Portside

In today's global economy, financial security is increasingly the property of the 1%.

Google Walkout, Revolutionary Rojava, Brazil Left Unites, Italy's Dilemma, Left Populist Path in Canada, Africa's Marxist Era, Latin Pink Tide Aftermath

Issues that Barcelona en Comú is tackling come up against limitations set by Catalan and Spanish law. The city lacks authority to regulate housing, although the city has created new affordable housing, has successfully limited the reach of Airbnb...

Oklahoma was once a center of left-populism. Could it be that again?

Democrats should be running on their own wedge issues and saying look, the Republicans want to take Medicaid away from your family, from your neighbors, from your friends. If you’re here in Appalachia and say you don’t know someone covered by Medicaid, that’s not true. Democrats should be using that issue like a damn cudgel and beating Republicans with it in 2018.

Populism is an ideological chameleon—often supplemented with whatever authoritarian, nationalist or socialist inclinations held by those leading the particular movement—populist victories can (and often do) manifest in all manner of terrible ways around the world. Other times, they change the political realm for the better.

Brexit has come to the United States. For thirty years now, in Europe and the United States, a bipartisan neoliberal consensus has embraced the benefits of globalization and the rise of the "knowledge economy." If only workers would go back to school, retrain, and send their children to college, the good jobs that disappeared would somehow return. But those good jobs did not arrive, and voters have opted for a faux populism that promises to reverse globalization.

Trump's nationalism is absolutely about ethno-purity and an element of populism as well, although it's clearly a misdirection...it's largely about wounded national pride which has been a potent motivating force on the American right for a very long time. The reason Trump is now playing the conservative anthem "Proud To Be An American" at his rallies is: Good old fashioned jingoism - the one thing that brings the old right, the new right and the alt-right together.