Jacobin

Namibia’s Workers Spearheaded Its Fight for Independence

2026-03-21T13:42:15Z

After more than a century of German and South African rule, Namibia finally gained its independence on this day in 1990. Working-class struggles and organizations played a vital role in the country’s long march to freedom.

Mobilization by Namibian workers was an important factor in the struggle that culminated in the country’s liberation from South African rule. Namibia’s nationalist organizations century grew out of a long history of collective protest and resistance. (Walter Dhladhla / AFP via Getty Images)

Labor movements in Namibia have been rather fragile over the past few decades, ever since the country gained independence from South Africa in 1990. This was not always the case. Collective labor action, both spontaneous and organized, has had a long history in the country as a notable segment of anti-colonial resistance.

With their trajectories embedded in a political economy of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and extractivism, Namibia’s emerging nationalist organizations of the mid-twentieth century grew out of a long history of collective protest and resistance. Mobilization by Namibian workers became an important factor in the struggle that culminated in the country’s liberation from South African rule shortly before the demise of apartheid in South Africa itself.

“Okaholo”

Namibia became a colony of the German empire from 1884. By December 1893, the earliest strike had been recorded at a mine at Gross Otavi. When the Allied powers stripped Germany of its colonies after World War I, the League of Nations entrusted Namibia’s administration to the Union of South Africa.

South Africa systematically extended its established policies of racial segregation to Namibia, seeking to extract as much wealth as possible from the colony as Germany had done before. With labor supply a foremost concern, the South African administration installed political structures in the north and a distinctive contract labor system that marked Namibia’s colonial economy and social relations until independence and beyond.

Despite persistently very low wages, traveling to provide migrant labor for the mines, fishing industries, and farms of central and southern Namibia became a defining life experience for the people in the northern regions. Between the 1930s and the 1980s, Owambo men generally spent much of their adult lives as contract workers away from home. In 1938, of the total black labor force of 47,275, 43 percent were already contract workers; by 1971, the figure was 83 percent.

The system was administered through the recruitment agency South West African Native Labour Association (SWANLA). Locally it was known as “omutete wOkaholo,” literally “to queue up for the [identity] disk,” because of the copper or plastic bracelets showing one’s identification number that freshly recruited contract laborers had placed on their wrist.

The contract system operated under virtually forced labor conditions. No hours of daily or weekly work were stipulated — the worker was simply required “to render to the master his services at all fair and reasonable times.” Contract laborers were housed in compounds for “single” men. Meanwhile, women in the north had to take care of agricultural production and raise families on their own.

The much-hated contract labor system became a primary factor in the emergence of Namibian nationalism. It started with the workers from across the north who were recruited to work in the South African gold mines, where wages remained low, but were still considerably higher than those earned in Namibia.

From Cape Town to Namibia

Working in South Africa allowed the workers new opportunities to gain access to political education and protest politics. By the mid-1950s, an estimated two hundred Namibian workers lived in Cape Town. Most of them had deserted labor contracts and were dwelling illegally in the city. If caught, they were under imminent danger of arrest and deportation.

The Namibians in Cape Town formed a close-knit community. Every Sunday, they got together at a barbershop run by Namibian expatriate Timothy Nangolo in Somerset Road. From there, they would go to the Grand Parade to listen to the political speeches delivered there on Sundays by members of the anti-apartheid opposition, including well-known Cape Town socialists.

Andimba Toivo ya Toivo, who became the leader of the Namibian workers, joined the Modern Youth Society, a broadly socialist and racially mixed group. The Namibians in Cape Town benefitted particularly from the support of the radical academic Jack Simons and his trade unionist wife Ray Alexander, who provided political education and a welcoming, anti-racist social environment.

In August 1957, they formed the Ovamboland People’s Congress (OPC), which later evolved into the Namibian liberation movement, the South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO). The OPC founders adopted a petition, which was sent to the United Nations. Signed by ya Toivo and eighty others, it demanded that South Africa’s mandate be removed and the administration of Namibia transferred to the UN Trusteeship Council.

Significantly, the petitioners also called for the abolition of the detested contract labor system. They raised demands for the right of women to join their migrant worker husbands at their place of employment, and requested that unmarried women from Namibia’s north should be given permission to look for work in the southern regions.

Initially, the OPC was a political revival of a long-standing “brotherhood,” which workers in the mines had formed to cater to their well-being, social security, and recreational needs. It encompassed a sense of comprehensive solidarity, unity, and mutual support among contract workers, and it provided the basis for collective responses to employers and administrations.

In April 1959, nationalist activity gained a base in Namibia itself with the official relaunch of the OPC as the OPO (Ovamboland People’s Organization). In Windhoek as in Cape Town, some of the group’s leadership harbored wider political goals of national liberation. However, it was the conditions of workers trapped in the contract labor system, and mobilization around labor issues, that took precedence for the rank and file.

Sam Nujoma, the Windhoek leader who later became SWAPO president, visited Walvis Bay in June 1959 to address meetings in the workers’ compounds of the port city. Almost all the workers came out to hear him speak about the need for freedom and an end to the contract system. After this rousing speech, he asked them: “Will you join the struggle to abolish contract labor?” Everyone shouted, “Yes! Yes! That’s what we want!”

OPO built on preexisting informal structures of “brotherhood” and on a long history of collective labor action. Despite brutal suppression, there had been labor action at the mines in Lüderitz, Tsumeb and Oranjemund almost every year between 1946 and 1959. The same was true of the fish processing factories of Walvis Bay.

Starting from 1949, organizers of the Cape Town–based Food and Canning Workers Union took trade unionism into Lüderitz Bay, the southernmost fish canning center of South West Africa. Ray Alexander played a key role in this effort as a union organizer, and provided a close connection with the Cape Town-based OPC group along with her husband Jack Simons. In the late 1950s, the fish canning industry of Walvis Bay, some seven hundred kilometers to the north of Lüderitz, emerged as a major center of industrial strife and political mobilization.

Workers hoped impatiently that the new organization was going to confront the contract labor system straightaway or, at the very least, that forceful negotiations with the management of mines and factories could ameliorate conditions. Helao Shityuwete, who was working in Walvis Bay at the time, recalled that despite much initial enthusiasm, organizing the workers was not always smooth sailing.

This was partly because of interference by the colonial regime and its allies in the “tribal authorities.” However, workers also became impatient as the conditions did not improve rapidly. When the OPO leadership emphasized nationalist aspirations, despite the organization’s ostensible aim to be the voice of the workers, this did not always match the desires of the workerist rank and file.

Resistance against the contract labor system fueled the formation of nationalist organizations in Namibia. In the 1960s, however, brutal repression led to the long-term incarceration of some of the leaders on Robben Island, while other members of the founding generation left for exile. The spirit of resistance seemed broken.

An Upsurge of Rebellion

However, the grievances that had been instrumental in the formation of the national liberation movement continued to instigate revolt and protest. The new upsurge started with demonstrations of high school students in August 1971.

When student leaders were expelled from schools in the country’s north and took up contract employment, they joined with labor and SWAPO activists to mobilize against the contract labor system under the slogan, “Odalate Naiteke” (“Break the wire” — in other words, break the contract system that tied the workers to their bosses like a wire).

This slogan linked resentment of the contract labor system to demands for liberation. In December 1971, the strike broke out largely spontaneously. Although mobilizing had laid the groundwork, walkouts happened without a hierarchical leadership, and workers refused to identify individual leaders. Instead, they expressed their demands collectively in mass meetings.

The strike started in the fish canning factories in Walvis Bay, where 3,200 contract workers were employed. Connections were built between different centers of contract labor. An ultimatum was set for December 12.

At a Sunday afternoon mass meeting in Windhoek, the workers decided that they would not go to work on the next day. On Monday, December 13, none of the Ovambo workers in Windhoek left the compound. Across Namibia, sixteen thousand contract workers went on strike to protest the system.

Two days later, the authorities deported the striking workers to Owambo. This enforced deportation was turned into a tactical opportunity on the part of the workers, who immediately organized a strike committee. On January 10, 1972, they held a mass meeting attended by 3,500 in the rural north, where the expelled workers characterized the contract system as a form of “slavery” because blacks were “bought” by SWANLA and compelled to reside in “jail-like” compounds.

Their demands included the abolition of the contract labor system, freedom to select the place and type of employment, higher wages, and permission to bring their families with them. In large-scale solidarity protests, high school students from across Namibia demanded an end to the South African occupation of their country.

The response of the authorities was mixed. There were some partial attempts to address the workers’ grievances with the abolition of SWANLA, to be replaced with a system of tribal labor bureaus. However, the colonial regime also cracked down on the unrest with measures that severely restricted political expression and mobilization.

By May 1972, 267 people in Owambo had been detained under emergency regulations. In Windhoek, so-called ringleaders of the strike were charged with “intimidating” the workers to stay away from work, although the state’s case eventually collapsed.

The massive strike of 1971–72 was a turning point of Namibian anti-colonial resistance politics. The workers’ calls for the abolition of the contract labor system and an end to controls over movement constituted a fundamental challenge to the oppressive, state-administered labor regime and apartheid colonialism. After a decade of enforced acquiescence, the alliance of workers and students wanted more than limited improvements.

In Owambo, resistance against contract labor broadened into a generalized revolt. Returned workers and other local residents cut and flattened more than a hundred kilometers of the border fence between Namibia and Angola. A campaign targeted the government’s cattle vaccination points, many of which were burned down. People suspected that the vaccinations administered by the colonial apartheid state actually killed their animals rather than protecting them from disease.

In the aftermath of the unrest, hundreds of young activists left for exile to escape repression. Among them was Namibia’s current president, Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, who had been arrested and spent her twenty-first birthday in prison.

Community Mobilization and New Unions

In contrast with the experience of South Africa, the upsurge of collective labor action did not lead to the formation of trade unions. The National Union of Namibian Workers (NUNW), which had officially been launched in 1970, remained dormant, existing mostly in official pronunciations of the exiled SWAPO leadership. Most workers in Namibia were not organized, although reportedly remnants of underground NUNW structures did function.

However, mobilization in the mid-1980s gave rise to a powerful (though eventually rather short-lived) labor movement. The new movement was initiated not by workers in the mining or manufacturing industries, but by community activists and the Council of Churches in Namibia (CCN), who played a key role in social movement politics at the time.

In late 1984, community organizers, led by social workers Rosa Namises and Lindi Kazombaue, initiated the Workers’ Action Committee (WAC). Namises and Kazombaue were working with the social welfare unit of the Roman Catholic Church in Windhoek, where they had found themselves inundated by workers complaining about problems in the workplace. Grievances included low wages, unfair dismissal, and no leave arrangements, as well as their broader living conditions and inadequate provision of housing and transportation.

The two organizers consulted with church and trade union activists in South Africa, whom they knew through personal connections. In a first step, they organized a workshop with a South African activist who was experienced in trade unionism to discuss how best to address the workers’ plight. This meeting took place in early 1985 and was attended by almost one hundred people.

From that point, the WAC was founded with the original aim to collect information and educate workers about their rights. The activists regarded this as a community program rather than an exercise in orthodox trade union politics.

The formation received strong backing about a year later when many of the Namibian political prisoners on Robben Island were released and returned to Namibia. In cooperation with the SWAPO Youth League, they set up a Workers’ Steering Committee in early 1986, which worked toward the establishment of a trade union movement.

The first new union, NAFAU (Namibian Food and Allied Workers Union) was established in September 1986. Two months later, the Mineworkers Union of Namibia (MUN) followed, and NUNW was reconstituted in April 1987.

The community focus of the labor-organizing activities soon merged with — if it was not overtaken by — a nationalist approach. When about ten thousand workers turned out for a massive May Day rally in 1987, the nationalist politics of the “Robben Islanders” had become central to the unions.

Ben Ulenga, a released Robben Island prisoner, was the secretary general of MUN and a key player in the formation of the new unions. He emphasized the nationalist orientation of the new unions, saying that “the Namibian workers were born with colonialism and the resolution of their problems could come about with the resolution of the colonial problem.”

After Independence

While Ulenga and his comrades conceded that the workers’ struggle would have to go on beyond independence, mobilization quickly declined after the South African withdrawal was completed in 1990. This came as part of the general demise of formerly vibrant social movement politics that had played a central role during the final years of the liberation struggle.

Tensions between SWAPO, which now became the ruling party, and the organizations of workers, students, and women were an important factor behind this development. Co-optation further weakened the labor movement as leading activists were recruited into senior positions in politics and the civil service.

Ulenga, for instance, served as a deputy minister and ambassador before he eventually resigned from SWAPO in 1998 and cofounded a new opposition party, the Congress of Democrats (COD). Dwindling financial support was also important, since international donors now channeled their funds to support the new government. These were among the significant reasons behind the faltering of the NUNW trade unions in the years after independence.

The Inheritors of an Unfinished Revolution

2026-03-21T12:40:05Z

Growing up after the monarchy’s fall, Nepal’s youth are confronting a republic that transformed political institutions while leaving the underlying social order intact.

(Narayan Maharjan / NurPhoto / Getty Images)

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With Chuck Norris, the Meme Was the Message

2026-03-21T11:44:41Z

Twenty years before Donald Trump was posting AI images of himself as a king, the internet learned how to meme by exaggerating the masculine superiority of Chuck Norris. What began innocently with “Chuck Norris Facts” has evolved into MAGA’s empire of slop.

Long before memes became instruments of political warfare, Chuck Norris was the strongest man in the world because everyone agreed to pretend he was. That was the joke. Now it is more or less how politics works. (CBS Photo Archive / Getty Images)

When Chuck Norris died Thursday in Hawaii at the age of eighty-six, the internet, the medium that ultimately defined him more than any film or television role, duly noted his passing with a mix of irony and sincerity.

“Chuck Norris will NOT be resting in peace,” wrote the digital artist Beeple, accompanied by an AI image of Norris in hand-to-hand combat with angels in heaven. “Chuck Norris passed away just so he could punch Satan in the face,” another user replied.

It was a fitting tribute. Norris left the earthly plane with a profoundly bizarre legacy that passed through several distinctly American incarnations: karate champion, B movie action star, Walker, Texas Ranger icon, and then, improbably, patron saint of the early meme web. Squint hard enough and you can spot in “Chuck Norris Facts” the DNA of the “based” right-wing political propaganda of today — the America-as-’80s-action-hero White House videos, the dehumanizing sh-tposting, and creepy AI-generated sludge.

Norris once made propaganda for the American militarism of a previous age. Born Carlos Ray Norris, he was an Air Force veteran and a black belt in martial arts before appearing in film. Early in his film career, he represented a stoic, bland American version of Bruce Lee (they even squared off in the 1972 kung fu film The Way of the Dragon). In the 1980s, he picked up a gun and became a perfect cinematic symbol of the Ronald Reagan era, a shoot-first-ask-questions-later cowboy commando out to do America’s dirty work on screen. Gen Xers know him best as the star of Missing in Action, a cartoonish action trilogy in which Norris flies to Vietnam to rescue prisoners of war — violently, of course. Norris, an outspoken Reagan supporter, admitted that Missing in Action was meant as a corrective to the anti-government mood of Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo. The goal, he said, was “to instill a positive attitude” about the Vietnam War.

