New Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner is making good on his promise to revolutionize the job of district attorney and, in the process, offering an extraordinary experiment in criminal justice reform at the municipal level that could serve as a national model.
Two new books about making change in smaller cities are worthy of close study by anyone hoping to push their own city hall in a similar left-wing direction.
Conor Lamb ran as an anti-establishment, labor-backed candidate who defended the welfare state. To keep winning, Democrats will need to embrace a bold, redistributive program. If anything, the problem is that the progressive efforts are too weak, not too strong.
The recent Power Rising Summit in Atlanta brought together nearly a thousand Black women from across the country to strategize on how to build political power and harness the momentum behind the surge of Black women running for office.
Writers once busy in prestigious magazines rationalizing war and torture are now confronting the obdurate pathologies of American life that stem from America’s original racial sin. Coates wonders why those once fierce in defending bloody imperial missions now embrace him for describing American power from the rare standpoint of its internal victims. Yet the danger for Coates is not so much seduction by power as a distorted perspective caused by proximity to it.
The left’s role is to move opposition in the direction of politics — enabling working people to apply pressure when it can change the situation in their favor, building their (small-d) democratic strength. This is our mission inside and outside the Democratic Party, in social movements, in unions and in intellectual settings.
Why the white worker theme is harmful. It’s a mistake to racialize an economy that harms the entire working class. What has happened to more whites now is that the market has moved past them as well. It took almost 40 years to get to this point, in the near term no recipe of policy fixes will sufficiently remedy the effects. Democrats need to focus on reversing those long-term trends, but also must have something to offer workers now.
This first of two projected volumes of a new biography of the South Dakota Senator and 1972 Democratic Presidential nominee takes his story to the end of 1968. It offers some surprises about this significant, and some would say underrated, politician.
Did we do enough in 2016? And how can we build a broader electoral movement? I don't believe the Left bears the brunt of the blame for Hillary Clinton's defeat, and I reject arguments that try to score political points through guilt-tripping. Both long-term and short-term factors worked against a Clinton victory. Trump is not Reagan; 2016 is not 1980. But both elections were lost by tone-deaf Democratic elites who dismissed the economic anxieties of the working class.
A new book on Donald Trump is as revealing of the foibles and dangers of this reactionary, mysogynistic megalomanic as any honest and brutal piece of opposition research can be. It's also a latent warning of how a future hard right candidate might succeed absent Trump's egregious vulnerabilities. The reviewer faults the book for what it doesn't offer and some readers might expect; any indication that centrist Hillary Clinton is no sure friend of working people.
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