"What Happens When You Combine Free Trade, Shrinking Unions, Wall Street Bailouts, Growing Corporate Monopoly Power, and the Abandonment of Campaign Finance Reform?"

"You get an economy favoring the wealthy and a political system favoring the powerful, while workers without college degrees suffer declining real wages and dwindling job security."

Robert Reich at The Guardian says that "[w]e are finally witnessing the decline of corporate Democrats."

"Intense Politicisation, with Neither Institutional Roots nor Ambitions"

"'On the surface,' Jäger writes, 'the Black Lives Matter protests would seem to have little in common with the mob that stormed the Capitol in January 2021. Morally, they are worlds apart … Organisationally, however, these movements exhibit a striking set of similarities: fleeting in duration, they maintain no membership rolls and struggle to impose any real discipline on their adherents.' As a consequence, everything explodes and nothing changes; movements surge suddenly forward and yet no territory is taken. He quotes political theorist Paolo Gerbaudo’s evocative phrase 'bodies without organs'. Modern political movements, he writes, are 'concentrated and muscular, yet without an internal metabolism'."

Zoe Williams at The Guardian talks with Anton Jäger, author of Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences.

"The Reckoning Coming When the MAGA Sleeping Giant Awakens"

"A January New York Times and Siena poll found 65 percent of voters say a middle-class life is simply out of reach, and 77 percent say it’s harder to reach now than it was for their parents. That isn't a 'left' or 'right' number: that's my dad's vanished paycheck and benefits, expressed as despair, across the whole country.

Which is precisely why the morbidly rich oligarchs and their lickspittle politicians, and the billionaire-owned media, work so hard to keep us in these neat little categories and at each others' throats."

Thom Hartmann at Alternet writes that "[t]he instant working people stop asking 'who's the enemy who looks, prays, or loves differently than I do' and start asking 'who took my dad's paycheck,' the whole game is over."

"This Was Supposed to Be a Change Revolution, but Voters Clearly Said No to the Revolution"

"'I think the Democrats' prospects are very bright in 2026 given the California Republicans' dysfunctionality and a complete backlash against Donald Trump,' Adams said. 'But I have much bigger concerns about the California Democrats long term, because it seems to me they're setting a record for most consecutive years of failing to fix the state's problems while getting reelected anyway.'"

Jenny Jarvie at the Los Angeles Times reports reactions to the results of California's primary elections.

And Harold Meyerson at The American Prospect explains "How California Politics Became So Blah."

Broken Eggs Cannot Be Mended

"The American people broke something when they gave Trump a second chance in office. And there is no going back to the Union as it was. If Democrats hope to lead the nation to any kind of recovery, much less renewal, they must understand and internalize this fact of the matter."

Jamelle Bouie at The New York Times argues that "Democrats must have a plan for reconstruction—for building something new on the wreckage of what President Trump, MAGA and the Republican Party have wrought—not for restoration of what was."

"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."

"Pro-Worker, Pro-Family, Pro-America"

"We have no complaints and feel fortunate to have had a place to regularly publish our political and policy ideas since 2020. Hopefully, TLP's insights and arguments made some difference in the Democratic Party's strategic discourse and in wider political debates—or at least got people to look at matters in a different light and reconsider some of their positions."

John Halpin at The Liberal Patriot winds the site down, alongside articles from various writers:

Henry Olsen,

Michael Baharaeen,

Justin Vassallo,

Juan David Rojas, 

and Ruy Teixeira.

"Something More Purposeful and Sinister Than Run-of-the-Mill Greed or Gangsterism"

"The resemblances are too many and too strong to deny. Americans who support liberal democracy need to recognize what we're dealing with in order to cope with it, and to recognize something, one must name it. Trump has revealed himself, and we must name what we see."

Jonathan Rauch at The Atlantic calls Donald Trump a fascist.

The Left Wing of the Possible?