In 1985, he cowrote and starred in the pulpy hit Invasion USA, about a CIA agent battling Soviet-backed guerrillas from Cuba who land in South Florida to commit terroristic acts. As with Missing in Action, Norris intended Invasion USA to promote militarism and justify increased national defense spending at America’s borders. “What if some guy on the order of a [Ayatollah Ruhollah] Khomeini or a [Muammar] Gaddafi mobilized those guys and started sending them out to every major city?” he said. “I know it’s going to happen.”

Norris’s star dimmed after the end of the Cold War, though he remained in the public eye with his CBS series Walker, Texas Ranger. He was always more of a living action figure than a talented actor in the first place, and Walker worked largely because it appealed to aging viewers still nostalgic for John Wayne.

By the early aughts, that dated form of American macho righteousness had become ripe for a different kind of afterlife: early-internet irony in the form of “Chuck Norris Facts.” In 2005, a high school senior named Ian Spector was stuck at home on a boring Friday night and logged onto SomethingAwful.com, a pre-Reddit Reddit for teenagers. There, he swapped “Facts about Vin Diesel,” a similar preexisting meme, with absurdist bons mots about Chuck Norris. The joke landed: Within months, Spector had twenty million hits a month, a book deal, and, later, a cease-and-desist letter from Norris’s lawyers. A meme had been born, though nobody quite called it that yet.

“A cobra once bit Chuck Norris’s leg. After five days of excruciating pain, the cobra died.” “When the Hulk gets angry, he turns into Chuck Norris.” “In an emergency, 911 calls him.” Norris did not merely beat bad guys in “Chuck Norris Facts”; he intimidated physics and broke the laws of nature. These jokes, the internet equivalent of tall tales, circulated across forums, chain emails, MySpace pages, and Facebook feeds during a more innocent time. This was also the era of online that gave us LOLcats, Epic Bacon, and the so-bad-it’s-good anti-racist anthem “Chocolate Rain.” The web was a novelty machine — goofy, warm, occasionally stupid, mostly harmless.

It is tempting to remember all this as innocent, and in a sense it was: a comic mockery and celebration of strength and masculine invulnerability. Norris memes were not written by Pentagon contractors or engagement farmers in a content bunker. They were just jokes passed around by bored people amusing one another. But you can see something more sinister in them too: an early lesson in memetic power. The AI-generated slop that now saturates right-wing social media, including from Donald Trump himself — Trump as Roman emperor, Iran crushed beneath a digital boot, the endless parade of hypermasculine fantasy imagery — often feels like a weaponized descendant of “Chuck Norris Facts.”

Today, Norris exits with a legacy stranger than most actors could ever hope for. He was first a Reagan-era fantasy of righteous American force, then an object of affectionate internet exaggeration, and finally, in retrospect, a clue to where online culture was heading. Long before memes became instruments of political warfare, he was simply the strongest man in the world because everyone agreed to pretend he was. That was the joke. Now it is more or less how politics works.

How Adults Took Over YA

2026-03-21T10:16:17Z

By treating young adult fiction as a laboratory for professional-class moralizing, the publishing industry has effectively abandoned actual teens.

The Harry Potter books — which have sold hundreds of millions of copies since 1997, making author J. K. Rowling a billionaire — proved to publishers just how lucrative YA books could be. (Getty Images / Stringer)

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Trump Wants a “Video Game War” in Iran

2026-03-21T10:50:03Z

Donald Trump has resurrected the military fantasy of the “video game war,” waged mostly through high-tech, lethal air power with few US casualties. But his administration may have miscalculated the ease of what can pass as victory.

Americans and the world watch a video game war unfold in what they long feared: unhinged conflict throughout the Middle East. (Getty Images / Stringer)

Within hours of the September 11, 2001, attacks, pundits scrambled to explain what they signified. “Perhaps,” Naomi Klein wrote days later, 9/11 will “mark the end of the shameful era of the video game war.” By that she meant, for Americans, the bloodless entertainment — familiar since the 1991 Gulf War — of watching precision bombs pulverize distant targets.

Americans now knew what the video game war, enabled by a nationalist media, concealed: the devastation, especially for civilians, when terrible violence strikes. This suffering, Klein felt, was the point of the terror: “The era of the video game war in which the U.S. is always at the controls has produced a blinding rage in many parts of the world, a rage at the persistent asymmetry of suffering. . . . [T]wisted revenge seekers make no other demand than that American citizens share their pain.”

Despite promises of swift victory, the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars confirmed for Americans the sentient hell of actual, blood-and-guts war. Both ended when the country had seen enough chaos, loss, and drift. Thereafter, the “Iraq syndrome” limited US aggression, while incentivizing advances in remote killing via drones. That was then.

Now Donald Trump’s attack on Iran has brought the video game war back with frightful vengeance. There is the Pentagon’s puerile mash-up of real bombing footage with scenes from Call of Duty. More than that, Trump has resurrected the military fantasy at the heart of the video game war: armed conflict with (nearly) zero losses, made imaginable by technological advances, chiefly in lethal air power. Equally important is its political premise: that Americans will scarcely object to, or even care much about, any war so long as victory is certain and costs are low.

It barely feels like the Iran War is happening at all, save on TV or social media. This is by design.

The Trump administration has largely dispensed with the dismal rituals by which the nation marches to major wars. Gone are the months of propaganda and pressure campaigns to hype the threat and demonize the enemy; to build support within Congress and the United Nations; and to work the country into an exceptionalist lather, amped to teach the world a lesson about American benevolence and resolve. Implicit in these blowoffs is Trump’s conceit that he can make war without accountability, constraint, or even manufactured consent.

Trump has managed only a grudging pantomime of commander-in-chief statecraft. His shifting explanations of why the war is happening at all feel half-hearted. He recites world-saving rhetoric — Iran, “the hour of your freedom is at hand” — as if quoting lines from a bygone movie. The administration’s true zeal is for its menacing memes and taunts, stripping death of both gravity and dignity. Among its perpetrators, the video game war is, indeed, treated like a game.

Even the media seems detached. Where is the saturation coverage and celebrity anchors rushing to the region, Kevlar helmets in tow? The tough questions for Pentagon briefers and sparring with Trump himself? So far, the war is just another story, not a national fixation.

This is not to say that the war lacks purpose within time-honored patterns of US aggression. Its origin is likely some combination of historical score-settling; strategic opportunity, given Iran’s regional isolation and internal conflicts; Israeli pressure; nuclear nonproliferation; neocon ambition; the timeless quest for oil; and Trump’s will to dominate as an end in itself. Empire never sleeps. Still, the nation seems dull to the fight, as yet visible only as a distant, screen-managed spectacle.

How to Lose a Video Game War

That all could change, slowly or quickly. The Trump administration may have badly miscalculated the ease of what can pass as victory.

Within a long view, Trump’s video game war 2.0 is apt to reignite global outrage at American arrogance and an escalating “asymmetry of suffering.” (The Iranian government reports more than 1,400 civilians dead and damage to nearly 43,000 civilian structures.) Already there have been at least three alleged domestic terror attacks, for which the war may have been the trigger. Who knows what bitter and aggrieved enemies might one day pull off.

Here, this week’s resignation of Joe Kent, a Trump appointee and leading counterterrorism official, is telling. In a remarkable rebuke of the president, his resignation letter stated that “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation.” The war, not Iran on its own, puts American lives at risk.

More immediately, Trump has tangled with a tenacious regime, expert in hybrid and irregular warfare. Technological advances cut both ways: pricey missile defense systems and precision bombs dropped by multimillion-dollar aircraft, as well as cheap drones and torpedo skiffs capable of hobbling global trade. With proxies across the region, Iran has found a way to raise the cost to the United States in treasure, if not yet in blood.

The costs are to the national budget, private business, and the individual consumer. Gasoline prices, not American body bags, might prove decisive, and Iran knows it. A pitfall of the video game war is the public’s general indifference to it. Few are invested in its success and will embrace shared sacrifice if it goes wrong.

US “boots on the ground,” even for tailored counterstrikes, exponentially increase the military, human, and political risk. With a large-scale, regime-toppling invasion, the United States would rediscover what it learned in Iraq: that even an oppressed people, bombed by their “liberators,” do not welcome military occupation. Such an occupation would doubtless brutalize civilians and foment both an insurgency and internal, lethal strife.

It is also a multitheater war with a dizzying array of actors, each with their own priorities. No coalition gives them a common purpose. A single-shooter approach doesn’t work in such a crowded battlefield. Nothing suggests that the Trump administration has given serious thought to the complex dependencies, vulnerabilities, rivalries, and capacities of putative allies. As a consequence, Trump is begging NATO nations and even China to police vital shipping lanes with their warships. So far, no takers.

Each day, panicked foreign nationals seek exit from the chaos. Americans and the world watch unfold what they long feared: unhinged conflict throughout the Middle East. Eventually, heartbreaking images of the civilian dead in Iran will hit the Western press, shifting the emotional landscape. More Americans will die.

Saying No to War

The US public, by a firm majority, does not want this war. Extraordinary opportunities exist for mobilizing to bring its end and weaken Trump. Yet antiwar sentiment has not translated into a visible antiwar movement.

That condition can change. The history of post-9/11 protest, which I write about in Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War, shows how the grassroots — even in the face of great adversity — can rally against war.

Sickened by the 9/11 attacks, a small but spirited minority of Americans feared the US onslaught to come. The ANSWER Coalition quickly formed to oppose looming war. From the rubble of a canceled global justice mobilization, the group held an antiwar rally of up to twenty thousand people in Washington, DC, in late September, before the invasion of Afghanistan had even begun. When the invasion did begin on October 7, ten thousand people rallied for peace in New York City.

An ANSWER banner at the head of an April 12, 2003, antiwar march in Washington, DC. (Ben Schumin / Wikimedia Commons)

Weeks into the war, Code Pink cofounder Medea Benjamin and other Americans rushed to the region to document civilian harm. Activists, including family members of the 9/11 dead, successfully lobbied the US government for compensation for Afghani victims. All this happened when much of the nation seethed with fear and anger, and even mild dissent was tarred as treason.

George W. Bush’s plodding buildup to the Iraq invasion gave antiwar forces time to gather strength. From the summer of 2002 to the war’s start in March 2003, millions of Americans attended thousands of antiwar actions. In October 2002, a new coalition, United for Peace and Justice, formed. Stitching together hundreds of groups, it madly planned for a day of global protest.

Under the banner “The World Says No to War!” between fifteen and thirty million people rallied on February 15, 2003, in seventy-two countries. Four hundred thousand turned out in New York City at the steps of the United Nations. The protests that day remain the largest in human history. While not preventing war, they isolated Bush on the world stage and made the war harder to fight.

The bitter years of the conflict saw ceaseless antiwar protest. This included a peace witness in Iraq itself, public anger from the grieving families of fallen soldiers, searing testimony from antiwar veterans just back from battle, whistleblower defections throughout government, and courageous acts of civil disobedience. Often ignored by the media and the political class, the movement helped turn hearts and minds against the war and hasten its end. Bipartisan disdain for “stupid wars” is, in part, a legacy of the movement.

Saying No to War, Again

To be sure, antiwar protest — from vigils to congressional call-ins — exists today. Stalwarts of the post-9/11 movement, like Veterans for Peace and Code Pink, remain vigorous. (In a poignant protest, vigil participants displayed children’s shoes outside of New York City’s famous public library to represent the more than 170 people killed in the US airstrike of an Iranian girls’ school.) Peace delegations will doubtless visit Iran to take stock of the destruction.

But such protests are nowhere near the frequency and scale of post-9/11 activism. There is no new, bold antiwar coalition nor, as yet, any signature mass demonstration commanding media attention. Many reasons account for the relative quiet. The peace camp, like most everyone, was caught off guard by Trump’s brazenly unilateral decision to start a war. Competition for one’s compassionate action is stiff at a time when the Trump administration is delivering a firehose of evil. Dissenters are rushing from one moral emergency to the next and battle outrage fatigue.

The war itself and its existing optics have limited outrage too. Fought mostly from the sea and air, the war has claimed just a handful of US soldiers, whose deaths always draw public concern. Few images of Iranian suffering have emerged beyond the girls’ school. So far, the video game war is partly fulfilling its purpose of blunting opposition. And Americans are likely suffering from Trump Resignation Syndrome — the wearying sense that Trump will do what Trump will do, regardless of laws, norms, judicial censure, and even public opinion. The temptation is to simply watch Trump’s war badly unravel and hope that he pays a big political price.

It is a temptation worth resisting. First, no one wants more chaos and death. The war should be pushed to a close by public pressure — not simply implode — in that way save lives. Second, the war is the ultimate expression of Trump’s authoritarianism and sociopathic love of domination, violence, and the murder of perceived lessers. (It is a “great honor,” he boasted, to kill Iranians.) Antiwar protest is a vital plank in a broader antifascist project.

Third, to resist war is to resist oligarchy and promote a fair economy. The Pentagon has made the staggering request of $200 billion to fund the war, on top of nearly $1 trillion in military spending in 2025. Taxpayers will be stuck with this new bill, while the superwealthy luxuriate in billions of tax savings from Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.” It is an ugly picture of a decaying empire, pocked by growing class cleavage and scattershot foreign wars.

In addition, recent precedent tells us that principled, public outrage can make Trump back down. The magnificent protests, and terrible murders, in Minneapolis galvanized the nation in resistance to Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) lethal predations. For now, at least, the kind of blitzkrieg sieges seen in Minneapolis, Chicago, and Los Angeles have been suspended.

The very idea of fully authoritarian wars, waged against Iran and threatened against Cuba, must be rejected. An antiwar movement could lead the way. Finally, antiwar protest — especially if welcoming Republicans — could help to fracture the MAGA movement (or at least peel off some of its GOP enablers) and diminish its power in a post-Trump world. That world cannot come soon enough, and it will be better if progressive social movements till its soil.

Whether a robust antiwar movement of mass protests and direct action will emerge remains to be seen. Overwhelm, resignation, and sanitized images of war are powerful headwinds to overcome. Against ominous signs, the war could end relatively soon, with politically manageable costs in blood and treasure and an outcome Trump can claim as victory.

So much is unknown, except the stakes: life and death and the survival of even a shred of American democracy.

Before the Punk Rockers, There Were the Working-Class Teds

2026-03-21T08:55:11Z

British class society had a dress code: the rich could be flashy, but workers were expected to wear a drab uniform. In the 1950s, England’s working-class Teddy Boys and Girls boldly donned pompadours and velvet, giving birth to modern British subculture.

Before the Beatles, before the Stones, before the Sex Pistols, there were the Teddy Boys — working-class kids dressed irreverently like Edwardian aristocrats who lit the fuse on every British youth subculture that followed. (Alex Dellow / Getty Images)

In the early 1950s, working-class teenagers in London started showing up to dance halls in long drape jackets with velvet collars, drainpipe trousers, and pompadour hairdos. Their look approximated the aristocratic Edwardian styles then in fashion on the expensive Savile Row, but slightly askew, knocked together by backstreet tailors on the cheap. These kids were called Teddy Boys, Ted being short for Edward, and they scandalized postwar Britain. The press painted them as violent thugs, and politicians fretted over their malign social influence.

