It’s our miserable fate to lose Dolly Parton and Tim Curry in a one-two punch at the end of summer 2026. Both died at eighty years old, and it seems damned unfair that both didn’t live to be 120 and die mid-performance, which was Parton’s stated goal.
What unites Parton and Curry is their joy. Two happier people would be hard to identify in the notoriously tragic world of showbiz fame, where behind-the-scenes lives tend toward grim pathos. Dolly Parton was known worldwide for her almost incredible levels of wide-smiling, life-loving élan that she managed to communicate to virtually everyone she met, and to everyone she didn’t, via wildly popular songs and film and television performances radiating ecstasy.
Tim Curry’s Joker-esque grin was equally wide and contained something else, an almost salacious glee in performance. Nobody was going to have to ask him twice to get up there and provide some splendidly extroverted entertainment that would give the public something to cheer about. Like so many British actors, he approached his career with alacrity, eager to show up for almost anything. Theater, movies, television, music videos, audiobook and animated film and TV voice work — you name it, you’ll find Tim Curry there. He even cut a few albums.
And his celebrity impersonations? Chef’s kiss. He did a fond but unsparing take on Mick Jagger’s pop-eyed, twitchy, mouthy, chicken-dance strutting to “Satisfaction” that’s a thing of beauty and a joy forever.
Stage-trained, with a huge, expressive voice, he first made his mark in the 1968 London production of the landmark hippie musical Hair, and from there went directly into his breakthrough role of mad scientist and übersexy “sweet transvestite from Transylvania,” Dr Frank-N-Furter, in the legendary camp-rock musical The Rocky Horror Show. The show was such a smash, it went on to tour America from New York City to Los Angeles and made Tim Curry a household name. The 1975 Rocky Horror film version became a cult hit that was considered such required viewing among young people, it kicked off the “Midnight Movie” phenomenon on college campuses across the United States.
It was in LA that Curry found himself most feted, where, as he put it, he went from “grubbing around” trying to pay the rent to “sitting by Jack Nicholson’s swimming pool.”
But it was also where he found himself having to come to terms with the thorny experience of sustaining a showbiz career and negotiating media fame. His response was typically wholesome and practical: he began reading biographies of famous bygone movie actors to see how they’d managed it.
Typecasting in Hollywood is especially pernicious, and Curry found himself constantly asked to reprise the Dr Frank-N-Furter effect by playing exuberant roles in drag. An effortless wit, Curry joked that he countered this tendency once and for all by aging in order to become “chubby and plain.”
And he also discovered there were pitfalls to being a British actor in Hollywood generally, in that there were only a few roles on constant offer for Brits. This observation led to a three-word greeting always exchanged when encountering former Monty Python member Eric Idle: “Butlers and villains.”
However, cast Curry as a butler, and you’ll inevitably get the loudest, funniest, most garrulous, and overly self-dramatizing English butler that ever lived, and his delightfully braying Wadsworth in Clue (1985) is the result.
Curry was always such a big presence, it was deemed impossible to cast him as a self-effacing introvert or any kind of wallflower. If he’s onstage in The Pirates of Penzance, he’s playing the Pirate King and earning a 1982 Laurence Olivier Award nomination for Best Actor in a Musical. If he’s starting his voice-acting career in a Hanna–Barbera cartoon depicting the Garden of Eden, he’s playing the snake and hissing out all the best lines. And he’s never not employed doing cartoon voice work thereafter. He won a Daytime Emmy for the cartoon series Peter Pan & the Pirates (1990–91), playing — you guessed it — the colorfully craven Captain Hook.
“I’m a toon type of guy,” he said cheerfully.
Onstage in the 1980 Broadway production of Amadeus, he’s nominated for a Tony Award playing the obnoxious young genius Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. In Clive Donner’s 1982 TV movie Oliver Twist, he’s the terrifying, murderous villain Bill Sikes. In Ridley Scott’s Legend (1985), he’s Darkness. In Muppet Treasure Island (1996), he’s “the sweet scoundrel pirate” Long John Silver. And in the first screen version of Stephen King’s It (1990), he’s inevitably the fanged clown Pennywise terrorizing children and guffawing with evil glee over it.
So many consistently, unabashedly oversize performances won a lot of affection from the public over the decades. Because, to put it brutally, we live in an ever-duller era when it comes to actors, especially, but also performers in general. There’s so much tiresome ego and artistic pretension and, underneath all that mess, cowardly fear of risk-taking that it’s a real thrill when someone like Tim Curry practically prances out front — he’s so glad to give his all for entertainment.
Curry titled his 2025 memoir Vagabond because of his own roving life and the fact that, as he explained, “in the 17th century, in the criminal code, actors were lumped together with thieves and vagabonds.” He was a heartening throwback to much more vivid days of yore when it came to performance, and with his usual congenial self-awareness, he was happy to announce the fact.
He had a rather rough childhood, constantly on the move as the son of a naval chaplain who spent most of his time at sea. At age twelve, Curry lost his kindly, humorous father — who was only forty-five — to an untimely stroke. After he became an actor, Curry channeled “his mercurial mother’s rages” into a range of dark, daunting characters.
In 2012, Curry nearly died of a stroke that partially paralyzed him. Terrified he might be confronting his father’s fate, confined to a wheelchair, and only gradually recovering his powers of speech, Curry still couldn’t imagine a life of inactivity. With his typical jaunty courage, he pivoted to memoir writing, then narrated the audiobook version.
It’s heartwarming to read that after many years of high-spirited partying, in later adulthood Curry had come to love his domestic life extravagantly. His idea of a great evening had become reading books in the company of his dog, and avid gardening — his father’s hobby when ashore. “If you’re English, somewhere around thirty a trowel appears in your hand, sort of like a prosthetic device,” he said.
Even after his stroke, Curry said he couldn’t imagine retiring. So it’s a bitter blow that forces outside himself have put an end to Tim Curry’s performing joys. Still, keep in mind that The Rocky Horror Picture Show is always playing somewhere in the world.
On a policy level, much of the debate about childcare comes down to how best to shore up a failing system. While there is tremendous disagreement about what role government should play, everyone from democratic socialists to the US Chamber of Commerce to Republican senators acknowledges that childcare isn’t working for too many households and that it’s having negative ripple effects on both families and the economy. From the reddest states to the bluest, lawmakers are actively wrestling with that reality.
On an individual parent level, however, much of the debate is still stuck on whether sending a child to a daycare center is going to harm them for life. That argument — along with its counterpoint, that formal childcare is an unalloyed positive — gets in the way of a productive conversation about making sure every parent has the care they need to raise their kids the way they want while providing for their families.
It was helpful, then, when Phoebe Arslanagic-Little and Ellen Pasternack wrote a recent piece titled “Daycare pseudoscience” for Works in Progress, an outlet generally aligned with the “abundance” movement. Much of their ire is directed at daycare critics like the prominent psychoanalyst Erica Komisar, who regularly claims that formal childcare disrupts children’s normal brain development — claims that Arslanagic-Little and Pasternack dismiss as “pure speculation.”
As enjoyable as that takedown may be, the pair are just as hard on liberal leaders, who routinely treat early care and education as a near-miracle intervention capable of transforming children’s educational and later-life outcomes. Enough research has been done, the authors counter, that “if there were large, lasting impacts on children, either positive or negative, we would probably know by now.”
I study chidcare for a living, and Arslanagic-Little and Pasternack do make some valid critiques. Out of a well-intentioned zeal for helping young children, the early childhood sector has at times gotten out over its evidentiary skis; there has been a tendency, for instance, to lean too heavily on small-sample studies of unusually well-funded and rigorous programs from the 1960s and ’70s. And while early childhood is indeed a sensitive period for brain development, when many foundational neural connections are formed, the brain remains fairly plastic throughout middle childhood and well into adolescence.
That said, Arslanagic-Little and Pasternack also miss important points. First and foremost, it’s vital to remember that there is always a counterfactual at play: Where would the child in question be getting their early care and learning if they weren’t enrolled in a given childcare program? While the authors scoff at how hard global development groups push for early care and education investments in low-income countries, the alternative for young kids in many of those cases is neglect — if not outright danger.
Most US studies compare children who are generally getting adequate care and learning in one setting to children who are generally getting adequate care and learning in a different setting. There is certainly such a thing as high-quality early care and low-quality early care, and we should be pushing for as much of the former as possible. But it’s not shocking — especially given that healthy child development seems to require sufficiency, not optimization — that adequate versions of various formal and informal care settings don’t lead to fundamentally different outcomes on a population level (even while they can absolutely lead to different outcomes on an individual level).
That’s not evidence, however, that childcare writ large has no large and lasting impacts, and the counterfactual is also likely why the largest positive results of childcare accumulate for lower-income children.
It’s also worth noting here that a lot of the early childhood research in America relies on very old data. There has not been a major childcare-focused study that follows a cohort of babies through adolescence and beyond since the federal Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, which recruited babies born in 1991. Yes, the kids in one of the most-cited studies we’ve got on childcare impacts were in care during the George H. W. Bush administration! If anyone would like to get on funding another one — especially after the Trump administration canceled a cohort study of kindergartners that was already underway, which was the closest we were going to get for a while — that would be very welcome.
Back to the topic at hand, many of the positive impacts of a well-funded childcare system seem to flow through the parents and not the child. Because young children develop in a family ecosystem, the stability of the family is paramount — both in terms of material stability, like having secure housing and food, and relational stability, like having parents who are able to be warm and responsive.
For instance, a study of extended-day pre-K in New Haven, Connecticut, found that parents who won a lottery to get a slot saw their earnings go up by nearly 22 percent on average thanks to the extra care access, with those gains persisting for at least six years. Even though researchers didn’t detect much lasting academic impact compared to the lottery losers (perhaps not stunning given the state of New Haven schools), it’s hard to imagine that level of improvement to family financial stability wouldn’t have a salutary impact on child well-being.
Similarly, a population-level scan misses all the ways in which childcare programs act as social infrastructure, facilitating friendships and creating vital neighborhood networks that can frequently be life-changing or even lifesaving.
But networks aside, those benefits aren’t unique to formal childcare programs: families can gain just as much from having real options to use family, friends, or neighbors as caregivers or to be financially supported to provide care themselves.
Starting from the principle that society does better when parents have viable childcare choices — and the ability to move between them as needs and preferences change — leads to a very different place than the quicksand of the daycare wars. This is a common arrangement internationally, as in several Nordic nations, where families can choose between a heavily subsidized (often free) licensed program and a monthly “home care stipend.” The key, of course, is that for licensed childcare programs to actually be viable and not constantly closing or paying skilled early educators a pittance that leads to sky-high turnover, they need permanent public funding.
That’s why it’s encouraging to see Democrats moving in the direction of a more pluralistic, inclusive, fully funded system, as with Project 2029’s “Child Care Choice Guarantee,” written by veterans of the last several Democratic administrations. So let critics like Komisar keep fearmongering; everyone else would do well to ignore the distraction and focus on building a system where parents can choose the care situations that work best for their families — without the irrational fear that picking wrong will cause permanent damage.
Daron Acemoglu, winner in 2024 of the so-called Nobel Prize in economics, has just published a new book, What Happened to Liberal Democracy? Now The Economist — the paper, founded in 1843, that stands as the epitome of free trade and economic liberalism — has seized on the opportunity to settle a few scores. In a piece that has taken everyone by surprise, it leveled a scattering of theoretical criticisms at Acemoglu’s work and, above all, called into question the standing of a highly regarded economist. Perhaps the clearest evidence is that The Economist declares in its headline that Acemoglu is “oddly unconvincing,” and that his arguments about AI are pessimistic to the point of losing credibility. Small wonder that the target of the attack took it personally and felt obliged to respond in public.
Everything suggests that the ultimate cause of the falling-out is that Acemoglu’s academic work, which revolves around technological change and the role of artificial intelligence, offers a proposal to strengthen the working class. This is one of the points The Economist goes after, labeling his approach pessimistic and unspecific. The economist Mònica Martínez Bravo captured the tension well when she wrote of “what curious things happen when a Nobel laureate in economics writes a book arguing for putting the working class back at the center of economic policy.”
In what follows, I want to examine in what sense, and how far, Martínez Bravo is right. And along the way I want to head into the fascinating and worrying world of the socioeconomic consequences of artificial intelligence.
One of the great open questions in economics concerns the effects of automation, that is, of the replacement of human workers by machines. Does it destroy jobs? Does it depress wages? Does it alter the balance of forces between capital and labor? Two hundred years on, the debate has produced no consensus at all, only a range of approaches for thinking about a highly complex process. And to understand it properly, we have to go back to the early nineteenth century.
David Ricardo is regarded as one of the founding fathers of political economy. In the first two editions of his major work, the Principles, however, Ricardo had little in particular to say about automation, since he shared the conventional optimistic view of the economists of his day. It is important to grasp this way of thinking about automation because, in broad terms, it still dominates the profession. On this view, when machines replace workers in a production process, two effects follow. The first is the obvious one: a certain number of people lose their jobs. The second is that introducing the new machinery can create new jobs that absorb the previously displaced labor. In other words, for economists there is nothing here to worry about, because the economy regulates itself in such a way that the introduction of machines — the incorporation of new technology — is able to sustain the level of employment. And Ricardo thought more or less this, but only until 1821.
In the famous third edition of the Principles, Ricardo added a new chapter in which he judged the conventional view to be mistaken and acknowledged that “the substitution of machinery for human labour is often very injurious to the interests of the class of labourers.” The impact of this shift was enormous, and his disciple John Ramsay McCulloch complained to him bitterly on the grounds that it gave encouragement to the anti-machine workers’ movements. It was a time of enormous social unrest: the Industrial Revolution was unfolding across the United Kingdom and radically transforming the working class’s way of life.
In a 2024 academic paper, Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson addressed this historical moment precisely. In their account, Ricardo’s change of mind about machinery had to do with his election to the House of Commons. His seat allowed him to see firsthand what was actually happening in the cotton industry and so correct his earlier views, because what was happening bore no resemblance to the economists’ optimistic picture: the Industrial Revolution was severely degrading the living conditions of the working class. The paper, incidentally, leans heavily on the work of two giants of British Marxist historiography, E. P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm (though it also cites, by way of complement, the eminent mainstream historian Joel Mokyr). Acemoglu’s figures indicate that, with automation, the real wages of handloom weavers fell by at least 25 percent, with no possibility for those workers of moving into new, emerging sectors. Their living conditions were simply flattened by the introduction of machinery into industry. The paradox is that, because productivity was rising and wages were not, employers reaped enormous profits that pushed inequality upward. In a phrase which Acemoglu returns to again and again: prosperity was not shared.
The logic of this critical reading of automation had been built into Acemoglu’s work long before. It appears most clearly, in a form aimed at the general reader, in his 2023 book Power and Progress, cowritten with Simon Johnson, where they stress that introducing new technology is not automatically beneficial for society. Whether productivity gains are shared, they argue, depends on factors such as the type of technology, the institutions (norms, customs, laws), and the direction society chooses to give technological advances. Significantly, Acemoglu and Johnson accept that prosperity is shared only when those advances depart from elites’ self-interest. Hence their account of the improvements in working-class living standards during the second half of the nineteenth century, which they attribute to the democratization of the political system, the growth of trade unions and legislation protecting workers’ rights; all of them factors that forced technical change in a direction other than that of the elites’ narrow economic interests. Anyone familiar with the history of the labor movement will recognize a clearly subversive political element in this line of reasoning.
It would be a mistake to think that all this is merely economic history or nineteenth-century political economy. Acemoglu’s point of reference is always present-day technological change, and more specifically the adoption of artificial intelligence in today’s production processes. But he uses economic history to think about the contemporary process, asking (in Power and Progress) what happens if the mainstream economists are wrong: if AI fundamentally generates labor market distortions that widen inequalities in wages and employment; if its impact redistributes power toward elites; if it impoverishes billions of people in the developing world; if it entrenches ethnic or social prejudice; or if it destroys democratic institutions. His conclusion is that contemporary society needs what emerged in the nineteenth century: the growth of counterarguments and organizations capable of pushing back against conventional thinking. To give a fuller sense of where he stands, it is enough to note that one of his most recent papers, coauthored with David Autor and Simon Johnson, is entitled “Building Pro-Worker Artificial Intelligence.”
Although some have found him too much of a dissenter, it is worth remembering that Daron Acemoglu is no revolutionary in the classical sense, even within his own discipline. The first book of his to reach my shelves was not an essay but his 2009 textbook Introduction to Modern Economic Growth: a graduate text of formidable algebraic complexity that surveys the models of economic growth from a single vantage point, namely, neoclassical theory. This is the dominant theory in economics faculties, and other schools of thought have historically been ranged against it, such as the post-Keynesian and the Marxist, which are for that reason regarded as heterodox. Acemoglu belongs to the dominant school, and indeed he recently described debate about capitalism as “mindless.” In the worldview underlying his models, there are no relations of production; power enters as a category of bargaining strength and regulatory capture; and the view of institutions is thin and never structural. His concept of the working class is consequently not a Marxist one, but it leads to what he calls “working-class liberalism.”
Yet all this is exactly what makes him genuinely dangerous in the eyes of mainstream economists: Acemoglu reaches his “radical” conclusions from inside the profession and inside the mainstream. His entire academic output is a lucid and algebraically demanding reformulation of the neoclassical models of technical progress. And every step he has taken over the past twenty years, such as treating the division of income between capital and labor as endogenous to technical change, he has taken without drawing on the vast body of heterodox work that trod that path long before him. Acemoglu today holds a view of trade that would not seem strange to Marxist authors, and a view of income distribution that post-Keynesians such as Joan Robinson or Nicholas Kaldor would recognize. And we have already seen that his reading of certain aspects of nineteenth-century economic history has striking points of contact with Marxist historiography. The crucial point is that Acemoglu has arrived at conclusions very close to those of the post-Keynesian and even Marxist schools but through different concepts and methods. Mainstream economists cannot fault him for want of technical brilliance, which is amply established. But they are frightened by the political conclusions that follow from his deviation.
The maneuver had already been rehearsed with Joseph Stiglitz. The US economist received the Nobel Prize in 2001 for his contributions to neoclassical theory, in particular his analyses of asymmetric information, and during the 1990s he was known, among other things, for his critique of the hard version of ecological economics. All of this made him chief economist of the World Bank, one of the institutions charged with promoting the “Washington Consensus” among developing countries — that is, with imposing neoliberal policies. Before his term was up, Stiglitz left his post, and in 2002 he published Globalization and Its Discontents, in which he called much of neoliberal policy into question. It was a harsh diagnosis, and one that those of us who were then postgraduate students of international and development economics always found instructive: a neoclassical economist attacking the conclusions of his own old paradigm. As now, The Economist was the spearhead against what struck it as an inadmissible turn, remarking drily that Stiglitz could have written a good book about globalization, but perhaps next time, and conceding that he was a brilliant economist before proceeding to demolish his standing altogether. Nor was it the only example: Kenneth Rogoff, then director of research at the International Monetary Fund (the other neoliberal pillar of the international system), attacked Stiglitz fiercely and entrenched what became the settled view among mainstream economists that as a scholar Stiglitz was a genius with a wonderful mind, but as a politician he was far less impressive. It is the clearest precedent for The Economist’s article on Daron Acemoglu.
What we can expect over the coming years is a concerted effort, led by part of the mainstream community of which The Economist is merely the vanguard, to devalue Acemoglu’s reputation, not so much on technical grounds as on account of his political “eccentricities.” As we have seen, this is not the first case and probably will not be the last, but the underlying logic has been in place for a very long time. The aura of respectability within the mainstream economics community depends both on technical foundations (with a high degree of mathematical sophistication, which makes the work largely inaccessible to the general public) and on the “reasonableness” of one’s political conclusions. It is worth recalling that the Nobel Prize in economics is not really a Nobel Prize at all, since Alfred Nobel never envisaged such an award for economics. That such a prize exists today is the result of the interests of the Swedish central bank, which in 1968, amid a bitter confrontation with the Swedish Social Democrats (then pursuing their reformist road to socialism), needed to burnish the reputation of those who defended its own (conservative) political positions. The great Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal received the prize in 1974; but his own reading of the episode was that, because he was a “radical” (his word), they made him share it with a “reactionary,” Friedrich Hayek. In 1977, Myrdal wrote a short article acknowledging that he had been wrong to accept it, that economics is not a science on a par with physics or the “hard” sciences and — take note — that the Nobel Prize in economics ought not to exist. What he was ultimately suggesting is that the award is heavily burdened with political values and principles.
Daron Acemoglu’s work has, to my mind, many limitations. Perhaps the most obvious is that, for all its focus on technology and technical change, it entirely omits any consideration of energy. To discuss the transformation of the nineteenth-century British economy without mentioning the role of coal is odd. Equally problematic is the scant attention paid to the imperial dimension of British industrialization — that is, to the fact that colonial trade, slavery, resource extraction, and Britain’s position in the world economy were part of the historical conditions under which the Industrial Revolution took place. This connects with another point for which Acemoglu has been widely criticized, this time from the heterodox side, and which is present in earlier books such as Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, cowritten with James Robinson. Acemoglu’s account of economic development is institutionalist, treating factors such as innovation, democracy, and types of government as the central variables determining which countries grow and which do not.
But his interpretation of artificial intelligence, his emphasis on the task model — it is not jobs that are automated but tasks — and his insistence that the effects of automation depend on power and on institutions such as the law, are correct and crucial for our present moment. It is true that other traditions can offer sharper and more structural accounts of the role of technology, but Acemoglu’s originality and brilliance lie in having reached the same destination as heterodox authors, albeit by another route. Complementarities between the different traditions are well worth exploiting. His insistence across several papers that technology can be (mis)used to tighten control over workers (something that AI is already doing) could gain a great deal from the entire Marxist tradition that begins with Harry Braverman’s superb book, Labor and Monopoly Capital, and revolutionized labor market theory. The same goes for the role of income distribution, which is not only a moral question but also one of economic efficiency (particularly in models where demand plays an important part).
