Corey Robin is the author of The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump and a contributing editor at Jacobin.
Don’t allow centrists to change the terms of debate and the metrics of success. Last week’s midterms saw victories for socialists and other progressives that will allow the Left to grow in the months and years to come.
Zohran Mamdani understood something no one else did: most Donald Trump voters had their reasons for going for Trump, and those reasons were economic. Mamdani saw that, and he saw a path to winning them back. He gave it a name: affordability.
Voters are epically dissatisfied as we enter into the midterms. But our political economy and social world are not changing in response to that dissatisfaction.
In the new film Fatherland, Thomas Mann is a standard-bearer for a tradition of liberal humanism that, though in many ways noble, proves completely incapable of fending off the most terrible evils.
In his dissenting Supreme Court opinion this week, Clarence Thomas argued for a version of the idea that citizenship is a matter of ancestral lineage — a position not unlike that of Israel, which assigns citizenship on the basis of Jewish descent.
Could democratic socialism become the brand of a new generation of political actors — not just on the fringe, not just in New York City, but across the country?
A small group of hawks convinced George W. Bush to launch a war in the Middle East, despite his campaign-trail rhetoric and against the advice of top US military and intelligence officials. The parallels with Donald Trump’s war on Iran are striking.
In just a few seconds, Zohran Mamdani takes a fairly sophisticated argument in political theory and translates it into a funny but substantive response to a heckler that redirects the conversation to affordability.
Now is the moment for a presidential candidate who commits to cutting off all aid to Israel — whether it’s military or nonmilitary.
Just one year ago, the idea that New Yorkers could get universal childcare was dismissed as utopian nonsense. An organized democratic socialist movement made it a reality, with the first phase launching this year.
If you take a closer look at the data, the generational differences within Jewish New York voters’ embrace of Zohran Mamdani looks a lot like the generational differences within black voters’ embrace of Bernie Sanders in 2016.
Reflecting on Zohran Mamdani’s inauguration speech yesterday, Corey Robin argues that the Left must now embrace excellence rather than ceding it to the Right, fighting for the flourishing of all people as the aspiration of a truly democratic society.
Good books offer new arguments, while excellent books pose new questions. Alyssa Battistoni’s Free Gifts, on the unfinished commodification of nature and care, is an excellent book.
Interacting with the neoconservative intellectual Norman Podhoretz, you felt desire. But it wasn’t a desire for ideas; it was a desire for being thought of as someone who was adept at ideas.
For Democrats, the main issue in the shutdown wasn’t electoral backlash — it was the filibuster. Leadership feared its removal, viewing it as a safeguard to keep the party’s rising left wing in check.
In 2020, Bernie Sanders decisively won the Nevada primary, in part because many younger immigrant voters persuaded parents and grandparents to vote for him. Zohran Mamdani’s victory, powered by similar dynamics, marks the second phase of this moment.
There is no simple opposition to be drawn between the liberal market order of the early 1800s and the supposedly more violent neoliberal state of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Coercive projects and authoritarian visions run throughout both.
The vision of W. E. B. Du Bois was one of congressional democracy, critical of presidential regimes that concentrate power in the hands of one individual — an individual who can, say, impose his vision of a White House ballroom in the sky upon all of us.
The issue of Palestine speaks to a range of constituencies that Zohran Mamdani is trying to stitch together into a new coalition — and creates a cleavage with the establishment leaders of the Democratic Party like Andrew Cuomo and Chuck Schumer.
With Eric Adams out of the New York mayoral race and the corrupt Andrew Cuomo his main opponent, Zohran Mamdani has a chance to cast his democratic socialism, his alleged “extremism,” as tied to the creation of a lawful society.