Max Décharné’s Teddy Boys: Post-War Britain and the First Youth Revolution (Profile Books, 2025) is the first book to give the Teds the full treatment. Décharné presents the Teddy Boys less as a criminal menace than a class provocation. World War II had so significantly reduced the population of working-age men, Décharné explains, that Britain in the early 1950s was approaching full employment. Teenagers could leave school and expect to get a well-paying job straightaway — and if they didn’t like it, they could quit and find another. The result was a cohort of working-class youths with unprecedented spending money and self-respect.

As Décharné explains in the following interview with Jacobin’s Meagan Day, British class society had always been marked by a rigid dress code. Eccentricity was for the aristocracy; workers were meant to dress in a drab, mud-colored uniform and blend into the background. In medieval times, wearing clothes above one’s station was an actual crime. The Teddy Boys’ and Girls’ real offense, then, was breaking class decorum by dressing in luxe, attention-grabbing clothing, a privilege of self-expression long reserved for British elites.

The flashy style and irreverent attitude of the 1950s Teddy Boys and Girls laid the foundation for the mods, punks, and everything that came after in subcultural Britain and beyond. Paul McCartney remembered knowing John Lennon as “the local Ted” before they formed the Beatles. Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren opened a shop to sell Teddy Boy clothing before going on to spotlight the Sex Pistols and invent the punk aesthetic. It’s impossible to envision the evolution of counterculture without the influence of the Teds.

Meagan Day

I don’t think many Americans will have even heard of the Teddy Boys.

Max Décharné

No, I’ve long been aware of that. It was very much an English thing. It never even made it to Europe, only to the Republic of Ireland. Irish teenagers would come over for three or four months and go home with a fat pay packet. And while they were here, they would absorb the culture and see these clothes in particular, and they’d go, “That’s for me, thank you very much.”

The Republic was incredibly conservative and very worried about what the Catholic Church would say. Some of the press in Ireland was actually even more vicious about the Teds than the press over here, because they didn’t understand it. But again, it was a purely working-class thing here, and it was a purely working-class thing there.

Meagan Day

I only know about it from coming across these pictures of Teddy girls in the 1950s, dressed very much like Edwardian boys, which seemed strange and striking enough to catch my attention.

Max Décharné

Yes, the astonishing pictures that Ken Russell, later famous as a film director, took for Picture Post in January 1955. Picture Post is very significant. It was the equivalent of Life magazine, which is to say it prided itself on really great street photography, war photography, documentation. It had come out of World War II, and so when the war stopped, it started focusing on home life here. The woman who wrote the great early article for Picture Post about Teddy Boys, which was essentially defending them, a year before the Teddy girls piece, was named Hilda Marchant. She had been a war correspondent, traveling with the troops, seeing the concentration camps being found, all sorts of really hardcore stuff.

Marchant was sympathetic to these young men — and then, later, young women — who were dressing up like this. She thought, really, what’s the problem? After everything everybody’s been through over here, the massive bombing of London and many other major cities, it’s just clothes. They were so young — some of them were thirteen, fourteen years old. Hilda Marchant didn’t find them scary, as so many people did. She found them at dance halls, went up and talked to them. The Teddy girl photographs taken by Ken Russell were in various poor parts of London. He went to the East End, he went to Elephant and Castle — places that were virtually destroyed by the saturation bombing in the war. Some of those photographs of Teddy girls were taken in the literal rubble.

Meagan Day

What did the backdrop of the bombings have to do with the rise of the Teds?

Max Décharné

Well, this was my parents’ generation. They both grew up during the war in social housing — what over here is called a council house. In America, you’d say that’s the projects. In Memphis, Elvis Presley grew up in the Lauderdale Courts, which was a housing project. Quite a nice one, low-rise, but it was government housing basically. And that’s what my parents came from. My dad told me that he could recognize every kind of military plane from below — whether it was a German plane or a British plane, whether it was a bomber. They could tell from the sound it made, from the shape of it, because they’d seen so many of them coming over, dropping the bombs or flying after them to try and stop the bombs dropping.

The Teds and Teddy girls were born in 1940, ’41, ’42. And by the time they started causing trouble for society, they’d had ten years or so of growing up in ruined streets, playing on bomb sites, playing on dangerous abandoned buildings, things that were likely to collapse that you weren’t supposed to go anywhere near. There was a lot of unexploded ordnance still hanging around. The country was bankrupt. We did not have the Marshall Aid that the United States provided to get Germany back on its feet. Germany got rebuilt. My wife is German, and I used to live in Berlin for many years. My street in Berlin was completely trashed in the war, but it had been restored. We didn’t have the money over here to do that. London was bomb sites.

So you’ve got these resentful kids growing up in poverty with the idea that nobody cares about them. They were expected to be sensible, join the workforce, be quiet, and not call attention to themselves. They didn’t do that, and it upset absolutely everyone. By dressing in flash clothing, they were seen to be getting above their station. It drew intense scrutiny and suspicion from the upper classes, the middle classes, politicians, the media, and also their own working-class parents, whose mentality was: play the game, blend in, don’t make a fuss.

A handsomely dressed Elvis Presley, circa 1956.

I mentioned Elvis because there are important parallels. Before he went national in the summer of 1956, Elvis was touring regularly down south; people like Buddy Holly in Lubbock, Texas, already knew about him. And he was scandalizing people by wearing flash clothing. It was coming from Beale Street, the R&B tradition — literally the pimps were dressing like that in Memphis. It was not respectable. He was getting beaten up for this. In his early years in the South, Elvis’s car was being dynamited by white supremacists who thought: You are dressing like the people from across the tracks, you are imitating the black pimps, we don’t trust you, you should be shut down immediately.

The Teds caused quite a similar reaction over here. The press portrayed them as a menace, as violent thugs. Yes, there was violence among them, but then I’m an old punk rocker from the 1970s. There was violence at a lot of the Ramones gigs I went to as a teenager, too, and the same fuss in the press. I really recognized the moral panic and being looked down on. I felt in the book that I had to say what the country was like at the time, in order to contextualize the extreme reaction from the church, the media, and the politicians.

Meagan Day

When we talk about getting above their station, there’s something about the sartorial expectations placed on the working class at this moment. What was the paradigm that the Teddy Boys came and exploded?

Max Décharné

We’ve always had this tradition of the great English eccentric, but it’s reserved for the upper class. The last few years of the eighteenth century were the era of the dandy. These were enormously wealthy people who would go and gamble at the gentlemen’s clubs up and down Piccadilly. They would brag about losing a hundred thousand pounds in one card game of an evening — and I’m not talking about a hundred thousand pounds now, I’m talking about a hundred thousand pounds then. They were often Lord so-and-so, Lady so-and-so. It was considered okay and acceptable for these people to dress up in anything they liked.

There was a guy called the Green Man of Brighton. He was a friend of Beau Brummell in about 1810 — Brummell being the chief dandy, the most famous one. The Green Man of Brighton was a wealthy aristocrat. He dyed his hair green more than two hundred years ago. He drove around in a green carriage. He had his horses dyed green. He had all of his servants dressed up in green livery. And British society knew how to deal with that. “Oh, he’s just an eccentric. He likes to hang around in his castle and fire a gun out of the window at the peasants.” That was okay.

Eighteenth century dandy Beau Brummell gives directions to his tailor.

If you were an eccentric in the upper class, that was fine. But if you were working class, absolutely not.

Meagan Day

The working class was expected to dress in a sort of mud-colored uniform, then?

Max Décharné

Yes, and it’s important to understand that by breaking this rule, the Teds had no friends in the upper classes. The civil service did not hire anybody between 1950 and 1954 who had not gone to either Oxford or Cambridge. Most of the BBC — we only had one TV channel until 1955 — most of the newspapers, the people running all of that, the journalists, the presenters, everybody had been to Oxford or Cambridge. They were the supposed opinion formers. And they were horrified by these working-class kids dressing in Edwardian aristocratic clothing.

I do a huge amount of newspaper research for my books. I like contemporary opinions. And it’s all astonishingly negative, the press about the Teds. Whereas if you go forward ten years, where suddenly the Rolling Stones are supposed to be the bad boys — and by the way, they’re old Teddy Boys, in the same way that most of the British Invasion bands are; John Lennon’s an old Teddy boy, Paul McCartney’s an old Teddy boy — these supposed bad boys are being invited out by the aristocracy. They’re being asked to parties with Lord and Lady So-and-So’s son or daughter. They were embraced by upper- and middle-class society very quickly.

That never happened with the Teds. You would never have found somebody in the press, aside from the Picture Post of course, saying, “I understand these kids, because my thirteen-year-old son is a Teddy boy.” Their thirteen-year-old son would’ve been a jazz fan. The upper class has a long tradition of loving jazz here. Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway — they toured over here a lot, right from the word go. Some of those early jazz bands literally played at Buckingham Palace in the 1920s. Jazz was accepted straight away. It was mass market, very popular. The BBC would broadcast it from the mid-twenties onward. But rock and roll was regarded as about as welcome as Covid-19 was five years ago. It was the new plague, and everyone should run away screaming. That was the kind of press rock and roll got.

Meagan Day

So the Teddy Boys are very intimately related to American rock and roll?

Max Décharné

They embraced it hugely when it came along over here. But they’d already been going for about three years by then. They were fully established here in London before we’d ever heard of rock and roll.

David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, dressed in high Edwardian style, in 1907.

I should explain simply: Where does the name come from? Ted is short for Edward, because they wore Edwardian clothing. Edward VII was the son of Queen Victoria. She died in 1901, and he died in 1910. So it’s basically the first decade of the twentieth century. There was a big nostalgia for that era after World War II. We’d been punched in the face by the first world war, and then just recovering from that and punched in the face by the second. A lot of people of a certain age were looking back at their youth and thinking, that Edwardian summer before the war, that was before it all went to hell. Those people were getting nostalgic, writing memoirs, and there was a fashion revival. It was the same distance away in time from them as the 1960s are for us now.

Meagan Day

Brideshead Revisited was written in 1945 — so this would’ve been exactly the moment. And not only is that an Edwardian fantasy, but it’s actually a fantasy about an aristocratic eccentric in Edwardian times. Who carried an actual teddy bear around, no less!

Max Décharné

Yes. If you’d have tried carrying a teddy bear around in the East End, you wouldn’t have gotten to the end of your street before winding up in hospital. The films being made over here, the great films made by the Ealing company — Kind Hearts and Coronets, stuff like that — they were all set in Edwardian times.

The Paris fashions from 1945, as soon as the war ended, went crazy. Christian Dior and several of the others, like Balmain, completely stole the look of 1910. It was dubbed by journalists “the New Look.” I always call it a new look inside granny’s wardrobe, because that’s what it was. It was not new in the slightest. Over here, people couldn’t really dress like that because clothing was rationed. You couldn’t go and buy twelve yards of fabric for a bustle or a train or whatever. But the styles still became really popular: Edwardian women’s hairstyles, the nipped-in waists of the jackets, velvet collars.

There was a hugely successful women’s clothing fashion revival from 1945 through the rest of the decade. And by 1949, Savile Row — the most expensive men’s tailoring you could get in this country — was thinking, okay, if women have adopted this, let’s sell it to the men. So they started marketing narrow trousers, long coats, and velvet collars. They were still trying to sell it with a bowler hat, which in America you’d call a derby hat.

The Teds didn’t go for any of that. Your hair was important — greased back, big pompadour, that sort of thing. And really, it’s a weird thing that this attempt to sell expensive Edwardian fashions was adopted by working-class kids from the East End and South London. They saw these pictures in the papers and started going to their local tailor, saying, “Here, mate, can you make me one of these? And I want a velvet collar.” They were getting made-to-measure clothing, but from a backstreet tailor — usually a very good one. The upper classes pretty soon dropped the Edwardian styles once they found that working-class kids had adopted the look.

Meagan Day

Before then, working-class people would have just worn the clothes that were available to them. Something changed — the disposable income, the mass photographic media exposing everyone to the fashions of the rich, the emboldened sense of self that would allow you to ask a tailor to help you emulate them. Talk about that revolution.

Max Décharné

There’s a great late-Victorian book set in the poorest part of London, in the East End, called A Child of the Jago by Arthur Morrison. It’s set in a couple of streets near Liverpool Street Station. These were streets you would not walk down because you would not emerge if you weren’t from those streets. Incredibly dangerous, basically. The young people there lived on stealing, housebreaking, mugging people, coshing people with a nine-bar over their head and dragging them into alleys.

They had money in their pockets. And there’s a line or two that I quote from the book — this is 1896 — where they go to their local tailor around the corner and they say, “I want a fancy stripe down there, I want this many buttons, I want all of this.” Essentially, they were imitating the kind of exaggerated clothing they had seen at the music halls — the vaudeville places where comedians always dressed in exaggerated getups. They were called Flash Boys, or Spivs. So the working-class flash thing had happened before. But the kind of people who could afford it in the East End tended to be on the outside of the law. That’s where they got their money. They’d stolen it.

Meagan Day

It’s kind of similar to the pimps Elvis was imitating, right? In terms of flash clothing and being on the other side of the law.

Max Décharné

Absolutely. And there were always racetrack gangs — in the 1920s and ’30s, the dodgy people who would make money out of the business of horse racing. Gambling at racetracks was legal in the 1930s, but there were all sorts of dodges. Graham Greene’s wonderful novel Brighton Rock is about the racetrack gangs. They played dirty, carried razors, sometimes carried guns, and they were dressed flash. They had to have disposable income in order to do that.

The difference after World War II was that it wasn’t people outside the law wearing flash clothes. Actually, while the press made out like they were another dodgy gang, the reason the Teds had extra cash was quite the opposite: Britain after the war had nearly full employment.

If you take a huge group of working-age men and send them to war to die, and then you also lose a lot of civilians in the bombing, that’s a large chunk of the workforce gone. So when the 1950s started, the country ended up in a situation that employers generally never want to see happen, which was basically full employment. I’ve spoken to a lot of people, including relatives of mine, and it’s an absolute fact that you could leave school at fifteen and walk straight into a job the first Monday morning. And it would be a well-paid job, because if the employer didn’t treat you well, you could tell the employer exactly where to get off at lunchtime and walk around the corner and get a new job by one o’clock in the afternoon. The wages had to be high enough to keep people happy.

So they had money. They spent it on dancing, going to the cinema three or four nights a week, and hanging out in coffee bars. And they could go and pay the equivalent of, say, several hundred pounds these days on a jacket and some trousers. Imagine getting bespoke clothing when you’re fourteen or fifteen. How long would you wear it? Only about a year, because by then it’s gone out of fashion or you’ve worn it too many times. You’ve gone dancing in it, you’ve gone jiving in it. Before they knew about rock and roll, they would go to big band jazz. Glenn Miller, the uptempo swing, jitterbugging — very acrobatic stuff. You wanted these clothes to look pristine, the way people get with trainers these days, “box fresh.” As soon as they’ve got a mark on them, you’d buy new ones.