Finally, many unresolved aspects of Acemoglu’s work will require development over the coming months and years, and they are decisive for public policy. His central proposition is that technology must be directed if it is to promote shared prosperity. His critics, including The Economist, point out how vague this is in practice. On this they are right: Acemoglu and his coauthors sketch a course that involves intervening in the outcomes of the self-regulating market in order to steer technology “somewhere else.” The historical comparison implies that the effect sought is the strengthening of trade unions, democracy, and counterpower against elites (read: the tech oligarchs), but the “how” of achieving all this is still missing.
Acemoglu also insists that society has alternatives to deploying technology in ways that will seriously hurt the working class. He accepts that employers seek to raise their profits and increase average labor productivity, even where that deployment produces no social benefit (in his terms, where it does not raise the marginal productivity of labor). A structural analysis will object that an employer adopts a given profit-maximizing technology because competition compels him to, so it is unclear how things could be otherwise without recourse to classical instruments such as state regulation. At root, the ordinary grammar of any process of “directing technology” is that of planning, the state, and social protection; and that is probably where the next round of arguments in the field will be found.
In sum, I hope to have shown why I believe, along with other economists, that The Economist’s attack on a widely respected and brilliant economist can be explained. Acemoglu’s problem, from the mainstream’s point of view, is that he has used mainstream economics’ own conceptual tools to show that technology and the market do not automatically produce shared prosperity. To accept that argument is to call into question every promise made by the promoters of AI (and also its associated costs, in which energy once again plays a central part), and to argue for public policies utterly unlike those defended from the centers of power tied to the big technology firms. To my mind, that is a highly fruitful path, and it is clear that we need more shared prosperity, which is to say, more of the sort of interventions and policies that Acemoglu proposes.
For those in the know, cinematically, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is an event film, though a small, arty one defying the odds by getting a mainstream release. Writer-director Jane Schoenbrun had a cult-film phenomenon with her last horror film, I Saw the TV Glow (2024), and her next horror outing was keenly anticipated by those who seek out adventurous new auteurs. I could tell by the youthful audience attending the first wide-release screening with me — all a little unusual and, with the exception of one Goth couple, sitting strictly alone — that we’d all heard the jungle drums announcing an offbeat, must-see release. I was by far the oldest person there.
Brilliantly cast, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma stars Hannah Einbinder, stand-up comedian and star of Hacks, as Kris Williams, a nerdy, academically trained writer-director who’s been hired to reboot a moribund slasher film franchise that got its popular start back in the 1980s under the title Camp Miasma. As part of her research and intense fandom, she seeks out the reclusive star of the first Camp Miasma film, Billy Presley, played by Gillian Anderson, movie goddess and former lead in the beloved 1990s series The X-Files. Together at Billy’s wintry home in the mountains where that first low-budget Camp Miasma gore fest was set and shot, Kris and Billy begin a collaboration on the rebooted franchise film by exploring the meaning and impact of the Camp Miasma films through their own increasingly intimate and erotically charged relationship.
Kris is very much inclined to intellectualize and deploy grad-school terminology in her initial meeting with the languid and mysterious Billy Presley, automatically throwing out Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic concept of “jouissance” and Carol Clover’s film studies argument about the slasher film genre’s Final Girl character. While watching the first Camp Miasma film together, screened in Billy’s own unlikely movie house in the woods, Kris also has a knee-jerk tendency to announce “That’s the transphobic part” at the start of the scene when the camp counselor (Zach Cherry) describes to the teenage campers the backstory of the undead slasher-killer Little Death (Jack Haven), who was raised by two luridly disturbed hermaphrodite parents to be “a different gender every day.”
Billy’s response to Kris’s interruption is to shush her. And she later explains in her extravagant Blanche DuBois Southern drawl that the first Camp Miasma movie — and the only one Billy starred in, withdrawing from the world immediately afterward — “isn’t about all that. . . . It’s about flesh and fluid.”
So the stage is set for a sexually charged tutorial in which Billy teaches the repressed Kris to acknowledge the visceral thrills that are the basis for her obsession since preadolescence with the Camp Miasma films. In short, Kris finds them to be a huge turn-on, mediated through the processes of film spectatorship. She identifies in excitingly taboo ways with “the victim, the slut” who is invariably half-dressed and nubile. “Don’t forget nubile!” says Kris with sly glee once she gets into the spirit of things.
Hilarious shots of Kris stripped down to panties and a tight T-shirt running in slo-mo through the woods in an exaggeratedly camp-erotic, breast-bobbing way, pursued by the spear-wielding Little Death, are part of the cocreated slasher film imagined by Kris and Billy. Kris also identifies with Little Death, as well as with the Final Girl, as played by sensitive, virginal young Billy Presley (Amanda Fix), whose first sexual experience in character is filmed in a deliriously complex set of shots alternating her own point of view with that of the approaching killer, Little Death. Little Death’s view of the sexually engaged about-to-be-victims is conflated with the camera POV as they approach the cot with phallic spear raised. Also intercut are increasingly probing close-up shots of “the look in her eye” that fascinates Kris, which includes the miniature reflection of the approaching killer in her pupil, as Final Girl/Billy and the teenage boy on top of her are about to be penetrated by the spear of Little Death.
And I suppose I have to note here that “the little death,” that is “la petite mort,” is a French term for orgasm. Judging by agitated online commentary, I gather this comes as thrilling news to a lot of young viewers.
I’ve got to admit, a little of this kind of thing goes a long way with me, and I found the film rather wearing over the course of its running time. But then, I’m a scarred veteran of grad school myself, and the old wounds still hurt in rainy weather. My film studies dissertation advisor was Carol Clover, who literally wrote the book on the slasher film. She’s the author of Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, the first academic analysis of the subgenre and the one who introduced the term “the Final Girl” that’s now in common usage. During the interlude following its publication, when Clover achieved remarkable fame for a professor, I was sitting in her office trying to get useful dissertation advice while she took calls from reporters around the world who wanted to interview her about The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Friday the 13th, Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and all the well-known slasher film classics.
Most viewers aren’t going to have this survivor-of-academia problem with the film — lucky them — and I hope most will have a more accurate idea of the tone of the film than the one I went in with. I was expecting a different movie entirely. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, which is both a study and a parody of slasher horror, is never scary. The geysers of blood are played for camp laughs. It’s a funnier film than I expected, with a satirical approach to Hollywood filmmaking that no doubt reflects Schoenbrun’s own insider experiences, including ludicrous Zoom calls with multiple producers. But the film is also considerably less wild than I anticipated. The promised “flesh and fluid” scenes, hyped in promo material that describes Kris and Billy descending into “a frenzy of psychosexual mania,” never really materialize. Sex scenes are mostly nurturing and, it must be said, quite tame, as the focus of the film remains on Kris’s remote, intellectualized, and heavily mediated route to sexual satisfaction.
Jane Schoenbrun, who uses they/them pronouns, seems to have a great affection for vintage film theory of the 1980s–’90s. Though clearly, they also have a humorously critical take on it, given that theory-damaged Kris is its representative. Kris, after all, solemnly describes her first breakthrough film, which was well-received at the Sundance Film Festival, as a remake of Psycho “from the point of view of the shower curtain.”
Schoenbrun has a much-discussed auteur’s investment in their films in terms of their own self-identification as trans and nonbinary and as a queer filmmaker. They’ve explored the experience of gender transition and dysphoria in their three films, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021), I Saw the TV Glow, and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. In interviews, Schoenbrun says, “I’ve been treating my own gender transition as my muse” in films dealing allegorically with “getting to the place where you’re ready to transition and the coming-out process” and “speaking to the joy and horror of coming into your own body and self.”
Their investment in media, the obsessive film and TV show viewing that helped get Schoenbrun and so many other alienated souls — myself included — through the torments of maturation in the United States, is manifest in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma in innumerable ways through evocations of such multigenerational classics as Sunset Boulevard, Psycho, The Shining, and Videodrome. There are constant references to slasher films of yore, including the obscure Sleepaway Camp (1983), which is the clearest inspiration for the Camp Miasma film-within-a-film.
Schoenbrun has an excellent cinematic eye, a real flair for striking and evocative imagery, including a love of lush color schemes, which does a lot to jolt Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma with energy whenever it threatens to bog down. For example, Kris and Billy walk casually from a realistically wintry forest into the alternate old-time cinematic world represented by a gorgeous matte painting of snowy trees behind them. There are sudden insertions of irradiated-looking negative imagery in vivid montages. The “split diopter” shot reverently identified by Kris during the Camp Miasma screening pays tribute to a popular technique of 1970s filmmaking that created a sense of depth in an image by holding two different areas on different planes in sharp focus simultaneously, with a slight blurring of the planes between them. Once Kris “goes into” the rebooted Camp Miasma film, she’s contained within the split diopter shots, and the penultimate shot of the overall film shows Kris and Billy together in split diopter, one near, one far, in equally sharp focus, exulting in the Final Girl’s quoted lines about Little Death from Camp Miasma: “He’s still down there, you know, at the bottom of the lake. He’s still hungry. Can you feel it? He’ll be back soon to feed again.”
And Gillian Anderson’s Billy Presley character, with her delightfully exaggerated Southern drawl, her red lipstick and glamorous long blond tresses, and the rhinestone-bedazzled turban she dons to evoke the spirit of Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, indicates the way she represents the enticement of cinema itself.
In short, Schoenbrun keeps confirming in steadily higher-budgeted, wider-released, and more extravagant films that they’re an arresting new talent on the rise. For that reason alone, any cinephile should already be headed to the movies to see their latest.
Legendary singer, songwriter, and cultural icon Dolly Parton died on August 25 at age eighty. Her death immediately inspired a flood of praise from stars and public figures, as well as a flurry of chatter on social media.
Few public figures right now would attract such universal accolades. The Empire State Building was lit up in pink in her honor, and President Donald Trump ordered American flags lowered to half-staff for a week.
Indeed, Parton’s appeal transcends political divisions in a time when many cultural rifts seem beyond repair; Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and his political opponent, Democrat Chuck Schumer, are only two of many politicians who expressed affection for the late star.
Parton endures above all for her triumphs as a musician: she sold a hundred million records, landed forty-four albums in the country music top ten, and crossed over into the Hot 100. Of the more than three thousand songs she wrote, several are among pop music’s most beloved, including “Jolene,” “9 to 5,” and “I Will Always Love You” — the latter made instantly recognizable by Whitney Houston’s immortal cover.
But Parton outgrew her humble origins as a Nashville songwriter, becoming a larger-than-life wisecracking icon in pop culture writ large. A March 2026 poll found that 70 percent of surveyed Americans had positive feelings about her, and many online commentators used her as a yardstick for likeability.
During her career, Parton won acclaim for her philanthropy and support for marginalized social groups — especially the LGBTQ community, who has always had a thing for her.
Even so, she explicitly refused to take a stand on current politics, saying, “I don’t do politics. I’m an entertainer.” Parton also had a series of gaffes later in life, including duetting with Kid Rock and rerecording “9 to 5” as a schlocky pro-business jingle for Squarespace.
That doesn’t matter. Regardless of her views, Parton was one of the most consistent voices for working-class people. She used her songs to tell stories of hard work, poverty, and defiance, transforming the lives of ordinary people into subject matter for heroic ballads.
Zohran Mamdani put it best when he characterized Parton as an “irreplaceable champion of the working class.”
Today, we mourn that great champion of the working class.
Throughout her career, Parton defied polite norms and smashed the stereotypes that were used to dismiss rural women’s concerns.
She was famous for self-deprecating quips like “it takes a lot of money to look this cheap,” embracing an aesthetic that was often dismissed because of its class origins. The singer often bragged that she modeled her look on her rural community’s “town tramp,” saying, “She was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen. When everybody would say, ‘Oh, she’s just trash,’ I’d say, ‘Well, trash is what I’m going to grow up to be.’”
This sensibility permeated Parton’s music, which cast tramps, widows, hungry children, divorcees, and other working-class women as narrators. Her songs told tales of poor families who nevertheless held their heads high and carried on even when the deck was stacked against them. She also wasn’t afraid to tackle difficult themes like women’s sexuality and marital infidelity.
These topics were central to her music during the 1960s and ’70s. For example, the title track from her 1969 In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad) captured the pain of farm workers who toil from sunup to sundown only to watch their crops get beaten down by hail. The song spoke of families too poor to go to the doctor as they watch their house fall into disrepair.
The record also featured covers of Tammy Wynette’s “D-I-V-O-R-C-E,” which candidly addressed the pain of marital separation, and Jeannie C. Riley’s beloved crossover hit “Harper Valley PTA,” which told the story of a widow who exposed the hypocritical scolds who called her an unfit mother.
These tracks directly linked Parton to an era of powerful women singers who tackled controversial issues. In addition to Wynette and Riley, that era saw some of the finest moments of singers like Bobbie Gentry, who boldly addressed women’s sexuality, suicide, and prostitution, as well as Loretta Lynn, who unapologetically spoke about gender inequality on tracks like “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind)” (1966) and “The Pill” (1975) — the latter of which was explicitly about birth control.
This era also hosted men like Johnny Cash, John Prine, and Kris Kristofferson, singers who documented the ugly and beautiful things that were often ignored or pushed out of view. Parton was only one of many artists who treated country music as a space for telling the hard truths about a society that was often cast in a rosy light by its apologists.
She stands among the best of them for the power and passion that infused her treatment of her subject matter.
In the 1970s, Parton continued to expand her themes and grow her reputation. Even while breaking into television as a cohost alongside the rhinestone-clad Porter Wagoner, she continued to put out albums that dove into the dark and difficult side of life.
Her “Coat of Many Colors” (1971), for example, turns childhood poverty into quiet defiance. The track tells the story of a child who goes to school with patchwork clothes and worn-through shoes, ignoring the bullies because she knows her family is rich in spirit.
My Tennessee Mountain Home (1973), a concept album about her childhood in East Tennessee, features “Daddy’s Working Boots,” one of the greatest odes to the toil and sacrifice of working people.
And then there’s “Jolene,” from her 1974 album of the same name. It’s a potent story of a woman who fears she’ll be left behind for another woman.
Parton’s most recognizable and powerful depiction of class is “9 to 5,” a story of a woman who is “trapped in a rich man’s game.” The song was penned for the 1980 film of the same name, which saw Parton star alongside Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin as three exhausted women who turn the tables on their sexist, exploitative boss.
Parton wrote the track while working on the film. She drew inspiration from the clicking of her fingernails, imitating the clacking of a secretary’s typewriter. (Parton is credited on the track for performances on both lead vocals and “nails.”) The song landed at number one on three different Billboard charts — the Hot 100, Adult Contemporary, and Hot Country Songs.
This track has sometimes been criticized as a resilience narrative, a paean to sucking it up and getting it done. That theme is central to Parton’s 2021 Super Bowl commercial for Squarespace, featuring a reworked version of the song where she tells the listener to start a business and “be your own boss.”
This is unfortunate, given both the original track and the subject matter of the film.
Opening with the clacking of a typewriter-like rhythm, Parton’s lyrics chronicle the experiences of an overworked and underpaid woman. She sings about giving your boss “all your time” while he gets “all the credit,” critiquing a system of “all taking and no giving” where workers are “barely getting by.” While the cheeriness of the track left it open to feel-good co-optation, the original is rife with anger about the inequities it describes.
That’s further underscored by the film. Fed up with mistreatment, the three women contemplate murdering their boss and ultimately decide to kidnap him. While he’s hidden away, they take over the business, winning over their fellow employees by instituting reforms like fair pay, better hours, and on-site childcare.
The Squarespace commercial has become the stuff of ridicule — the New Statesman called the song a “sell-out to toxic ‘side hustle’ culture,” while David Sirota described it as “the most dystopian ad I’ve ever seen.”
But the original song is what people remember, a powerful testament to Parton’s working-class messaging at the high point of her career.
In the end, Parton wasn’t the Left’s perfect hero. Her views were complex, often rooted in idealized images of resilience and entrepreneurship as much as in representations of a system that was never going to deliver success to everyone.
In that sense, she embodies a tension that is at the heart of country music itself, a genre that has often captured working-class life better than many other genres, yet just as often resolves that pain into status-quo traditionalism rather than confronting its causes.
But music doesn’t always have to double as a political sermon. Art isn’t just here to smuggle in orthodoxies like the textbook of a Marxist schoolmaster.
Parton addressed what people were waiting to hear about: poverty, injustice, labor exploitation, and working-class pride. She did so in a way that was as funny as it was heart-wrenching, producing music that endures long after its moment.
Those subjects are still too rare on the country and pop charts today, not to mention in the Left’s own conception of who its audience is.
Parton gave a voice to those who are all too often forgotten, both in culture and politics. It wouldn’t hurt the Left to steal a page from her songbook.
Gianni Infantino must be shocked. He’s spent his near-decade-long tenure as FIFA president squeezing football for every cent possible. Now he’s weathering a global revolt against his leadership just for doing what he’s always done, after he quite literally tried to sell the World Cup to the highest bidder.
Popular criticism toward Infantino has long been brewing, reaching fever pitch during the rip-off convention that was the 2026 World Cup. But secretly developing a scheme to open the world’s most popular (and already extremely profitable) sporting event to private equity has proven too much even for some of his closest cronies.
Previously impressively indestructible, Infantino now genuinely seems to be in trouble, as one national football federation after another withdraws support for his reelection. The end of his reign would be cause for worldwide celebration. His ability to degrade an already corrupt and broken institution, and deeply harm football in the process, cannot be overstated.
But merely deposing FIFA’s beleaguered head isn’t enough. Football’s stewardship needs to be reimagined to become befitting, and more reflective, of the people’s game.
Using FIFA to print money at fans’ expense has long been Infantino’s modus operandi. Still, his latest move crossed a line for even some of football’s most corrupt and moneygrubbing actors. His proposed “FIFA Forward Enterprise” (FFE) plan would spin off a significant element of the global football governing body’s operations, including commercial rights for broadcast, sponsorship, and ticketing as well as “operational delivery of FIFA tournaments.” The newly minted division was meant to be controlled by FIFA, though 20 percent would be sold to private investors for $4.2 billion.
That might seem like an odd move considering FIFA is ostensibly a nonprofit; Infantino argued the scheme was about “the democratization of football worldwide.” The billions in revenue were surely just a fluke by-product. Anyone concerned that this was merely about lining Infantino’s pockets could rest assured, as there’d be plenty in it for FIFA’s 211 member associations too. Infantino promised an immediate $20 million windfall to each member for supporting the plan.
If exposing the World Cup to direct investment from private equity sounds shortsighted, or a deal that values FIFA’s commercial and operational assets at $20 billion seems undervalued when the 2026 World Cup alone raked in $15 billion in revenue, fear not: the best financial minds were on the case. JPMorgan Chase, which helped cook up the last big financial failure in football, the aborted 2021 breakaway Super League, spent a year fleshing out the plan in secret. Joshua Kushner, brother of Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, was primed to be to be a lead investor. When the deal fell apart, Kushner immediately moved on to trying to buy the Los Angeles Lakers, perhaps showing that his heart wasn’t really in football after all.
Infantino’s FFE proposal only survived, publicly, at least, for a lamentable three days. It was scrapped shortly after it was leaked by The Times, soon prompting overwhelming criticism. Even typical Infantino sycophants, like regional confederations CONCACAF (North and Central America and the Caribbean) and AFC (Asia) were quick to reject the plan. Top Infantino adviser at FIFA and former investment banker Carlos Cordeiro quit in disgust.
Whether football’s top brass are truly upset about preserving the sanctity of the game or merely frustrated about being cut out of the wheeling and dealing, they’re upset. Led by European federation UEFA, which has long been critical of Infantino, power brokers have seen enough blood in the water to try to force a coup.
A civil war over Infantino’s leadership has embroiled global football, with clear geographic fault lines. UEFA, CONCACAF, and AFC released a joint statement that, while not naming the FIFA boss, was clearly aimed at him. It argued that “When trust is broken through deception, when an individual places himself above the collective that entrusted him with authority,” the duty of service to the “football family” has “been abandoned.”
UEFA has pledged to boycott FIFA tournaments and is pushing for Infantino’s ousting even after the failure of FFE. Even with the widespread criticism, many of the individual nations in these regional confederations — such as Mexico in CONCACAF or Qatar in AFC — have still voiced support for Infantino. CAF (Africa) has also rejected calls to push Infantino out. Nearly a decade of greasing wheels and courting partisans is paying off in a crisis.
While some prominent players, like England star Lucy Bronze, and the Fédération Internationale des Associations de Footballeurs Professionnels (FIFPRO), the global players’ union, have also come out against FIFA’s beleaguered president, Infantino looks to have shrugged off immediate calls to step down. He’s up for reelection next year, and the glory days of waltzing through elections unopposed are certainly over.
The international onslaught killed the FFE proposal but did little to dampen Infantino’s Trumpian approach to leadership. If anything, he’s doubling down. His initial response to the sell-off being revealed to the public was to try to force through a vote as quickly as possible to undercut resistance. When that failed and it degraded into a fight for his own survival, he pulled out all the stops: pushing to further expand the World Cup from forty-eight teams to sixty-four in a bid to win over direct support from nations who feel left out of the party.
Cognizant of Morocco’s regional importance in winning over neighbors and allies, Infantino also reportedly offered the country hosting rights for the 2030 World Cup final in exchange for support. Morocco is already primed to host the tournament along with Spain and Portugal, but a location for the final match has yet to be determined. What could be more fair and transparent than the FIFA president unilaterally handing it out in a back room in Rabat?
FIFA has internally largely rallied around Infantino and crushed any voices willing to dissent. Chief Operating Officer Kevin Lamour, who was publicly critical of the FFE plan, was just fired without FIFA providing a cause. As long as Infantino is still running things, he’ll do it with an iron fist.
