Jacobin

The Constitution didn’t stop Trump — it made his reign possible.

Even the Founding Fathers had second thoughts about the system they had created.

As the US celebrates its 250th, it has begun to resemble the decadent Spanish Empire it replaced: producing nothing while collecting rents, sacrificing its interior to enrich a bloated elite, and embracing exclusionary nationalism to exploit its underclass.

After the Trump administration denied visas to the Iranian team, its participation in the 2026 World Cup seemed unlikely. Mexico’s decision to host the players was rooted in its shared struggle for sovereignty in the face of US aggression.

Jonathan Chait’s Atlantic essay claims the Democratic Socialists of America has betrayed the legacy of its founder, Michael Harrington. It gets DSA’s history, and what the organization is today, wrong.

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.

For generations, historians have downplayed the American Revolution as a squabble between elites. But the revolution unleashed egalitarian forces its architects could neither control nor contain.

Americans have celebrated Thomas Paine’s Common Sense for generations. What gets lost in the fanfare is how common sense is not some eternal repository of political wisdom, but something continually reshaped by democratic debate, argument, and persuasion.

The leading black intellectual and freedom fighter W. E. B. Du Bois was a longtime committed socialist and, eventually, a Marxist — commitments that were central to his life and work. Liberals are dead set on suppressing this aspect of his legacy.

The feminist insight that personal life is political is complicated by neoliberalism, which casts political problems as matters of personal virtue. This moralization of personal conduct can displace the collective action needed to transform society.

The last of Ireland’s Magdalene laundries, workhouses for “morally wayward” women, closed in 1996. Since then, the institutions’ many horrors have come to light, but misinformation has also been endemic. A new book provides a granular, factual account.

Americans used to fight for constitutional change — and not just in the Supreme Court chamber. Jill Lepore talked to Jacobin about the decline of the amendment process and the rise of judicial power.

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?

Nursing in the US is highly unionized, well-paid, and increasingly central to the economy. Rank-and-file nurses are well-positioned to fight for common good demands and for a broader revival of the labor movement.

The Rural Urban Bridge Initiative’s flagship program shows how local organizing can reduce partisan polarization and slow the GOP’s inroads among rural voters — a clue for what it might take for the Left to win in red areas of the country.

The US incarcerates more people than almost any country on Earth. Meanwhile, pharma executives, Wall Street bankers, and fossil fuel companies escape meaningful accountability for harms that have killed far more Americans than street crime ever has.

Brutish and bigoted, grubbing and petulant, Donald Trump is an uncannily apt embodiment of the full sweep of US imperial arrogance and decadence in Latin America.

For Madison and the other Framers, the danger wasn’t the power of elites but that of the mob.

A luxury resort backed by Jared Kushner has prompted massive protests in Albania, now ongoing for over a month. The project has become a lightning rod for opposition to Prime Minister Edi Rama’s cronyish development model.

Two of Britain’s most powerful unions oppose soft-left MP Ed Miliband’s bid to become chancellor. They fear the green transition could cost jobs in the oil industry, one of the few sectors where workers have consistently secured above-inflation pay raises.