the Run Now

"This also began Steinem's career as a provocative journalist, penning articles including If Men Could Menstruate, which ran in Ms, a magazine co-founded by Steinem and Dorothy Pitman Hughes in 1971. The first issue featured Wonder Woman on the cover; the superhero had recently given up her powers to stay with her male love interest, and the essay argued that DC Comics should restore her powers and return the character to her feminist roots. Steinem also wrote articles such as What It Would Be Like If Women Win in Time, and After Black Power, Women's Liberation, the 1969 New York magazine article that would make her name as a feminist leader."

Sian Cain at The Guardian writes an obituary for Gloria Steinem.

"There's a Reason 'Democratic' Is There at the Front of the Label"

"One of the ironies of this is that as terms developed over the first half of the 20th century, 'socialism' (in the sense of socialist parties and so forth) generally became self-identified as socialist over and against the anti-democratic elements of communism which, of course, also claimed the socialist label. Old news for people who know this history but a lot of the most intense anti-communists were socialists, though that can seem odd to those outside these sectarian debates. Indeed, the DSA, which Michael Harrington helped found in 1982, was at the forefront of that element of socialist politics."

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo warns against "[t]his vanguard, Marxist-Leninist revolutionary party claptrap" in the Democratic Socialists of America.

And Joshua Zeitz at The Bulwark asks, "[d]oes the DSA genuinely admire the social-democratic European model?"  

"And They Must See This as Not Three Fights but One"

"Thus will changing the paradigm be the work of many years. Can the Democrats, and the people in their orbit, do it? I think they can. They have popular policies, but they have to remove those policies from their silos and connect them to values and offer people a vision for themselves as individuals and for society at large, a vision that stirs people's souls as Americans. They have to connect their economic ideas to ideals that Americans cherish—democracy and freedom. You can't get much more American than democracy and freedom. They are core to our national project. And they are not separate from economic justice. They are inseparable. It is up to the Democrats to defend all three."

In 2022, The New Republic ran an excerpt from Michael Tomansky's The Middle Out: The Rise of Progressive Economics and a Return to Shared Prosperity.

"Marx in the Twenty-First Century"

"This is not to say that Marx thought that industrialization, mechanization, or globalization were bad things. He was no Luddite. His concern was the disconnect between profits and human need: Much like today's industrial regions, the slums of nineteenth-century Manchester that Marx observed were filled with workers who were exhausted, unhealthy, and miserable while the factory owners dined on beef bourguignon and claret in their mansions. The factories these days just happen to be in Shenzhen or Dhaka, not the other side of town. Unlike the British machine wreckers of a generation before, Marx saw no way to stuff the technological genie back into the bottle. New tools must be utilized for the greatest good: Instead of getting rid of the factories, the public should take ownership of them."

Max Holleran at The New Republic reviews David Harvey's The Story of Capital: What Everyone Should Know About How Capital Works.

"Power All the Way Down"

"Already during his lifetime some scholars complained that, as the historian Lawrence Stone put it, Foucault's 'dominance and control' model 'reduces the actors in history to two, the controllers and the controlled.' In a recent book, 'Left Is Not Woke,' Neiman goes further. For the political left, she argues, Foucault's legacy has been disastrous: a reflexive distrust of Enlightenment ideals—including tolerance, universalism and progress itself—which are viewed as cynical ploys by European states to justify imperialist ambitions. His theory does not allow for a human collective bound by shared values and fighting for the common good, she writes, only for 'a bunch of tribes jockeying for power.'"

At The New York Times, Emily Eakin marks the 100th birthday of Michel Foucault.

And at Slate, Laura Miller reviews Eakin's The Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory.

"If the Study of History Teaches Anything, It Teaches Us the Limitations of Life"

"Professor Wood distilled what he found exceptional in the Revolutionary period in 'The Radicalism of the American Revolution.' 'To base a society on the commonplace behavior of ordinary people,' he wrote, 'may be obvious and understandable to us today, but it was momentously radical in the long sweep of world history up to that time.'"

At The New York Times, David Stout, Alex Traub, and Ash Wu write an obituary for Gordon S. Wood.

And David Waldstreicher at The New Republic writes an appreciation.

"One Reason the Revolution Disappoints Is Because We Assume It Ended Too Soon"

"Yet Richards's final plea is still worth heeding: 'a narrative of the American Revolution that only criticizes is a poor replacement for a narrative that only celebrates.' It may simply be that history books are not the best place to look for this 'usable past,' as historians call it. In many ways, ordinary Americans are already doing that work themselves. You see one version in MAGA's appropriation of Revolutionary symbols, from the 'Don't Tread On Me' flag to the movement's Tea Party roots. But the impulse appears on the left as well. Bernie Sanders frequently invokes the Founders in his fight against oligarchy, even casting his first presidential campaign as part of an ongoing 'political revolution' that 'never ends.' Mainstream liberals, too, seem to have caught the Revolutionary spirit: What is the protest slogan 'No Kings,' after all, if not a reminder that the founding still resonates, and might not be as distant as it seems?"