All of this is disturbingly extreme, even by Infantino’s standards. Still, it also continues in the same direction he’s long been dragging global football. The 2026 World Cup’s record ticket prices, commercial-focused “hydration breaks”, and god-awful halftime show were all dire indications of financialized football on steroids.
FIFA also courted shady finance partnerships, like a sponsorship from an obscure Abu Dhabi–based prediction market prior to the World Cup. Though not directly under FIFA’s purview, the football world has become awash in private equity cash as Infantino has technically been the game’s global steward.
The FFE scheme was cut from the same cloth, but Infantino was finally caught out for being too greedy. Still, it’s also worth recognizing that many of the same institutions that are now raking him over the coals were happy to watch the sport get watered down to make a quick buck, without ever worrying about footballing integrity.
UEFA might be marginally less likely to rip off fans than FIFA — thanks solely to large-scale fan protests — but the organization that recently reformatted the Champions League and introduced the Nations League clearly has an eye on the bottom line too. If a serious push for a breakaway tournament were actually made, led by the richest countries in the world and the global footballing elite, it would also deserve real skepticism.
Similarly, merely replacing the top of a corrupt organization is also unlikely to lead to much meaningful reform. Infantino himself came in on a wind of change, promising to clean up FIFA’s act in the wake of predecessor Sep Blatter’s corruption. If a reform-minded leader like Lise Klaveness, one of the more critical voices in global football, were to wrest control from Infantino, it would be a big win. Yet it’s an open question if reforming FIFA is possible, or if it needs to simply be blown up. In either case, global football desperately needs a real democracy to bring the people’s game back into the hands of the masses.
The status quo of each FIFA member nation getting one vote creates a veneer of equitable democracy. Yet this has long since devolved into FIFA figures buying off administrators of smaller nations in order to secure votes. Whatever happens, institutions like FIFPRO, which represents the men and women playing at all levels, ought to be involved, rather than just grinding players into a pulp in the name of more games and more profit.
Fan-based organizations like Football Supporters Europe also ought to have their say. Any organization that sees fans as merely customers to be fleeced and not the backbone of what makes football special — and events like the World Cup remotely possible — will only continue to falter under the weight of its own greed.
Drastic changes that can give fans and players an integral role in shaping football seem unlikely, but there’s never been a better opportunity. Infantino’s shaming could be a once in a lifetime chance to give football back to those who make it beautiful. Either the most oppressive and corrupt elements of these institutions will be destroyed and the game democratized, or private equity can continue its inexorable takeover of the sport the world loves.
The Democratic primary might be over, but the Michigan Senate race is somehow still the leading theater in the ongoing civil war for the Democratic Party’s future — and an instructive case study in how the party’s left-averse centrists plan to maintain a grip on the party’s future at a time when their voter base is moving away from them.
Three weeks after the Democratic primary was settled and progressive insurgent Abdul El-Sayed won the party’s Senate candidacy over his centrist, Israel lobby–backed opponent, there is yet another Hasan Piker news cycle gumming up the race. This time, Piker is being accused of threatening or calling for violence against Jews, specifically for showing an image of the pro-Israel Michigan State Senator Jeremy Moss and then warning that if American Jews continue to tie themselves to Israel, “eventually someone’s going to come around and take action, not against the State of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.” El-Sayed has already publicly disavowed the comments and distanced himself from Piker.
A host of centrist Democrats who both have it in for Piker and were distinctly unenthused about El-Sayed in the first place have turned the comments into a controversy, given El-Sayed’s earlier decision to campaign with the left-wing Twitch streamer. It’s quite a twist in the race: even with the primary over and the party’s voters now focused on beating the hard-right Donald Trump loyalist on the Republican ticket, Mike Rogers, the party’s centrists are still effectively attacking their own candidate.
The clip that they and others are responding to is, not surprisingly, deliberately edited to make Piker’s remarks sound as offensive as possible. In a longer, unbroken video of what Piker said, he’s specifically responding to two things: a user who describes themselves as an “anti-Zionist Jewish person” struggling to change the minds of others at their temple, and the news that Moss was withholding his backing for El-Sayed until he fulfilled the nebulous condition of “demonstrat[ing] some serious outreach to Oakland County’s Jewish community.”
Here is a fuller transcript of Piker’s remarks:
Look, the anti-Zionist Jews in my community, you have a very tough job ahead of you, where you have to go back to your communities and try to get your elderly relatives to understand that this connection between Israeli and Zionism that is expressed over and over again through a lot of these Jewish institutions . . . is teaching people the idea that Jews are monolithic. And this is a dangerous, a very — look, it’s a very dangerous mode of propaganda. And you wanna know why? Because people don’t f-ck with Israel any longer. And if Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone’s going to come around and take action. Not against the State of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews. . . .
Now, is Oakland County’s Jewish community in unison making this demand of Abdul El-Sayed? No, of course not. But if there isn’t opposition from Jewish figures in this community that are loud about the divergence between this representative and their own desires, then the media narrative will set in, even if they don’t realize this media narrative presents Jews as single-minded and singularly invested in the continuation of the Israeli apartheid. I don’t know how many different ways I can explain this. I don’t know how people don’t recognize how dangerous this predicament is, how dangerous this is for Jews. You’re running around basically tying your entire identity to a country that inevitably will be seen as Jewish ISIS, and you’re saying, “As Jews, this is all we care about.” You’re making antisemitism worse.
‼️🚨 Mike Rogers is pushing a blatantly clipped video. In the full clip, Hasan never called for violence. He was discussing Jeremy Moss’s refusal to endorse Abdul El-Sayed and that the worst anti-semitism comes from those who conflate all Jews with Israel. pic.twitter.com/h0LsX8mWH2 https://t.co/MbscMqRMo1
— palki 🌹 (@themeasuredtake) August 24, 2026
It’s an extreme stretch to describe Piker’s remarks as an incitement of or justification for violence and bigotry against Jews. The basic point he’s making — that the tendency by pro-Israel voices to conflate Jewishness with lockstep support for Israel makes Jews less safe — has been made by a number of Jewish voices, including Ezra Klein at the New York Times, David Klion at the Nation, Norman Solomon at the Guardian, union organizer Molly Kraft, and Hannah Arendt nearly eighty years ago.
This controversy also comes as El-Sayed’s Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, is getting a free pass, from both El-Sayed’s centrist Democrat critics and the national media, for surrounding himself with a panoply of unsavory characters: a campaign campus coordinator who promotes white supremacists and joked about expelling Jews to North Korea; another member of his student outreach team who defended young Republicans who had been caught making racist jokes and saying they “love Hitler”; and a “Faith Coalition Leadership Team” made up of homophobic extremists, an anti-Muslim bigot, and one pastor connected to a church sex abuse scandal.
It’s a remarkable scenario for Democrats concerned with bigotry to entirely ignore these distasteful and alarming associations held by a member of the opposing party and focus their attacks on their own candidate instead. It’s a sign of the importance that centrists see in winning what they view as an intraparty “civil war.” It’s a fight they seem to see as more important than winning a Senate race and control of Congress.
El-Sayed’s primary win was a shock to the system for Democratic centrists, involving not just the victory of a pro-Palestine, Medicare for All–supporting progressive in a key battleground state but also one in which the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) didn’t endorse yet played a key role. This put establishment Democrats in a bit of an awkward position: they have long claimed the Left habitually refuses to “vote blue no matter who” come the general election and so pave the way for GOP victories. This wasn’t actually true, but it’s been one of the Democratic center’s most reliable go-to attack lines against their left flank.
With the tables now turned and party centrists needing to “vote blue no matter who” and swing their support behind a progressive candidate to stop the Trump-backed Republican, a number of establishment Democrats — including El-Sayed’s centrist opponent in the primary — have backed the Democrat. But not all.
One, Michigan Rep. Hillary Scholten, had preemptively refused to back El-Sayed against his Republican opponent before he’d even won the primary, and she now continues to do so, despite being called out for it by one of El-Sayed’s own former rivals. Days after his win, Third Way — a Wall Street–funded organization that advocates for Democrats to adopt Republican economic policies like cutting Medicare and Social Security — announced a $15 million campaign to attack both DSA and candidates who worked with the group, even if it meant costing the Democrats swing seats. They specifically name-checked El-Sayed as one of their targets.
Meanwhile, the week before this saw several stories about prominent Democrats publicly abandoning the “vote blue no matter who” ethos. A group of prominent Michigan Democrats announced their support for El-Sayed’s GOP opponent for purely factional reasons. “If El-Sayed were to win the general election in this important swing state, we fear the far left and anti-Jewish elements in the Democratic Party would become dominant, including in the imminent 2028 presidential race,” they wrote, not long after the news that some Democratic bundlers are raising money for his Republican opponent.
Several other Democrats have similarly publicly refused to back El-Sayed, including Moss, the state senator demanding El-Sayed make “outreach” to his local Jewish community. (It’s worth noting that El-Sayed has the support of a number of prominent Jewish figures and groups both in the state and outside of it).
So there are two things happening here. One is that, through this controversy, centrist Democrats have shifted the conversation away from the news that some of their own are willing to hand a battleground state to Trump to keep the party from moving leftward. This was the exact line of criticism Piker was making in the remarks that spawned this controversy, accusing Democrats like Moss of threatening to help Rogers win unless El-Sayed reversed his broadly popular position on US policy toward Israel.
“They want Abdul to take a less popular and immoral position, a position that he does not hold,” Piker said about Moss’s demand. “We should not let these people forget these shameless positions that they are holding on to in this pivotal moment, where the Senate majority hinges on this seat.”
This is obviously an inconvenient topic for Democratic centrists, who don’t want voters to remember their party disloyalty if El-Sayed does end up losing. So in a bit of political judo, they’ve cleverly turned Piker’s criticism along these lines into a news cycle about him allegedly inciting violence against Jews — a news cycle that, as a bonus, also hurts El-Sayed’s campaign, while seeming to leave centrists’ fingerprints off it.
The other is that this comes less than three weeks after Third Way’s announcement that it was now devoting itself to “discrediting” the Left and targeting El-Sayed in particular. One of the corporate Democrats who accused Piker of “inciting violence against American Jews” and helped drive this news cycle, Rep. Josh Gottheimer, was formerly named an honorary cochair of Third Way. He was described by Politico earlier this year as saying he was “ready to play Whac-A-Mole to beat back forces who would pull the party hard left,” and as someone who “sees himself as uniquely positioned as a bulwark against the party’s leftward impulses.” Watching all this happen right on cue, Third Way’s cofounder has publicly taken a victory lap.
This might seem odd. After all, sabotaging El-Sayed’s campaign would be overwhelmingly contrary to the interests of these Democrats’ own voters, who are terrified of Trump and want their party to have a Senate majority. But El-Sayed losing would reap benefits for them as an ideological faction, at a moment when they feel the party slipping away.
It would allow them to resume casting progressives as the party’s biggest electoral liability and help Democratic voters forget that party centrists handed Trump the presidency twice. If they create the perception that El-Sayed lost because of Piker, it would help “discredit” the broader socialist Left that Piker comes out of in the eyes of these voters, just as Third Way is planning. And last, it would keep out a progressive who could tilt the whole Senate’s political center of gravity leftward, and instead install a right-wing candidate who has far more ideologically in common with them, in terms of both his lockstep support for Israel and his corporate-friendly politics.
This might seem surprising. But it’s worth remembering that, as reported by Amie Parnes and Jonathan Allen in their account of the 2020 election, centrist Democrats were seriously unsure who they would vote for if that year’s race boiled down to Trump and Bernie Sanders, because “their fears of losing their party to socialism competed with their fears of Trump winning a second term.”
Most everyone involved in the Democratic Party considers the Michigan Senate race a high-stakes election. But many rank-and-file Democratic voters likely don’t realize the stakes are very different for their party’s centrist wing — for whom the most perilous outcome might be their party actually winning in November.
Six years after “Megxit,” Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are reversing course — at least partially. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex will reportedly return to Britain later this month for an extended stay, settling with their children Archie and Lilibet in a private residence outside London while the children attend British schools. They will retain their mansion in Montecito as well as a holiday home in Portugal, and remain nonworking royals, which sounds like a contradiction, but alas. No official explanation has been offered for this spectacular U-turn, but perhaps the prodigal son eventually tires of eating among the swine, or, in Harry’s case, of producing polo documentaries that no one watches.
Regardless, let me say on behalf of the rest of America: Goodbye and good riddance. We thankfully still have little use for royals, as the No Kings rallies have proved about our gold-plated pretend emperor holding court in the White House. Plus, there’s very little to miss. Harry’s retreat to the UK is not exactly Odysseus returning to Ithaca, older and wiser, ready to reclaim his place on the throne. He didn’t battle witches or outwit gods or even, really, suffer in California in any way ordinary people would recognize as suffering. The fallen prince has only a diminished Netflix deal and several hours of unlistenable audio, and the only army that conclusively routed him was Spotify’s podcast division.
And Montecito is far from war-torn Troy; it’s California’s wine-dipped coastal retreat for the rich and famous, which The New York Times has described as “pale, pricey, gently geriatric” (translation: white, rich, and old). There, in 2020, Harry and Meghan purchased a sprawling $14 million mansion (now valued at $29 million) that made their historic Frogmore Cottage in England look like a royal-themed Airbnb.
To be fair, Harry and Meghan aren’t Henry VIII–level villains, and their original alibi for Megxit in 2020 was understandable on some basic human level: Buckingham Palace was cold and inflexible; the British tabloid press’s Eye of Sauron relentlessly kept tabs on Harry’s family’s every move; and who doesn’t want to marry for love? The problem is that Harry and Meghan did more than leave an unhappy situation to escape the confines of a decrepit institution. They built a grand theory of themselves, a vision in which the Crown was an unbearable weight, and royal life was the only force preventing their authentic, brilliant selves from flowering. Freed from these things, they would prove that they could be American meritocrats and reveal what they actually had to say. But in the end, what they had to say, it turned out, was mostly that being Harry and Meghan was very hard.
Their career plan followed a familiar route pioneered by the Clintons, the Obamas, and other political celebrities who decided that wielding power was merely a prelude to producing content about the responsible use of power. Every former president, first lady, prince, and duchess now seems to believe he or she has an inner Oprah Winfrey. They no longer wish to be merely influential; they must become influencers, teaching the rest of us about leadership, resilience, and, of course, empathy. It’s noblesse oblige for the streaming TV age.
The Sussexes entered this racket at its most decadent moment. Netflix reportedly offered them a deal worth as much as $100 million. Spotify reportedly signed them for $20 million. Archewell Productions promised documentaries, scripted television, children’s programming, and inspirational audio. Harry and Meghan would become the new king and queen of liberal infotainment.
Look at what six years of “finding their voice” actually produced. With Love, Meghan, the lifestyle show meant to relaunch the Duchess as an American Martha Stewart for the girlboss set, didn’t crack the platform’s top three hundred shows in its debut year, and its hyper-staged jam-making and floral arranging were mocked across every timeline it aired near. They were producers of the documentary Cookie Queens, about the empowerment of young girls becoming Thin Mint entrepreneurs, which opened in theaters earlier this month to $328,000 across 446 screens.
They produced only one genuine hit: Harry & Meghan, Netflix’s 2022 documentary about their relationship with the royal family. It set a record for a Netflix documentary debut. It was also six hours of palace gossip, family recriminations, and therapeutic jargon — an Instagram story stretched to Homeric length. Nothing else approached its success, except for Harry’s memoir Spare, for the obvious reason that nothing else contained the royal family. The animated children’s series Pearl was canceled. Harry’s Polo failed to enter Netflix’s global top ten. The second season of With Love, Meghan failed to crack the platform’s top thousand in the second half. And the streaming giant pulled its backing from Meghan’s As Ever lifestyle brand — though you can still buy her $32 small jars of honey.
Likewise, Meghan’s Archetypes podcast produced twelve episodes before Spotify ended its agreement with Archewell, prompting executive Bill Simmons to call the couple “f–king grifters.” Her subsequent podcast, Confessions of a Female Founder, lasted nine episodes and will not return for a second season. Meanwhile, Harry produced nothing original after a year of brainstorming with Spotify — unless you count his reported idea for a nationwide hot chocolate–tasting podcast.
A lot of the content aimed to be earnestly woke, but for people who have stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Meghan’s Archetypes podcast dressed itself up as feminist reckoning while mostly just cataloging the indignities of being extremely rich and extremely famous, a kind of trickle-down celebrity feminism where the revolutionary act is a duchess admitting she, too, has felt underestimated. Harry, for his part, built Spare and a docuseries out of grievance, however clumsily: furious about racist tabloid coverage in one breath, while coolly recounting that he had killed twenty-five Taliban fighters — men he described as chess pieces removed from the board — in the next.
Too many of their subsequent projects have been a flailing attempt to manufacture a second act out of nothing but self-regard, and audiences, unlike royal correspondents, are under no obligation to keep pretending it’s compelling.
Harry has portrayed his battles with the British press as a quest to slay dragons. Meghan once compared him to Super Mario of all figures, the man who “slayed the dragon” and “saved the princess.” But the Sussexes’ Californian adventure suggests that the dragon was also the most interesting thing about them. Once Harry had rescued his princess from the palace, neither seemed to know what the rest of the story was supposed to be.
Do not feel sorry for them. America offered them what it offers every aristocrat, politician, and reality star: the opportunity to reinvent themselves as content. It gave them streaming contracts, celebrity friends, acres of California sunshine, and more money than most producers could dream of. What it could not give them was a personality independent of the Crown.
So welcome home, Harry and Meghan. Britain can have them. But spare us the heroic framing: Odysseus spent ten years trying to reach home; Harry just spent six trying to monetize why he left his.
A lively debate has been taking place in Jacobin over what to do about artificial intelligence. AI is clearly a technology with potential for enormous benefit and harm — and perhaps both at the same time. Financially, it could put even more income in the hands of billionaires, or it could produce a bubble the implosion of which pushes the net worth of investors, innocent and guilty alike, off a cliff. Either way, it needs to be redirected away from narrow financial imperatives and toward social ends, and this requires a change in ownership.
But what change, and how? The obvious go-to for socialists is to give government a controlling interest, and that’s what Bernie Sanders has proposed: use a onetime tax to transfer half the equity in US-based AI companies to a new sovereign wealth fund, which would then have veto power over future decisions affecting the technology while sharing in the profits it generates. But there is also unease with the idea, not least because Donald Trump has also floated federal ownership stakes — and even a remote similarity is grounds for suspicion. More precisely, given the state of American democracy and the grotesque imbalance of political power favoring the ultrarich, it is reasonable to doubt that a large public stake would yield the outcomes we want to see from it.
To design social ownership so it truly reflects social purposes in a globalizing world, we need to rethink the issue from the ground up. Just why do we need to remove ownership and control from the hands of wealthy investors? Exactly what changes are we trying to bring about?
The first question has a three-part answer. First, we are suffering from the overbearing power of an oligarchy that transforms vastly excessive wealth into suffocating political and social influence. If AI generates the economic benefits advertised for it, even greater riches will follow. AI companies convert vast stores of collectively produced knowledge and culture, along with publicly supported research, into private wealth. If AI does produce the economic benefits its exponents promise, those gains should be broadly shared rather than accrue to a small group of plutocrats. Second, the breakneck pursuit of market domination is generating immense costs while failing to deliver benefits that can’t be readily marketized. It is undertaken either nakedly for enrichment or in the name of a perverse, zero-sum notion of patriotism (any loss of market share to Chinese companies, some say, imperils America’s “national security”). Finally, AI is a complex, rapidly evolving technology, and, as such, it is almost impossible to regulate.
Yes, broad regulations on the use of AI and the resources it vacuums up are feasible and should be enacted as soon as possible. Personally, I’d begin with a prohibition on any chatbot or similar program using the first person in its messaging: “I” is a lie. But regulation of how models are trained, how they respond to prompts, and how they may soon be integrated with reasoning engines — these matters are almost impossible to regulate from the outside. It’s a game of never-ending catch-up that regulators, even if aggressive and well-motived, are unlikely to win.
So, to sum up the why, we need to share the wealth, dial back the profit motive, and incorporate public regulation within the enterprises developing and applying AI.
Which brings us to the crucial problem of how. Public ownership would deal with the first problem, and no doubt that’s a major reason why Sanders and others want to take this step. It might also help with the third, since, if nothing else, the government as equity investor could demand that all information relevant to regulation be made public in real time. Those are both significant advantages that should not be disparaged.
But public ownership also poses problems of its own. One, as a previous Jacobin writer correctly emphasized, is that government control and democratic control are typically quite far apart. Even in the best of circumstances, people get to vote only periodically for political representatives. By the time decision-making snakes its way down to lower levels in the bureaucracy the democratic mandate is weak. And today those circumstances are light years from democratic perfection.
Yet the problem with public ownership is even more fundamental. To see it, we need to think concretely about what it is we want AI to do — and not do — and ask how ownership models alone can resolve potential conflicts. Here are several issue areas that occur to me:
Privacy and personal freedom. AI is being deployed to create systems of private and public surveillance without equal in human history. This ranges from surveillance pricing, where what we pay is a function of what an AI agent determines we are willing to pay, to state profiling of our political values for purposes of social control. A frightening prospect is the use of AI to target and annihilate places and people beyond human oversight, as exemplified by Israel’s Lavender program.
Management and employment. Much of the putative economic value of AI stems from its claimed ability, now or soon, to assume direct management of businesses, government agencies, and other organizations, with the wholesale dismissal of the human beings who now do this work. That can lead to frustratingly unresponsive or unhelpful services — an aspect of Cory Doctorow’s enshittification — and of course it raises the specter of mass unemployment. Yet replacing drudgery with automation can also be an enormous social boon; just think of the millions of secretaries whose typing, filing, and other repetitive clerical chores were taken over by word processing apps. (I was in their ranks once.) Key choices about how organizations should be run, and who will be needed to run them, are at stake.