Some of these guys wound up with a wardrobe full of bespoke, very flash clothing. And the girls started doing that too. If you look at the Ken Russell photographs, you’ll see that all of them are dressed differently. There was no uniform. If you look at a proper Teddy boy photograph from 1953 or ’54, or the guys on the front of my book — that’s a dance hall here in Tottenham, in North London, May 1954, and they’ve all just left school, and every one of them has a different suit. Some have got six buttons, some have got two. Some have a velvet collar, some haven’t. Some have got a string of pockets down there. You can tell they’ve each gone into their own tailor and said, “I want this, this, this, this.”

The reason I’m saying May 1954 is that the first American rock and roll record to make it into the British charts was December that year — Bill Haley & His Comets, their cover of Big Joe Turner’s “Shake, Rattle and Roll.” So what are these guys dancing to in that dance hall? It’s big band jazz. But by that stage, Teddy Boys were so notorious that you were lucky to even get allowed into a dance hall. They had big signs up saying, “Anyone wearing Edwardian clothing can’t come in.”

Meagan Day

So there were two different ways for the working class to get enough disposable income to buy tailor-made clothing and emulate aristocratic eccentrics. One was criminal or borderline-criminal activity, and the other was full employment. And it turns out that the latter was considered a bigger menace to society than the former.

Max Décharné

Yes, that’s absolutely correct. I’ve never lived through an era like the one I was investigating in the early 1950s, when employers were actually scared of their teenage workforce — scared that they would just walk out the door and leave them in the lurch. That was the backdrop to the entire phenomenon of the Teds.

Meagan Day

It seems these working-class teenagers were so much more emboldened than their parents, or really any previous generation.

Max Décharné

There’s something I quote in my book from a very pompous conference of academics and sociologists, around 1961 or 1962, reported in the respectable press — the Guardian and the Times. The lecturer at one point says that up until the end of the 1940s in this country, people dressed in a uniform. He’s not talking about a military uniform. The upper class had its eccentricities, but there were also standards. That was the whole point of Savile Row clothing. You were supposed to be able to tell someone was really upper-class by these little intricacies of tailoring.

Meanwhile, this lecturer at this conference said, the working class had their uniform, but it was supposed to be neutral colors. You were supposed to blend in. You were not supposed to call attention to yourself. There were laws in this country in medieval times against breaking this uniform code. If, as a working-class person in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, you were found wearing expensive clothing, you could get prosecuted for it. Certain colors were reserved for the aristocracy — scarlet, things like that. Anything that just looked good, basically. The working class was supposed to dress in mud colors. Up until about the eighteenth century, it could get you arrested for imitating your betters, as it would be called.

That attitude was still hanging around in the 1950s. It really offended the upper-class people who had gotten into the men’s Edwardian revival at the end of the 1940s and then found themselves reading about these street kids who dressed like that.

One funny thing was that the prime minister at the time, late 1950s, was Harold Macmillan. He was a genuine Edwardian, reared in Edwardian times. And he actually sponsored a few boys’ groups in the East End. He went around to one of these youth clubs where there was a group of Teds, all still at school. His speech to them got reported in the press. He was quite remarkably open-minded for the era. He said, “I suppose we’re all Edwardians together.” But usually, there was just resentment that these kids had stolen a fashion they had no right to.

Meagan Day

It reminds me of the concept of stolen valor, when people cause great offense by wearing military uniforms when they’ve never served.

Max Décharné

That’s a very good analogy. In fact, I’ll tell you about Jimi Hendrix when he came over here. Chas Chandler from the rock band the Animals found him in New York, brought him over, and took him down Carnaby Street, where vintage secondhand military clothing of the extravagant type was popular. Victorian hussars’ uniforms, things with all the gold braid — they were popular among the mods and the fashionable crowd in ’66.

Jimi Hendrix shares a laugh with his drummer, Buddy Miles. (CC BY-SA 4.0)

That’s where all the great pictures of Hendrix wearing those jackets come from. He didn’t arrive from America wearing that. He found that down Carnaby Street. And there were lots of outraged letters and even questions asked in Parliament about people being prosecuted for impersonating the military.

Meagan Day

So it starts with Edwardian aristocracy and it extends to other sacred cows like military officers. It reminds me of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the psychedelic military uniforms, and how unthinkable that would’ve been not a few decades prior.

Max Décharné

Those were deliberately cartoons of military costumes. That photograph was taken just off the King’s Road in 1967. You see that iconoclasm in mid-1960s films made over here, the ones that are trying to be trendy. They’ll go into somebody’s flat, and if there’s anything old there, it’s usually been subverted. Like those beautiful wind-up gramophones from the twenties with the extravagant horn — lovely things — you’d usually see them in a ’60s film having some cheap Day-Glo paint slopped all over them.

Meagan Day

And by the time we get to the 1980s, it’s gone all the way to lampooning the pre-Victorian elite with the New Romantics.

Max Décharné

You can see four or five of the early New Romantics in David Bowie’s video for “Ashes to Ashes.” He went down to one of the main clubs and rounded some of them up. They got their clothing from ecclesiastical clothing suppliers who were literally making clothing for Catholic bishops and priests. That’s what they’re wearing in that video.

Meagan Day

You can really see the influence of the Teds on that whole ethos. Can you talk about the afterlife of the Teds? How responsible are they for the subcultures that came after?

Max Décharné

You have your Teds at the beginning, then in 1955 and ’56, we get the full blast of American rock and roll over here. And this country loved American rock and roll. It adopted it wholesale, to the extent that even after a lot of people like Bo Diddley, Little Richard, and Johnny Cash went out of fashion in America, once the British Invasion came along, what were those guys doing? They were coming to Britain and touring all the time, playing to huge crowds. This is why the early Beatles tours and the early Stones tours, they’re supporting Roy Orbison, they’re supporting Jerry Lee Lewis. The love for ’50s rock and roll never died over here. And the Teds were always around, all the way through when I was growing up.

I’m from Portsmouth, which is a tough dockyard town on the south coast of England, where the Royal Navy is based. You always had Teds walking around. And by the time you get into the early 1970s, suddenly you’ve got a ’50s rock and roll revival. A lot of the bands on our main music program, Top of the Pops — the glam rock bands that came up at the same time as T. Rex and early David Bowie — many of those bands are wearing Teddy boy drape jackets, brothel creeper shoes, slicked-back hair, doing three-chord songs that are looking back to the 1950s. And at the same time, what are we seeing at the cinema? The breakthrough film from George Lucas, American Graffiti, looking back to the ’50s. The double soundtrack LP to that was a huge hit over here, forty tracks of American rock and roll.

At the same time, Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood start up down the wrong end of King’s Road in 1971 selling Teddy boy clothing — three or four years before they find the Sex Pistols. They’ve got a shop selling very retro gear, one of the only places you could actually buy that sort of thing. In fact, Glen Matlock, the original bass player of the Sex Pistols, the reason he first walked into that shop in 1973 as a teenager was that he’d heard it was one of the only places you could get a pair of Teddy boy shoes.

Teddy fashion continued into the 1970s. (Dave Guy / CC BY 2.5 / Lightly cropped)

And early punk rock over here has got so much in common with first-generation ’50s rock and roll. The idea was, let’s get away from the progressive rock, the five-hour guitar solos, the long-haired hippie stuff. Let’s keep it short, nasty, two minutes, get in, get out. It’s supposed to be for dancing, not sitting. I have a friend, he was at university in the late 1960s, and he was astonished that in my university days we used to jump around to the band. He said, “No, no — everyone’s lying around on the floor, and the band would be up there usually sitting on cushions, and this huge haze of marijuana smoke hovering three feet above the ground.” Punk was harking back to the rock and roll thing of the 1950s. It was for people who wanted to jump around, who couldn’t sit still.

So there are a lot of people my age who got into ’50s rock and roll and the general ’50s look in the 1970s — whether dressing as a Ted or getting vintage American clothing from the time, dressing the way Eddie Cochran or Gene Vincent would’ve dressed. That was in the DNA of punk. The Teds were the ones who latched onto rock and roll. They had the haircuts, the flash clothes, and the music taste. And that influence has never gone away, regardless of all the successive waves of music since.

Meagan Day

What inspired you to write this book?

Max Décharné

On a personal level, my uncle — my dad’s brother — was a Teddy boy. And he was great. In the old days, when I was a teenager, I said, “What was it like for you?” And he said, “Well, essentially everyone hated us, but no one gave us any trouble. We would go downtown on a Saturday just to stroll around, and it was like the parting of the Red Sea.” Everyone just got out of their way. Not because of anything they’d done, just all this rubbish people had read in the newspapers saying these people are dangerous.

That was my personal inspiration. I knew he was just an absolute sweetheart who loved the music and loved the clothes, and that’s why he was into it. You can see him in my parents’ wedding photograph in 1957. He’s the one at the end doing his best James Dean sneer, trying to look cool with a superb haircut. The Teds were people like that, and their attitude arrived in the culture to stay.

Budgeting Scolds Are Gaslighting Struggling Americans

2026-03-20T12:35:44Z

The affluent often blame poverty on bad budgeting skills, claiming the poor just need to be taught financial literacy. But working-class people require living wages and a functioning safety net, not condescending lectures about money management.

Last week, Ohio Senator Jon Husted condescendingly blamed his constituents’ poverty on bad budgeting skills. But research shows the exact opposite: working-class people know the value of a dollar and are way less likely to overspend than the rich. (Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images)

Speaking on a conservative podcast last week, Senator Jon Husted confidently asserted that low-income people can’t handle daily challenges and lack basic budgeting skills. “People living in poverty are just not very experienced at navigating the real world, right?” said Husted, a Republican representing Ohio who is facing a November election, likely against former Senator Sherrod Brown.

“I remember talking to one young lady who said, ‘Well, I don’t really know how money works at a grocery store,’ because she grew up and has lived all of her adult life using SNAP [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program] cards to buy groceries,” Husted continued. “So you literally have to teach people how to budget.”

Husted’s comments drew criticism from Brown and others. Deservedly so. But his statements reflect an attitude held by far more people than one out-of-touch politician. Husted’s condescension about poor Americans permeates the government and many nonprofit organizations. In these environments, it’s common to hear that people endure poverty not because they don’t have enough money but because they don’t manage their money properly. This myth is often packaged as a call for “financial literacy.”

The US Department of the Treasury has an entire commission devoted to financial literacy. The Congressional Research Service has issued a report claiming that “African American and Hispanic adults, women, lower-income adults,” and “adults with less formal education” all lack financial literacy. Missing from the report was any acknowledgment of the decades of stagnant wages and intensifying inequality, generations of racial discrimination in housing policy, and other structural factors that disadvantage these groups.

The International Federation of Accountants claims that a lack of financial literacy perpetuates poverty. Nonprofit organizations create four-week training courses to teach homeless families about money management. These are hardly outliers; it’s typical for organizations to pat themselves on the back for teaching budgeting skills to the poor.

Only one problem: the poor are often already fastidious money managers. I have spent many years working with low-income people, most recently in a law school clinic where we represent tenants facing eviction, and I can attest that nearly every client we have is remarkably precise with their budgeting. They have to be. It is the only way home health care workers, food service workers, and people living with disabilities can survive on incomes far below any reasonable definition of a living wage.

The Poor Outperform the Rich in Financial Choices

Our clients know to the penny what to expect on their utility bills, where to find the cheapest rice, beans, and pasta, and which health clinics are most likely to give out samples of prescription medicines.

While the Treasury Department defines financial literacy as understanding “investment diversification,” our clients are experts at knowing the last day they can pay rent without incurring late fees and which food pantries are within walking distance of the bus line.

(Speaking of food pantries, Husted’s alleged conversation with a SNAP recipient who has never paid cash for food is almost certainly fabricated. SNAP benefits fall far short of covering the cost of even low-priced meals, so even recipients of the maximum benefit still pay out of pocket for food each month.)

No need to take my word for it. Studies have shown that low-income people outperform the rich in many financial decisions. “The poor are more attuned to the cost of everyday experiences,” writes University of Chicago professor Anuj K. Shah. “They think of money even in situations where many other people do not.”

The research points to a broader irony. When behavioral economists study how people evaluate financial trade-offs, it is wealthier subjects who make irrational choices — overpaying for convenience, misjudging the value of a discount relative to what it could actually buy. Low-income people, by contrast, carry a constant awareness of what money means in practical terms: a tank of gas, a week of groceries, a copay. The rich, then, are worse at managing household budgets than the poor, a paradox that makes the premise of “financial literacy” programs aimed at addressing poverty look not just patronizing but backward.

US Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows that, compared with wealthier households, households receiving means-tested assistance spend a far smaller share of their income on entertainment, alcohol, and tobacco. So it is not surprising that, when safety-net benefits are increased or guaranteed income funds are distributed, low-income people reliably use the extra funds to cover basic necessities like housing, food, and health care.

Which leads to an obvious conclusion: it is Senator Husted and other proponents of gaslighting financial literacy programs who need a lesson in “navigating the real world.” In Husted’s Ohio and across the country, people deserve living wages and a robust safety net, not condescending lectures.

Celebrities Can’t Save Opera. Public Funding Can.

2026-03-20T11:18:14Z

Timothée Chalamet's offhand jab at “dying” high culture sparked celebrity outrage. But without robust public investment and democratic ownership, opera and ballet will keep shrinking into elite pastimes instead of surviving as vibrant public art forms.

Far too many of Timothée Chalamet’s critics are ignoring the role of public infrastructure in the modern life of the performing arts. (Anthony Wallace / AFP via Getty Images)

Timothée Chalamet was one of the more discussed Oscars snubs this week. For months since the film’s release, critics have celebrated his performance in Marty Supreme as the work of a young actor well on his way to greatness. Chalamet pulled out all the stops both in promoting the film as well as spearheading its Oscar campaign. The film itself earned stellar reviews and made $180 million worldwide, garnering nine Academy Award nominations. Yet it went home empty-handed.

Despite all this, most of the commentariat claims Chalamet deserves the slight. Not because he wasn’t great in the film but because of his recent comments on opera and ballet.

Chalamet has found himself in hot water thanks to a now-viral interview where he quipped that “no one cares” anymore about those two art forms. The incident is now being cited as one more piece of evidence that the young actor has let fame go to his head.

The comment provoked a string of toothless retorts from celebrities like Whoopi Goldberg and Nathan Lane as well as wounded reactions from people who have been fighting tirelessly to preserve these venerable traditions.

Many jabs at Chalamet focused on his inability to compete with the sheer artistic talent of dancers and singers, while others insisted on the enduring power of classical performing arts.

These objections miss the point. Opera and ballet are in genuine financial and cultural crisis, and anemic celebrity white knighting does little to expand their audience.

