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- America at 250: An Idealist Without Illusions
I sat on the curb the morning of July 4th, watching a parade in a suburb outside Chicago, where my wife and I were visiting her mother. My thoughts turned to the Bicentennial, which only about a quarter of today’s Americans are old enough to remember. I was 18 then—68 now—and even the best of AI medicine won’t get me to the 2076 Tricentennial alive. My first thought was how much worse off we are than in the summer of 1976, when genial Jerry Ford was in the White House, and Jimmy Breslin wrote a post-Watergate book called How the Good Guys Finally Won. I focused for a moment on the “finally.” This time, I’m afraid that even if the Trump nightmare ends, we’ll have the delay implicit in “finally” without the finality and satisfaction of the accountability we achieved after Nixon resigned half a century ago. It was around 1976 that I defined my politics as John F. Kennedy once did: An idealist without illusions. Pragmatic and sensible for a teenager, no? Two years ago, I wrote a book called American Reckoning, in which I confessed that the specter of tens of millions of voters still supporting Donald Trump after January 6 convinced me that I had more illusions about the good sense of the American people than I had assumed. Trump’s terrifying second term has only reinforced that cold realization. And if he successfully steals the midterms, it’s curtains for American democracy. And yet I felt strangely hopeful on the curb today, as the firetrucks and cheerleaders and Boy Scouts and Uncle Sam on stilts moved past me. I waved my little American flag with genuine patriotism and faith in our civic religion. Why? Why do I feel that way when we have a demented president, a corrupted Supreme Court, and a Republican Party and corporate class full of craven knee-benders who have failed the character test of their generation? The answer is not just that this is a resilient country that has overcome worse (if different) crises in the past. It’s that a rational assessment—one without illusions—of the last 50 years since I watched the fireworks over Chicago’s Navy Pier must yield to a recognition of how far this country has come. (For a sense of how the country changed between big 4th of July anniversaries, see The Flag Was Still There, by David McKean and M. Todd Bennett.) Yes, we have… [TheTopNews] Read More.1 week ago - The ‘Consumer Socialism’ Trap
This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.This past January, in his inaugural address, Zohran Mamdani memorably promised to “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” In the parlance of the Democratic Socialists of America, of which Mamdani is a member, collectivism is a good thing. It is not meant to recall Stalin’s seizure of farms, which resulted in mass famine, or Mao’s Great Leap Forward, which also resulted in mass famine. American socialism today is different. The DSA still formally aspires to “popular control of resources and production,” otherwise known as seizing the means of production. Yet the New York City mayor’s attention-grabbing policy proposals—to freeze rents, establish city-run grocery stores, and pay for universal child care—are aimed at a more modest goal: socializing the cost of consumption.“Consumer socialism” does not liberate workers from the exploitation of owners; it liberates consumers from the burden of prices. Although its advocates may claim inspiration from both the Great Society tradition of the Democratic Party and Nordic-style democratic socialism, consumer socialism is really a muddle of the two. The Great Society emphasized poverty reduction through means-tested programs such as Medicaid and Head Start; consumer socialism is meant for all. And unlike the Nordic welfare states, which are supported by high levels of taxation for all workers, Mamdani’s approach aims to raise sufficient revenue from corporations and the rich. Consumer socialism tries to have it all: universal social provisions without universally steep taxes. It retains, like other forms of socialism, a supreme optimism in the ability of state planners to shape markets. Where the old central planners failed, the new ones think they will succeed.Mamdani is only one of consumer socialism’s proponents. The newly elected mayor of Seattle, Katie Wilson, is a former transit organizer who campaigned on both universal child care and spending $1 billion to pay for union-built public housing. The leading candidate for mayor of Washington, D.C., is DSA-backed Janeese Lewis George, who also calls for universal child care and massive production of below-market-rate housing. (She is open to the idea of government-run grocery stores as well.) Mamdani, Wilson, and Lewis George have claimed the mantle not of Stalinists or Maoists, but of a different subspecies of socialist—the “sewer socialists” who ran Milwaukee for decades starting in 1910. They made peace with the capitalist superstructure and devoted… [TheTopNews] Read More.1 week ago - Watch: Why Australia’s PM apologised for ‘inappropriate’ Kylie...