Environment and resources. Unlike earlier iterations of digital technology, AI makes massive, almost mind-boggling demands on our water resources, energy systems, and rare minerals. This is due to its brute-force training methods, and it might be mitigated by more specialized training combined with greater use of logic. In any case, there are important issues to resolve about how to trade off computing capacity and resource use, along with whose resources should be tapped and how they should be compensated for them.
Applications across society. As much as attention has focused on the issues above, this may be just as important in the long run. Already educators are struggling with the slash-and-burn effects of AI on classrooms. The impacts on writing, music, and visual culture could be enormously positive, negative, or (most likely) both. AI shows great promise in research, but a lot will depend on whether it augments our understanding of the fields to which we apply it, or simply pulls results out of a black box. This would matter even if agents were perfectly reliable, which they’re not. Who can we trust to design these applications in a way that expands our potential as learners and creators?
There are important conclusions to draw from even this cursory survey. One is that many kinds of choices must be made. Some are distributive — who gains, who loses — but others involve fundamental values. Another is that, given the many dimensions of AI’s future development, it’s impossible to specify a single public interest that all of us would agree to sign onto. It’s difficult to overstate how important it is to understand this. The public whose interests should guide us is the actually existing one, with all its diversity of attitudes and priorities — not an imaginary public in which everyone thinks just the way you or I do.
Even if everyone in the United States adopted progressive values, choices would still have to be made among competing priorities. The issue is not data centers everywhere versus nowhere, or AI-generated documents versus only human-written ones, or any other dichotomous choice. It is about priorities, emphases, adjustments, and reimagined designs. The current choices are mercenary and terrible, but there is no simple alternative upon which everyone will agree.
So we need not only democracy in the AI world but also true pluralism: different implementations existing side by side from which we can choose. This is also necessary for standard economic reasons, since we won’t know in advance what approaches to the development of AI will turn out to be best, either in technical or social terms. Again, pluralism.
Fortunately, we already have the beginnings of the alternative we need: ownership by purpose trusts. Up to now, this has progressed one retirement at a time, as public-minded owners such as Patagonia’s Yvon Chouinard, who chose to place control of their companies in the hands of trustees legally bound to protect particular purposes. In the case of Patagonia, this was an environmental commitment.
Under the stronger version of the model proposed here, profit would become a means, not an end. The trust deed would stipulate that earnings, after necessary reinvestments, be devoted to advancing the firm’s overriding purposes rather than distributed to private investors. If you scan a directory of such firms, you’ll find a variety of mandatory purposes, ranging from worker benefit to community development to enhancing local food systems, with many designating more than one of them. Which is how it should be: we are a diverse society, and our purposes are many and do not always lead to the same choices.
However, to adapt this model to AI we need to make two very large changes. First, the public, acting through its elected representatives, would have to initiate the conversion of existing firms to purpose trusts. This would require a process for recruiting trustees and, above all, financing the purchase of firms’ equity. Some form of tax on profits would obviously be essential. Second, the purposes would need to be chosen not by enlightened, aging entrepreneurs but by society itself. Because multiple trusts could coexist, they could pursue a range of purposes that would not always agree with one another. Some roughly democratic method would be needed to ensure that the allocation of funding among the trusts corresponds to the proportion of the community that supports respective purposes.
A side note: Anthropic is not itself a trust, but its governance structure includes a long-term benefit trust. It differs from the mode described here in several crucial ways: investors maintain their claims on profits; Anthropic’s mandate was focused on the long-term risks posed by AI, leaving most business questions unaddressed. It is relatively easy for equity owners to dissolve the trust whenever they wish. It is no secret that Anthropic is preparing for an initial public offering.
Another big advantage of the purpose-trust approach over public ownership is that it is far better suited to handle the pushes and pulls of the global economy. It can partner with foreign firms if it chooses. It can pursue international strategies consistent with its purposes separate from the passing predilections of politicians — a huge consideration since China is also a key player. And it can use these relationships to promote people-serving purposes beyond our borders, which can add a potentially progressive twist to globalization. This flexibility follows from the model: once capitalized, trust-owned firms are operationally autonomous and governed by their legally binding purposes.
This last point is key. Consider a trust-owned AI firm whose legally binding objective is to help users be more creative and productive. This would obligate the firm to develop tools that enhance user’s capacities and to prohibit the development of applications that are routinizing or disempowering. But such a broad purpose could only be realized through sustained interaction with users. Some of this would take the form of standard market feedback, as when a gardener buys an AI helper that makes gardening more worthwhile, or someone learning a new language purchases an AI teaching tool. Our hypothetical trust-owned business would still have to earn enough revenue to cover its costs, just like everyone else.
Now imagine that its tools were intended for use by people at work, making it possible for unions and professional or advocacy groups to have a voice in their design and deployment. Organizations of all sorts could partner with our AI developer, since trust ownership is a form of social ownership that preserves the firm’s independence. One trust-owned firm could also collaborate with another when their missions overlap, or if they operate in related parts of the economy — for example, an AI developer joining forces with a pharmaceutical company, with both owned by purpose trusts. And, as mentioned above, national borders do not set boundaries on these kinds of partnerships unless specific laws are passed to regulate them.
Conversely, two trust-owned firms with opposed missions might compete if they’re in the same market — not to amass the greatest possible profit but to advance their respective missions. This would be social ownership without the myth of a homogenous, same-thinking society.
Of course, unlike public ownership, social ownership via purpose trusts does not come ready-made. We have limited experience to draw on, and important questions remain unanswered. There will surely be a learning curve. But the need for a vibrant, diverse, and purpose-driven alternative economy is more urgent than ever, and the way to figure it out is to start creating it.
Advanced capitalist countries have recently rediscovered the role of industrial policy to build out key economic sectors like semiconductors and AI. But what happens if business is the one calling all the shots?
In this episode of the Jacobin Radio podcast Confronting Capitalism, Vivek Chibber discusses how developing countries used industrial policy in the past, why the United States and Europe are now turning to greater state intervention, and how one could build a new social democratic alliance between the state and labor. This lecture was delivered on August 12 as the opening keynote address at the 2026 IFAR Consortium Conference, hosted by the Indonesian International Islamic University (UIII).
Confronting Capitalism with Vivek Chibber is produced by Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy and published by Jacobin. You can listen to the full episode here.
I was asked to speak on some relevant topic having to do with development inequality and the Global South. And it seems to me that industrial policy is something that is relevant not only because it brings all these matters together, but because it is also now in the air once again after a hiatus of many, many years. And I thought it would be interesting to explore what exactly it is, where it came from, what its prospects are, and what to make of it today in this world as we move on into, hopefully, a new era.
Now, the context in which industrial policy has come up today is very different from the last time that it was a major issue. And the last time in development studies that it was a major issue was in the mid-1990s. And interestingly, the World Bank itself came up with a report called “The East Asian miracle.”
This report was a landmark event, because even while it continued with the World Bank’s basic orientation — which was that development should be market-oriented and should avoid an extensively interventionist state — it did have to accept, at least grudgingly, that the Northeast Asian miracle economies, primarily Korea and Taiwan, but also some of the Southeast Asian economies that had done well, had relied to a great extent on state intervention. And the report had to go through all kinds of somersaults to both acknowledge that state intervention occurred and was not entirely disastrous, but at the same time keep to the orthodoxy that it should nevertheless be avoided.
Now, that was the mid-1990s, and that was the moment at which development studies was taking a turn under the influence of some very, very important works by scholars like Robert Wade and Alice Amsden. It was discovered and argued to great effect that not only was state intervention a regular feature of East Asian success in their development but was a foundation for that success. In the interim, the scholarly world deepened this argument and indeed confirmed it in many, many ways.
The irony, of course, is this was happening exactly at the moment when liberalization in the developing world was at its peak.
Just as the East Asian miracle report comes out, we see that across Latin America, South Asia, and in the East Asian miracle economies themselves, the developmental state was being rolled back. So not surprisingly, just as the Bretton Woods institutions acknowledge the importance of industrial policy, the actual practice of industrial policy starts to wane.
So how is it that today we find the topic coming back?
Well, not only has it come back, but the World Bank has a very different attitude toward it. It’s come back largely now because the advanced world is moving toward some sort of practice of state intervention. And because of the enormous influence that the United States and Europe has on the bank, lo and behold, the bank not only publishes now, in 2026, a report on industrial policy and its revival but is largely supportive of it.
It looks like something that was taken off the agenda for a quarter century is now back on the agenda.
So in this talk, I want to address four questions. First of all: What exactly is industrial policy? Secondly: What were the conditions that gave rise to it? Thirdly: Where did it come from? And fourthly: What were the variables, the factors that determined whether it was successful or not? Because it is indeed the case that it was not always uniformly successful. And having then explored this historical lineage of industrial policy, we want to ask the burning question for today, which is: What are the prospects for its success today and what forms should it take if we are to return to it in the sort of way we did in the postwar era?
So let’s just start with the definition. What is industrial policy? Well, there are two basic components of this approach to development. One is that industrial policy seeks to protect local firms from international competition. The reason for that is that it is perceived that because local firms are uncompetitive — either because their country is just starting its path to industrialization or because the country is losing an edge that it used to have — those firms cannot effectively compete against international rivals.
And so in order to give them the space and the ability to build up their productive capacities, there needs to be some kind of attenuation, some kind of lessening of that international competition. They’re given all sorts of protections from it, mainly through things like tariffs, but also through things like exchange rate manipulation and interest rate manipulation. This is the protective aspect of industrial policy. This is complemented by its second essential component, which is various forms of subsidies that lower the price of inputs so that firms may be able to then hothouse their investment process.
The idea is that the protections and the tariffs clear out international rivals and create a space for firms to develop their capacities, and then the subsidies accelerate the process by which they can develop managerial skills, acquire new technology, learn how to use that technology, create the skills that their workforce needs, etc. Something that would take decades to achieve is hoped to be achievable in a matter of a few years.
These measures were essential to industrial policy but understood to be temporary. The idea was not to create a forever world in which local firms are protected and subsidized but to have it be an island, a brief moment in history, so that they can gather up their abilities and then throw them out onto the global economy so that they may compete effectively.
Not surprisingly, industrial policy was primarily practiced in the developing world, because this was the area in which manufacturing was not yet very much developed and in which it was felt that unless they were given a chance to build their capacities, the firms in these countries would forever be uncompetitive in relation to the advanced world. But it should be understood that there’s nothing intrinsic in industrial policy that confines it to the developing world.
Since the principle is to allow firms to build their capabilities to better compete on the global market, you can also see it being practiced in advanced countries. When? Well, when firms in those advanced countries that once had a competitive edge find themselves losing that competitive edge to new rival firms or countries where firms are developing their capabilities faster.
So you can have, and you have had, industrial policy in both parts of the world, both in the Global South and, for example, right now in Europe and in the United States, because it’s perceived that they are falling behind relative to newcomers — of course, primarily China.
The problem with industrial policy, its central contradiction, was that the very instruments that were used to promote industrialization also had the potential of undermining that very goal. The very instruments — tariff protection and subsidies — that were essential to industrial policy had this one problem, which is they were intended to make firms more competitive, but precisely the fact of attenuating and reducing the competitive threat from rivals eased the pressure on local firms to build their competitive capacities.
What was happening with industrial policy was, because the global rivals were being warded off from the local market, the very importance and the centrality of building up their competitive edge was lessened on local firms because they were essentially given free and easy profits. Since international competition was no longer a factor, firms locally, even if they were uncompetitive, even if they did not emphasize efficiency, were able to capture local markets with relative ease.
That meant that implementing industrial policy also ended up creating the conditions for its failure. States, therefore, had no alternative but to try to develop instruments to ward off or to block firms’ inclination to accept the subsidies, to accept the free profits, and then refuse to upgrade their equipment, refuse to adopt best practice technologies because they didn’t need to, because the profits were coming in for free.
How could states avert that outcome? They did it, or they tried to do it, by developing administrative capacities, institutions within the state that had the job of monitoring those firms and then sanctioning them in the event that they did not use the subsidies in the way they were intended.
So alongside the adoption of industrial policy in the postwar era, there was a decades-long process of state-building and institution-building. Without those newly created institutions that might be able to monitor and sanction, that is to say, discipline local firms, there was a live chance that those subsidies that were being given to them would be frittered away or used in ways that were not initially intended.
This set up a conflictual process between those firms and the state. What states found, what state managers found, was that firms were very, very happy to accept all the gifts that were being given by the state, but at the same time rejected or struggled against the insistence on discipline and the insistence on using subsidies as intended.
Why would they do this? In these developing countries, precisely because the markets are protected through tariffs, there’s a big incentive to take the monies that are coming through cheap loans, cheap credit, easy inputs, and to then reallocate them to other lines and other sectors to capture what’s called first-mover advantage.
If I’m being given money to start up a new auto plant, let’s say, but I also know that it’s possible for me to acquire monopoly rights and first-mover advantage in building, say, machine tools, what I do is take the money that’s being given for auto, redeploy it toward machine tools, and now I have a first-mover advantage or monopoly presence in both sectors rather than just one. The reason I don’t have to worry about losing advantage in auto is that it’s already been protected from international competition, and I don’t have any local domestic rivals.
So the lesson that states everywhere learned was that what firms were looking for was not laissez-faire. They were not looking for a free market economy. They were looking for the first component of industrial policy while rejecting the second. They were looking for all the subsidies, all the gifts coming in from the state, but very resistant to the demand for reciprocity, very resistant to the demand for then abiding by the priorities that the planners and the state managers had accorded and instead reallocating them toward their own priorities and their own sense of where the money would be best used.
This was a direct consequence of the dilemma of protectionism and of closing off competition.
Interestingly, the two countries where you saw the most success of industrial policy, Korea and Taiwan, were successful precisely because the states managed to not simply give firms easy access to local monopolies and easy profits. They successfully had the firms take the subsidies and then commit to highly competitive markets where they would be forced to use them in ways that enhanced their capabilities. These were of course export markets.
For very specific and highly contingent reasons, Korea and Taiwan were different from most of the other developing countries in that in these countries, instead of committing simply to import substitution and growing in the domestic market, Korean and Taiwanese firms committed to what’s called export-led industrialization.
Export-led industrialization means that their investment practices were primarily geared toward the export markets in the United States and to a lesser extent Europe, not primarily geared toward capturing the domestic market, whereas in countries where there was more of an emphasis on import substitution, the freedom or the lack of exposure to export markets made it easier for them to not worry about competitiveness.
In other words, what export-led industrialization did was that it exposed local firms to cutthroat competition. Because they were exposed to cutthroat competition, they actually needed the coordination that came through state discipline, whereas countries like India, Turkey, and Egypt had firms that were rejecting state discipline, state coordination, and state directives.
Korean and Taiwanese firms needed it, and the reason they needed it was when they were trying to compete in export markets, they needed to make sure that inputs coming from upstream firms and linkages to downstream firms were actually timely, effective, and well coordinated. If they had been left to the free market and firms’ own decisions, that might have come about but would have done so in a way that was much slower, less predictable, and more risky than it was through the coordinating hand of the state. And so what export-led industrialization did was it made firms need the state.
These were the two universes of industrial policy in the postwar world. Most middle-income countries that resorted to it succeeded, but only moderately well, because a fair proportion of the gifts and subsidies that states were giving to the firms did in fact go to waste, did not in fact go toward upgrading their equipment.
While the miracle economies of Korea and Taiwan did much better because of these competitive pressures on them, overall, industrial policy was a success. Even among countries like Turkey and India, it did succeed in creating an industrial base, albeit at a slower pace and with less global efficiency than in the miracle economies. So discipline was only partial, but it did succeed to an appreciable extent, more so than any other strategy the Global South had in the century preceding it.
The political foundations of developmentalism and industrial policy were essentially this partnership between the state and local capitalists. But just as the entire era of industrial policy and developmentalism had political foundations, so did what replaced it, which is the neoliberal era.
Now, the reason I’m stressing this is there’s a kind of a current, you might even think of it as an orthodoxy, inside development studies which looks at the onset of neoliberalism and globalization in the South as something that was imposed by the West, or as something that was imposed by the advanced countries through the Bretton Woods institutions, like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.
According to this account, countries would fall into debt, they would have a payments crisis, and the IMF would come in and give them a loan. And in exchange for the loan, it would be demanded that they liberalize, that they free up their markets, and they allow firms from Europe and the United States to come in, whereas they had been thrown out in the era of import substitution.
Now, empirically, it is true that Bretton Woods institutions did come in with a great many demands to liberalize, but it’s important to understand that this is not something that started in the 1980s and ’90s, which is the era that we associate with neoliberalism. In fact, Bretton Woods institutions had been pressing for liberalization ever since the late 1960s, accelerating in pace and increasing in intensity through the 1970s.
The IMF came in at several occasions in Latin America, in South Asia, in the Middle East, and provided loans with demands for austerity, with demands for liberalization, and the response on the part of these developing countries would be, in fact, as long as the Bretton Woods advisers were in the country, to do some liberalization to change their exchange rates, to change monetary policy.
But the moment the advisers went back and the payments crisis was averted, the countries would go back to import substitution, back to industrial policy. Why? Well, the reason was that no policy could remain stable as an economic policy unless it had domestic sources of support. The World Bank can come in, the IMF can come in and make demands, but it has to leave, and once it leaves, what the state does is going to depend on what the local elites, the local politically powerful classes are demanding of it.
Through the 1960s and ’70s, the most important constituency inside these developing countries, which is the industrial class and the business class, was still very deeply committed to the free profits, the easy profits, the cheap credits, and the easy existence that import substitution and protection provided to it. This is why to accord primacy to the Bretton Woods institutions is, I think, an analytical error. They could be a trigger for promoting liberalization, but they were never the fundamental cause.
The fundamental cause was the growth of a local constituency that started to see a more liberalized economy as being within its own interests, and this did not really develop until well into the 1980s.
What was this constituency? Well, it was of two kinds. One was the largest firms inside these countries, who, while being happy with the easy conditions of the industrial policy and planning era, did in fact see limits to their own growth unless they were able to go into the global market and also get cheaper capital goods from industrial countries. Their problem was that they were trying to build up some degree of their capacities over time, but the very inefficiency of local firms also meant high-cost, unproductive capital goods, and there was no chance they could ever compete on the global market without cheaper inputs and cheaper capital goods, which required easing up the tariffs — the barriers to the entry of foreign goods — which included foreign capital goods.
So, on the one hand, there was a domestic capitalist class that saw itself as having developed well enough and being powerful enough to actually contemplate entering global markets.
On the other hand, precisely because they were now endowed with greater abilities in spite of being slower in developing them, those greater abilities meant they did not need to tolerate a regulatory and interventionist state anymore.
It’s important to understand that firms always wanted the subsidies, but they never wanted the more disciplinary interventions of the state. But states, even when they were not as effective as Korea and Taiwan, did introduce and evolve just such instruments of regulation and monitoring, even if they didn’t work very well. Firms grudgingly accepted them because they were part of the overall package, but once those firms thought they no longer needed them, you saw them pushing back with greater vigor against the interventionist state.
There’s no place where this happens more aggressively than Korea itself. By the 1990s, Korea’s chaebol were saying, “We do not want the old-style Korean interventionism that we had in the ’70s and ’80s because we no longer need it.”
You saw this happening in India. You see it happening in South America. The largest firms in these countries were now pushing back against the more protectionist and the more interventionist states.
So by the mid-1980s, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, India, of course, Korea, in all these countries there is a local constituency that is now quite interested and supportive of a liberalizing agenda.
When the IMF and the World Bank came in and said, “You must liberalize,” state managers found that there was a local constituency that’s saying the same thing, that’s saying “Yes, we must liberalize.” And whereas in the 1970s you had episodes of first liberalization and then going back to a protected regimes, in the 1990s you find liberalization sticks. It doesn’t get reversed and it starts moving on.
So the political foundations of globalization and liberalization in the Global South were a transformation of its own domestic industrial class and domestic business elite, which means it’s not going to go away on its own.
Today we’re not going to have an era where if the United States stops pressuring these countries to liberalize, and they will go back to where they used to be, because there is no powerful constituency in these countries anymore, as there was in the 1940s and ’50s, that wants the kind of developmental partnership that you had back in the postwar era.
This means that if industrial policy does come back, it’s not going to be the same as it was in the postwar years.
Firms are always happy to take subsidies everywhere. There’s no country in which they will refuse cheap inputs, protection by the state. There’s no country in which they will refuse all kinds of cheap loans and cheap credit.
The issue is: Will they also accept the second component of industrial policy, which is the coordination, monitoring, and discipline on the part of the state? Because capitalists as a group in the Global South no longer feel they need the coordinating capacities of the state, they will be happy to accept industrial policy of a certain kind, which is what we colloquially call the “nanny state.” The more sophisticated term for this is indicative planning.
Planning in a capitalist economy falls into two categories in the postwar era. There was something called indicative planning and there was something called directive planning.
Directive planning is what I’ve been talking about, as industrial policy and planning in which you not only try to help your local business firm, but you try to direct the flows of investment from one direction to another.
The less demanding form of industrial policy is one in which you simply give firms their subsidies, and then you try to help them achieve their own ends rather than having them change their ends. This is called indicative planning. It was practiced in some of the advanced world in the 1950s and ’60s, and what set it apart from directive planning was precisely the absence of discipline. The state was simply a helping hand to the capitalist class.
What you see happening today in the United States, Europe, and across the world, is that the return of industrial policy has much more of an emphasis simply on helping local firms achieve their own ends rather than redirecting those firms into desired channels that may not accord with or correspond to the firm’s own priorities.
The difficulty of industrial policy today will be that even in the West and also in the South, firms are, as they always are, willing to accept subsidies and assistance but not the discipline. That’s the first challenge of industrial policy in this era.
The second challenge is that neoliberalism was not simply a moment when economies were freed up, when regulations were rolled back. It was also an era in which states were dismantled.
So once firms in the South gave up their marriage, their fixation on developmentalism, and adopted a globalizing, liberalizing agenda, those same firms also started putting pressures on states to dismantle their planning agencies, to dismantle the administrative institutions that had been endowed with the ability to raise funds, monitor, and sanction.
