Category: the left
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A short political glossary
Some rules help with a simple guide that can provide rigorous analysis of politics
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Saint Bernie and that horrible woman: why the “left” is so reactionary.
On the eve of the fateful 2016 Presidential election, in a pre-election “explainer”, Dissent magazine told its readers a completely false story that St. Bernie Sanders was bringing us socialism, whether we deserved it or not, but evil neoliberal Hillary Clinton was a fanatical devotee of the harshest form of…
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“Neoliberal” is a dishonest word
“Neoliberal” was coined by Milton Friedman in the 1950s as a friendly seeming marketing rebrand for the same old conservative economics policies. What Friedman and his colleagues really meant was that working people needed to be made to suffer to accept lower living standards through a rerun of conservative economic…
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Adolf Reed is yelling at clouds
Adolf Reed specializes in sharp attacks on arguments nobody has made. Even Larry Summers has been calling wealth inequality a danger to the social fabric for at least 20 years, but Professor Reed denounces: a contention that the lesson from Trump’s victory is that it’s not practical, or moral (the…
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The Jim Crow iceberg and the end of Bilbo populism.
There is popular but catastrophically false “left/progressive” narrative of post WWII history in the US that ignores or minimizes the role of racism and race privilege. The New Deal fell apart in the 1940s when Jim Crow Democrats in Congress crossed the aisle to work in common cause with right…
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The Celebrity Apprentice Left and health care
Democrats have been attempting to pass universal national health in the USA since the Truman administration proposed national health insurance and other reforms in 1945. “Under the plan I suggest, our people would continue to get medical and hospital services just as they do now — on the basis of…
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Agency, neoliberalism, and anti-neoliberalism.
What caused US manufacturing to off-shore and the white working class to abandon the Democrats? During the 1970s a massive change in technology particularly communications and transport (like container shipping) made it easier to manage production at a distance and move goods by sea. More importantly, economic advances in India…
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Progressive Economists keep confusing themselves
Dean Baker’s CEPR published the following interesting graph which tells us both something interesting about the economy and something sadly dismal about how “progressive” economists keep confusing themselves. Dean goes on to helpfully remind us of the real meaning of this graph. Obama’s economic legacy:Months of consecutive job growth is…
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America’s senile left
The quote below from Tom Engelhardt is indicative of the weird reactionary shell shocked state of the American left after 7 years of a black man in the White House. We are in the United States in 2016, 60 years after CIA coup in Iran installed the Shah’s torture state,…
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Movement Progressives have learned nothing
As we collapse into election 2016, it’s clear that Movement Progressives, many of whom have coalesced around Bernie Sanders, have learned nothing. The author of this 2010 blog post just cited it as evidence that his complaints about President Obama were well justified – and the dense material of often…
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