Yet far too many of Chalamet’s critics are ignoring the role of public infrastructure in the modern life of the performing arts. Well into the twentieth century, opera and dance preserved their mass appeal even as new paradigms emerged — including film. Especially in Europe, they did so on the back of ambitious state ownership programs and public funding.

The real question isn’t whether anyone cares about opera and ballet — it’s who will pay to keep them alive. What these art forms need isn’t celebrity defenders but a renewed commitment to the kind of ambitious public support that preserved their relevance in the past century.

Taking Shots for No Reason

The controversy with Chalamet began in February when the actor sat down with Matthew McConaughey during the Variety & CNN Town Hall. During the conversation, McConaughey asked Chalamet about whether he feared cinema was dying as a result of declining attention spans.

Chalamet acknowledged the worry, saying, “I don’t want to be working in ballet or opera, or things where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive, even though no one cares about this anymore.’”

With a laugh, he quickly tried to add a caveat, remarking, “All respect to the ballet and opera people out there. I just lost fourteen cents in viewership. Damn I just took shots for no reason.”

The drama continued into mid-March, especially after a TikTok post resurfaced a 2019 appearance where Chalamet called opera and ballet dying art forms.

In the last two weeks, there has been a wave of comments from celebrities like Jimmy Kimmel, Juliette Binoche, and Justine Bateman. (Doja Cat also joined the fray, but she later retracted her comments after admitting she’d never seen a live ballet or opera performance.)

Chalamet’s comments additionally elicited responses from performing arts world institutions and personalities, including actor/dancer Zach McNally, former American Ballet Theatre principal dancer Misty Copeland, and New York City Ballet principal dancer Jovani Furlan. Hawaii Opera Theatre and Seattle Opera even introduced discount codes referencing the incident, claiming they brought in additional revenue due to the controversy.

The story became a centerpiece of the recent Academy Awards. Early in his opening monologue, host Conan O’Brien joked, “Security is extremely tight tonight. I’m told there’s concerns about attacks from both the opera and ballet communities.”

When Copeland danced onstage along with members of the Sinners cast performing their hit “I Lied to You,” Chalamet attempted to make amends by giving her an enthusiastic ovation.

But by then, several think pieces were already in the works, with a New York Times op-ed saying that Chalamet’s toxic masculinity betrayed his earlier promise of being a “new kind of leading man.”

A common refrain was that the actor lacks the talent to compete against opera and ballet stars. Furlan’s retort, for example, was accompanied a video demonstration of his staggering technique where he balanced on a BOSU ball, a clear attempt to flex on Chalamet’s comparative lack of physical prowess.

Other critics pointed out Chalamet’s hypocrisy, given that he previously bragged about having a grandmother, mother, and sister who trained in dance. As he claimed, “I’m like a Venn diagram of the best cultural influences of the twenty-first century and twentieth century.”

Still others rejected the basic premise that opera and ballet were culturally irrelevant. While speaking at SXSW last week, director Steven Spielberg insisted that the magic of cinema and concerts were also shared by ballet and opera. Acknowledging the crowd’s laughter, he remarked, “And we want that to be sustained. We want that to go forever.”

Certainly, Chalamet’s comments were boneheaded. But these arguments miss the mark. As one industry insider put it, “Those feigning outrage might start proving their support by posting a photo of the last ticket they actually bought to a ballet or opera performance.”

Indeed, if Spielberg believes so strongly in the transformative magic of music theater, we opera fans would more than welcome his cinematic adaptation of Parsifal.

Art as a Public Good

Still, there’s a deeper issue at stake. Commentators in the discussion often focused on the organic appeal of opera and ballet, their intrinsic merits as art forms.

Doing so ignores the role of public support in driving interest in classical performing arts — and how catastrophic defunding has been for arts organizations.

The data is nothing short of alarming. A 2025 study of US opera during the period from 2005 to 2023 found that box office receipts and private donations have declined even as administrative expenses have grown. Survey data gathered by the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) also shows a precipitous decline in attendance of both opera and ballet performances since they began collecting data in 1982.

A representative state of affairs is seen in the case of New York’s Metropolitan Opera, which posted their own Chalamet clapback on Instagram. After years of financial challenges, the Met has begun draining its endowment, announced layoffs, and said it was open to selling the two iconic Marc Chagall murals that adorn their grand staircase.

A key factor has been the decline of the limited public funding for the arts. The NEA, an already embattled federal funding agency, has seen a renewed round of defunding during the second Trump presidency, throwing already precarious arts organizations into jeopardy.

Some of Chalamet’s critics questioned the accuracy of his statement by pointing to the relative popularity of opera and ballet in Europe. Surely these traditions enjoy more public support, some of which can be attributed to the civic pride that surrounds these homegrown art forms.

However, what separates the European arts landscape from that of the United States is the higher level of public ownership and funding for art forms like opera and ballet.

Germany, one of the highest per capita spenders on culture, pours significant money into subsidizing art. Many of its most acclaimed ensembles, including the Berlin State Ballet and the Bavarian State Opera, are publicly owned. In fact, a number of such German institutions are former court ensembles that were transformed into public entities after the German Revolution.

A similar situation is seen in France. In 2019, prior to COVID-era audience compression, French opera companies received more than twice as much of their income from government funding as from ticket sales.

This publicly funded model is what makes opera and ballet accessible to everyday people. Thanks to public support, Paris Opera (founded in 1669 by Louis XIV) is able to offer tickets as cheap as €10, including heavily discounted tickets for the young, elderly, and unemployed.

It is these sorts of provisions and institutional models that are decisive for driving public engagement — and they will need to be part of any effort to save opera and ballet from a hypothetical future death.

Art for the People

In the end, interest in the performing arts isn’t about pure intrinsic appeal. And its fate will not be sealed by Chalamet’s comments or his critics’ heroic media interventions.

Culture is defined by shared values and the institutions that make art accessible to ordinary people. Whether art forms live or die is a collective choice, and it should not be left to the whims of the market.

This is actually a lesson that was put on display in 2019 when Emmanuel Macron threatened to take pensions away from Opera Paris’s musicians and dancers — a support system that also began under Louis XIV. These artists went on strike with other public sector workers, fighting to preserve their cultural heritage and their rights as workers. In the end, they won.

Those of us interested in saving the performing arts would do well to head this lesson, recognizing our shared interest with working people — as workers and consumers of art.

The US Is Spending Billions to Bomb Iran

2026-03-20T10:11:20Z

The Trump administration has spent around $24 billion in public funds on its war against Iran so far. Here’s what that money might have been used for instead.

The $24 billion that the US has spent bombing Iran could have been spent on any number of useful programs instead, from public broadcasting to paid leave to making the child tax credit permanent. (Getty Images)

In the first six days of war on Iran, the Pentagon spent $11.3 billion in taxpayer funds. By its own estimates, it has burned through approximately $1 billion more every day since. That amounts to approximately $24 billion — or more than $41 million an hour, or roughly $11,000 per second.

To understand the scale of such spending, it’s worth looking at what else that money could have paid for. The US Agency for International Development — which led overseas humanitarian efforts until it shut down last year after the Trump administration gutted its programming — oversaw just $35 billion in appropriations in 2024 alone. One Harvard researcher estimates that recent aid lapses have already caused hundreds of thousands of deaths abroad due to disease and malnutrition.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which distributes more than $500 million in federal funds annually to 1,500 public media outlets, including the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR), voted to dissolve in January following nearly sixty years in operation. That came after the Trump administration slashed $1.1 billion from its funding for 2026 and 2027 — roughly equivalent to a single day’s worth of fighting in Iran.

Meanwhile, now-abandoned Biden administration plans to institute federal family and medical leave were projected to cost roughly $22 billion a year to guarantee all private sector workers twelve weeks of paid parental, family, and sick leave in the next decade. After predictable pushback from corporate-backed former Senator Joe Manchin (I-WV), Congress whittled the proposal down to four weeks before ultimately striking it completely from the administration’s social and climate safety package in 2021.

The pandemic-era expansion of the child tax credit, which sent families monthly payments of up to $300 per child, reduced youth poverty in the United States to record lows. Making the expansion permanent would have cost the federal government an average of $160 billion a year — the equivalent of just under five months of fighting in Iran. This proposal was also personally derailed by Manchin in 2022, sending millions of children back below the poverty line.

Increasing the Department of Agriculture’s school lunch program to offer universal meals to all public school students, regardless of income, would cost about $11 billion a year, on top of $19 billion the department already spends on school lunches annually.

Federal health care spending, meanwhile, costs taxpayers more than $6 trillion annually — but the government could save roughly $450 billion a year, or 13 percent, by enacting Medicare for All.

This article was first published by the Lever, an award-winning independent investigative newsroom.

The Minecraft Marxists

2026-03-20T10:00:31Z

The proletarian revolution is playing out on a desktop near you.

A screenshot of the socialist Xeroist Republic of Zilatra on the Stoneworks server in Minecraft.

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Christian Zionists Helped Stoke Trump’s Iran War

2026-03-20T10:11:05Z

The Christian Zionist movement has long pushed for regime change in Iran. With allies in Donald Trump’s inner circle and its ideas seeping into the US military, it has played a key role in building support for the current war.

Christians United for Israel and the broader Christian Zionist movement have long been pushing for Iran regime change. (Michael Brochstein / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images)

The morning after the United States and Israel began bombing Iran, Pastor John Hagee of Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, began his globally broadcast Sunday sermon with a special note about the “brilliant execution of Operation Epic Fury.”

“It’s refreshing to know that God is in total control and he has plans that will not be removed,” he told his parishioners.

Hagee, too, is in control, and the war in Iran is part of his — and his lobbyists’ — plans.

As the founder of the ten-million-member group Christians United for Israel, Hagee is a leading voice in the Christian Zionist movement, a subset of Evangelicalism that calls for the return of Jewish people to the “Holy Land” of Israel to bring about the second coming of Jesus. For Hagee and his colleagues, that end-time prophecy runs through Iran.

And while much attention has focused on the Israel lobby’s efforts to draw the United States into war with Iran, Christians United for Israel and the broader Christian Zionist movement have also been pushing for Iran regime change.

Since 2016, the group, which claims to be “one of the largest pro-Israel organizations worldwide,” has spent millions lobbying Congress on a plethora of causes related to penalizing the Iranian government and boosting Israel armament. It also boasts on its website that it helped pass bills providing Israel with military weapons and persuaded states to adopt laws opposing the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions (BDS) movement to end Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories.

What’s more, several people in Donald Trump’s inner circle have embraced elements of the movement, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Israeli Ambassador Mike Huckabee, and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA).

The White House, the Defense Department, and the US Embassy in Israel did not respond to requests for comment.

For Christian Zionist followers, the war with Iran isn’t just about Israel’s “right to defend itself,” said Mimi Kirk, director of the Institute for the Study of Christian Zionism, a watchdog group that tracks and seeks to counter the movement. According to Kirk, combating Iran is part of its ideological mission.

“Iran is the symbol of what’s against Israel and what needs to be destroyed,” Kirk told the Lever. “So the idea for Christian Zionists is that you have to clear the way for Israel to be strong. It gets put in this kind of geopolitical [category] for the US and Israel, but it also gets put into these religious terms to kind of rally the troops.”

Lobbyists for the Apocalypse

Much of the modern iteration of Christian Zionism stems from the Scofield Reference Bible, an early twenieth-century annotated version of the text by a protestant preacher named Cyrus Scofield.

The book calls for Christians to support the Jewish people, stating, “It has invariably fared ill with the people who have persecuted the Jew — well with those who have protected him. The future will still more remarkably prove this principle.”

According to Kirk, Christian Zionist ideology became linked to politics in the late 1970s, when pastor Jerry Falwell began working with Heritage Foundation founder Paul Weyrich to steer evangelical voters toward supporting the Republican Party.

Falwell, whose Moral Majority campaign helped elect President Ronald Reagan in 1980, made Israel a core tenet of his sermons, stating that “to stand against Israel is to stand against God,” and supported Israeli settlement expansion on Palestinian land in the 1980s. The Israeli government reportedly gifted Falwell a private jet for his efforts.

“Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority platform was kind of a springboard for Christian Zionism,” Kirk said. “The evangelical political movement was in response to the movements for civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights of the 1960s.”

In 2006, Hagee founded Christians United for Israel, framing it as a “biblical advocacy” mission to “go to Washington and go face-to-face with senators, representing Israel.” Since 2016, the group has spent nearly $2.5 million lobbying Congress on matters including Iranian sanctions, the Lebanese paramilitary group Hezbollah, the BDS movement, and military spending, disclosures show.

This past year alone, Christians United for Israel spent more than $679,000 lobbying Congress on Iranian and Syrian sanctions, a bill that would penalize US citizens who boycott Israel, pro-Israel trade legislation, and other matters. The group has also reportedly invested between $50 million and $65 million in illegal Israeli settlements being built in the West Bank, a Palestinian territory.

Christians United for Israel did not respond to a request for comment.

One of the more controversial tenets of the Christian Zionist movement calls for the building of a Jewish temple on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, a sacred site for many religions that is also home to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third-holiest site in Islam.

Once this so-called “third temple” is built, Christian Zionists believe Jews will return to the Holy Land and red heifers will be sacrificed, ushering in the apocalypse. During these end-times, Jews supposedly will either convert to Christianity or “be damned to hell.”

American ranchers have been breeding red heifers for just such a sacrifice. In August, Huckabee, a self-described Christian Zionist, and Johnson met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at an Israeli site holding the cows in the West Bank.

“We had a number of members of Congress here to pray,” Johnson said in a video from the site. “We pray for our nation and for peace in Jerusalem, for peace for Israel.”

When asked about visiting the site and if he considers himself a Christian Zionist, a spokesperson for Johnson directed the Lever to his “public record for his perspective and beliefs.”

“The Speaker has been very public about his Christian faith in countless settings over the years,” Taylor Haulsee, a spokesperson for Johnson, told the Lever via email.

“Potential Violations of Department of Defense Regulations”

In 2017, Hagee, at the invitation of Vice President Mike Pence, met with Trump in the Oval Office. At the time, Hagee was pushing the White House to move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a controversial move because it would recognize Jerusalem as Israeli territory. Trump officially moved the embassy to Jerusalem a year later.

While Hagee hasn’t met with the president during his second term, many in Trump’s close orbit are supporters of elements of the Christian Zionist movement.

While serving as Trump’s ambassador to Israel, Huckabee has pushed Christian Zionist–backed concepts. In a recent interview with conservative podcaster Tucker Carlson, Huckabee, paraphrasing the Bible, said he would be fine if Israel took control of land stretching from the Euphrates River in Iraq and Syria to the Nile River in Egypt — a region that encompasses much of the Middle East.

This land, according to Genesis 15, was promised to Abraham’s descendants, who are considered the Jewish people. A core tenet of Christian Zionism is that the Jewish people must return to this land.

He later claimed it was a “tongue-in-cheek” comment, but more than a dozen Arab countries condemned his remarks.

“I think it was very telling that Huckabee said that, and he said it religiously,” Kirk said.