Where we are today is in a situation in which if capitalist states try to move toward industrial policy of a directive kind, of a kind that actually pushes firms into new sectors, they would have to engage in a new process of state-building, just as you had in the 1940s and ’50s.
Those institutions, those administrative agencies that had been put out to pasture in the 1980s, no longer exist. They will have to be built again from scratch, precisely because firms no longer feel that they have to put up with these disciplinary institutions, with the administrative agencies of the state.
So the two problems states face are that, first of all, in the Global South — in countries like India, Brazil, and Mexico — leading firms no longer feel like they need the state the way they did in the 1950s and ’60s. And secondly, the states themselves are much weaker. So the institutions will have to be rebuilt.
What are we likely to find? I think we’re likely to find that industrial policy will be indicative — simply, in other words, a helping hand or a nanny state rather than a more directive state. If you look at the CHIPS Act in the United States, if you look at what’s called the Green New Deal, they’re mostly subsidizing efforts. They do not come with a great amount of conditionalities. On paper they do, but it’s not clear to what extent firms have actually been following them.
The difficulty of knowing the extent to which industrial policy today in the United States or in Europe is actually directive is that the current Trump interregnum is so unique. Donald Trump is so disruptive and mercurial that state agencies have been derailed from their tasks in a way that makes it impossible to know whether those tasks are being undermined because of resistance from firms, or if it’s being undermined because the state itself is dismantling them. But I think what you will find over the years is that where industrial policy is returning, it’s largely supportive and not very disciplinary.
But there’s another question, which is: Even if Bidenesque, World Bank–supported industrial policies are promulgated with some degree of efficiency, do they deserve public support? The reason I’m raising it is the following.
What subsidies and cheap credit are is essentially public monies, taxpayer money, being handed over to private, profit-maximizing firms. And what this means is that the firms are in many ways having some of the risks of investment being socialized, because they’re not having to raise their money themselves — they’re not having to go and acquire inputs themselves, which is costly. Those costs are being reduced. But the profits are still entirely up to the dispersal and the wishes of the firms themselves.
One way to put it is that what industrial policy of a nondirective, that is, of an indicative kind, is doing is socializing their risks while allowing them to privatize and privately appropriate all the profits. The question is: Is this something that the public should support? Is this something that we, in a democratic society, should be supportive of, which is for private actors to be given access to public monies without any kind of obligations on their part as to what they do with the money? Without any kind of obligations on their part to the public good as a condition for acquiring those monies?
At the very minimum, I would say, in a democratic country, in a democratic polity, these funds should come with some kind of agreement on the part of the firms as to what they will do with it, much as the principles of directive planning in the 1940s and ’50s had. The money should come with an insistence that the firms agree to certain labor rights, that they agree to certain environmental regulations, that they agree to certain conditions of work and upgrading the conditions of work for their employees as a part of the agreement on access to those monies.
This was part of the motivation in the 1940s and ’50s as well. These were newly democratizing countries, not just newly developing countries, and there was public pressure to make sure that whatever money was going to these firms would also be reciprocated in some way with obligations on their part. I think those principles today are going to be as valid as they were back then, and this brings us back to the problem, therefore, of discipline.
Even today, if you’re going to have industrial policy, there is going to be massive public pressure for that policy to come with conditions that are imposed on the firms. The problem is, this is not Brazil of 1950 or India of 1955.
Industrial policy is coming back, not just in the Global South, but also primarily right now at this moment in the United States and Europe, and firms in the United States and Europe, private firms, are much more powerful than the firms had been in the 1940s and ’50s in the Global South, and if they are not interested in reciprocating in exchange for the loans that they’re getting, their ability to fight back, to block state initiatives toward reciprocity is much, much greater than it was for firms in developing countries in the postwar era.
So we’re stuck with two possibilities, or rather one possibility, which is you can have industrial policy, but it’s going to be policy that is largely supportive and not very demanding of those firms, which basically means public monies are going to be used toward private ends.
The promise, of course, is that if those monies do, in fact, result in more chips being produced in the United States, in better AI, you’re going to have faster growth, and that faster growth means a tide that lifts all boats, more jobs, better wages, more income growth for labor and the employees. But that’s largely an artifact of the free market ideologies of the 1980s and ’90s.
What we have seen over the last two generations in the advanced world, especially in the United States, is growth and a decent pace of investment but also stagnant wages for two generations and increased wealth accumulation. So the entire idea that we just throw money into the private sector, hope that they invest it, and that investment will mean better standards of living and increasing welfare for the general population, has largely been shown to be a fallacy. And therefore, if public monies are being redirected toward these firms, it should come with some guarantees, some kind of political exchange between labor and capital such that the reinvestment also comes with guaranteed improvements across the board for the employees and for the general population.
The challenge is: How do you do it? How will you get a reluctant business community, even a hostile business community, to agree to such reciprocities?
I’ll close with a couple of suggestions as to how you might make sure that firms minimally use the monies in the ways intended, but maximally also bring with those reinvestments some kinds of guarantees for employees and for the general population.
One is you learn from Korea and Taiwan, and today I think China is employing the same principle. Korea and Taiwan were able to get their local firms to agree to the state’s coordination and the state’s disciplining, because without it they would not have been able to survive in the highly competitive markets of the United States.
One way to get local firms, even in countries like the United States, to agree to discipline is instead of blocking off international competition, which is the first pillar of industrial policy, you in fact invite it in. You let the Chinese firms come in. You let European firms come in. You let Korean automakers come in by, in fact, discouraging tariffs.
Once you allow that international competition to come in, you have in fact created a competitive threat for your local firms. They know that they cannot survive the pressure and the threat from these foreign entrants.
Once they now have to compete, in this case, in their domestic market rather than export markets, they have good reason to accept state subsidies and state coordination as a condition for their survival.
And once they’re vulnerable to the state, once the state is able to actually promise something that they desperately need, it gives industrial policy managers leverage, where they say, “Here’s what we’re going to do. You six firms line up for the subsidies. We will give the subsidies to those firms that we think are best endowed and best positioned to use these subsidies, to use our assistance in productive ways, and then we’ll monitor you. And if you manage, if you use them in the ways as directed, we’ll renew them. We’ll give it to you again two years from now. But if you refuse to do so, we go to the next person in line.”
Essentially, this is something like what China has been doing for twenty-five years. China has actually allowed a very intense domestic competition coming from foreign capital and trying to promote competition from its firms inside the country by its firms, largely because it’s a continent-sized economy.
It can actually have a very competitive, very vibrant domestic market of its own. And then, essentially, instead of administratively picking winners randomly, which is what the World Bank caricature is, what it does is to see which firms are actually performing well, and then it hothouses the further development of those firms through its subsidies. Something like that could also be adopted in the United States and Europe.
Now, the thing about that is it means changing dramatically the current policy of going along with tariffs, protecting the domestic market, and then offering subsidies. This ends up making some of the same mistakes that the developing world was making in the 1940s and ’50s.
And it’s actually easier to achieve than in Korea and Taiwan, because they have to push their firms into these very competitive markets. All you have to do in the current world is simply lift the tariffs. You don’t have to do much. Just lift the tariffs, let foreign competition come in, and then you start partnering up with local firms. This gives the state the kind of leverage that the Korean and Taiwanese states had in the 1960s and ’70s.
That’s one recommendation. The problem with it, of course, is that while it solves the investment problem, it does nothing for the distribution problem. It does nothing directly for the interests of employees of the larger community. It does nothing for general income growth in the population.
So what might be another alternative?
Well, the other alternative for industrial policy today is to change the governing coalition and the alliance that oversees it.
All industrial policy and planning in the postwar world was a partnership between the state and capital.
In the Global South, it was a partnership between the state and the local industrialist class, because both entities wanted to see a rapid industrialization process. Labor was largely marginalized. It was given some space within the political arena, but extremely small, and its hands were largely tied. And so labor was largely dependent on the state’s support for things like wage increases, minimum wages, works councils, and even collective bargaining.
The result was that, ironically, even while industrialists developed their capacities between the 1940s and 1970s, the trade union movement in these countries remained quite weak. This was because it largely depended on state support, and not on its own mobilizing power or strength on the ground.
One possibility today, particularly in the West, but even in some countries in the Global South, is to flip the equation.
Whereas my first suggestion is for the state to acquire leverage over capital by allowing in foreign competition, the second strategy would be to acquire leverage over capital through a mobilized citizenry, through a labor-led coalition for democratic rights, and for greater inclusion in the economic sphere.
If firms are going to be given subsidies, that is, public tax revenue money belonging to the public, those firms then also have an obligation to the public to do what? To allow for greater trade unionization, to allow for more collective bargaining, to allow for more workers’ rights at the workplace, and for agreements around social welfare, and generally what we call social insurance.
This does not have to make those firms uncompetitive. The core of the social democratic project in Europe, from the 1930s all the way into the 1980s and ’90s, was something called the “political exchange” between labor and capital, and part of that political exchange was for labor to work with capital to upgrade its abilities, much as industrial policy seeks to do.
But capital had to agree on reciprocating to the labor movement by committing that every increase in productivity also resulted in increases in wages. Every uptick in economic growth was also corresponding with an uptick in taxation, which was then used for redistribution through social insurance. This was made possible because of what’s called the power resources of the labor movement.
This is not so easy to do in the Global South right now, but it’s also not impossible, and it is definitely possible in the Western countries, in the advanced countries where industrial policy is coming back. This second leg of the strategy would be based on flipping the ruling coalition from one that was centered around the state and capital to one where the state is linked first in the first instance to labor, and then it uses the leverage that labor provides it for something I would call social democratic developmentalism. Social democratic rather than capital-based developmentalism.
Is this possible? We don’t know, but it is important to learn the lessons from the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s.
The first lesson is that the ability to discipline firms is the core of the issue. Every state can give largesse, every state can be captured, and every state can give lots of free money to the local businesses and become what I call the nanny state. But without the discipline, without monitoring and sanctions, much of that money goes waste, and it does very little for the general population.
Secondly, even if that money goes toward growth, even if it’s invested and used the way the firms stipulate, it does not solve the problem of distribution and inequality. To address those problems, it’s not enough to simply give money to investors and hope that the rising tide will lift all boats. You have to give the boats equipment. You have to be able to make sure that when the tide is rising, the boats are in fact able to ride it. And the fundamental constraint on industrial policy, therefore, is not technical, it’s political.
The Bretton Woods institutions and much of the economics profession always treated industrial policy as if it were a technical matter. Getting the right coefficients, lining up savings with investment, getting the exchange rates right, getting the interest rates right. All that is important. But at rock bottom, once it’s understood that in order to make it successful, you have to exercise some kind of power over businesses, it immediately becomes political.
And if that’s the case, it is a political decision today, whether this returned industrial policy is going to be one that’s essentially oriented toward the interests of business and the owner class or one that actually tackles both questions — growth and distribution — at the same time. Even though we are in a neoliberal world, there are many ways in which labor is today positioned to take advantage and to rewrite the rules so that the industrial policy that comes back will not be one that is simply another wrinkle of the neoliberal era.
On September 20, Berliners will elect a new state parliament in a contest that has already become a referendum on a referendum.
Five years ago, 59.1 percent of the city voted to socialize the holdings of Berlin’s largest for-profit landlords. Following a long campaign to force a vote, the referendum gave a nonbinding but overwhelming mandate to take the city’s housing back under public control. Yet the governing parties never delivered. Now the question of whether that vote will ever be honored is again the defining issue of a Berlin election.
There is indeed hope that it will be honored, because one serious contender in this race is democratic socialist party Die Linke, which is running on a detailed bill that would automatically expropriate any housing company holding more than three thousand apartments in the city, converting roughly 240,000 to 260,000 units into public ownership. It is, in other words, promising to actually do what Berliners already told their government to do in 2021.
That the city needs such a measure is not seriously disputed even by its opponents. Berlin’s population has grown faster than its housing stock for over a decade, and city estimates put the shortfall at tens of thousands of apartments per year, relative to actual demand.
This gap has persisted under a series of governments, including the current ruling coalition made up of the Christian Democrats (CDU) and Social Democrats (SPD). Its target of building twenty thousand units annually has repeatedly gone unmet. The rents asked for Berlin homes are moving far faster, and have since 2015 risen at one of the steepest rates of any major German city, while wages have crawled forward at a fraction of that pace. The corporations at the center of this fight have not suffered, either. One major landlord, Deutsche Wohnen, alone paid out over €350 million in dividends in a single pre-referendum year — roughly €2,100 per apartment, extracted directly from tenants and routed to shareholders.
The mechanics of that delay are instructive, because they show how a governing class can honor the letter of direct democracy while gutting it in substance. The 2021 vote did not mandate a specific law; it merely instructed the Berlin Senate to “introduce all measures necessary” for socialization under Article 15 of Germany’s Basic Law — the constitutional provision, inserted decades ago at the SPD’s own initiative, that explicitly permits transferring land and means of production into common ownership “for the public good.”
Rather than draft that law, the SPD-led Berlin Senate under then-Mayor Franziska Giffey spent nearly two years commissioning a panel of legal experts to determine whether socialization was constitutional at all. In June 2023, the commission delivered a 150-page report: yes, it is constitutional, and yes, compensation to landlords can legally be set below market value. Giffey never introduced a bill. By the time the report landed, she had already lost the mayoralty to the CDU’s Kai Wegner, whose coalition with the SPD has spent the years since producing a “Socialization Framework Law” (passed this March) that sets out general conditions for future transfers into common ownership, without transferring a single apartment. It does not take effect for two more years, specifically so that the Federal Constitutional Court can first review it.
This is not an accident of bureaucratic caution. Rather, it shows how the SPD — a center-left party formally meant to champion affordable housing — has functioned for years as a brake on this movement.
In the immediate aftermath of the 2021 referendum, the Senate under Mayor Giffey quietly welcomed the merger of Vonovia and Deutsche Wohnen into a single European real estate giant, even as it postponed drafting the socialization law that this same giant was supposed to fear. The pattern is now repeating: the SPD’s top candidate in Berlin for the September 20 election, Steffen Krach, has stated flatly that “there will be no expropriations with the SPD,” even as his own party’s platform pays lip service to the 2021 result. The CDU has been more consistent, if no more sympathetic to renters. Mayor Wegner has said repeatedly that “expropriations cost billions we don’t have” and “prevent the housing we urgently need.” His new lead candidate, Finance Senator Stefan Evers, has called the socialization demand “populist.” What CDU and SPD jointly offer voters, then, is a law engineered to look like compliance with 2021 while functioning as its opposite. There is no automatic threshold for the number of apartments, no timeline that survives beyond a single electoral cycle, and a built-in two-year delay for judicial review that conveniently outlasts the next Senate’s term.
Wegner’s insistence that “expropriations cost billions we don’t have” is not a throwaway line but in fact points out what is really at stake. Under Article 15, socialization is not confiscation. The state must compensate owners, and the size of that compensation is precisely what CDU and SPD have weaponized to make the whole project look unaffordable. The Senate’s administration has floated a compensation level as high as €36 billion if landlords were paid close to market value.
The grassroots campaign that forced the 2021 referendum, known as “Deutsche Wohnen & Co. enteignen,” as well as Die Linke’s bill built on it, reject that premise outright. Their draft proposes paying well below market value — in the range of 40 to 60 percent, disbursed as long-term bonds rather than cash — with some campaign leaders having floated a purely symbolic payout of €1 per apartment. Which number is legally defensible is genuinely contested; the expert commission convened by Giffey concluded that below-market compensation is constitutional but did not fix a figure.
In practice, this arithmetic dispute is the single argument the German right has found durable enough to carry the debate for five years. It claims not that the referendum was illegitimate, and not that housing corporations don’t extract obscene rents, but that any expropriation cheap enough for the state to afford is, by definition, a taking too unjust for a court to uphold. On this reading, any expropriation generous enough to survive a court is, by definition, too expensive for the state to attempt. It is an argument built to make the referendum’s outcome permanently unenforceable, regardless of who wins Berlin’s state election next month.
Into this vacuum has stepped Elif Eralp, Die Linke’s fortysomething top candidate, whose campaign has explicitly and repeatedly invoked Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York City. When Mamdani won the NYC mayoralty, Die Linke Berlin posted a video, translated into English, addressed “from Berlin to New York,” and told reporters, “If a leftist can win in New York, he can win in Berlin too.” Die Linke cochair Ines Schwerdtner traveled to New York to watch Mamdani’s campaign firsthand; party officials from Germany joined delegations from France and Britain touring the operation for lessons transferable to their own elections. The parallel is not superficial. Both candidates are children of immigrant families entering city politics from relative obscurity — Eralp’s parents fled Turkey as socialists and trade unionists — running on the explicit promise of a city “you can afford to live in.” Both campaigns center a single, legible demand: rent relief funded by taxing capital rather than labor.
Call it the Mamdani Effect: the sense, newly plausible after last November’s NYC result, that an unapologetically redistributive campaign can win in a global capital rather than merely protest within one. It has measurably buoyed Die Linke’s numbers. Polling this summer has the left-wing party leading or narrowly trailing the CDU, on roughly 20 percent support. It’s a remarkable score for a party that had for years suffered seemingly inevitable decline before a turnaround in the February 2025 federal election. Yet the political upheaval cuts both ways in Berlin, as the same crisis of affordability and institutional distrust that helps Die Linke has lifted the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) nearly as high, with some polls putting this far-right force within a point or two of Die Linke and well clear of the SPD.
Berlin, a city that likes to think of itself as an island of cosmopolitan tolerance in a country trending rightward, now offers one of the starkest illustrations anywhere of the continent-wide hollowing of the political center: the AfD, formally shunned by every other party as a coalition partner, nonetheless polls as a top-three force in the capital, while the SPD — the party that once defined the city — is down in the low teens.
None of this is happening in a vacuum insulated from federal politics: and here the parallel to New York becomes almost too literal. Just as New York’s political and business establishment mobilized against Mamdani by propping up other candidates, Berlin’s federal government — which is also a coalition of the CDU (plus its Bavarian sister party) and the SPD — moved this July to preempt the entire debate. Its parties agreed to draft a federal law that would bar German states from passing any socialization laws for private rental housing. The stated rationale, familiar from every major city where the ownership class feels threatened, is that even discussing expropriation “damages investor confidence” and “sends a fatal signal” to capital markets — this from an industry that, by its own trade association’s public accounting, invests hundreds of millions annually in “maintenance,” even while the funding shortfall it complains about persists into its second decade. Should that federal law pass before a new Berlin Senate can act, the entire fight over the 2021 referendum would become moot by fiat of Berlin’s political masters, in the same coalition currently running the city.
This is what the September 20 vote is really about. In truth, even assuming that no coalition includes the AfD or Sahra Wagenknecht’s party (hovering around the 5 percent threshold for representation), it is not clear that Die Linke coming in first place would be enough to ensure that it leads the government and enacts its plans. The Greens and SPD, its potential partners in a “red-red-green” alliance, may in any case choose to throw in their lot with the CDU. Ultimately, though, this election is about more than just which party tops the polls and picks the mayor. It is about whether Berlin’s electorate will again have the chance to force the major parties to implement a democratic mandate that they have spent five years slow-walking into irrelevance.
Elites in both Berlin and Washington share the instinct that renters’ rights are negotiable whereas landlords’ property rights are not. In imposing this assumption as unchallengeable, they want to foreclose the whole issue. This is what they must not be allowed to do.
We are in a moment of particular fascination with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) across the nation. With the victory of congressional candidates like Claire Valdez, Darializa Avila Chevalier, Chris Rabb, and Melat Kiros, DSA has arrived on the political stage, proving that the election of Zohran Mamdani was not a fluke but a harbinger of a growing movement. Outlets like Fox News have seized on all sorts of DSA content, from interviewing cochairs and National Political Committee members to, for some reason, breathlessly reporting on a Y2K-themed prom fundraiser thrown in Los Angeles.
That coverage took a turn last week, with the press and pundits obsessing over Gustavo Gordillo, the democratically elected cochair of the New York City chapter of DSA, a thirty-eight-year-old former union electrician who has had his personal life suddenly put under a microscope as if he were Princess Diana. He’s not the first; it’s happened to other DSA leaders before him, such as Cea Weaver.
Over the past week, local and national media have desperately tried to get readers and viewers to care that Gordillo lives in a house purchased by his father. A New York Times profile quickly turned into a long investigative saga by multiple outlets; for some reason, the local public radio station’s outlet Gothamist trekked to an anarchist bookstore to ask patrons about the story. (Spoiler: turns out nobody there really cared.) Numerous column inches have been dedicated to this story; city council members have weighed in; journalists now are camping outside the Brooklyn row house. Maybe the paparazzi will be outside the next chapter meeting.
The intent here is to delegitimize DSA by “exposing” the “hypocrisy” of its leaders. But it’s not quite clear what the “gotcha” is supposed to be. The underlying message seems to be that Gordillo shouldn’t believe in and be organizing for a better, more equitable world because his father, like most parents who have worked hard throughout their lives, wanted to leave his children (Gordillo and his brother) with the economic stability that a house provides.
The home was, according to the Times’ reporting, purchased in 2019 at barely above the median home price in Brooklyn at the time — hardly the stuff of the ultrawealthy. Even with its appreciation since then, the house is less than a third of the threshold of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s new pied-à-terre tax, on second homes worth over $5 million. (And, of course, the house is not a second home.) This is, unfortunately, just what homes tend to cost these days, which one would think the Times would know.
But even if we were talking about a 1 percenter here, what’s the upshot? That someone who is leading a relatively comfortable life has chosen not to zealously defend that wealth and selfishly bask in its splendor but rather to fight for a world where everyone is able to have their needs met? Sounds like a good thing to me.
