After years of Obama’s capitulation to the corporate, military, and “security” elites, Dems may have a hard time selling themselves as populist champions.
2014
Trauma Legacies in the Middle East
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What happens when you put a daughter of the Holocaust among Arab trauma workers just back from the Syrian crisis? A powerful personal story.
2014
Generative Justice: The Revolution Will Be Self-Organized
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Whereas previous generations of revolutionary activists demonized technology, today’s generation has recognized the incredible opportunities to engage citizens that new technology affords. The emergence of the Open Source movement, which emphasizes continual modification and improvement, points to a future defined by generative justice: the constant generation of value within harmonious local networks.
2014
Loving-Kindness to the Thousandth Generation
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Violence can take on a life of its own, rippling in unexpected directions. But our religious traditions teach us that love proliferates exponentially more.
2014
The Future of Progressive Action in America
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To grow strong, the multifaceted Left in America—including those who call themselves “liberals” or “progressives” as well as others who simply draw upon the central teachings of the Torah to love our neighbors as ourselves—must come together around our shared basic value of interconnection.
2014
What the Left Needs to Be Heard
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To steer our culture aggressively in a different direction, the Left needs what right-wing groups have long used effectively—power, influence, and, perhaps most importantly, money. By utilizing a concentrated and ongoing stream of funding from a diverse group of sources, small voices will again have the chance to speak out and be heard.
2014
To Be Realistic, Demand the Impossible: Toward a Visionary Left
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In the last forty years, the Left has utterly failed to articulate any viable alternative to neoliberalism’s vision of a fully marketized society. Still, the current global crisis of capitalism has made clear the contradiction of a civilization directed toward profit accumulation rather than human need and thus defined the task of an emancipatory Left: we must master capitalism’s own drive toward universality by making its benefits truly common.
2014
Let Me Be the Leninist, Please
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Let me offer a simple, alternative definition of what “Lenin” stands for: the view that great social change depends to some significant degree on “leadership.” That is, social change depends on groups of people who have developed effective organizing skills, concrete social connections in milieus engaged in protest, and some shared sense of a future to be won—and thereby can foster and advance momentum toward the desired transformation.
2014
On Anxiety and the Next Left
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The Left is moving from a politics of mourning and melancholy to a politics of anxiety. For a left bedeviled by a “will-to-powerlessness,” this shift might well turn out to be an unexpected bit of good news.
2014
How Much History Does the American Left Need?
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The American Left needs all sorts of things. Rather than dwelling on its own history, it would serve itself much better by pressing for serious economic equality—and politicizing the ongoing economic crisis.
2014
Life After Debt: Why America Needs an Anti-Capitalist Left
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America needs a Left that approaches social change without “economistic” blinders, countering capitalism not by appealing to it, but by opening space for people to no longer be dominated by its logics. Making efforts to relieve the debts of those in need—while striving to reimagine our debt-financed society—is a logical starting place.
2014
The Power of a Decentralized Left
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For a new Left to grow strong, we must rid ourselves of the false notion that unilateral solutions proposed by the Right must be met with isometric plans from a monolithic Left—a shift that requires engaging with the tumultuous and complicated relationships we have with one another. However, it is precisely through working out our disagreements that we will arrive at more sustainable, effective, and just decisions.
2014
Joe Louis’s Fist
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“My father said when Louis won, the radio static was a wave / of sound that stayed all night like the riots blocks away in Harlem, / as the scent of lilac and gin wafted down Broadway to his window.” A poem by Peter Balakian.
2014
Faith and the Metaphor Muscle
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To grapple well with the big challenges of our times, Hering says, we need to reclaim the language of myth, metaphor, and imagination.
2014
The Legend of How the Tao Te Ching Came Into Being on Laotse’s Journey Into Exile
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“When he was seventy and fragile, / the Teacher felt compelled to seek repose, / for the Good within the land was on the wane, / and Evil gaining strength again. / So he drew on his shoe.” Jon Swan’s translation of a poem by Bertolt Brecht.