In a campaign that included many startling pronouncements, Trump’s pledge to build the wall in June 2015 became the iconic phrase that stitched together a right-wing nationalist tapestry of resentment, nihilism, and violent nostalgia. Mexico would pay for it. A form of imperial tribute recast as reparations to a wronged and aggrieved America, whose sovereignty had been violated by unchecked “illegal immigration,” unfair trade deals, and unfavorable inter-state alliances. Justice would finally be secured by a president with the boldness to reassert the rightful order among nations. The American

As we enter what feels like the second or third decade of the 2020 presidential campaign, a question hovers menacingly over American politics: Can liberals get a grip? Three years into the Trump era, it cannot have escaped anyone that the country’s political system is in the throes of a major crisis. Yet the mainstream of the Democratic Party remains bogged down, lurching back and forth between melancholy and hysteria. “The Republic is in danger!” the Rachel Maddows of the world intone, but aside from a Trump impeachment that has no hope of actually removing him from office, the solutions on

In the downstairs bar of a Brighton comedy club, I sat with sixty or so activists clustered around tables to discuss the four-day workweek. They were participating in The World Transformed, a radical gathering held alongside the Labour Party’s annual conference, where the party’s left wing hashes out proposals that it hopes Labour will adopt. Indeed, by the time this panel met, a shorter workweek had already been announced by Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell in his floor speech. The people in that club, then, were thinking about implementation, as well as dreaming about what they’d do with more

In April 2014, a group of protesters in Oakland blockaded a purple coach bus that was transporting Yahoo! employees to their Silicon Valley offices. Demonstrating against the tech-fueled inequalities in the Bay Area, one member of the protest climbed on top and intentionally vomited down the bus’s front windshield. Shortly after the incident, Oakland resident Sonja Trauss read a TechCrunch essay explaining how the “vomiting anarchist” had been born out of decades of inequitable Bay Area housing policies. Trauss, a thirty-two-year-old former teacher and “marginally employed rabble-rouser,”

The United States, we are told, is the most powerful nation in world history, the sole superpower, winner of the Cold War, the “indispensable nation,” a “hyperpower” that has achieved “full spectrum dominance” and “command of the commons” over all other military forces on Earth. Yet, the United States failed to achieve its objectives in Iraq and Afghanistan, was defeated outright in Vietnam, and since World War II won clear victories only in the first Gulf War of 1991 and in smaller “police actions” in the Dominican Republic in 1965, Grenada in 1983, and Panama in 1989. How can we explain this