Of course, from the New York Times to Rupert Murdoch’s press, these are institutions that largely express elite concerns, and elites are not happy about the rise of socialist politics in this country. They dress up these attacks in the language of “hypocrisy,” with the implication that because we are a socialist organization, we want to hunt down every moderately comfortable person with torches and pitchforks. Obviously that’s not true, and they know it; even the most ambitious DSA program advocates a world with an equitable, democratic economy. We advocate that those with means contribute more, and we’re happy to have anyone who believes in that goal of a better world participate in our project — even someone who, God forbid, owns a home.
If you asked me to psychoanalyze the reactionary commentariat, I’d say their guilty conscience is resurfacing as they’re forced to consider why someone who isn’t struggling themselves would have the audacity to want to help others. These people, many of whom are from far more privileged backgrounds, feel ashamed to think that they could be doing more with their class position — that they in fact owe it to others to do more. In response to such anxieties, they turn to retribution. Maybe an enterprising journalist should take up such questions with the authors of these pieces on Gordillo.
The Murdoch press love to facilitate this kind of pile-on. They have a particular obsession with whipping up a hate frenzy against particular DSA members to make examples of people fighting capital. For example, the New York Post recently attacked Grace Ryan, who has supported progressive New York congressional candidate Brad Lander and volunteered as a DSA organizer, for her father’s background as the owner of a chocolate company.
Socialists shouldn’t be fazed by these attacks. Many leaders on the broad left, from Marxists to liberals, emerged from a downwardly mobile professional class — some frustrated with a fragile class position, others perfectly comfortable in their wealth.
Vladimir Lenin, Maximilien Robespierre, Mahatma Gandhi, and Fidel Castro all studied law. Leon Trotsky was originally a mathematician and mechanical engineer. Simón Bolívar came from one of the wealthiest families in the Americas; Rosa Luxemburg came from a well-off family in Russian-occupied Poland. Che Guevara was a doctor. Giuseppi Garibaldi was a teacher; Giuseppe Mazzini was, you guessed it, a lawyer.
Even the earliest socialists were class traitors: Friedrich Engels came from a wealthy business family and used that wealth to support Karl Marx. And Marx’s father? Another lawyer.
We could go on and on. Franklin Delano Roosevelt came from a famously patrician family yet oversaw the greatest expansion of social welfare and other pro-worker policies in American history.
These figures took up progressive politics and organizing because they saw social injustices they wished to correct. Looking behind the curtain of their deeply unequal societies revealed to them the exploitative and brutal nature of the system, even if they were benefiting from it. Confronted by the failure of the institutions that once supported their class, they made a choice — a choice to fight on behalf of others.
These figures subsequently became part of mass movements composed of all class backgrounds, and that is what DSA represents today. Obviously Gordillo is not Simón Bolívar. (At least not yet — there’s always time!) But he is a representative of a fast-growing, mass movement, one of many leaders from various class backgrounds who form a bloc of diverse organizers.
I live in Los Angeles and organize with the DSA chapter here. I attended what may generously be called an “elite institution,” the University of Southern California, on scholarship. But I have comrades within the organization who have been undocumented or homeless. DSA’s elected officials come from all walks of life: our slate of DSA-LA electeds includes Hugo Soto-Martinez, a champion for workers and tenants who is the son of street vendors, a former union organizer, and the sole renter on city council.
It’s been a very long time since the United States saw a socialist movement of this size, and DSA is in its relative infancy. That this movement includes people of all stripes shows the breadth of the demand for societal change. The obsession with the class position of a few members pretends that the fight for socialism is simply an elite concern that ordinary people do not understand. Not only is this not true, it is backward: socialism is a concern for the shared humanity of everyone, a concern that those from “comfortable” walks of life can also come to grasp.
These ideas are increasingly understood by people of all walks of life. We know 58 percent of Democrats have a positive view of democratic socialism, and 46 percent of all Americans ages eighteen to thirty-four view democratic socialism positively. And democratic socialists are winning over voters of color: Claire Valdez won every age bracket and racial group in her district, Darializa Avila Chevalier decisively won black voters in her district, and incumbent democratic socialists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib have long represented majority-minority districts.
It is because of our growing power that the establishment is trying so hard to discredit this movement. From Los Angeles to New York, the same attacks are being recycled against the Left by a rotating group of talking heads. But socialism is growing because it’s rooted in the real, material struggles of peoples’ lives.
That movement has to have workers at its core. I also hope it includes socialist chocolate heiresses who want to knock doors and former sculpture Master of Fine Arts students. It’s a testament to the strength and appeal of the organization that we take all sorts, and it’s a testament to how out of touch the establishment is that these are the attacks they’re forced to trot out.
Gordillo may be living in a house his father bought him. But it’s DSA that’s living rent-free in our critics’ heads.
The surge in the political power of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is real. That much, everyone agrees on. Reactions to this reality, though, cover the full spectrum. “About time,” say veteran leftists, for whom the current moment feels like the culmination of decades of hard organizing. “Change is possible!” say bright-eyed young people being rescued from disillusionment by socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s charm. “What the hell is this?” say members of the Democratic establishment, caught by surprise due to their habit of never speaking to normal people, if they can help it. “The communist threat is back,” say Republicans.
And unions? Well. Unions are interesting. With a handful of notable exceptions, it’s fair to say that unions in the United States haven’t decided what to think yet about the recent rise of DSA and their aligned candidates. This points to one of organized labor’s sticky flaws — but more important, it points to an enormous opportunity that smart unions should be salivating over.
New York, where Mamdani’s victory in the mayor’s race last year kicked off DSA’s ballooning national profile in earnest, is a useful preview of where this is all going. When Mamdani first entered the Democratic primary, he was considered a fringe candidate. Scandal-ridden former Governor Andrew Cuomo was considered the safe, establishment choice. Even as Mamdani rose in the polls in the months leading up to Election Day, he only attracted endorsements from a small number of local unions, like United Auto Workers (UAW) Region 9A, whose leaders had preexisting ties with the Left. The city’s biggest and most powerful unions almost all either endorsed Cuomo (1199SEIU, 32BJ SEIU, the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council, and more) or, like the United Federation of Teachers, endorsed no one at all in the primary, unable to bring themselves to go on record for a self-declared socialist even as his chances began to look more plausible.
After Mamdani won the primary and established himself as the new king of New York City’s Democratic Party, all of those big unions proceeded to endorse him. A similar process played out this year with the DSA- and Zohran-backed congressional candidates running in the city’s primaries. Even Claire Valdez, a former UAW organizer, drew endorsements only from a minority of left-leaning unions, while her opponent, Antonio Reynoso, garnered the endorsements of the who’s who of major New York unions. Sure, Reynoso is a strong progressive himself and would have likely been as pro-labor as anyone in Congress. But Valdez, and seven other DSA candidates in the city, won. Without the formal backing of the bulk of organized labor.
The dynamic was clear. As in most places, New York City’s biggest unions are not really “progressive” as much as they are full members of the Democratic Party power structure. This is not inherently bad — that’s where the power tends to be, and a party where unions are an influential cornerstone is somewhat less susceptible to the lures of high-finance lobbying. Still, being members of the establishment means an aversion to valuing ideology over membership in the club. Despite the fact that DSA candidates are extremely pro-union — you could hardly visit a picket line in the city over the past year without tripping over Mamdani or his allies — the actual unions could not bring themselves to endorse any of them until they proved the hard way that they can defeat their more centrist opponents at the ballot box. You could call this political common sense by the unions. You could also call it conservatism. You could also call it a missed opportunity.
Because, although there have been no indications so far that DSA candidates are the vindictive type, it is a bit dispiriting that unions lacked the foresight and courage to get behind the most labor-movement-friendly candidates in these races until they were more or less forced to do so by process of elimination. There are two reasons to be disappointed by this. One, of course, is ideological: it would be nice if America’s unions were able to make a principled decision to back the candidates who most accurately understand the reality of where the battle between labor and capital stands. (Maybe one day!) The other reason is less utopian: DSA’s rising power is not going to stop any time soon, and the unions brave enough to get on board now will have a first-mover political advantage that will be lost to their more reluctant brethren.
I’m not talking about any dreamy anticapitalist pipe dream here. I’m talking about tangible power politics. The good news is that the window of opportunity for unions has not closed. DSA candidates, who understand that a revived labor movement is necessary to achieve the Left’s goals, are all newly elected. They are in desperate need of strong working relationships with the unions that have, until now, aligned themselves with the mainstream Democrats the DSA people just defeated. And the unions, whose decades-long institutional entrenchment with the Democratic Party has not produced any tangible revival for labor, are in desperate need of fresh, new energy and ideas. Many union members are tired of the Democratic establishment. Understandably. The solution for union leaders is not to start playing footsie with fascists. It is, instead, to look to the rising power of the Left and recognize the fact that they can help change the Democratic Party for the better.
This, by the way, is the very same dynamic that was present when Bernie Sanders’ presidential run in 2016 shocked many DC creatures with its popularity. Forward-thinking unions then had an opportunity to get on board with Bernie, who was the truest believer in the labor movement. But unions could not see past the perceived safety of the establishment choice, chose to overwhelmingly back Hillary Clinton, and ended up with nothing.
In 2026, Bernie’s movement has had a decade to organize and flourish. We are seeing the same choice again, writ large. Organized labor’s timidity, its unwillingness to jump in with both feet and try to push the Left’s momentum forward, is not only a backward ideological choice — it is a failure to grasp which way the wind is blowing. The backlash to the American age of oligarchy is growing, whether unions position themselves well or not.
Let me give you one concrete policy example. Most Democrats of all stripes support basic union priorities like the PRO Act. But Claire Valdez, the New York DSA candidate soon headed to Congress, has in her platform a plan for the federal government to fund union organizing. That is a policy that would address the biggest obstacle to mass organizing today — a lack of resources — without needing to wait around forever for a big labor law reform bill that never seems to pass. It is also a policy that has little real momentum in the Democratic Party. But it could, if unions chose to throw their weight behind it and support the members of Congress most likely to back it.
At both the citywide and national levels, major unions are like enormous cargo ships: made up of a lot of different stuff, capable of great force, but very, very slow to turn. They benefit from having visionary leaders who can see past the horizon of today’s polls and into the future of what is possible. America’s crisis of inequality, the wealth of its billionaire class, and the collapse of union density have all grown so critical that drastic charge — for better or worse — is inevitable. DSA’s spread inside the Democratic Party is still at its early stages. Unions can help be part of the solution to the party’s reform, or they can get left behind in favor of more savvy progressive interest groups. Make the right choice.
If unions are going to grow, they will need new state and local policy.
Over the summer, primary victories for pro-worker candidates running for US Congress like Abdul El-Sayed have stolen headlines. But the numerous candidates who won downballot, like Janeese Lewis George for mayor in Washington, DC, could have significant impacts on workplace organizing in the coming two years.
Whether we like it or not, laws — not just on the federal but also on the state and local level — shape the opportunities for and constrictions on union organizing. For unions to grow at the scale the moment demands, workers and policymakers must reshape those laws so that organizing can expand. Workers need to use every strategic option available. That includes using state and local policy and government action.
Indeed, many of the harms the labor movement faces come down to federal, state, and local policy changes or government interventions, like the Taft–Hartley Act of 1947, which amended the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) and made it much harder to organize a union and strike as a worker. It will take new interventions to undo them. Meanwhile, presidents, including this one, have used executive orders to unleash a war on unionized federal workers and workers at large.
At the same time, pro-labor policy has spurred, and been spurred by, workers in their efforts to organize. The NLRA of 1935 created a government-recognized and -supported process for organizing unions and precipitated widespread growth in union membership. In the 1960s and 1970s, state- and local-level expansions of public sector bargaining rights enabled the creation of the public sector backbone of the labor movement. More recent efforts to expand bargaining rights to workers like home health aides and childcare providers have grown union density in a number of states.
The NLRA governs how most workers in the private sector formally unionize, strike, and collectively bargain, and it creates serious constraints on what state and local governments can do. Nonetheless, states still have ample opportunity to establish workplace protections and create more favorable conditions for organizing.
Over the past two decades, we’ve seen state legislatures and city councils improve the lives of workers through the $15 minimum wage, paid sick leave, and paid parental leave. Even major programs of the national American welfare state, such as unemployment insurance, depend heavily on state legislation and were first developed on the state level. Wisconsin, under pressure from organizing workers, created the first unemployment insurance system in 1933, two years before the current federal-state system was first set up in 1935.
State legislators, city council members, governors, and mayors can do more than pay lip service to supporting workers’ ability to organize. Here’s how.
Millions of workers across the country remain uncovered by the National Labor Relations Act. Policymakers and workers can expand the right to organize, bargain, and strike for those excluded workers. These workers often include state and local public sector workers like public-school teachers, domestic workers like housecleaners and nannies, and farmworkers.
Virginia provides an example of both progress and work still to be done. The commonwealth lifted the ban on collective bargaining for public sector workers in 2021, allowing localities to permit collective bargaining by their public employees. Teachers in Fairfax County organized and formed the largest bargaining unit of 2024 nationally — the 27,500-strong Fairfax Education Unions. But Virginia’s governor vetoed a bill that would have extended collective bargaining to public sector workers statewide, leaving critical work to be done in the coming year.
Another way is to decrease the cost of organizing by making the conditions for organizing more hospitable and less risky. Some of these changes have been won in the last decade such as Just Cause for Fast Food Workers in New York City. Just cause protections make it illegal to terminate an employee without warning or a good cause. This means workers can feel more secure in coming together with their colleagues in forming a union.
Decreasing turnover in service sector industries, by mandating more predictable schedules or paid meal and rest breaks, might make it easier for workers to stay at a given job for a longer period of time and organize. Likewise, guaranteeing eligibility to a dignified amount of unemployment benefits for any worker without and looking for work would improve the likelihood that workers take action on the shop floor.
Workers in several states have already won and can win more policy changes that decrease the risks they face when they go on strike or take other action.
When workers decide to go on strike, they take on significant economic risk to fight for dignity. States like New York, New Jersey, Oregon, and Washington expanded unemployment insurance eligibility to striking workers, just like other employees temporarily out of work. Writers Guild of America East and Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists members put those programs into good use in New York and New Jersey as they struck in the summer of 2023. Other laws that guarantee strong retaliation protections backed by well-funded enforcement for workers who are fired can further boost the likelihood of action.
Setting industry-wide standards decreases employers’ cost differential for having organized employees. In the United States, some jurisdictions have created industrial standards boards like Minnesota’s Nursing Home Workforce Standards Board. Worker, industry, and state government representatives set industry-wide wage, hour, and health and safety standards, with strong worker-led compliance training and enforcement.
When that happens, competing employers face more uniform labor conditions, and unionized employers are able to compete without being at a disadvantage because of their higher labor standards. That means firms can’t compete and profit from keeping wages down and cutting corners on health and safety. As a result, businesses would have less reason to oppose workers unionizing.
State resources can create new opportunities for nonorganized workers to come into contact with labor organizations.
The unemployment insurance system presents one such opportunity. The program has low uptake rates among those eligible. Thanks to the organizing of unions, unemployed workers, and other community organizations during the pandemic, Maine established a community navigator program in which worker organizations helped disadvantaged workers apply for unemployment insurance. It significantly improved access to unemployment insurance for people out of work. It also raised workers’ expectations and changed their attitudes about action on the shop floor.
Other states could replicate this kind of program. They could go further and take inspiration from the Ghent system used by several European countries, in which unions directly administer unemployment insurance and deliver benefits. Similar programs would enable workers to come into contact with and join labor organizations.
Worker protection laws face a crisis of underenforcement. Employers often bet that underfunded public agencies, hampered by decades of austerity, will never enforce state and local laws against them; as a result, too many cut corners, pay less than the minimum wage, refuse to pay overtime, and ignore health and safety rights. Workers have won and can win more laws that increase the chances they catch scofflaw corporations, highlight the benefits of unions, and bolster revenues for their enforcement agencies.
For example, the EmPIRE Worker Protection Act, a bill proposed in New York State, would give workers, whistleblowers, and unions the right to sue on behalf of the state over violations of labor rights for fines. The law would enable workers who fear retaliation to seek help from a union that could bring a case for all workplace violations; as such, it would give workers more reason to turn to the labor movement for help.
The categories and examples above are neither exhaustive nor mutually exclusive but represent just some of what is possible if workers organize — not just on the shop floor but also in city halls and state capitol buildings and take action to enact policy that empowers working people.
Many elected state and local officials are worker allies; some, including many who just won their primary elections, come from the labor movement and will fight fiercely to pass laws that facilitate worker organizing and building strong unions. Other elected officials will not help grow the labor movement. With either group, worker organizing and strategic action is needed for government policy to change: worker allies within the government need external support, while fence-sitters and opponents need external pressure.
The resulting legislative process represents a forge for new tools workers will need to scale their organizing. Once workers win a new policy, it requires implementation to make sure it’s real in people’s lives, then rigorous organizing to make the most of it and use it for unionizing goals. For example, to turn mandatory paid rest and lunch breaks into organizing conversations at lunch, workers must know their protections, rights, and abilities under the law inside and out, unions need to actively educate and support workers taking action and exercising their rights, and the government must enforce the law.
Only then will the policy promise of the soon-to-be-elected crop of pro-worker state and local officials be fulfilled with union density growth.
A series of trials in the United States involving social media giant Meta could cost the tech behemoth over $1 trillion in fines and reshape social media. The efforts are a reminder that our collective capacity to regulate harms can be slow, lumbering, and imperfect, but occasionally successful. Sometimes nature heals itself. We should celebrate that.
Perhaps the most important trial — and test — will be an action launched by California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey, which began last week. The states, which are seeking $200 billion in damages, argue that Meta and its platforms are addictive, targeted at children, and in violation of privacy and consumer protection laws. Meta, of course, maintains its innocence.
The claim of innocence is rich, and implausible. Last spring, Meta and Google were found liable for causing harm in a personal injury trial in California. That judgment included millions in damages against the companies. In another recent judgment in New Mexico, the judge labeled Meta a “public nuisance” while ordering fines just under a billion dollars and extensive reform measures aimed at curbing child exploitation on platforms.
These judgments against the company aren’t likely to be the last court cases Meta — or other social media companies — lose. The trajectory of action on social media reform is trending against the behemoths in the United States and around the world. There’s a precedent for the change.
The federal trial is one among the thousands of cases against Meta and other social media giants, with a common comparative frame appearing time and time again: Big Tobacco. The idea that social media companies are harmful, know it, and not only ignore the dangerous effects of their products but go out of their way to hook consumers, including minors, on them offers a neat parallel with the tobacco industry.
For decades, tobacco companies knew they were harming, even killing, people. They nonetheless lied and insisted they were innocent. Court judgments against them over the years hobbled tobacco makers. Though the fight continues against the industry, which has leveraged its capital and political influence to defend itself, it is a proof-of-concept case that even massive industry players can be held accountable if we’re willing to fight and demand our political and judicial leaders follow suit.
The harms at issue in these cases are neither frivolous nor abstract. By now, the psychological injury these platforms inflict on growing minds are well known: anxiety, depression, compromised focus, and an increased tendency toward self-harm, all encouraged by an architecture designed to be as addictive as possible. But the fight behind these trials is about more than addressing these harms. It is a fight to preserve childhood as a period of maturation and development rather than surrender it to algorithms designed to monetize attention. Breaking free of them can help provide room for children to “touch grass” — to spend time outside, take risks, experience boredom, play with flesh and blood friends.
Social media companies are worth trillions, with Meta alone valued at approximately $1.4 trillion. That’s a lot of money, a lot of power, and a lot of influence. But Silicon Valley’s colonization of children’s minds — and our lifeworld more generally — is not inevitable, nor is the ubiquity of their technologies an eternal barrier to a different world. A barrier? Yes. An insurmountable one? Not necessarily.
Maybe it’s inaccurate to say that nature sometimes heals itself, though. The backlash against social media platforms, and their framing as addictive and predatory, is driven by activists taking part in social movements, individuals using the legal system for its intended purpose, and politicians who haven’t been captured by Big Tech who have the courage to demand justice and to enforce the law. Left to their own devices, tech giants would capture every last second of our daily attention spans, drawing us down their rabbit holes of endless doomscrolling or envy-scrolling, stopping on the occasional advertisement to complete the unholy trinity.
The suite of technologies that destroy mental health and political institutions in equal measure — and for the same reason, profit — is engineered and operated by companies that are neutral on the substance of content as such. They’ll call it free speech or consumer rights, but the concern of companies who long only to capture and keep your attention are interested only in the emotional valence of content: whether the stuff you’re seeing and/or hearing draws you in by provoking a response, whatever it might be. In short, the companies are psychopaths. That’s who we’re dealing with.
Targeting minors is a strategy to get users when they’re young, locking them into an ecosystem that will grow along with them over the miserable years to come. It’s evil, irresponsible, and antisocial in the proper sense of the word. Younger people addicted to social media become older people addicted to social media, just like past generations of teen smokers who took up the habit tended to stick with it for the length of their statistically shorter-than-average lives. You might expect that harming or even killing your consumers makes for a bad business model, but addictive substances and technologies at scale share a capacity to compensate for any losses through consistency and volume. There’s always another person to hook. We keep making them, and the companies keep capturing them.
Individual actions and social movements, necessary and useful as they are, can only do so much to combat the dynamic. Court cases, penalties, and state regulation are essential to controlling company behavior as well as product design and implementation. Society has a right and a duty to defend itself through collective action and the institutions of state, and that right extends to setting limits and expectations for corporations, especially those with an outsize influence on our lives and politics.
We can’t predict what will come of cases brought against Meta and other social media companies, though we can be sure these companies take every measure they can to resist judgment, reform, and taking responsibility for the effects of their products. We can, however, recognize that the current trajectory points toward reform and taking back control of our attention spans — and, in turn, our own health and the health of the body politic. We can build upon these efforts and the victories they’re already yielding to fight harder. There is reason to think we might win. That calls for optimism, even joy, because we’re making good progress on an important matter — and we’re doing it together, socially.