"In recent polls, about 40 percent of Americans say they have a 'positive image' of socialism. A clear majority of people under 30 feel that way. But for most of them the term evokes what Mamdani and other social democrats who have actually managed to win elections try to achieve: a more secure life in a society that narrows class differences without preventing some individuals from becoming rich as long as they create products or services that ordinary people value. Four decades ago, the great social-democratic author Irving Howe described those 'socialists' who managed to gain influence in capitalist countries: 'They engage themselves with the needs of the moment, struggling for betterment in matters large and small, reforms major and modest: They do not sit and wait for the millennium.'"

At The New Republic, Michael Kazin says that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is "not a democratic socialist but a social democrat."

But Ruy Teixeira at The Liberal Patriot offers caution about "The Future of the Left in the 21st Century."

"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."

Sweet Neo Cons

"Today, roughly 70 percent of Americans say they don't believe in the American dream. That loss of faith is like a giant bomb detonated in the middle of our society, robbing us of our central, unifying vision. Absent that shared vision of possibility, people revert to a tribal, us-versus-them morality. If the ghosts of the original neocons have anything to tell us about specific policy choices, it's that we need to do what we can to expand social mobility and restore faith in the American dream."

David Brooks at The Atlantic argues that "[t]he neocons were right."

While Chris Ryan at Tangentially Speaking asks, "Just How Cynical is David Brooks?"

"And Yes, We Now Know, Republican Extremism as We Have Known It Can Become Far Worse"

"So the devil we thought we knew, the man whose saturnine image chilled many a liberal heart during his years in power, pointed at this new devil and suggested new depths of power-hungry mendacity were coming into sight. Perhaps Dick Cheney knowingly lied about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the U.S. invasion in 2003, or perhaps he was self-deluded. And maybe Cheney and George W. Bush swept into office in an election even more disputed than that of 2020. But they relied on the U.S. Supreme Court to consummate their victory, not a mob invading the U.S. Capitol."

Ed Kilgore at New York reacts to the death of Dick Cheney.

"To Produce More Winning Candidates Who Address Voters' Pessimism Head-On"

"This phenomenon might seem distasteful or incomprehensible. Democrats groan, 'How could these so-called moderate voters possibly give the amoral, white-supremacist-coddling, and self-aggrandizing Trump the benefit of the doubt?' It would nevertheless be futile to refute the ways in which it has transformed our politics. The breadth of Trump's 2024 coalition, the increasing scale of the Democrats' regional polarization penalty, and the association of progressivism with a 'woke' left-establishment axis (rather than with the common good and safeguarding the American dream)—these challenges all suggest the rise of the 'moderate' Trump voter is one Democrats must first accept if they are to arrest the MAGA realignment."

Justin Vassallo at The Liberal Patriot describes a rivalry within the Democratic Party between "progressives" and "populists."

While John B. Judis at Compact writes that "The Left's Project Has Just Begun."

The Return of History

"I think that there was excess state regulation and state interference in economies that had developed by the 1970s. And so, you had politicians like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher that tried to roll back some of that regulation. They were supported in this by very prominent economists, like Milton Friedman. The problem was that [they] went too far and attempted to undermine all forms of state activity, even necessary ones, for example, of regulating the financial system. And as a result, we ended up with a globalization that increased inequality and led to substantial instability in the global financial system. And this, of course, provoked a populist backlash that you see both on the left and the right, which partially explains why we are where we are today."

In a 2022 El Pais article, Sergio C. Fanjul interviews Francis Fukuyama.

"A New Generation of Democrats Needs to Recapture This Same Spirit"

"Democrats need to move away from the language of equity, which implies that it would be acceptable to close the racial gaps in health or education by helping members of the disadvantaged racial groups improve while denying any help to lower-income whites. Obama understood this reality instinctively, as he made clear in his 'A More Perfect Union' speech. He called on all Americans to 'realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.' Like the 44th president did, today's Democrats must talk along these lines regularly and weave these concepts into their communication about all kinds of issues, not just on special occasions."

Ian Reifowitz at The Liberal Patriot writes about "How Democrats Lost Obama's Vision of American Identity."

