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- 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.4 days ago - Trump’s Election Subversion Plans?
In May, I logged in to a virtual town hall meeting convened by two of my elected officials in Oregon—Secretary of State Tobias Read and U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley, both Democrats—on election security in the midterm elections. I wasn’t surprised to hear that Read and Merkley were concerned that the Republican Party and President Donald Trump might attempt to disrupt the 2026 midterms. But my attention was seized when Merkley said, “We may need to have a citizen brigade just stand outside places where votes are counted just to say, ‘We citizens are protecting our counting process, thank you very much.’” Bear in mind that Oregon has the longest- and smoothest-running vote-by-mail system in the country, one that has been in place since 2000 without a hint of irregularity. Vote by mail is a point of civic pride, just like Crater Lake or legal weed, and a particular point of pride for this magazine because one of its contributing editors, Phil Keisling, Oregon’s Secretary of State for much of the 1990s, did so much to make “vote at home,” as it’s sometimes called, a reality. If Merkley, from what The Washington Post once called “tidy Oregon,” was contemplating a protective people’s blockade of election boards, how serious is the prospect of election trickery elsewhere? The answer is: serious. I was inspired by Merkley’s comment to start looking seriously into the covert battle over how the midterm elections are conducted. Citizens can be forgiven for feeling confused and anxious. We all know that Trump’s popularity is falling, and the Democrats are licking their chops for a possible “blue wave” feast this fall. But sober observers like The Atlantic’s David Graham, The Washington Post’s David Ignatius, and NBC political analyst (and Washington Monthly contributing editor) Jonathan Alter have recently posed diverse scenarios ranging from contested House races to troops in the streets, all of which scheme to produce underhanded Republican triumphs. These may be the most important midterms since 1862, when the opposition to Lincoln came close to crippling the Union war effort. What, I wondered, could I do to help protect them? What could my neighbors do? And the answer to this question is a good deal less bleak than it might seem, given the president’s ramblings. It’s not clear that Trump has a plan to subvert the midterms, and even less clear that he… [TheTopNews] Read More.4 days 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.5 days ago
- A Narrowing Vision of America
When the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage 11 years ago last month, the reaction was sheer jubilation. Couples flocked to courthouses to formalize their unions. Thousands rallied in community celebrations. The White House glowed with rainbow lights (I know, it’s unfathomable today). The Court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges extended marriage equality to a group of Americans whose rights had previously been in doubt. Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy’s interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment was generous and inclusive: “The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own times. The generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all of its dimensions, and so they entrusted to future generations a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning.” Same-sex couples, the Court concluded, deserved that liberty: “They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.” Last week, however, the Supreme Court offered a starkly different vision of who in America deserves freedom and the protection of law. It ruled that Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause do not shield trans athletes from transphobic discrimination. It gave the Trump administration sweeping powers to end the legal status of Haitian, Syrian and other refugees fleeing disasters and violence in their homelands. More than one million people now face the risk of mass deportation. Earlier this term, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, effectively empowering the disenfranchisement of Black voters in the South. Granted, the Court also reaffirmed birthright citizenship, a win for millions of Americans born of immigrants (including me). But as Monthly Legal Affairs Editor Garrett Epps points out, the Court could hardly rule otherwise, given the weight of history, precedent, and the plain language of the Constitution. The Court’s ruling was less cause for celebration than relief—like when a Category Five hurricane swipes the coast before heading back out to sea. Taken together, the Court’s rulings this session enable a Trumpian America that’s bigoted, mean and monochromatic (i.e., white): America not as a “melting pot” but as a cauldron of racial resentment. Especially appalling were Justice Samuel Alito’s weak protestations that Trump’s animus toward Haitians was not “overtly racial”—a characterization that Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and… [TheTopNews] Read More.5 days ago - Trump’s Remarkable Losing StreakEarlier this year, President Trump claimed a new area of expertise: election law. “I have searched the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject,” Trump wrote on social media, and found an “irrefutable one” that he would soon present. He suggested that it would allow him to bypass Congress and gain approval from the courts to impose his will on the nation’s locally run election system, including requiring voters to show identification while casting ballots in the upcoming midterms.It was a heady time for a man who obsesses over voting policy and is seeking to prove that the 2020 election was stolen out from under him. Two weeks before Trump claimed in his February 13 post to have broken new legal ground, the FBI had conducted a raid of an election warehouse in Fulton County, Georgia. Officials made off with more than 650 boxes of ballots as part of a criminal investigation stemming from Trump’s 2020 defeat, an unprecedented action that the president hailed as a major advance for his unsubstantiated claim that the contest was riddled with fraud. The House of Representatives had just passed the SAVE America Act, a bill that would force people to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote and to show photo identification when casting a ballot.[Read: A serious debate about an unserious bill ]Now a sense of gloom has replaced the hope that Trump and his allies had when they thought they were on the verge of making good on his election promises, which also included eliminating most voting by mail and conducting mass purges of voter rolls. The SAVE America Act is doomed to fail in Congress, and Trump is at war with his own party over it. Nothing, so far, has come of the Fulton County case. And the president’s legal arguments are a lot more refutable than he claimed. Trump is consistently being rebuffed in court; the Justice Department has lost at least a dozen election lawsuits. Some changes to the election system that Trump laid out in a March executive order have been blocked by judges. The president is running out of time and low on options to change the country’s voting policies—which he has denigrated as “rigged” and reminiscent of developing nations’—because the courts, Congress, and the Constitution seem to keep getting in the way.District-level judges have, over the past two weeks,… [TheTopNews] Read More.6 days ago
- Independence Day, From Jefferson to Reagan to Trump
Thomas Jefferson’s reported last words were, “Is it the Fourth?” John Adams’s were, “Thomas Jefferson still survives.” As a matter of fact, Adams was wrong; Jefferson had predeceased him by some hours. Their fellow Americans viewed their joint deaths on July 4, 1826, as a providential sign. Who are we to question their judgment? Exactly 50 years and one day earlier, Adams guessed wrong on another matter. Writing his wife Abigail from Philadelphia, where he was attending the Second Continental Congress, Adams predicted that: The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe, that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever. Adams was right to imagine what future celebrations would look like, but he did get the day wrong. July 2 is a day that matters to historians who want to explain exactly how, why, and when the Second Continental Congress made national independence the goal of American resistance to British misrule. But July 4 is the day that Americans celebrate, and what we cherish is less the decision for independence but its public Declaration, which was primarily the work of Jefferson with a little help from his friends. Yet Adams was inadvertently right in one other respect when he said, “Thomas Jefferson still survives.” Jefferson remains a lively, engaging, and now controversial presence in the American historical consciousness to an extent no other Founder enjoys. One reason why is that he was the most cosmopolitan American of his age, and his estate at Monticello, that architectural treasure, remains the supreme manifestation of his genius. But the main reason is that we link Jefferson to those five crucial words, that “self-evident truth,” of the Declaration of Independence: that “all men are created equal.” That principle forms the dominant creed of American republicanism. Even though it took our revolutionary forebearers some years to learn that Jefferson was, in fact, the key author of the Declaration, our association of the master of Monticello with that phrase is the source of his… [TheTopNews] Read More.6 days ago
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