Ever since Karl Marx’s famous pronouncement against utopias, the Left has often been skeptical of what he called “writing recipes for the cookshops of the future.” However, the idea of a future socialist society does not start from a blank slate. For twentieth-century history offers many examples of attempts to transcend capitalism, which any present-day discussion must draw lessons from.
This is what economic historian and social theorist Aaron Benanav does in a recent series of essays. He draws on these past experiences as he sets out an ambitious plan for a “multidimensional economy” and how to get there.
Jonas Elvander is an editor at the Swedish left-wing magazine Flamman and a PhD researcher at the European University Institute, working on the history of planning. In an interview, he spoke with Benanav about the lessons of the Soviet five-year plans and how we can critically engage with the approaches advanced by Otto Neurath, John Maynard Keynes, and Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).
Jonas Elvander
It’s rare that people write plans for how to transcend capitalism today. What pushed you to do this? And why do you think it has become so unusual?
Aaron Benanav
Since the 1970s, the working class and the Left have been in retreat. This extended beyond the stagnation and collapse of the Soviet Union to social democratic parties, left-Keynesian ideas, and welfare states. The dominant question became how to preserve earlier gains, not what it would mean to win.
The 2008 financial crisis brought a real revival: the 2010s saw large social movements and new left parties. But they did not develop a new vision of what they were fighting for.
The excitement and the frustration of that experience pushed me to look more seriously at the problem. I came to think that the Left had not adequately reckoned with the failures of the twentieth century, and that this failure was blocking a genuine renewal.
Jonas Elvander
You’re part of the Endnotes collective. Should your plan be seen as a break with them?
Aaron Benanav
My new work grows out of my experience with Endnotes. Endnotes has theorized a long era of deindustrialization and economic slowdown and has examined the social and labor movements that have arisen beyond the end of the classical labor movement. We try to see how they might become the basis of an exit from capitalism.
But like many Marxist groups, we did not think it was important to say what should come after capitalism. Taking that question seriously changed my views. The transformation we need to undertake cannot simply be carried out through autonomous action from below. It has to be consciously enacted at the level of society as a whole.
Endnotes also gave me a rigorous way to think about capitalism as a society organized around a particular way of valuing our activity: everything good is represented as a monetary sum, and the goal is to expand those sums through profit-making.
In my new work, I develop what I call a theory of values. Instead of a world in which everything has to be translated into money, we should create a world in which a variety of ethical and political values — many of them difficult to express in monetary terms — can directly shape what and how we produce. These might include sustainability, material security, care, the quality of work, community, and individual autonomy.
Jonas Elvander
I guess the thing with Marxism is that it’s always most relevant when you’re in capitalism, while in a noncapitalist world its descriptive quality becomes less relevant.
Aaron Benanav
Yes, Marxism puts forward truths about capitalism that other ways of seeing the world lack. The division of income between capital and labor, for example, is not a technical outcome automatically determined by the organization of production. It is political, and our institutions systematically disadvantage workers in that struggle.
But Marxism tells us remarkably little about what comes after capitalism. Across the twentieth century, attempts to make it serve as a guide to a society or economy beyond capitalism often blocked people from thinking more freely about new institutions.
The most controversial conclusion I have drawn, from a Marxist perspective at least, is that we need markets after capitalism. In late twentieth-century debates, any allowance for markets was treated as a concession to capitalism. But markets make a viable postcapitalist society more decentralized, adaptable, and open to experiment.
The mistake Marxists made was to identify market exchange with profit-oriented investment. Markets and currencies existed for thousands of years before capitalism without producing a dynamic economy organized around profit. We need to preserve exchange while abolishing the power of private profitability to direct investment.
Jonas Elvander
The Soviet Union’s five-year plans are usually remembered as part of a wasteful system of central planning. Yet you think they contain an important lesson for us. What should we recover from that experience, and what should we leave behind?
Aaron Benanav
The five-year plan is one of the most important institutional discoveries of the twentieth century. They showed that investment can be coordinated: society can agree in advance on a general direction and get different parts of the economy moving toward it at the same time.
The five-year plan was not drawn from any Marxist blueprint. It emerged from attempts to solve a practical problem: how to develop a poor economy without creating shortages in one sector and unusable surpluses in another. The same coordination challenge returns whenever an economy must transform many interdependent systems at once.
Capitalism struggles with transformations of that kind. We can see it today with electrification: many different systems have to change together, but each develops separately, so the transition is slow. A five-year plan allows a society to choose a direction and set out along it. It may not be the best path, but coordination gets you there faster, and you learn as you go.
The Soviet economy was extraordinarily wasteful. The information and coordination problems of central planning overwhelmed the dynamism of the five-year plans.
Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China later separated coordinated investment from total planning and combined it with market exchange more successfully, although they remained capitalist. We should use these tools to get out of capitalism instead.
Jonas Elvander
You describe a “digital data matrix” for coordinating production. Doesn’t that risk bringing central planning back through an all-seeing computer?
Aaron Benanav
Since writing the essays, I have abandoned that science-fictional term. It gave the wrong impression. Once currencies are digital, it becomes possible to produce a real-time, but necessarily partial, digital picture of economic flows and connect it to biophysical, social, and subjective indicators. I call this a common ledger.
Forecasting and advisory services based on this ledger could help households, firms, and investment boards bring that information to bear on their choices. But the ledger has no executive function: it informs choices rather than making them.
Jonas Elvander
Another important thinker to you is the Viennese polymath Otto Neurath. He was a participant in the Bavarian Soviet Republic and later a major figure in Red Vienna, whose proposals helped launch the socialist calculation debate. What makes him so important to your project?
Aaron Benanav
Neurath understood that a society beyond capitalism could have many standards of value rather than one. We could organize the economy around material security, sustainability, care, good work, fairness, and justice, instead of economic efficiency and the increasing quantity of goods and services we consume.
Neurath also saw that our values necessarily come into conflict. They cannot all be realized to the same extent. At some point, producing more goods will conflict with making the economy more sustainable. One account of good work will conflict with another. Society has to decide how to compose these values in a particular way.
People often say that they want democratic rather than authoritarian socialism, but they do not explain why democracy would actually be intrinsic to their version of socialism.
Neurath shows us the way. If there is no single measure of value that we can use to identify the best possible future, and if different futures realize our values in different ways, then we need democratic procedures for choosing among those futures.
Neurath himself remained committed to central planning and could not explain how multiple values should enter such an economy. His contribution is not a complete institutional model. It is the recognition that economic judgment cannot be replaced by calculation. A society can measure its resources and study the likely consequences of its options, but no equation can tell us which sacrifices are worth making.
Jonas Elvander
Keynesian ideas are enjoying a revival on the Left, especially in debates about industrial policy and the green transition. But you think Keynes points beyond a more active capitalist state. What does the Left still have to learn from him?
Aaron Benanav
Keynes gives us the idea of an economy in which investment has been freed from the need to generate a profit. This sounds strange because people hear “investment” and think of financial assets purchased to earn a monetary return. But we already invest in infrastructure, schools, and hospitals without expecting them to generate profits. Investment simply means mobilizing people, resources, and productive capacities to rebuild and transform what and how we produce. We can invest for reasons that have nothing to do with making money or maximizing growth.
Radical Keynesians such as William Beveridge focused on full employment as one goal of non-profit-oriented investment. He envisaged public authorities controlling 75 percent of investment. I would extend that to 100 percent. I also reject their technocratic approach: in my proposal, investment decisions would be made democratically.
That does not mean putting every initiative to a vote. In the civic sector, individuals and small groups could organize projects and attract resources without having to justify them in advance, operating under democratic rules and light oversight.
Jonas Elvander
You make the case for “functional finance.” How does your approach diverge from Modern Monetary Theory?
Aaron Benanav
MMT’s central insight is correct. A government that issues its own currency is not like a household. The ultimate limits on its spending are the available labor and other resources. Inflation becomes a risk when spending outruns those limits. As long as resources are going unused, public spending can and should mobilize them.
But MMT generally uses a job guarantee to support employment while leaving most investment in private hands. Profitability still determines which productive capacities get built, while the legislature tries to stabilize the economy after the fact.
I draw a more radical conclusion from the premise MMT shares with Keynes. Investment does not require someone to save money first. In real terms, saving is society’s decision to set aside part of its current productive capacity for building the future. Once workers, machines, and materials have been made available, society can create the funds needed to mobilize them. The investment fund is social from the outset, not the property of whoever has accumulated money. The fiction that private savers created these resources and therefore acquire the right to decide how they are used falls away.
Once investment is freed from profit and individual control, the question becomes political: What should we use these capacities to build? There is no single optimal future toward which we can simply launch ourselves. We have many good options.
Jonas Elvander
If decisions about investment become political rather than private, how would that actually work? Who would decide where resources should go?
Aaron Benanav
Most investment decisions would be made by democratic sectoral boards, each responsible for one field of production. Take health care. Should more resources go to expanding mental health care, preventive medicine, or end-of-life care?
These choices require technical knowledge, but they also reflect different judgments about what matters and different visions of the sector’s future.
A health care board might bring together elected representatives of health care workers and patients, technical experts, and civic groups concerned with the sector’s wider social and ecological effects. It would receive a budget and choose among investment proposals. Each proposal would embody a view of how the sector should develop. The resulting package would not necessarily point toward a single coherent future.
Democratic planning allows society to move forward without resolving these disagreements once and for all: people can continue to favor different futures while deciding together which projects to support and on what scale.
From this perspective, a sectoral board would be less like a central command center than a representative government within a field of production. Then, because some transformations cross sectoral boundaries, additional mission committees would coordinate projects such as greening the economy or reducing working hours.
Put the pieces together and you have the basic framework: the Soviet discovery of coordinated investment, Neurath’s account of multiple and conflicting values, Keynesian public investment, and markets that preserve decentralized knowledge.
Jonas Elvander
Friedrich Hayek’s argument against planning was that economic knowledge is dispersed across society and that markets coordinate it better than any central planner could. You seem to say that what is needed to solve this “knowledge problem” is not more computing power or artificial intelligence, but democracy.
Aaron Benanav
Hayek’s starting point was right. Modern society has not only a division of labor but also a division of knowledge. Prices allow people who know different things to coordinate their activities without anyone having to understand the whole economy.
But markets are not the only institutions that solve this kind of knowledge problem. Climate science brings together atmospheric physicists, oceanographers, geologists, and ecologists, each working with a different body of knowledge. The modern corporation does something similar within the firm, bringing engineers, designers, accountants, and production workers into a common organization.
Both show that markets are only one way of coordinating divided knowledge.
The deeper problem is that an economy must coordinate not only different forms of knowledge but also different ethical values. Once we recognize this plurality of values, economic decisions become problems of composition. The values at stake cannot be ranked on a single scale. Every choice realizes some goods and sacrifices others.
People disagree about what to do. Hayek wanted individuals to make judgments about values within their own lives, while the market coordinated the results.
But many value-laden economic choices are unavoidably collective. Investment decisions determine which possibilities society creates for everyone: whether we build toward greater material consumption, more care, lower emissions, or less work. Democracy and markets can work together within the same process of composition.
Jonas Elvander
You have made a case for retaining markets after capitalism. But those markets would operate with two currencies rather than one. Why?
Aaron Benanav
The Bolsheviks initially thought they would abolish money. What the Soviet Union ultimately did was divide money into two circuits: cash rubles for consumption and noncash rubles for production. But the two remained forms of the same currency, held in a fixed one-to-one relation. People earned wages but often could not find goods to buy, so enormous savings accumulated on the consumer side. By the 1980s, this monetary overhang contributed to the system’s breakdown. A real split requires separate circuits with a flexible conversion rate between them.
That led me to study the history of money. Before the nineteenth century, markets commonly operated with different currencies serving distinct circuits. Peasants and long-distance merchants had different monetary needs, and their currencies did not inevitably converge as long as the circuits remained mostly separate.
Capitalism required a sustained political effort to produce a singular currency that could serve as both a universal means of exchange and a universal store of wealth. If markets are going to persist after capitalism, there will probably also have to be multiple monies.
Jonas Elvander
Why is that separation so important? Why can’t a single currency support an economy organized around many values?
Aaron Benanav
The problem is that under capitalism the same accumulable money passes through production, consumption, and investment. The surplus a firm earns can become private income for business owners or finance changes in production.
Firms generate that surplus by cutting costs or increasing revenues. Gans in economic efficiency, in this narrow sense, therefore take priority. Sustainability and work quality count only when they improve the bottom line.
Reformers often try to make other values count by attaching financial rewards to measurable proxies for those values. But that leaves financial gain in command.
People game the metrics rather than pursue the underlying goal: schools teach to the test, while hospitals manipulate reported waiting times. A market organized around a universal, accumulable currency cannot treat ethical values as ends in themselves.
The split currency breaks this connection without abolishing markets. In my system, Points used in production cannot be converted into Credits used for consumption, accumulated indefinitely, or used to finance investment. A firm gains no private income or additional productive power by underspending its operating budget.
Producers still face prices and have budget constraints, so they have to use resources carefully. But they can compose sustainability, work quality, efficiency, and other values within that constraint instead of being compelled to maximize a surplus.
The split also prevents inequalities in consumption from becoming inequalities of productive power. Someone with more Credits cannot use them to buy productive assets or command investment. Consumption remains decentralized, while decisions about society’s productive future pass through democratic institutions.
Jonas Elvander
Last, are you writing recipes for the cookshops of the future?
Aaron Benanav
I dislike the “utopophobic” way that Marx’s line about cookshops is used to bar any conversation about what should come after capitalism. There is a real difference between the cookshop and the recipes. We should not decide in advance exactly how health care, agriculture, housing, or family life will be organized. Those are the recipes: they will remain subjects of political conflict.
But we do need to elaborate on the cookshop: the institutions that allow different views to contend without reproducing capitalism. A postcapitalist society will still contain political opponents with incompatible views of the good life. Its achievement would be to give those conflicts a durable, democratic form, not to settle them in advance.
Sveriges Television (SVT), Sweden’s tax-funded public service broadcaster, has recently launched Silent Attraction, which seems to be an exceptional reality show even by global standards. In the show, left-leaning women and manosphere-influenced men are brought together in a large house to find a potential partner without initially knowing anything about each other’s political views.
The premise is as simple as it is awkward: the sixteen participants are not allowed to speak to one another. Instead they are encouraged to observe each other, perform exercises in which they stare deeply into one another’s eyes, and attend pool parties where they use body language to get to know each other and signal whom they find attractive.
Those who make a match are eventually allowed to speak, beginning in the third and fourth episodes. But just as they do, they are shown prerecorded videos in which their match explains their views on gender, equality, LGBT+ rights, climate change, and other political questions. They are then asked to reflect on how these views affect their initial attraction and to continue exploring their attraction and the possibility of entering a relationship in their home settings.
SVT is legally required to produce programs in the public interest and to uphold the principles of democracy, equal human dignity, individual freedom, impartiality, and objectivity, alongside strong protections for freedom of expression and access to information. In this setting, the most immediate impression of Silent Attraction is that it tells a story of the decay of Swedish public service as an institution of popular education. Its premise could easily have been lifted from a commercial broadcaster.
At the same time, SVT is narrowing rather than expanding the range of its public service offering, phasing out programs such as News in Easy Swedish, which makes news and current affairs accessible to people who might otherwise struggle to follow conventional coverage, including newcomers to Sweden and people with cognitive disabilities, and reducing the role of its educational channel, The Knowledge Channel. Silent Attraction, meanwhile, attempts to preserve the appearance of a democratic mission by presenting itself as a response to the growing political divide between men and women. Its premise rests on the familiar claim that women tend to be more “GAL” — green, alternative, and libertarian — while men tend to be more “TAN,” or traditional, authoritarian, and nationalist. However, the solution the show offers is not political education or collective deliberation, but romantic attraction: get men and women to desire one another first and then hope that desire can overcome their political differences.
In this sense, the program serves to depoliticize a growing gender conflict by tapping into an ideological status quo in which romantic love is presented as a higher good — something we should aspire to despite our political differences. But this may be too simple a reading.
As I have argued in these pages, while heterosexual coupledom is one of the sites where gender inequality is reproduced, it is also a setting where those inequalities can be confronted and transformed. Drawing on our findings in a research project on involuntary celibacy and singlehood, colleagues and I have argued that men and women who lack experience of intimate relationships with one another may find it easier to turn each other into political abstractions rather than flesh-and-blood human beings. Involuntarily single men have a more critical stance toward gender equality, and both men and women describe how they have gained more understanding for each other through long-term romantic engagement. In this sense, love has the possibility to become a “revolutionary laboratory,” and falling in love can have consequences for how we make sense of the world.
So even if the experiment no doubt deserves criticism — both as a symptom of the broader collapse of what was once a genuinely educative broadcaster and as a rather cruel way of turning people’s desire for intimacy into content — the impulse behind it is not quite as absurd as it might initially appear. In fact, it is hard not to see something preferable in it to the current vogue for heteropessimism, a sensibility that has taken root in both feminist and anti-feminist circles.
From opposite political directions, these camps increasingly converge on the same bleak conclusion: that men and women are fundamentally incapable of understanding one another, let alone of forming meaningful, sustaining relationships. As Samanta Pinson Wrisley argues, building on a lecture held by Lauren Berlant, this heteropessimism is problematic partly because it lets go of the possibility for change while making heterosexuality itself the problem, rather than the political context in which women and men meet:
The fact is that heterosexuality has a lot of problems, but it is not the problem. Rather than making heterosexuality the receptacle for all of our bad feelings about the state of sexual politics, which obviously exceed heterosex, feminism needs to acknowledge negative affects as part of the fabric of ambiguity that cloaks sexual politics. Leaning into feminist negativity and uncertainty is a tall order, for doing so means making peace with what Maggie Nelson summarizes as “the fact that everything is not going to be OK, that no one or nothing is coming to save us, and that this is both searingly difficult and also fine.” But let’s not mistake this position for a nihilism or a different form of pessimism; it is, instead, a capacious view of the intricacies of desire, the tensions that define it, and the conflicts that give it life. I will resist going so far as to call it an embracing of hetero-optimism, but it is a move in that direction. May we discover the requisite “skills for bearing this transition,” as Lauren Berlant said in 2019, and rebuild our “confidence in how to be together”.
Seen in this light, Silent Attraction’s clumsy attempt to create the conditions for people to meet begins to look less ridiculous — and perhaps even faintly utopian. Yet watching the show makes clear that we still have a long way to go, to say the least. The women are hardly heteropessimists: for the most part, they are simply asking for equal rights, and most are closer to liberal feminism than radical feminism. Yet the men describe them as “really hardcore.”
When the men try to explain their unease with feminist accounts of women’s subordination and men’s power — pointing, for instance, to men’s high suicide rates or to their own experiences of being unable to express their feelings as young men — some of the women dismiss these arguments as attempts to shift attention away from the “real” problem. In the process, the possibility of a deeper understanding of how gendered patterns harm all of us, albeit in different ways, is lost. So too is the attraction between the men and women.
What does this tell us? Perhaps that political change can begin with something as simple as attraction: the willingness to encounter another person before reducing them to a political category. But attraction alone is hardly enough. For intimacy to become politically transformative, we also need a way of understanding our relationships that takes gendered power seriously without turning men and women into clear-cut camps of winners and losers.
The point is not to deny the inequalities that shape our relationships, but to recognize that their effects are more complicated than a simple distribution of privilege and suffering. Gendered power does not leave one side unscathed and the other victorious. In different ways, we all find ourselves on the losing side of a social order that makes it harder to understand one another — and, ultimately, to be together.
Before the spectacular implosion of his $45 billion AI hedge fund late last month, twenty-four-year-old Leopold Aschenbrenner had laid out a road map for a new Cold War with China.
In June 2024, shortly after being fired from OpenAI, Aschenbrenner published a treatise titled “Situational Awareness,” analogizing his work in Silicon Valley to the race to build the atomic bomb. The nuclear secrets that had permanently changed the world’s balance of power and won World War II for the United States, he wrote, had been upstaged. Advancements being made across Silicon Valley augured the imminent arrival of artificial superintelligence, a technology upon which the future of American economic and military supremacy rested.
It was a race, said Aschenbrenner, that would “determine the future of the free world.” The only question was whether the United States or its authoritarian adversary China would get there first.
Aschenbrenner’s manifesto skyrocketed his profile in Silicon Valley, earning him the trust of major tech investors who poured assets into a new hedge fund under his control. He named it, of course, Situational Awareness.
The ideas articulated in his essay, however, had not always been so well received in the industry. During the first Trump administration, Silicon Valley reacted with widespread concern as the White House sanctioned and blacklisted top Chinese tech firms, worried that decoupling American tech firms from the enormous Chinese market could harm the tech industry’s growth and revenue. After the Biden administration signaled bipartisan political support for the new Cold War by implementing sweeping semiconductor export controls on China, the industry rankled, with some US chip firms lobbying furiously against them.
Today, however, Aschenbrenner’s manifesto is a foundational text in the growing Silicon Valley consensus around the new Cold War. In his own 6,500 word essay this month, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg wrote that obstructions to the AI build-out’s necessary energy and data center infrastructure represented a national security risk to US dominance in the AI race with China. Others, from liberals like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic chief Dario Amodei to right-wing venture capital heavyweights Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, agree.
In an address at the conservative Hudson Institute that quoted Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, Palantir CEO Alex Karp put it bluntly. When it comes to the AI race, he said, “There are only two cultures that are going to win in the next year. It’s going to be us or China.”
Ironically for Aschenbrenner, it was Chinese tech competition that brought his hedge fund crashing down. On July 30, in a seeming repeat of January 2025’s DeepSeek moment, a Chinese start-up named Moonshot AI released a cheaper, open-weight AI model that bested its closed-source US counterparts in some benchmarks, sending AI stocks — and Aschenbrenner’s highly leveraged portfolio — tumbling.