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has apologised for remarks he made about popstar Kylie Minogue in a podcast interview last week. [TheTopNews] Read More.1 week ago - The Alabamafication of National PoliticsOn Juneteenth, I watched Doug Jones, the Democratic nominee for Alabama governor, deliver a speech at the Scottsboro Boys Museum, in the northeastern corner of the state. I found myself thinking of the 1960s civil-rights rallies that I’d covered as a young reporter, and that many of the older Alabamians in the packed venue had attended. A former U.S. attorney who served three years in the Senate, Jones is a master of the old-time Bama stem-winder in settings such as the 150-year-old Black church that houses the museum, which commemorates nine young Black men who were falsely accused of rape nearly a century ago.“We don’t want to go back, folks,” Jones said, in a rising preacherly cadence. The audience responded with Amens. “We have a different view of governing,” he said of his campaign. “We have a different view of Alabama than somebody from Florida that wants to be your governor. My view of Alabama, and what we’re trying to do in this campaign, is to build a house with a crowded table.” He went on, “We’re all a little broken, but in Alabama we all belong.”The Florida quip was a shot at Jones’s opponent, Senator Tommy Tuberville, and a nod to the one issue that Alabama’s Republicans fear in this campaign to lead one of the reddest states in the South. A Democratic judge in Montgomery will rule soon on whether Tuberville meets the state constitution’s seven-year residency requirement to run for governor. His opponents argue that his real home is the 5,000-square-foot Florida beach mansion that he bought after his 10-season coaching stint at Auburn University.Tripp Skipper, a former paid consultant to Tuberville, summed up the Republican view of the contest for me. “The only path for victory that I see for Doug is one that the courts provide for him, and I don’t see that happening,” Skipper said. “The voters have already rendered a verdict on Tuberville and Jones, and the political environment has not changed in any significant way since 2020.” That year, Jones, who was trying to hold on to the Senate seat he’d won in a 2017 special election, lost to Tuberville by nearly 472,000 votes.[Adam Serwer: The Supreme Court has invented a right to discriminate]Tuberville is certainly the favorite in the race. He is a committed loyalist to Donald Trump, who won the state by 30 points in the last presidential election. Alabama… [TheTopNews] Read More.1 week ago
- Astros stars unexpectedly join Wayne Gretzky at World Cup match
Hockey royalty, baseball stars and a Canadian soccer hero all gathered to cheer on Canada in Houston. [TheTopNews] Read More.1 week ago
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I sat on the curb the morning of July 4th, watching a parade in a suburb outside Chicago, where my wife and I were visiting her mother. My thoughts turned to the Bicentennial, which only about a quarter of today’s Americans are old enough to remember. I was 18 then—68 now—and even the best of AI medicine won’t get me to the 2076 Tricentennial alive. My first thought was how much worse off we are than in the summer of 1976, when genial Jerry Ford was in the White House, and Jimmy Breslin wrote a post-Watergate book called How the Good Guys Finally Won. I focused for a moment on the “finally.” This time, I’m afraid that even if the Trump nightmare ends, we’ll have the delay implicit in “finally” without the finality and satisfaction of the accountability we achieved after Nixon resigned half a century ago. It was around 1976 that I defined my politics as John F. Kennedy once did: An idealist without illusions. Pragmatic and sensible for a teenager, no? Two years ago, I wrote a book called American Reckoning, in which I confessed that the specter of tens of millions of voters still supporting Donald Trump after January 6 convinced me that I had more illusions about the good sense of the American people than I had assumed. Trump’s terrifying second term has only reinforced that cold realization. And if he successfully steals the midterms, it’s curtains for American democracy. And yet I felt strangely hopeful on the curb today, as the firetrucks and cheerleaders and Boy Scouts and Uncle Sam on stilts moved past me. I waved my little American flag with genuine patriotism and faith in our civic religion. Why? Why do I feel that way when we have a demented president, a corrupted Supreme Court, and a Republican Party and corporate class full of craven knee-benders who have failed the character test of their generation? The answer is not just that this is a resilient country that has overcome worse (if different) crises in the past. It’s that a rational assessment—one without illusions—of the last 50 years since I watched the fireworks over Chicago’s Navy Pier must yield to a recognition of how far this country has come. (For a sense of how the country changed between big 4th of July anniversaries, see The Flag Was Still There, by David McKean and M. Todd Bennett.) Yes, we have… [TheTopNews] Read More.
