Paul Krugman misunderstands the Sanders campaign’s theory of change. It isn’t that a high-minded leader can draw out our best selves and translate those into more humane lawmaking. It is that a campaign for a more equal democracy can build power, in networks of activists and across constituencies.
At its height, the American welfare state provided direct financial support to scores of writers. They used it to challenge the political status quo, revolutionizing literary form in the process.
Bernie Sanders’ surge in recent national polls has brought inevitable comparisons to an insurgent candidate whose enthusiastic young supporters took Hillary Clinton by surprise eight years ago. But Sanders’s campaign is of a very different kind than Obama’s, with deeper potential and a different measure of success.
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.
What was missing from Bernie Sanders’s democratic socialism speech and policy agenda is just as interesting as what was included.
A selection of key essays on democratic socialism from the Dissent archives.
Leftists will never entirely be released from the obligation to engage with the Democratic Party, but the left’s strength, and its power, will always lie outside formal politics.
With a counter-argument from Michael Kazin.
Outside of Cuba, debate around the future of the island hangs on a misleading binary: free-market capitalism or bust. Consistently written out of the picture are Cuba’s democratic socialists—a few of whom I caught up with on a recent trip.
Beyond Zionism and its discontents, Tony Judt’s Jewishness was a vibrant companion of the historian’s aspiring cosmopolitanism.
Karl Polanyi, whose ideas took form in 1920s Vienna in direct opposition to the free-market orthodoxy of Ludwig von Mises, has gained belated recognition as one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. His central argument, contra von Mises, is that a self-regulating economic system is a completely imaginary construction, impossible to achieve or maintain.
A history of Dissent magazine, by Maurice Isserman.
As infamous pick-up artist Roosh himself admits in “Don’t Bang Denmark,” Nordic social democracy doesn’t support his kind.
In the not-so-distant past, when Norberto Bobbio, the Italian political theorist, first asked this question, it was (or so it looks today) relatively easy to answer. There were only two choices: the version of socialism that prevailed in what we …
The current financial and economic crisis has once again placed the dangers of capitalism at the forefront of our collective consciousness. The left, which until relatively recently had seemed adrift across much of the Western world, lacking in coherent and …
From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice by Thomas F. Jackson