And long before overseeing Trump’s war in Iran, Hegseth espoused some Christian Zionist beliefs. In 2018, while he was a Fox News host, Hegseth called for the construction of the third temple in Jerusalem — a move that would almost certainly cause violence in the region. Hamas, the Palestinian militia group that has governed the Gaza Strip since 2007, said its October 7, 2023, terrorist attack was partially motivated by the third-temple movement.

It’s not just politicians who have pushed Christian Zionist doctrine; the concepts are also seeping into the US military.

A military commander reportedly told lower-level officers to tell troops that the attack on Iran was “all part of God’s divine plan,” citing passages from the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the “imminent return of Jesus Christ,” according to a March 3 statement from the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group.

Other top commanders have reportedly issued similar messages, leading thirty members of Congress to urge the Defense Department’s inspector general on March 6 to investigate the claims.

“If accurate, these outrageous statements . . . raise not only glaring Constitutional concerns, but potential violations of Department of Defense regulations regarding religious neutrality and breaches of professional obligations and standards expected of military leadership,” the members wrote.

“Members of the United States Armed Forces swear an oath to support and defend our secular Constitution — not any specific religious doctrines.”

This article was first published by the Lever, an award-winning independent investigative newsroom.

Europe Is Sanctioning Critics of Israel and Militarism

2026-03-20T08:32:39Z

Sanctions were once sold as a gentler foreign policy tool for exerting pressure on dictatorships and terrorist organizations. Yet measures like banning individuals from having bank accounts or traveling are increasingly used to chill free speech in Europe.

Europe is increasingly turning toward sanctions and military buildup in the name of resisting other states’ authoritarianism. Yet troublingly, within its own borders it is also building up tools to stifle critics of Israel and EU foreign policy. (Peter Dejong / ANP / AFP via Getty Images)

Imagine you’re at the supermarket one day, but weirdly your card doesn’t work. You try to check your account online, and it doesn’t let you log in. You call the bank, but it tells you that it’s unable to disclose any information about why this is happening. At home, you try to find out what happened, perhaps googling your name. And then you find out: your name has ended up on a sanctions list. Only weeks later do you get an official letter informing you about your new status. The letter itself is strewn with errors. It’s unclear what exactly you’re meant to have done wrong. And there’s nothing to tell you how you can defend yourself.

Recently, such cases have become ever more common. Economic and travel sanctions imposed by the United States or the European Union, originally intended as a gentler alternative to military intervention or police measures against dictatorships and human rights violators, are increasingly targeting individuals and organizations whose politics are deemed beyond the pale. Several cases have caused an international stir in recent months.

In August 2025, Nicolas Guillou, a French judge at the International Criminal Court, found himself locked out of the financial system and most online services. Why? Because the United States had placed him on a sanctions list that also includes al-Qaeda members, drug smugglers, and Vladimir Putin, simply because the court issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Five other ICC judges and three prosecutors have also ended up on the sanctions list.

Meanwhile, in Germany, the closure of the accounts of legal aid organization Rote Hilfe, the German Communist Party (DKP), and other left-wing organizations made headlines. The US government has declared “Antifa” a terrorist organization, so banks that want to operate using US-based systems such as the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) are pressured to stop supporting this vaguely defined group, for instance by debanking organizations that have provided legal aid to those associated with Antifa.

The EU is also ramping up pressure through sanctions. German bloggers Alina Lipp and Thomas Röper have been sanctioned since May 2025. Jacques Baud, a former employee of the Swiss intelligence service, military analyst, and regular commentator on the international Russian news channel RT, ended up on a sanctions list due to alleged support for Putin, by which EU authorities mean his pro-Russian analyses of Western policy in the run-up to the war in Ukraine. Lipp and Röper are right-wing bloggers who live in Russia; the sanctions have little impact on their daily lives. Baud, however, lives in Brussels, in the heart of the EU. All his accounts were frozen until he was granted a “humanitarian exemption” in early February. The measures also include travel restrictions: Baud is not allowed to leave Belgium, not even to travel to his home country, Switzerland, whose government wants to intervene on his behalf. A French citizen was also placed on the list with the same sanctions package.

“Reduced to Zero”

One case that deserves special attention is that of German journalist Hüseyin Doğru. Since the EU placed him on a sanctions list in May 2025, he has had no access to his accounts and is not allowed to travel. Doğru lives in Berlin and is much more affected by the sanctions than others. “You can’t even buy me a coffee,” says Doğru during an interview in Berlin. “In theory, I’m not even allowed to help myself to anything in the fridge after my wife went shopping.” The German Bundesbank, which is in charge of enforcing sanctions, granted him an exemption to withdraw a minimum subsistence allowance of €506 a month from his bank account. And even this tiny sum was temporarily blocked by his bank. “I can’t feed my newborn babies,” says Doğru. “On an existential level, you’re reduced to zero.”

Doğru was editor in chief of the portal red., which specializes in anti-colonial perspectives. Red. has ceased operations due to the sanctions. Doğru’s case is unique because of the official reason for his punishment: his is the only entry in the sanctions regime RUSDA, which punishes alleged support for Russia, that refers to coverage of the Middle East conflict. Doğru, his company AFA Medya, and the website red. allegedly supported Russian attempts to “undermine or threaten stability and security in the [European] Union” by supporting “violent demonstrations” and “systematically spreading false information.” The EU accuses Doğru of maintaining “close financial and organisational connections with Russian state propaganda entities.” The EU claims that Doğru “shares deep structural ties, including interlinkages between, and rotation of, individual personnel with Russian state media organisations.”

The allegedly “violent” demonstration refers to the occupation of Humboldt University in Berlin by pro-Palestinian activists in 2024. Because Doğru reported on the occupation on his website, he is said to have created a platform for the “rioters” to spread the ideology and symbols of terrorist groups such as Hamas. Does reporting on protests against the German government or its allies constitute an exercise of a fundamental right in a democracy or political subversion on behalf of a hostile power? For the EU, it’s the latter.

The sanctions were preceded by a series of articles in German newspapers that sought to prove Doğru’s political proximity to and financing by the Russian government. Doğru seems to have found himself in journalists’ crosshairs due to his extensive reporting on the war in Gaza and the repression of pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Germany. One of the journalists is still hounding Doğru, sending press requests to organizers of panels that he has spoken at to make sure he does not get paid in contravention of the sanctions.

Doğru firmly rejects the EU’s accusations. “Red. has never received financial support from Russia or Russian broadcasters,” he emphasizes. The outlet was partially financed from his savings, Doğru says, but mainly from donations. There were, however, indirect links to Russian media. Before founding red., Doğru worked for Redfish, which produced video content and documentaries for the video agency Ruptly, a subsidiary of RT. The EU classifies RT as a propaganda tool and has blocked it in Europe. But is it illegal to have worked for a subsidiary of a subsidiary of a channel that was legal at the time? RT and Ruptly experienced a staff exodus after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Redfish ceased operations. Doğru then founded red. Some of its employees had previously worked at Redfish. Doğru emphasizes that Ruptly and RT never exercised any control over content at Redfish. Redfish also produced videos that took a critical look at Russian politics, such as the Kashmir conflict and antiwar protests following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Working with Ruptly, Doğru says, was simply an opportunity to produce left-wing journalism that otherwise would have been difficult to finance.

According to Doğru, the reporting on the Humboldt occupation was normal journalistic practice. “Our sources informed us in advance about an upcoming political intervention,” so he reported on his exclusive access, as any journalist would do. “Apparently, the state was bothered by our critical reporting on the repression of pro-Palestinian activists here in Germany.”

Chilling Effect

Doğru’s case raises serious questions about freedom of expression in Europe. Who decides what constitutes acceptable journalism and what constitutes propaganda that must be suppressed? What exactly is disinformation — is it simply a different interpretation of facts? Can opinions be sanctioned as disinformation? The EU is making an example of Doğru. It’s a warning: if journalists report in a way we don’t like, we can destroy your lives. The chilling effect is already having an impact: Doğru has received little (public) solidarity from left-wing politicians, journalists, or the media. Some left-wing publications refused to report on the case at all; Doğru is too tainted by the accusations of being pro-Putin. The few attempts to help Doğru have been blocked. German newspaper Junge Welt wanted to give Doğru a job but was informed by the Bundesbank that that would constitute prohibited economic aid. To date, despite repeated inquiries by his lawyer, Doğru has not gotten a concrete answer as to whether he is allowed to work.

“Journalists are being deprived of their professional and material existence through sanctions or debanking; that is an attack on freedom of the press and freedom of expression,” says Ezra Abendrot, a spokesperson for Rote Hilfe. “The fact that Hüseyin Doğru is listed in EU sanctions demonstrates how far-reaching and arbitrary these instruments can be.” Rote Hilfe itself has fallen victim to such sanctions. Last fall, a local bank blocked the organization’s accounts. The expansion of sanctions lists and measures such as debanking should be “seen in the context of escalating authoritarianism and persecution of political dissent,” according to Abendrot. Like in other areas of repression, the Kurdish movement was an early victim of such measures in Germany. In 2015, for example, a local bank closed a donation account for Rojava.

Anyone trying to understand this ever-expanding sanctions apparatus will come across London-based law professor Eva Nanopoulos’s work. She is concerned that sanctions today rarely draw scrutiny. When the system was greatly expanded by the EU in the wake of 9/11 as part of the “war on terror,” there was still a lot of criticism of these executive measures, which lacked due legislative process and were not subject to criminal proceedings. Today, Nanopoulos says, sanctions are “far more draconian,” but criticism has almost died down. “We seem to have simply accepted the claim that certain forms of terrorism require extraordinary measures,” she says.

Sanctions have long been considered a gentler alternative to military intervention. Nanopoulos considers this narrative of “smart sanctions,” which supposedly target specific individuals and spare the general population, a liberal myth. Such instruments are not humanitarian innovations of the 1990s but were developed earlier by the United States in the context of the Cold War and the “war on drugs.” According to some estimates, sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s, which were purported to only target the leadership, led to the deaths of around 500,000 children, mainly due to the blockade of medicines. However, Nanopoulos also calls for a fundamental debate on sanctions: “We should not judge sanctions as good or bad based on their effect. We need to have a fundamental discussion about the kind of exercise of power we are witnessing here.”

Defenseless

Over the last few years, the system has ballooned. The EU alone maintains thirty-three sanction regimes affecting almost six thousand individuals, organizations, and governments. These sanctions include measures such as arms embargoes, travel restrictions, and economic and financial blockades against actors from specific countries such as Belarus or Iran but also transnational regimes, including sanctions packages aimed at preventing the proliferation of chemical weapons or terrorist organizations. The sanctions regime related to the war in Ukraine accounts for the most cases by far. The number of new organizations sanctioned each year has exploded since the early 2000s, from only about a hundred cases to several hundred new entries per year — even over a thousand in 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine. Now sanctions are increasingly affecting EU citizens. “We’re witnessing the classic imperial boomerang,” says Nanopoulos. “What we introduced to take action against others is now coming back to haunt us.”

In Doğru’s telling, sanctions are a Kafkaesque system. “There is no court, no trial, no defense, no charges, no evidence. You have to figure out how to get out of it yourself.” In theory, you have thirty days after the sanctions package is enacted to lodge an appeal with the EU Council of Ministers. However, Doğru only received a letter informing him of the sanctions weeks after they came into force — and it was sent to the address of a coworking space in Istanbul used by AFA Medya as an office, rather than to his Berlin home. Moreover, the letter contained fundamental factual errors: Doğru is listed as a Turkish citizen, even though he has been a German citizen since his naturalization. Doğru’s lawyer was at least able to get his wife’s accounts (she is not on the list herself) unblocked. He was also granted access to the files, so that Doğru now at least knows exactly what he is accused of. Yet he is not allowed to publish this information.

Even if everything goes by the book, it’s still not easy to defend oneself. Sanctions lists are created in a highly opaque process: national governments propose names to the EU Council of Ministers, which then decides on sanctions measures. Prior national prosecution is not required. This is because sanctions do not address criminal offenses but political misdeeds. The documents on which the decisions are based and the minutes of the Council of Ministers meetings at which the decisions are made are classified as confidential, often in the name of alleged security interests. This means that they cannot be accessed by the public or those affected and their lawyers. “It’s actually quite clever to use such lists to circumvent the principles of the rule of law that would otherwise apply in one’s own country,” says Nanopoulos. It seems unlikely that this system is legal. An expert opinion commissioned by the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance in the European Parliament and written by Ninon Colneric, a former judge at the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, concluded last fall that sanctions such as those imposed on Doğru violate both EU and international law, particularly because the accusation of disinformation is so vague. In particular, denying the right to a hearing before sanctions are imposed appears both disproportionate and unlawful.

How Europeans would counter American sanctions is even less clear. In 1996, the EU enacted a so-called blocking statute, which is intended to prevent the extraterritorial effect of US law on European soil. Updates in 2018 and 2021 explicitly prohibit European organizations and companies from implementing laws that harm European citizens. “But today, there seems to be little will in European politics to implement [the EU’s] own laws to protect its own citizens,” notes Nanopoulos. Rote Hilfe has had some success at this level: a regional court ruled that German and European law apply, and not the political decisions of an “authoritarian foreign government.” This means Rote Hilfe’s accounts remain open, for the time being.

However, legal means alone will not be enough to overcome this system, notes Ezra Abendrot of Rote Hilfe. Authoritarian measures are a political problem and need to be combated politically. But resistance to the sanctions system is not looking good. At the beginning of February, the German Bundestag implemented an EU directive aimed at harmonizing the implementation of sanctions at the national level. With the amendment, violations of sanctions officially become criminal offenses. The new law amounts to a massive tightening of the rules. Only the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) voted against it, while the Greens and the Left abstained.

While the West increasingly resorts to sanctions, or war, in the name of resisting other states’ alleged authoritarianism, within its own borders it is also building up a set of instruments that undermine the rule of law and the guarantees that come with it. Ironically, in the name of defending freedom, liberal democracies are producing the same authoritarian practices that they claim to be fighting elsewhere.

Capitalism Has a Lot of Room to Redistribute Wealth Right Now

2026-03-19T15:31:39Z

Some on the Left believe that the capitalist system will not tolerate any greater interventions in its operation or redistribution of its spoils. There is no good evidence that this is true.

The feasibility of a broader set of redistributive policies under capitalism today is far larger than is commonly assumed. (Tasos Katopodis / Getty Images for SEIU)

Over the past four decades, a pervasive pessimism has taken hold on the Left regarding the prospects for meaningful redistribution within capitalist economies. This pessimism has been shared not only by centrist social democratic parties but also by more radical democratic socialists, many of whom have come to regard redistributive reform as either futile or self‑defeating.

At the core of this outlook lies a belief that capitalism imposes tight structural constraints on democratic politics — constraints that sharply limit how far governments can push redistribution or regulate markets without triggering capital flight, investment strikes, or economic crisis. In other words, people have come to believe that the capitalist system will not tolerate any greater interventions into its operation. The good news is that we have not found any good evidence that this is true.