1 week ago
This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.This past January, in his inaugural address, Zohran Mamdani memorably promised to “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” In the parlance of the Democratic Socialists of America, of which Mamdani is a member, collectivism is a good thing. It is not meant to recall Stalin’s seizure of farms, which resulted in mass famine, or Mao’s Great Leap Forward, which also resulted in mass famine. American socialism today is different. The DSA still formally aspires to “popular control of resources and production,” otherwise known as seizing the means of production. Yet the New York City mayor’s attention-grabbing policy proposals—to freeze rents, establish city-run grocery stores, and pay for universal child care—are aimed at a more modest goal: socializing the cost of consumption.“Consumer socialism” does not liberate workers from the exploitation of owners; it liberates consumers from the burden of prices. Although its advocates may claim inspiration from both the Great Society tradition of the Democratic Party and Nordic-style democratic socialism, consumer socialism is really a muddle of the two. The Great Society emphasized poverty reduction through means-tested programs such as Medicaid and Head Start; consumer socialism is meant for all. And unlike the Nordic welfare states, which are supported by high levels of taxation for all workers, Mamdani’s approach aims to raise sufficient revenue from corporations and the rich. Consumer socialism tries to have it all: universal social provisions without universally steep taxes. It retains, like other forms of socialism, a supreme optimism in the ability of state planners to shape markets. Where the old central planners failed, the new ones think they will succeed.Mamdani is only one of consumer socialism’s proponents. The newly elected mayor of Seattle, Katie Wilson, is a former transit organizer who campaigned on both universal child care and spending $1 billion to pay for union-built public housing. The leading candidate for mayor of Washington, D.C., is DSA-backed Janeese Lewis George, who also calls for universal child care and massive production of below-market-rate housing. (She is open to the idea of government-run grocery stores as well.) Mamdani, Wilson, and Lewis George have claimed the mantle not of Stalinists or Maoists, but of a different subspecies of socialist—the “sewer socialists” who ran Milwaukee for decades starting in 1910. They made peace with the capitalist superstructure and devoted… [TheTopNews] Read More.
1 week ago
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has apologised for remarks he made about popstar Kylie Minogue in a podcast interview last week. [TheTopNews] Read More.
1 week ago
On Juneteenth, I watched Doug Jones, the Democratic nominee for Alabama governor, deliver a speech at the Scottsboro Boys Museum, in the northeastern corner of the state. I found myself thinking of the 1960s civil-rights rallies that I’d covered as a young reporter, and that many of the older Alabamians in the packed venue had attended. A former U.S. attorney who served three years in the Senate, Jones is a master of the old-time Bama stem-winder in settings such as the 150-year-old Black church that houses the museum, which commemorates nine young Black men who were falsely accused of rape nearly a century ago.“We don’t want to go back, folks,” Jones said, in a rising preacherly cadence. The audience responded with Amens. “We have a different view of governing,” he said of his campaign. “We have a different view of Alabama than somebody from Florida that wants to be your governor. My view of Alabama, and what we’re trying to do in this campaign, is to build a house with a crowded table.” He went on, “We’re all a little broken, but in Alabama we all belong.”The Florida quip was a shot at Jones’s opponent, Senator Tommy Tuberville, and a nod to the one issue that Alabama’s Republicans fear in this campaign to lead one of the reddest states in the South. A Democratic judge in Montgomery will rule soon on whether Tuberville meets the state constitution’s seven-year residency requirement to run for governor. His opponents argue that his real home is the 5,000-square-foot Florida beach mansion that he bought after his 10-season coaching stint at Auburn University.Tripp Skipper, a former paid consultant to Tuberville, summed up the Republican view of the contest for me. “The only path for victory that I see for Doug is one that the courts provide for him, and I don’t see that happening,” Skipper said. “The voters have already rendered a verdict on Tuberville and Jones, and the political environment has not changed in any significant way since 2020.” That year, Jones, who was trying to hold on to the Senate seat he’d won in a 2017 special election, lost to Tuberville by nearly 472,000 votes.[Adam Serwer: The Supreme Court has invented a right to discriminate]Tuberville is certainly the favorite in the race. He is a committed loyalist to Donald Trump, who won the state by 30 points in the last presidential election. Alabama… [TheTopNews] Read More.
1 week ago
Hockey royalty, baseball stars and a Canadian soccer hero all gathered to cheer on Canada in Houston. [TheTopNews] Read More.
1 week ago
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