While Bridget Bowman, Ryan Nobles and Frank Thorp V at NBC News write that "Bernie Sanders makes his next moves to reshape the Democratic Party."

"He Is a One-of-a-Kind Grotesque"

"The text and the caption depend for their power upon—indeed they would be totally unintelligible without—Trump's built-in assumption that millions of people would find themselves almost inexpressibly outraged by his naive identification of Cinco de Mayo with all Hispanics, whom he claims to love in some absurd blanket sense—how when he is such an obvious gutter racist?!—and his uncouth assumption that 'taco bowls' are a real food to which superlatives might be applied at all and that the pseudo-salads are a part of Mexican cuisine. (This is probably not an exhaustive list of the number of micro-aggressions or dog whistles implied in this masterpiece of rhetoric.) The atmosphere of knowingly perverse cultural insensitivity—probably the closest thing we have nowadays to the teashop Orientalism of The Mikado—is heightened by the contrast between the high-school cafeteria quality food and the white napkin and silverware, to say nothing of the golf trophies and the view of the Manhattan skyline from the window behind him and his ludicrous grin. This, played with a thousand variations over the half decade or so in which he has been at the center of American public life, is the essential Trumpian conceit: playing a poor person's idea of what being rich is (having real linen!), a woke person's idea of racism (liking déclassé foods), a worker's idea of what a boss is (someone who fires people), and doing so without ever acknowledging the performance to any of the not-always overlapping segments of his audience, who in turn refuse to acknowledge it to one another."

In a 2020 article at The Week, Matthew Walther argues that Donald Trump "is essentially a camp figure."

"Arguably the Most Sartorially Influential Person to Ever Hold the Presidency"

"Whether sailing off the coast of Hyannis Port or hosting a glamorous black-tie dinner at the White House, Kennedy's innate charisma and charm were merely enhanced by the approachable way in which he outfitted himself. 'JFK was almost unaware of clothes being of any great importance,' remarks Deeda Blair, whose husband served as U.S. Ambassador to Denmark during the Kennedy administration. 'He always was well dressed and I would even say distinguished, but effortless and easy—unremarkable ties and I suspect no fussing about pocket squares.'"

Andrew Nodell in a 2017 Women's Wear Daily article discusses President John Kennedy's clothes.

"In the 1935 Telling, Redistribution Was the Mechanism of Abundance"

"Even in those invocations of abundance, the stark differences between the socialist abundance movement of 1935 and the moderate abundance agenda of 2025 are apparent. The concept of 'production for use' is in contrast to the capitalist profit motive. In socialist thought, one of the core issues of a capitalist economy is that profit motives result in wealth accumulation becoming divorced from the creation of actual economic value. A production for use system makes production and allocation decisions based on need (or 'use value'), rather than market prices."

Dylan Gyauch-Lewis at The New Republic describes "An Altogether Different Kind of Abundance Agenda."

"Is It Possible to Imagine a Different Politics"?

"At a time of national division some 57 years ago, Robert Kennedy attracted disparate groups of voters who were otherwise at each other's throats. Today, as we have just come through a set of elections in which many Americans expressed dissatisfaction with their choices, RFK's example points to something more inspiring: a politics that tamps down, rather than sows, racial division; that seeks to treat all Americans with dignity; that crosses political ideologies to seize on the best ideas; and that can instill a deep pride in country. It will be fascinating to watch in the years to come which set of political leaders, if any, will seek to take up his mantle."

At The Liberal Patriot, Richard Kahlenberg and Ruy Teixeira present a "deep dive into the political worldview of Robert F. Kennedy [Sr.]."

To Live Is to Maneuver

"Would Buckley really be so shocked by the growth of populism and illiberal nationalism and a creeping authoritarianism on the right? Surely, those afflictions in the late Obama years were hardly new, or any more daunting than they had been in Buckley's time. The true crisis on the right, I believed, lay in the fact that it no longer had anyone of Buckley's stature to keep the tablets. It still doesn't."

Brian Stewart at The Bulwark reviews Sam Tanenhaus's Buckley: The Live and the Revolution That Changed America.