The Moonshot moment, however, also highlighted material differences between the US and Chinese tech sectors, much of which can be traced to the state policy that shaped them. The Chinese government has kept a tight rein on its tech industry. After Jack Ma, the billionaire head of the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, criticized the country’s financial regulators in 2020, the state torpedoed his firm’s historic $37 billion public stock offering, removing him from control of the company and splitting Alibaba into six different firms.
It was the start of a sweeping regulatory crackdown that disciplined the nation’s technology industry and wiped out $2 trillion in value from the sector. Today the Chinese state has ushered in AI development plans focused more on practicality than dreams of superintelligence, a strategy that prioritizes efficiently diffusing AI tools and services throughout the economy and has been described by Xi Jinping as an approach “strongly oriented towards applications.”
By contrast, until the 2020 election and the arrival of Lina Khan to head the Biden administration’s Federal Trade Commission, decades of bipartisan consensus blessed the emergence of America’s tech monopolies, placing technology policy and related industrial strategy in the hands of a few powerful Silicon Valley players.
Even the rise of a new technology like AI highlighted the centralization of power in Silicon Valley. Microsoft entered into exclusive deals and profit-sharing partnerships with OpenAI, while Google and Amazon took major stakes in OpenAI’s main rival, Anthropic. Nvidia, which controls 90 percent of the AI semiconductor market, has similar arrangements with much of the AI industry. Much of the trillions in capital flowing into the AI investment boom represents gains extracted from state-sanctioned monopolies that span cloud services, online advertising, social media, and e-commerce, as well as hardware monopolies like Nvidia.
Both the US and Chinese technology industries are products of their respective states’ policies, neither of which have been particularly democratic. The very first words of Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness manifesto describe the results of the long-standing US approach to industrial policy and technology regulation: “You can see the future first in San Francisco,” he wrote. “Right now, there are perhaps a few hundred people, most of them in San Francisco and the AI labs, that have situational awareness.” His proximity to the concentrated power and capital of America’s inventor-investor-policymakers facilitated his vision. “Let me tell you what we see.”
What he sees is what the CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and Amazon see, along with many of their twenty-four-year-old engineers: opportunity. The idea of looming conflict with China has its conveniences, offering an existential AI arms race that entices funders and increases firm valuations while providing built-in marketing for products that are still searching for consumer desire.
Some benefits are more personal. The Situational Awareness treatise enabled Aschenbrenner, who lacked investing experience entirely, to raise an initial $100 million for his hedge fund — which, in the span of under two years, reached a scale that its peers took decades to achieve — and cushioned his fall from grace when it came crashing down around him. Today investors are clamoring to reinvest.
But the ultimate return on this vision is even more lucrative. At its core, the new Cold War with China is a framework that provides Silicon Valley crucial insulation from democracy. At a congressional hearing in 2018 where he was grilled about an infamous Facebook data breach, Mark Zuckerberg’s notes laid out the strategy as simply as it gets: “Break up FB? US tech companies key asset for America; break up strengthens Chinese companies.” A photograph of the notes, taken by the Associated Press, quickly went viral.
The national security refrain developed into a commonly used defense against antitrust and tech regulation efforts during the Biden administration. In 2021, faced with the possible passage of a bipartisan slate of antitrust bills aimed at their industry, top Silicon Valley firms organized a letter from a dozen senior Trump, Obama, and George W. Bush administration national security officials, including former Defense Secretary and CIA Director Leon Panetta, later a key speaker at the 2024 Democratic National Convention. Legislation to rein in American tech giants would degrade America’s military and intelligence dominance, they wrote, a regulatory mistake that would come “at the expense of U.S. economic and national security” and “cede U.S. tech leadership to China.” It was a useful argument: despite bipartisan backing in Congress and growing public support, none of the antitrust bills were passed.
Today the Cold War with China that Leopold Aschenbrenner so breathlessly relayed is a potent shield both for Silicon Valley and the national security state. A bipartisan backlash against the growing power of Silicon Valley to dictate the terms of American life is underway, with Americans across the political spectrum finding common ground in opposing the automation of their jobs, data centers and their associated energy costs, the increasing prevalence of surveillance tools like Flock cameras, and the spread of extractive rent-seeking tools like algorithmic price-fixing of groceries and apartment rents. Against this backdrop, arguments about national security and great-power rivalry offer an attractive way for tech firms to short-circuit growing public demands for control over the technologies shaping their lives.
The new Cold War with China offers the national security establishment a similar opportunity to safeguard its own power from democratic control. Recent disastrous choices, including Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the US war on Iran, are significantly weakening the foreign policy establishment’s hold on both parties and igniting support for antiwar politics. A new existential threat abroad that must be managed by experienced operatives with the commensurate security clearances, however, could provide fertile ground for re-entrenchment.
Neither trillions of dollars in AI investment nor a worldwide program of gunboat coercion can conceal the slipping grasp of Silicon Valley and the national security state over American public opinion. How many people desire to live out Leopold Aschenbrenner’s vision — a world in which a few hundred people scattered across Silicon Valley AI labs and Washington national security posts are afforded “situational awareness” through their proximity to unassailable power and can act to shape the world accordingly? Few to none. The shadow of the new Cold War with China points to the unanswered question straining at the heart of Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Silicon Valley vision: How much longer will Americans be willing to surrender democratic control of the world-structuring institutions that shape their lives?
In a new report from the Equality Action Center, Joan C. Williams and Jared Abbott lay out a sensible, pragmatic approach to what has always seemed a Sisyphean task: explaining to progressives how they can turn more people on to their politics than they turn off. In so doing, Williams and Abbott offer a means to block one of the misanthropic right’s signature moves: playing populist and turning the working class against a college-educated left that wants to address our system’s fundamental injustices.
The report is essentially a “For Dummies” coalition guide for progressive smarties (especially social justice advocates, political candidates, and funders) that shows how to recognize and redirect the antisocial, prejudicial habits of their class and channel them toward the common goal of taking populism back from the Right.
Much of the guide’s wisdom comes down to the broad working class’s perception that college-educated voters are too focused on problems that don’t affect workers’ lives. Citizens scrabbling just to get by are turned off when they see elites focusing on issues that may be real and significant but that they perceive are at a distance from the pressures they face to put food on the table, collect a paycheck, and pay the rent.
Wage-earners certainly are not mostly anti-LGBT, anti-international, anti-immigration, anti-art, anti–gun control, anti-abortion, anti-democracy, or anti-environment. But they do prioritize issues directly connected to their economic and social precarity. This is not hard to understand, and progressive and the Left — if they hope to win the trust of working-class voters — need to remember it.
This is exemplified by the biggest priority gap in the survey: the 40-point delta (90 percent versus 50 percent) between liberal college-educated voters and no-four-year-degree working-class voters on “defending democracy.” The issue was the second-highest priority for the college set, but just the nineteenth (of the twenty-five priorities Williams and Abbott tested) for the working class. Food, jobs, health, wages, and safety outpoll any four-syllable word used by a group that’s uphill from you.
And what about that darling term of the current election cycle, “affordability”? The buzzword is broken out into its components (jobs, wages, work conditions, consumer costs, etc.). It’s found that the college set is preoccupied with the consumer-costs side of the affordability crisis versus the working class, which prioritizes the predistributive costs associated with jobs, wages, housing, and health care. The working class is accustomed to living without a credit line (or an investment portfolio) buffer, the college set less so. The takeaway: when speaking to affordability, progressive and left candidates need to speak not just to store and restaurant prices but to the mortal impacts of low wages and high rent.
Of the issues tested, the three largest gaps where college grads trailed working-class respondents — and in every racial group — concerned personal security. This should not surprise anyone.
Do more educated, affluent people inhabit safer, or more dangerous communities? Are there more precariously situated noncitizens in Ypsilanti or Grosse Pointe, Michigan? Are there more in Chappaqua or Mount Vernon, New York? What about Oakland versus Menlo Park, California? Working-class respondents favored securing the border by 28.3 points, lowering the crime rate by 21.8 points, and adding more police by 19.3 points.
On the other side, issues that college grads prioritize more than the working class, there are four issues with a wide spread. The college set prefers: LGBTQ+ rights by 32 points, immigration by 32 points, climate by 29 points, and abortion rights by 26 points.
These are called “wedge issues,” given their tactical utility to strategists on the Right. It’s not that these issues don’t matter — not even a slim majority of working-class voters wishes to persecute minorities, force women to have unwanted children, or further disrupt the climate. But they are simply not seen as immediate as the threats that come from not paying your rent, car payments, daycare, and medical bills — existential issues that those on the college track don’t experience so often or acutely.
Here, Williams and Abbott identify how to find enough common ground on issues to fend off the wedge-driving political operatives on the right.
The study doesn’t pretend to test every framing under the sun, but it does get after many, and successfully so. The researchers provide a well-stocked workshop filled with ready-to-use tools to build coalitions on these and other wedge issues. For instance, they supply messages that boost working-class support for universal childcare by nearly 28 points, climate change action by nearly 24 points, supporting trans girls on sports teams by 23 points, citizenship paths for immigrants by 22 points.
Their findings indicate that the working-class is not rabidly pro–Immigration and Customs Enforcement or militantly against civil liberties, and a coalition that favors immigrant safety is not only possible but easy to communicate, even in the face of a right-leaning opposition actively seeking to prevent coalition.
The report shows how the Right pierces a progressive cause’s flank when the Left assumes consensus. Progressives and leftists need to see past our bubble and realize that not everybody is at our elevation on subjects like climate and culture wars, and that when we assume in this fashion, we make asses of ourselves to the people to whom we preach solidarity.
The Right, as Corey Robin has famously argued, learns from the Left. Edmund Burke argued conservatives should copy the Jacobins. The slaveholders, even as they denounced the rights of man, celebrated the demotic virtues of widespread slaveholding in the antebellum South. Newt Gingrich argued that the conservative minority in the House needed to adopt “Viet Cong” tactics to harry the majority.
More recently, the Left has also attempted to learn from the Right. Liberal activists created the State Innovation Exchange (SIX) as a left-leaning version of the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Further left, socialists have argued recently that the left should copy the parliamentary tactics of the congressional far right. Much of this discussion has focused on the House Freedom Caucus (HFC), the right-wing caucus founded in 2015.
All the way back in 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez herself contrasted the unity of the HFC with the much bigger but more loosely organized Congressional Progressive Caucus. In 2020–21, the “force the vote” debate on the Left centered around whether socialists in Congress should, like the HFC, threaten to vote against their party’s Speaker candidate (in this case Nancy Pelosi) unless they received a promise that one of their key legislative priorities (Medicare for All) would be brought to the floor for a vote. More recently, Neal Meyer has argued that the HFC’s success in bullying Kevin McCarthy provides a model for the kind of combativity and cohesion that we should expect from socialist legislators.
I’m not convinced.
In my view, the HFC has been considerably less successful than is generally appreciated, and the costs of its strategy have largely been ignored. Its example for socialist legislators is, therefore, largely (but not entirely) a negative one.
Before getting into the comparison, it’s worth establishing what exactly the House Freedom Caucus is. The caucus was founded in January 2015. The impetus for its founding was the failure of far-right Congressmember Mick Mulvaney to win leadership of the Republican Study Committee (RSC). Founded by New Right impresario Paul Weyrich in the 1970s to pull the party right, by the 1990s the RSC had become a central Republican leadership institution in the House. During Barack Obama’s administration, frustration with the RSC had mounted among the most conservative House Republicans, as the committee tended to support Speaker John Boehner in cutting budgetary compromises with the Obama administration rather than shutting the government down. When Mulvaney lost the RSC leadership contest to Texas energy executive Bill Flores, he and his ideological confreres determined that a new organization was needed for conservatives unwilling to compromise with liberalism.
While the RSC leadership vote was the proximal cause, the founders of the HFC were also reacting against the failure of the House Tea Party Caucus. This caucus had been founded in July 2010 as the organization of the new belligerent right that was then storming Republican primaries. But despite the attention the caucus and its members commanded, by summer 2012 the organization was defunct, having failed, as an organization, to have much influence on anything.
Mulvaney and his comrades, notably Jim Jordan of Ohio and Raul Labrador of Idaho, were determined to avoid a repeat of the Tea Party Caucus. Instead of a group that was publicity-seeking and undisciplined, they wanted a group that would be secretive and highly coordinated. To that end, they shut out House members like Louie Gohmert and Thomas Massie, who, while deeply conservative, had reputations as undisciplined loose cannons. The new caucus would be invitation-only and, unlike most caucuses, would not make its membership public. It would also bind its members by rules like the 80 percent threshold, which held that if 80 percent of the caucus supported a vote, the remaining 20 percent would have to follow.
Very quickly, the caucus became a thorn in Speaker John Boehner’s side, denouncing him and voting against bills like Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding and trade deal authority for the president. Boehner used his power as Speaker to retaliate, removing HFC members from subcommittees and cutting some off from National Republican Congressional Committee funds. In July, Mark Meadows filed a motion to vacate the chair, calling for a vote on Boehner’s speakership in the middle of the term. It was an extraordinary move, the first such motion in nearly a century. In order to avoid a bruising leadership fight that might end in defeat anyways, Boehner announced his retirement. He was replaced by Paul Ryan.
In the 2016 presidential race, the HFC didn’t play much of a role. The group was opposed to Trump, who it correctly saw as totally uncommitted to fiscal conservatism. It was largely divided between Ted Cruz, who had built a strong connection with the HFC, and Rand Paul, whose dogmatic libertarianism appealed to several of the group’s leaders. Though discipline and unity had been the caucus’s founding watchwords, it did not attempt to make a coordinated intervention into the Republican primary.
When Donald Trump became president, the posture of the group shifted considerably. While it continued pushing for far-right priorities, it did not engage in the kind of all-out warfare it had directed against Boehner. Instead, the group often compromised, and when it did fight, it often lost.
On taxes, perhaps the cause closest to the caucus’s heart, there were two priorities in 2017. First, it wanted Trump’s tax cut to be deficit-neutral so it wouldn’t increase the deficit. In this, it was in accordance with the House leadership. Paul Ryan wanted the same thing. But it was opposed to Ryan’s means of paying for it — a border adjustment tax (BAT) that would amount to a huge tax increase on importers. This formed its second priority. Ryan would junk the BAT in summer 2017, though the HFC could hardly claim sole credit. The tax spurred opposition from a huge sector of business, from retailers to the Koch brothers, the latter of which used their connections with the Trump White House to turn the administration against the BAT as well. But with the BAT gone, there was no way to make the tax cut deficit-neutral without huge spending cuts that would derail the entire bill. The HFC pushed for these, but got nowhere, and the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed without any compensating spending cuts or new revenue.
The second major fight for the HFC was Obamacare repeal. The caucus wanted a full repeal. Here the HFC did come into serious conflict with the Republican leadership and the Trump administration and was regularly denounced by both. Two members actually left the caucus in the midst of this battle. Paul Ryan had developed a bill, the American Health Care Act (AHCA), that would repeal much of Obamacare but left in place some of the original bill’s new taxes and also offered refundable tax credits to help households purchase health insurance. The HFC refused to support the bill, and lacking the votes to pass it, the House leadership canceled its scheduled vote on it. It subsequently passed amendments that would bring the bill closer in line with what the HFC wanted.
Though it didn’t win all of its demands, the HFC agreed to support the bill. Mark Meadows explained that “had we not come around . . . there would have been the typical stereotype that they’ll never get to ‘yes.’” But even in compromising, the HFC was unable to achieve its demands. The revisions to the bill had made it too conservative for moderate Republicans, who pulled their support, dooming the AHCA once and for all.
When the Democrats took back the House in 2018, the HFC faded in prominence. The reason is simple. To be a minority of a majority is to have some power. But to be a minority of a minority is simply to be powerless. From 2019–2023, the HFC voted basically the same as other Republicans. It joined the fight to defend Donald Trump against impeachment, causing one of its members, Justin Amash, to leave, and also worked to punish Liz Cheney for voting for impeachment after January 6. But neither of these distinguished the HFC from the bulk of House Republicans. When its party was in the minority, the caucus simply did not have very much power.
All of this changed after the GOP took the house back in 2022. As soon as the new Congress came in, the HFC was determined to exercise its power. Though the vote to confirm Kevin McCarthy, who had led the GOP conference since Paul Ryan’s retirement in 2019, would normally have been pro forma, it turned into a bitter struggle between the HFC and McCarthy’s allies. The caucus demanded McCarthy and the conference leadership take up various fights, such as impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and creating a congressional subcommittee on the supposed persecution of January 6 rioters. McCarthy also agreed to give HFC members more committee assignments, to refrain from intervening in primaries without an incumbent, and, most consequentially, to bring back the motion to vacate the chair, which allows a single Republican to initiate a new election for Speaker.
McCarthy’s speakership was hamstrung from the beginning by resistance from the HFC. As he attempted to pass budget bills that Joe Biden was willing to sign and hence avert a government shutdown, the HFC continually denounced him, demanding cuts that would make the bills unacceptable to Biden. As a result, in the spring and the fall McCarthy ended up passing more liberal budgets than he would have preferred, because he had to rely on Democratic votes to pass them. Though the HFC succeeded in weakening McCarthy, its actions made the actual policy outputs of this period more liberal.
In October, the axe fell. HFC member Matt Gaetz filed the motion to vacate, and the House voted 216–210 to remove McCarthy. The race to replace McCarthy was messy. Four candidates tried and failed to win majorities. Mike Johnson, a fourth-term congressmember from Louisiana, finally succeeded after a chaotic three weeks. Though not a member of the HFC, Johnson had attended caucus meetings and received money from the group’s PAC. His election was widely viewed as a triumph for the caucus.
Yet while Johnson was quite friendly to the HFC, for the remainder of Biden’s presidency, the group had little success in shaping policy. The Senate still held a slim Democratic majority, so any bill the House hoped to pass needed to be acceptable to Chuck Schumer. When Johnson pushed through appropriations bills that did little to advance HFC priorities, caucus members wailed and gnashed their teeth but could not change the legislation and would not try to remove Johnson over the betrayal.
The Republicans’ victory in the 2024 elections returned the party to unified control over the federal government. The margin in the House, however, was quite small. As such, it might be expected that the HFC would yield disproportionate power in this environment. However, the reality has been rather different. As political scientist Frances Lee has shown, “During the first seven months of 2025, the HFC collapsed as a distinct voting bloc in the House Republican conference.” When Trump wanted to pass a continuing resolution that sustained spending levels appropriated under Biden, the HFC unanimously supported him, despite some complaint. Similarly, when Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill failed to include spending cuts savage enough to offset its tax cuts, the HFC released a document criticizing the bill, and five members voted against a rule to proceed. But when Johnson continued pushing it, the HFC folded and unanimously voted for the bill it had just described as “morally and fiscally bankrupt.”
As the 2026 midterms approach, the situation of the HFC has deteriorated even further. Almost the entire leadership is leaving the House. In the statehouses, where local franchises of the HFC have been set up, it is losing ground. Wyoming had been its most successful state. The caucus had won majority control of the statehouse in 2024 and announced an ambitious legislative agenda. But after it failed to pass most of it, its reputation sank. In the primaries this week, the caucus lost thirteen members in the House and six in the Senate.
To sum up, as of this writing, the future of the House Freedom Caucus is uncertain. It does not exist as a distinct voting bloc anymore, and its leaders are departing. If, as seems likely, the Democrats win control of the House in November, its power will be diminished even further, as it returns to the status of a minority of a minority.
Where does all of this leave the argument that socialists in office should emulate the caucus’s practice of what Matthew Green has called “legislative hardball”? In my view, there are three things that stand out as particularly relevant from the experience of the HFC.
First, the returns to legislative hardball are highest when the caucus is a minority of a majority and particularly when there is an opposite-party president. In these situations, the caucus could use its size and discipline to compel the House leadership to enter into fights with the administration that it otherwise would have avoided. These were also the situations in which the caucus succeeded in winning more power for itself in the form of committee apointments and so on.
When the caucus was a minority of a minority, it was effectively powerless and indistinguishable from the rest of its party. When a party majority was combined with a same-party president, the caucus often made noise and complained about policies being made but was generally unsuccessful in shaping the policy outputs.
Second, the caucus’s actions often resulted in policy moving the opposite direction from what it preferred. Its obstructionism led its party leadership to look for votes on the other side of the aisle in some circumstances. Since some compromises had to be made in order to attract these votes, the resulting legislation was more liberal than it would have been if the caucus had simply supported it. Recalcitrance can have real costs.
Finally, the HFC’s accomplishments have fallen far short of its ambitions. HFC members hoped that its work would build the caucus into a kind of third party in American politics (effectively a right-wing version of the party surrogate model that is popular in the Democratic Socialists of America). This has plainly failed. The caucus has failed to sustain itself as an independent voice in Congress and is deteriorating institutionally as well. The very tactics that gave it its power are in large part responsible for this deterioration. The caucus gained a reputation as obstructionists and is unpopular with much of the rest of the party.
There are a few implications for socialists in office. On the positive side, the conditions in which socialist legislative hardball are most likely to be successful are those in which the Democratic Party has a majority in Congress and an opposite-party president. This is the situation that will likely obtain after the midterms. Given that, I think it makes sense to look for some opportunities for the new socialist bloc in Congress to throw its weight around. However, it is worth saying that socialists in Congress do not have the kind of organizational coherence the HFC operated with. They do not have an official caucus or any institutional means of cooperating. Building this should be a priority.
On the whole, however, I think the experience of the HFC should lead socialists to be cautious about legislative hardball as a general stance. The risks are very high. A socialist caucus that rejects legislation as not left-wing enough, only to lead the House leadership to look to pass it with Republican votes instead, is not accomplishing very much for the cause of socialism. And obstructionism within the party can actually isolate a caucus instead of winning a leading role for it.
In other words, I’m afraid the lessons of the House Freedom Caucus for socialists are fairly limited. This is a pity, because the task in which socialist legislators are now engaged, as members of a party they do not lead, is a tremendously difficult one in which there are few models from which to learn. But the experience of the HFC does at least provide some guidance as to the risks of following its example.