The belief that we are near the limits of reform is often justified by appeal to what has become known as the structural dependence thesis (SDT): the idea that because capitalists control investment decisions, states are structurally dependent on their confidence and therefore cannot substantially shift income shares in favor of labor for more than brief periods. In its strongest form, SDT implies that any attempt to push redistribution beyond a narrow corridor will inevitably be punished by markets, leading to unemployment, stagnation, and political backlash. In this view, the apparent exhaustion of social democracy is not contingent or political; it is structural and unavoidable.

Yet this diagnosis rests on shaky empirical and theoretical foundations. Our research shows that capitalist economies have historically sustained a far wider range of distributive outcomes than the strong version of SDT allows. Income shares are not tightly anchored to an equilibrium determined by the “inner logic” of capitalism. Rather, they vary substantially over the long run, and these variations are closely associated with shifts in class power, institutions, and political choices.

If this is correct, then a crucial implication follows: we have little reason to believe that contemporary capitalist democracies are anywhere near the feasible limits of redistribution or state intervention. The retreat of social democracy since the 1980s reflects not an exhaustion of policy space but a transformation in the balance of power between classes and a political acceptance — often internalized by the Left itself — of an unduly restrictive conception of what is possible. Reassessing this mistaken pessimism is essential if democratic socialist politics is to regain strategic clarity and ambition.

The Appeal and Limits of Structural Pessimism

The intuitive appeal of the structural dependence thesis is undeniable. Capitalist economies do rely on private investment for employment, growth, and fiscal capacity. When governments antagonize powerful economic actors, negative reactions can and do occur. Episodes such as the crises faced by left governments in Chile in the early 1970s, France in the early 1980s, or Greece after 2010 are frequently cited as cautionary tales confirming the iron grip of structural constraints.

However, it is crucial to distinguish between some constraints and severe constraints. The weak version of SDT — that not all income distributions are feasible within capitalism — is trivially true. Wages cannot be pushed to levels incompatible with production nor profits eliminated entirely without undermining accumulation. But this weak claim is entirely compatible with a broad range of distributive outcomes. It does not justify the stronger conclusion that capitalism tightly fixes income shares or renders ambitious redistribution futile.

The strong version of SDT goes much further. It claims that capitalist economies gravitate toward a specific equilibrium distribution and that attempts to push the wage share above this equilibrium will trigger profit-squeeze dynamics that ultimately restore the status quo. In this view, social democratic reforms can at best achieve temporary gains, which are eventually reversed by market forces.

Yet the empirical record does not support this claim. Long‑term data from the United States and the United Kingdom show large and persistent shifts in income distribution that cannot be explained by cyclical deviations around a stable equilibrium. Wage shares have risen and fallen by substantial margins over decades, often without corresponding collapses in investment or growth. These movements are inconsistent with the idea that capitalism enforces a narrow distributive corridor.

Historical Variation and the Myth of Natural Limits

One of the most striking implications of the evidence is how much historical variation capitalist economies have tolerated. The postwar “golden age” of capitalism in the United States and Western Europe featured high union density, strong welfare states, progressive taxation, extensive regulation, and relatively compressed income distributions. Far from collapsing under the weight of redistribution, these economies delivered rapid growth, rising productivity, and broadly shared prosperity.

By contrast, the neoliberal era since the late 1970s has been marked by a declining labor share
(which refers to the portion of total GDP that goes to workers), exploding inequality, weakened unions, deregulated finance, and reduced social protection. Yet there is no reason to believe that the latter configuration represents a more “natural” or economically necessary equilibrium than the former. Both were politically constructed and institutionally sustained.

Crucially, the transition from the postwar settlement to neoliberalism was not driven by immutable economic laws but by deliberate political choices and shifts in class power. Central banks were reoriented toward anti‑inflationary priorities, capital controls were dismantled, labor law was rewritten or neutered, and unions were systematically weakened. These changes expanded the power resources of capital while eroding those of labor, thereby reshaping income distribution over the long run.

If capitalism could sustain the distributive outcomes of the postwar decades, it follows that the feasible set of redistributive policies today is likely far larger than is commonly assumed. The claim that “globalization” or “financialization” has permanently foreclosed ambitious redistribution is itself a political argument masquerading as economic necessity.

Power, Not Markets Alone, Shapes Distribution

Class power should be re-centered as a determinant of long‑term income distribution. Our findings show a robust long‑term association between union density and the wage share of production and nonsupervisory workers — arguably, a reasonable proxy for the working class in the United States. When unions are strong, labor captures a larger share of income; when unions are weak, that share declines, while supervisory and capital incomes rise.

This evidence directly contradicts the strong SDT. If capital’s control over investment strictly constrained redistribution, then union strength should have little or no long‑term effect on income shares. At most, it should generate short‑term fluctuations that are eventually neutralized. Instead, the data suggest that changes in power resources have durable distributive consequences.

This insight has profound implications for democratic socialist strategy. It suggests that redistribution is not merely a matter of technocratic policy design but of political organization and power-building. Markets do not mechanically enforce a fixed distribution; they operate within institutional frameworks shaped by law, politics, and struggle. Altering those frameworks can — and historically has — shift the balance of income between classes.

Are We Near the Limits of Redistribution?

Given this historical and empirical background, the widespread belief that contemporary societies are already near the limits of redistribution appears implausible. In most advanced economies today, tax systems are significantly less progressive than they were in the mid‑twentieth century; top marginal rates are far lower; wealth taxes are minimal or nonexistent; and corporate taxation has been eroded by international competition and political choice. Public ownership and industrial policy are far more limited than in earlier periods, while labor protections have been significantly weakened.

At the same time, inequality has reached levels not seen since the early twentieth century. The top 1 percent now capture a vastly disproportionate share of income and wealth, while real wages for large segments of the working class have stagnated or declined. These outcomes are not the result of hitting redistributive ceilings but of moving decisively away from them.

From this perspective, the relevant question is not whether further redistribution is “possible” but why it has been politically abandoned. The answer lies less in objective economic constraints than in political and ideological defeat, institutional erosion, and the internalization by the Left of a pessimistic narrative about feasibility. Once social democratic parties accepted the premise that markets must be appeased rather than shaped, their policy ambitions narrowed accordingly.

Implications for Democratic Socialist Strategy

If we accept that the feasible space for redistribution is wider than commonly believed, then the strategic implications for democratic socialism are significant. First, it suggests that the social democratic component of a democratic socialist agenda — progressive taxation, expansive welfare provision, labor market regulation, public investment, and selective decommodification — remains not only relevant but indispensable.

Second, it underscores that redistributive policies cannot be evaluated in isolation from the power relations that sustain them. Durable redistribution requires institutions that enhance the bargaining power of labor, limit the structural power of capital, and embed egalitarian norms in political life. This includes labor law reform, support for collective bargaining, regulation of finance, and constraints on capital mobility.

Third, it cautions against false dichotomies between “reform” and “transformation.” Expanding social democratic policies is not a retreat from socialist ambition but a necessary terrain of struggle within capitalism. Far from exhausting transformative potential, such policies can shift power balances, reshape expectations, and create conditions for deeper structural change.

Rethinking State Intervention and Markets

A related implication concerns the scope of state intervention in markets. Neoliberal ideology has long insisted that markets are efficient, self‑regulating mechanisms that states can only distort at great cost. Yet the historical record tells a different story. States have always been deeply involved in structuring markets — through property rights, contract law, regulation, monetary policy, and public investment.

The question, therefore, is not whether the state should intervene, but how and in whose interest. Industrial policy, public banking, strategic investment, and price regulation are not radical departures from capitalism’s historical norms but recurrent features of successful development strategies. Their marginalization in recent decades reflects political choices, not functional impossibilities.

If anything, contemporary challenges — climate change, demographic aging, technological transformation — make more extensive state coordination unavoidable. The idea that such coordination must stop short of meaningful redistribution is a political constraint, not an economic one.

Recovering Political Imagination

The belief that social democracy has reached its limits is best understood as a symptom of political defeat rather than an accurate diagnosis of economic reality. The strong structural dependence thesis, which underwrites this belief, lacks empirical support and obscures the historical variability of capitalist income distributions. Capitalism does impose constraints, but those constraints leave ample room for ambitious redistribution and market‑shaping state action.

Recognizing this matters not only for analytical clarity but for political strategy. When the Left treats its own defeats as proof of impossibility, it forecloses the very struggles through which limits are tested and expanded. By contrast, understanding redistribution as a function of power, institutions, and political will reopens the space for collective agency.

There is, therefore, no compelling reason to believe that the social democratic side of the democratic socialist agenda cannot be pushed much further than it has been in recent decades. On the contrary, the evidence suggests that we are likely far from the boundaries of what is economically feasible. The challenge is not discovering new economic laws but rebuilding the political forces capable of acting on this knowledge. Now is a time for socialists to be ambitious.

Brazil’s Left After Lula

2026-03-19T11:57:47Z

As Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva seeks his final term as Brazil’s president, the Left’s electoral strategy — who runs, which factions align, and how the coalition balances pragmatism with principle — is already shaping the post-Lula era of Brazilian politics.

As Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva seeks his final term as Brazil’s president, the Left’s decisions leading up to the elections will shape the next era of Brazilian politics. (Evaristo Sa / AFP via Getty Images)

“Here in South America, we present ourselves as a region of peace,” Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva declared last week as he hosted South African leader Cyril Ramaphosa, adding that “nobody here has an atomic bomb.” Normally the genial Lula might have left it at that, celebrating his country’s peaceful, collaborative foreign policy tradition. This time, however, he ended with a warning: “If we do not prepare ourselves in terms of defense, one day someone will invade us.”

Back in office since 2023 and seeking a fourth (and final) term later this year, the eighty-year-old confronts a world reshaped by Trump-era shocks to the global order. As his foreign policy advisor, Celso Amorim, recently put it, “Whereas two decades ago I would have said that we lived in a world of opportunities, today we live in a world of difficulties.”

The geopolitical uncertainty has upped the ante of what was already set to be a deeply contentious race this October between Lula’s broad coalition of moderates and leftists and the far-right challenger, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, the forty-four-year-old son of the imprisoned former president Jair Bolsonaro. Much will be written about the campaign in the months ahead, but a critical story is already unfolding within the Left itself. Decisions made in 2026 — over who runs, which factions align, and how the progressive coalition balances pragmatism with principle — will shape not just this campaign but likely the early post-Lula era.

Two high-stakes decisions this month in particular are worth examining: whether Finance Minister Fernando Haddad will once again risk a difficult race for governor of São Paulo, and whether the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL) will enter into a formal federation with Lula’s Workers’ Party (PT) or preserve its independence. At first glance, these questions seem merely tactical. In fact, we already know the answers: yes to the former; no to the latter. But these are actually weighty debates marking early skirmishes in the contest to define the Brazilian left after Lula.

Four years ago, Haddad ran for governor of São Paulo, Brazil’s largest and wealthiest state. He lost but did better than any PT candidate ever had and, in the process, helped ensure a robust statewide campaign for Lula’s successful presidential bid. He then took on arguably the most important position in Lula’s cabinet.

It is no secret that Haddad harbors presidential ambitions. In 2018, with Lula behind bars on corruption charges that have since been vacated, he was the PT nominee who took the fight to the elder Bolsonaro. Most observers posit he is the party’s strongest name for a future presidential contest. But first he must make it through 2026.

Party leaders have maintained that Haddad should once again run for São Paulo governor. They have no illusions about his prospects: he would almost certainly lose to the incumbent Tarcísio de Freitas, the former Bolsonaro cabinet minister who bested him in 2022. But polls show he is the only one who could keep the race close, which would help bolster Lula’s candidacy in a contest widely assumed to be decided by slim margins.

Should Haddad subject himself to a grueling campaign only to go down in likely defeat? Would doing so help or hinder his chances of succeeding Lula at the national level? Will he be seen in the future as a team player who took one for the team time and again, or would he be tarred as a perennial loser? After all, Haddad — who served as secretary of education in Lula’s first administration — has not won an election since prevailing in the 2012 mayoral race in the city of São Paulo, falling short in his 2016 reelection, his 2018 presidential run against Bolsonaro, and his 2022 gubernatorial campaign.

Haddad has made his opinion on the matter clear. Over the past year, he has repeatedly insisted he had no intention of running for office in 2026. Instead, he said he preferred to step down from the finance ministry early in the year to help coordinate Lula’s reelection campaign, a task he argued was incompatible with the demands of managing the country’s economic portfolio.

Lula’s insistence — and Flávio’s surprising strength in the polls — has reportedly convinced the reluctant Haddad to accept the task put to him by the president and the PT. Although he has not confirmed his candidacy as of this writing, it is reportedly a done deal. He has a campaign team in waiting and will leave the finance ministry on Thursday to prepare for the election.

The episode illustrates the peculiar position Haddad occupies within Brazilian politics broadly and within the PT specifically. As finance minister, he has spent the past three years playing the role of institutional stabilizer, crafting a fiscal framework aimed at reassuring markets after Bolsonaro’s chaotic final years, while simultaneously defending the government’s social spending priorities.

The balancing act has been largely successful, if not without friction. Haddad’s more orthodox fiscal posture has periodically clashed with influential voices inside the party, including Lula’s powerful Chief of Staff Rui Costa and former PT President Gleisi Hoffmann, both of whom have pushed for a more expansive approach to public spending and economic policy. In that sense, Haddad’s technocratic stewardship of the economy has elevated his national profile while also revealing the ideological and strategic tensions simmering within Lula’s governing coalition.

Haddad’s likely candidacy in São Paulo is thus also an early test of how the PT might manage the transition to a post-Lula era. A strong performance — even in defeat — could consolidate Haddad’s status as the party’s most plausible national standard-bearer. But another decisive loss could embolden alternative figures within the party and encourage a broader debate about the party’s leadership, strategy, and ideological direction. None of this is lost on Haddad himself, who has repeatedly signaled his discomfort with the role of sacrificial candidate.

His reluctance reflects not simply personal caution but an awareness that the political terrain Lula once navigated with ease has grown far more treacherous. Brazil’s electorate is more polarized than at any time since the return to democracy, and the Right’s institutional strength in states like São Paulo remains formidable. Still, loyalty to Lula — and to the party that shaped his career — appears to have carried the day. If Haddad does ultimately enter the race, he will do so knowing that victory is unlikely but that the campaign could prove decisive in helping determine who inherits Lula’s political mantle when the era of the metalworker-turned-president finally comes to an end.

The question of who might eventually succeed Lula is only one dimension of the broader strategic debate unfolding on the Brazilian left. Equally important is how the Left will organize itself politically once the gravitational pull of Lula’s leadership inevitably weakens. Here, a second decision taken this month offers an instructive glimpse of the tensions ahead.

In early March, leaders of PSOL confronted a proposal that would have reshaped the institutional architecture of Brazil’s progressive camp: whether to enter into a formal electoral federation with Lula’s PT. Under Brazil’s electoral rules, federations bind parties together nationally for at least four years, effectively requiring them to operate as a single bloc in congressional contests while sharing television time, campaign resources, and electoral calculations. In practical terms, a federation between the PT and PSOL would have consolidated much of the Brazilian left into a single parliamentary vehicle.

