Social change is seldom either as incremental or predictable as insiders suggest. Instead, movements win by changing the political weather, turning demands considered unrealistic into ones that can no longer be ignored.
Last May, Ireland made history by becoming the first nation to legalize same-sex marriage by popular vote. Will abortion rights—the final stronghold of Catholic morality in the island nation—be next?
The city of Ferguson has reneged on its promises to reform policing practices. Its current standoff with the Justice Department reveals the stubbornness of a municipal system that combines handouts to big corporations with predatory fines for the poor.
The Gulf countries’ migrant labor regime is brutal. But calling it “slavery” obscures what is really a highly modern system of exploitation—and the struggles of workers themselves to change it.
The Democratic elite’s dismissal of the Sanders campaign ultimately reflects a contempt for democratic ideals.
Jane Mayer’s Dark Money is a magisterial portrait of the right-wing billionaires who have “weaponized” conservative philanthropy and pulled the GOP ever further right. Yet Mayer’s account fails to explain something just as alarming: the far-right surge from the grassroots.
Unlike his chief rival Ted Cruz, Donald Trump dismisses the high-church liturgy of American politics in favor of blunt tribalism. In Trump’s America, no one is looking out for you.
In a special audio dispatch, Daniel Aldana Cohen and Kate Aronoff discuss what the COP21 deal will mean for the climate movement in 2016. They hear from activists who were in the streets in Paris, as well as from UNFCCC veteran J. Timmons Roberts, about why we need a wartime-level mobilization today.
“You feel free—you feel this is your business,” says trafficking survivor Judith Daluz of the cleaning cooperative where she is now a worker-owner.
Bernie Sanders’s climate plan offers a welcome alternative to the vagueness of the Paris Agreement. But to win over a broader public, a leftist climate agenda will require a vision of a “just transition” that goes beyond our energy system.
Minneapolis protesters’ call to #ReleasetheTapes exemplifies the movement’s strategic use of symbolic demands to win in the court of public opinion.
In a special symposium, Karen Narefsky and Aaron Tanaka offer two visions for socializing the spaces where we live and work.
In the face of the racism and disinvestment that have hobbled U.S. public housing, the left should not retreat from the concept but reclaim it.
Community land trusts provide a model for a non-capitalist approach to stewarding land—transforming the ways we think not only about property, but about earth and ecology itself.
A selection of key essays on democratic socialism from the Dissent archives.
