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Ross Barkan is a writer and journalist in New York City.
From GameStop to COVID-19 relief, the past year has given us an abundance of reasons to ignore the advice of neoliberal economists like Larry Summers. There are tentative signs that the Biden administration might do just that.
The forgotten war in Afghanistan, a senseless waste of money and lives, will soon turn 20, and there is no sign that Joe Biden is serious about ending it. When it comes to US militarism, the much-heralded leftward shift in American politics has so far had little effect.
Governor Andrew Cuomo’s failure to contain the virus in the earliest weeks of the outbreak doomed New York to far more suffering than it needed to endure. Now, with a vaccine here, he is again proving his unfitness to lead his state through the worst crisis it has faced in modern history.
For the Left, the historic contribution of Christian socialism was its ability to relate the values of modern socialism to the time-honored themes of traditional religious teaching. The Left would do well to recover those lessons today.
Much of the American mainstream media adopted a highly combative, watchdog approach to covering the Trump White House. Will the media abandon that approach under a President Joe Biden?
New York’s first and only black mayor, and one time Democratic Socialists of America member, David Dinkins came to power at a time when anyone left of center was forced into a defensive posture.
The Biden campaign’s decision to forsake door-to-door canvassing may have cost Democrats dearly in down-ballot races. It was emblematic of the party’s disastrous abandonment of face-to-face organizing.
Chuck Schumer knows how to hold a press conference and he knows how to raise money from Wall Street. Those skills got him reelected to Senate leadership today. But when it comes to the take-no-prisoners, polarized politics of the twenty-first century, he’s completely out of his depth.
All around the world, the Left has been hemorrhaging working-class support for decades. To think it could achieve long-run success as the champion of affluent cosmopolitanism is whistling past the graveyard.
Entire sectors of the economy are now invested in a state of permanent war and surveillance. Here’s what it would mean to defund the US military and put that money to meeting human need instead.
On Palestinian rights, Bernie Sanders was a progressive outlier in 2020, sandwiched among Israel hawks and imperialists. But in the coming decades, his candidacy won’t be an outlier at all: progressives are forcing a reckoning on Israel.
While Joe Biden cedes the ground to Donald Trump, other campaigns are learning that canvassers, properly masked, can have safe conversation with voters more than six feet away. The Biden approach could help put the election in jeopardy.
Joe Biden may indeed win in November. But he has run an inconsequential and pathetic campaign — one that could pose enormous dangers in the coming years.
Mayor Bill de Blasio has been rightly criticized for letting the New York Police Department run wild with brutality in the recent racial justice protests. But he’s not the only “progressive” in New York bowing to the boys in blue — the city council, supposedly to de Blasio’s left, has long been under the NYPD’s thumb, too.
By next month, Mike Bloomberg will likely have spent more money than the entire Hillary Clinton campaign spent through Election Day — and hers was the most expensive in history. If he isn’t stopped now, Bloomberg will permanently change US politics in profound and frightening ways.
An admirer of dictators, a lowbrow misogynist, an unfiltered bigot — Michael Bloomberg is the only Democratic contender who might actually be worse than Trump.