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books

John Rawls, Socialist?

Ed Quish Jacobin
The author of this book, writes reviewer Quish, "makes a powerful case for a 'socialist constitutionalism' that deserves a place in contemporary debates on the Left."

Socialism and the Liberal Imagination

Mason B. Williams Dissent
How do socialist demands become liberal common sense? The history of the New Deal offers a useful lesson. It had a recognition that a good society rests on a sense of mutuality, reciprocity, and community spoke to what was wrong with a market society

We Need Popular Participation, Not Populism

Hilary Wainwright Red Pepper
What we need is a form of political leadership that frees democracy from liberalism through supporting citizens in asserting their popular sovereignty over the conditions of material daily life by getting organised as workers, as hospital users, as teachers, as students, as parents – and as citizens capable of mutual self-government.

books

There's No Going Back

Sam Rosenfeld Democracy Journal, Spring 2016
The initiatives of the New Deal and FDR's Second Bill of Rights represented less a permanent triumph of the welfare state or a model for a progressive way forward than a unique combination of non replicable circumstances, including a temporary cessation of enduring tensions involving race, immigration, culture, class, and individualism, which served to sustain a pale social democratic reform for just a few decades. What followed instead was today's new Gilded Age.

The Long March of Bernie’s Army

Harold Meyerson The American Prospect
If the Sanders generation can speak to America as boldly as Roosevelt did, and build their power once Bernie’s campaign is done, they may just make their revolution yet.

Exit Polls Show Democrats Embrace “Liberal,” Republicans Embrace Hatred

Bill Scher Campaign for America's Future
In the primaries held so far this year, many more Democrats are identifying as liberal than in the past, powered by dramatic changes in the views of young voters. Is the Republican Party undergoing a similar shift to the right? Yes, but the picture is a little more complicated.

labor

The Most Challenging Issue Facing Liberalism Today

Timothy Noah MSNBC
Most liberals continue to pay lip service to unions and their importance to the Democratic coalition. But in private, many will tell you that they have little use for them. Julian Zelizer, a Princeton political economist, argues that the marriage between liberalism and organized labor “took a terrible turn starting in the 1970s,” when global competition moved manufacturing jobs from the unionized Northeast and Midwest to the non-union South and, ultimately, abroad.
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