Brexit Strategy
There was no alternative: The long decade of austerity that lead to Brexit.
Journalist Laurie Penny examines the dull, disastrous austerity decade before 2016's Brexit-vote, and traces the Leave victory to a wider series of losses across Britain: of an effective welfare state, of a left opposition strong (or interested) enough to defend it, and of hope for a brighter future - apart from a rented room in Edinburgh.
Laurie wrote the article Brexit, Pursued by Despair for The Baffler.
A report from the Brazilian protest movement you won't read about in the New York Times.
Live from São Paulo, Brian Mier reports on the wave of strikes against neoliberal cuts in Brazil - in opposition to laws setting the retirement age above life expectancy, and in spite of the American and Brazilian corporate media downplaying mass protest numers and dismissing the harshest edges of the Temer government's post-coup takeover.
Brian published the piece “There is no negotiation whatsoever”: Union leader Douglas Izzo talks about labor rights in post-coup Brazil for Brasil Wire.
Immigration, integration and the myth of the European bootstrap.
The Radical Pessimist, Kevan Harris (with the help of Cybelle Fox's Three Worlds of Relief: Race, Immigration, and the American Welfare State from the Progressive Era to the New Deal) examines the role of state assistance in the integration of European immigrants into America and American politics, in contrast with the isolation of Hispanic immigrants in America's West.
Kevan's first book A Social Revolution: Politics and the Welfare State in Iran is out this August. Proud of our boy.
On the origins of America's racial wealth divide, and the endpoint of toxic inequality.
Sociologist Thomas Shapiro examines the toxic nature of inequality in America - as a result of government policies in a time of increased precarity and restricted mobility for many Americans, and as the source of America's racial wealth gap, a deep structural divide that robs minorities of equal access to opportunities and threatens democracy in America.
Thomas is author of Toxic Inequality: How America's Wealth Gap Destroys Mobility, Deepens the Racial Divide, and Threatens Our Future from Basic Books.
We don't have to do anything: How the Democrats found their dead end.
Writer Thomas Frank shifts through the wreckage of the Democratic Party in the Trump Era, and finds a group of failed politicians unable to see the deep unpopularity of their own policies, or a path beyond serving the narrow interests of the elite professional class they've served since the Clinton years - with a generation of disastrous results.
Tom's book Listen Liberal: Or, Whatever Happened to the Party of the People? was just released in paperback with post-election writing, from Picador.