Eric Herschthal at The New Republic reviews Nathan Perl-Rosenthal's The Long Revolution: Creating a United States after 1776 and Thomas Richards, Jr.'s The Unfinished Business of 1776: Why the American Revolution Never Ended.

"Probably Did More Than Any Organization to Expose the Society's Dark Side to the World"

"No smear campaign, this was an exposé. The covert program ginned up negative press and made the society toxic in the eyes of most Americans. The exposure neutered the ability of violent, conspiratorial, white-supremacist elements associated with the society to win elective office or dominate either the Democratic or the Republican party. And the ADL's campaign forced Birchers to spend time, energy, and resources fending off charges of extremism or bigotry. The incessant public conversation about Birchers as a hate-filled group generated the impression that the organization must be tainted and ought to be shunned."

Matthew Dallek at The Bulwark discusses how the Anti-Defamation League challenged the John Birth Society.

"Lest We Forget the Horrors" Part II

"Now that Trump has returned to office, amid civil rights, humanitarian, economic, and constitutional crises, we felt it critical to make an inventory of this new round of horrors."

As with Donald Trump's first term, the editors of McSweeney's present "An Unending Catalog of Trump’s Cruelties, Collusions, Corruptions, and Crimes."

"What Went Wrong?"

"Some portion of the book's confusion about capitalism, and its author's refusal or inability to stand by its claims about capitalism, is symptomatic and shared. In 2014, Seth Rockman, one of Beckert's colleagues in the new history of capitalism, announced that the field had 'minimal investment in a fixed or theoretical definition of capitalism.' That was a virtue, Rockman claimed, not a vice. If they 'let capitalism float as a placeholder,' scholars would be freed to do 'the empirical work of discovery' and find 'ground-level evidence of a system in operation.' Twelve years—and 1,325 pages—later, free time is over, and judging by the results in hand, scholars of the new history of capitalism have no more sense of a system now than when they began." 

Corey Robin at The Nation reviews Sven Beckert's Capitalism: A Global History.

Let's Dance

"That's what birthed punk rock. Not anarchy but ennui. The energy had to go somewhere. It went into a fast, urgent 'One, two, three, four…'"

Jonathan Eig at AudioPhix marks the fiftieth anniversary of Ramones.

And Simon Price at The Quietus discusses the Ramones' impact in Britain.

"We Continue to Live in the Wake of Mid- to Late-60s Developments"

"It's easy to look back at the Johnson administration, with the benefit of hindsight, and see little possibility for the revitalization of the New Deal coalition. But it's important to remember just what a moment of political sea change the mid-1960s was. With the exit of the Dixiecrats, the Democratic Party was in the midst of a profound transformation wherein its base did substantively shift. That [Bayard] Rustin saw an opening for the civil rights and organized labor coalition to take a driving seat within the party was not that fanciful, yet it was treated that way by a curious number of people on the Left then and still on the Left today. It's worth asking why that was and is. His critics on the Left are fine pillorying Rustin for his comments on anti-war protest tactics. But where are the similar condemnations of the New Left for sitting out the fight for the Freedom Budget for All Americans, arguably the last off-ramp from an imminent neoliberalism?"

Damage Magazine runs Benjamin Y. Fong's introduction to the new book Rustin's Challenge.

"Fascism Is the Banal Dream of Tiny Men and Deserves Its Place in the Sewage of History"

"Self-described socialists have made many mistakes. Some of these have been brutally tragic and ruthlessly genocidal. Authoritarian socialists like Stalin committed mass atrocities that serve as a chilling reminder of the horrors that can be inflicted by those mouthing well meaning platitudes.. But the ethical core of socialism remains inspiring because, in sharp contrast to fascism, it makes far greater demands of us. Socialists want a world where, even if everyone won't be happy, ordinary human misery will replace unnecessary suffering. This is a goal that is so ethically demanding we've yet to fully build a society that realizes it. Despite all the bombast about heroism and power, in the end fascism resonates because it appeals to our lowest instincts. It is so tempting to imagine one's self a dispossessed racial aristocrat, in part because that makes it so much easier to push aside all ethical demands that get in the way of our greed and lust for power. Fascists strive impotently for a bigness the shrunken aspirations of their soul can never reach."

Matt McManus at Current Affairs explains "Why Fascists Always Come for the Socialists First."