This proposal had influential supporters within the party. Allies of Brazilian Secretary-General Guilherme Boulos — including figures such as Erika Hilton and the current minister of indigenous peoples, Sonia Guajajara — argued that the growing strength of the far right demanded a more unified response. In a fragmented party system shaped by increasing pressure for small parties like PSOL to surpass minimum vote thresholds in order to retain access to public funding and television time, a federation with the PT promised to protect PSOL’s parliamentary presence while expanding the overall left’s representation in Congress.

Boulos himself is also often discussed as a potential future presidential contender, presenting a different profile from Haddad; younger, from an upstart, nominally more left-wing party, and associated with a more combative, activist-oriented wing of the Left, his rise would signal both generational and strategic diversification in the post-Lula era.

But the federation proposal triggered a backlash within PSOL. Many of the party’s leaders warned that federation risked dissolving the political independence that had defined the party since its founding in 2004 by dissidents who broke with the PT over what they saw as excessive concessions to neoliberal orthodoxy. For these critics, PSOL’s role has always been distinct — less a governing party than a vehicle for programmatic clarity and social mobilization, capable of pressing the broader left on issues such as racial justice, environmental protection, and labor rights.

Strategic considerations reinforced these ideological concerns. A federation would require PSOL to coordinate candidacies with the PT and its existing partners, potentially limiting the number of PSOL candidates for Congress and obliging the party to support state-level alliances with centrist figures the party has long opposed. For many activists, the risk was that PSOL would become little more than a junior partner to the much larger — and establishment-oriented — PT.

In the end, the party rejected the proposal decisively, with its national leadership voting overwhelmingly against federation while simultaneously reaffirming its strong support for Lula’s reelection bid. The outcome preserved PSOL’s autonomy but also underscored the delicate balancing act facing Brazil’s progressive camp: how to combine unity against the far right with the pluralism that has allowed different strands of the Left to flourish.

Taken together, the uncertainty over Haddad’s candidacy this year and the PSOL federation debate reveal the contours of a political moment that extends beyond the immediate electoral cycle. One touches on the question of leadership (who will inherit Lula’s mantle?), while the other concerns the structure of the Left itself: whether its future lies in consolidation under the PT’s umbrella or in a more plural configuration of allied but independent parties.

These internal debates matter not only for Brazil but for the region and the world. Indeed, as the far right advances across Latin America and beyond, decisions over coalition-building, party autonomy, and generational leadership will shape whether progressive forces can present a credible counterweight to authoritarian currents in this hemisphere and beyond.

This year’s election, then, is partly about the time horizon for those decisions. A Lula victory would push back the reactionary tide and buy space for strategic planning. Defeat would likely intensify pressure and accelerate the timelines for difficult choices about the Left’s future in Latin America’s largest nation.

In either case, the stakes extend beyond electoral arithmetic. They speak to a broader uncertainty about Brazil’s place in an increasingly unstable world — one in which old assumptions of regional security no longer hold. In that sense, Lula’s warning that an unprepared region risks “invasion” resonates as a literal prediction but perhaps even more so as a reflection of a shifting geopolitical reality in which external pressures and internal divisions are increasingly intertwined.

Politics After Literacy

2026-03-19T11:56:15Z

Postliteracy won’t replace reason with madness, but it might give us madness of a new and different type.

Illustration by Benny Douet.

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Julie Menin Is Protecting New York’s Ultrawealthy

2026-03-19T10:57:25Z

Socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani wants to tax the superrich to fund universal childcare and other urgent working-class needs. The oligarchic city council Speaker Julie Menin is trying to block his agenda.

Zohran Mamdani needs to raise taxes on New York’s wealthiest to fund his affordability agenda. City council Speaker Julie Menin does not want to see that happen. (Gardiner Anderson/New York Daily News/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)

In the battle between democratic socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and centrist New York Governor Kathy Hochul over whether to increase taxes on the state’s superrich, New Yorkers are firmly on the mayor’s side, with 62 percent approving of his plan. So are both houses of the state legislature. Much of the city council approves too, with twenty-two members calling on the governor to give the city the power to increase taxes on millionaires by 2 percent.

One important New York City political power player opposes taxing the rich though: Julie Menin, the oligarchic Speaker of the New York City Council. The Speaker doesn’t have as much power as the mayor or the governor, but Menin is playing an important and insidious role in setting the terms of debate on this issue.

The city’s ruling class breathed a sigh of relief when Menin gathered the support to become city council Speaker in November, just after Mamdani’s election as mayor. That’s in part because she’s part of the superrich class herself. Menin’s husband, Bruce Menin, is a partner and cofounder of Crescent Heights, a privately held real estate development company with a nationwide portfolio, and the couple lives in an Upper East Side apartment valued somewhere around $5–9.5 million. She’s not just another politician with an opinion — she’s a class warrior for her fellow plutocrats, publicly leading the resistance against the mildest sign of redistribution from inside city government and, unfortunately, informing the governor’s thinking.

At stake in New York City’s budget negotiations is the survival of Mamdani’s wildly popular agenda as well as the ability of millions of New Yorkers to thrive. These negotiations are currently underway at two different levels of government: the city and the state.

At the state level, both houses of the legislature agree that with a $5.4 billion budget gap in the city, horrific cuts from the federal government to food stamps and health care, and the overwhelming public approval of Mamdani’s affordability agenda, it’s time to increase taxes on the superrich — who, after all, just got a massive tax cut at the federal level from Donald Trump. The governor has been an enthusiastic partner to the mayor on universal childcare. But Hochul — whose campaign donors include more than a few members of the Epstein class — has repeatedly rejected the idea of taxing the superrich to pay for it.

At the city level, hearings and negotiations over the existing budget are currently underway, and Speaker Menin’s comments have not been good. She has repeatedly made the case that there is so much waste to cut in the city’s spending that there should be no need to tax the rich or even dip into the city’s rainy day fund. Menin repeatedly says in interviews that there are “savings” to be found in the budget. Another euphemism Menin and her team use is “right-sizing the budget” (by which they obviously mean make it smaller).

Her estimates of how much “savings” can be found are wildly exaggerated by counting some items twice, Politico reported. And Menin takes the governor’s refusal to tax the rich at face value — “Look, the governor has said she’s not raising taxes,” she recently stated — as a natural phenomenon rather than a malleable political condition.

There are resolutions from the progressive councilmembers calling upon the state to tax the rich, but Menin has not supported them. Although Menin has said there will be no cuts to services — probably a sign of how successfully the popular mayor has shifted the common sense of this debate — she is firmly siding with the governor by continually insisting that taxing the rich is off the table.

While Menin says there should be no cuts to services, her insistence on funding those services solely through savings is either unrealistic or a route to a particularly insidious and brutal form of cost-cutting. Eric Adams’s previous administration “saved” money by simply leaving vacancies in the city workforce unfilled. That approach leaves city agencies understaffed and means that nothing works well and services aren’t provided.

This may be what Menin intends. She doesn’t want to tax rich households like her own but also doesn’t want to be held responsible for an unpopular regime of austerity; hence her dishonest rhetoric about “savings.” Mamdani has warned that this approach of leaving vacancies unfilled could lead to fewer teachers and nurses, delayed housing inspections, and overburdened, underfunded city offices failing to serve New Yorkers.

The ruling class of the city understands that Menin is on its side and has been praising her. Steve Fulop, the head of the New York City Partnership, the leading voice of the city’s business interests, said recently on Republican grocery magnate John Catsimatidis’s radio show, referring to Menin’s refusal to embrace the politics of taxing the rich, “The Speaker has been great.”

Although the city council has no power to raise taxes, the Speaker’s position matters because the governor is clearly watching how city politics play out. In fact, Hochul has even said that she is not making any decisions until she sees what city council is going to do. As Hochul continues to field pressure from voters and colleagues on this issue, Menin’s insistence that taxing the rich isn’t necessary gives cover to the governor to continue refusing to do so.

Mamdani’s affordability agenda is popular; taxing the superrich is by far the most popular way to fund it. While other revenue options the administration has floated, like raising property taxes and expanding paid parking in the city, are worth debating, they skirt the necessary head-on fight against the class that can afford it most: the ultrarich.

This is especially true now, with the emergence of a truly parasitical billionaire class. According to Oxfam, just twelve men owned half of humanity’s wealth in 2025. More billionaires live in New York City than anywhere else on Earth, and they’re doing better than ever. And in case you haven’t noticed, the ruling class has grown increasingly disgusting, decadent, utterly unconcerned about the common good, and scornful of democracy.

Americans in general and New Yorkers in particular want to express their disgust with the oligarchs. Governor Hochul should get on board with taxing them, and Speaker Menin should get out of the way.

The Many Invasions Survived by Lebanon

2026-03-19T10:28:42Z

Israel is again invading Lebanon and displacing hundreds of thousands of people. With Israel determined to crush all forms of resistance, Lebanon has been dragged into a war it did nothing to start.

The return of the Israeli army to Lebanese territory is no longer only about occupying but also about emptying the south of its population. (Adri Salido / Getty Images)

Although long used to all manner of wars, Lebanon is watching in stunned disbelief as catastrophe strikes with an unprecedented violence. Everyone here remembers that in 2000, under pressure from Hezbollah, Israel withdrew from the south of the country, which it had occupied for eighteen years. The Shiite organization earned its nickname “Resistance” there, becoming the only Lebanese militia to keep its weapons — allowing it to become the Iran-backed “state within a state” that we know today.

The terrifying return of the Israeli army to Lebanese territory thus takes on the air of revenge, but with a key difference: it’s no longer only about occupying but also about emptying the south of its population (8 percent of the country’s land area) and ordering residents in the southern suburbs (some 800,000 in a country of five million) to evacuate as well — before the bombings.

In both regions, the panicked populations immediately fled their houses without looking back. Pursued by Israel’s watchful eye (and bombs), which nothing escapes, men, women, and children took refuge further north in schools emptied of their pupils, in rentals whose prices suddenly became prohibitive, or else outside, during this winter month, on the pavements of Beirut and elsewhere.

The truth is, the war in Gaza has taught Israel one simple thing: there’s no longer any need to conquer a territory by force; all it takes is WhatsApp or an X account to sow terror by ordering evacuations, on pain of suffering — in the words of Israeli minister Bezalel Smotrich — the fate of the Gazan city of Khan Younis (400,000 inhabitants), almost entirely razed to the ground in 2024.

One man whispers in another’s ear, and his flattering murmur precipitates a cataclysm of global proportions. It’s like this that the diabolical Benjamin Netanyahu managed to drag the president of the world’s greatest power into a devasting war without cause or defined objectives.

The chain reaction was immediately set in motion: decapitated in the first hours of conflict, the Iranian regime lashed out far and wide, particularly against Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, all of which are close allies of the United States and hosts of its military bases. One can imagine the Israeli prime minister gloating: Iran’s retaliation has established his country as an objective ally of the oil monarchies.

In Lebanon, under the pretext of avenging Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s death, Hezbollah made the improbable decision to fire several rockets at northern Israel, offering Netanyahu the ideal pretext to massacre it — and massacre the unhappy Lebanon along with it. And so finished the race that had been underway for a year between Israel and the new Lebanese government over the question: Who will disarm Hezbollah?

President Joseph Aoun and his prime minister, Nawaf Salam, had committed to doing so and more or less managed to in the south. But they were moving slowly — too slowly? — in the rest of the country in order to avoid a direct confrontation between a still-fragile national army and a still-formidable Shiite militia. For although weakened by the war waged against it by Israel and the fall of its Syrian ally, the regime of Bashar al-Assad, Hezbollah remained capable of resisting the Lebanese government and even of carrying out its threat to spark a civil war.

The aim appears to be the same. But if it’s Israel rather than the government of Beirut that incapacitates Hezbollah, the situation changes completely. Conscious of the danger, the Council of Lebanese Ministers decided — a little late — to formally ban all of Hezbollah’s military activities and arrest members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards present in Lebanon with a view to extraditing them. The latter, who likely fired the rockets that set the powder keg ablaze — since Hezbollah’s Lebanese leaders were not really in control — had, for the most part, left the country once their crime was committed.

Lebanon on Its Knees

Everything has started to work in Netanyahu’s favor. Under the pretext of protecting his northern border from the “existential” threat that the Shiite militia poses to his country, he is seeking to create an uninhabitable buffer zone as wide as possible in southern Lebanon. For now, he is bombarding the country with the aim of bringing it to its knees, forcing it to surrender and sign an uneven peace treaty.

Hezbollah’s rockets will ultimately have served the same purpose as the massacre carried out by Hamas on October 7, 2023: to give Israel the opportunity to destroy Gaza on the one hand and fracture Lebanon on the other.

The aim of the war that Donald Trump let himself be dragged into appears just as nebulous, and even his MAGA base is beginning to realize it. Contrary to what he believes, the destruction of all of Iran’s military capacities will drive it far more likely into civil war and generalized chaos than to lead to regime change.

The objectives pursued by Israel are much more tangible. Its goal is to be the only armed country in the region where all of its enemies will be disarmed so that it may quietly pursue its grand historical ambition: to annex occupied territories and thus devour the whole of historic Palestine, “from the river to the sea.” But it has to act quickly — its “gains” only being possible thanks to the presence of Trump in the White House, which won’t last forever.

That leaves one question: What can Israel do with its uncontested military supremacy? In other words: What is its plan for the day after? The answer is that there isn’t one. Yet it is difficult to imagine a peaceful future based entirely on subjugating the Middle East through brute force. Without a positive vision, it will never work — but Israel may not be capable of understanding this, as it thinks only of itself.

Between a US-Israeli coalition that is setting the region on fire in defiance of international law and an Iranian regime that shamelessly massacres its own people and bombards its neighbors indiscriminately, it is impossible to choose. The only hero in this story is the long-suffering Iranian people, whose courage and resilience are overwhelming.

As for Lebanon, the victim of a predatory neighbor and a militia obeying the orders of a foreign country, it is being dragged against its will into a war in which it is truly not to blame.

It must remember that, as small and fragile as it is, the country has survived all its invaders since the dawn of time. A series of stelae (commemorative stones) a few kilometers north of Beirut, at Nahr el kalb (“Dog River”), bear witness to this.

This article was originally published by Libération.

Jürgen Habermas’s European Illusion

2026-03-19T18:46:13Z

The late Jürgen Habermas saw Europe as a vehicle for a social democratic, postnational politics. But as the real European Union increasingly diverged from this ideal, Habermas’s thinking failed to reckon with the project’s fundamental limits.

Jürgen Habermas was among the leading thinkers of the German center left and its cosmopolitan Europeanism. But his thought also reflected the contradictions of this postnational outlook, including its severe blind spots regarding Israel. (Arne Dedert / picture alliance via Getty Images)

By the time he died this past Saturday at age ninety-six, Jürgen Habermas had become something of a reviled figure for much of the Left. His liberalism, centered on a belief in communicative rationality, was perceived as an abandonment of the more radical impulses of the Frankfurt School — Sam Moyn, for example, wrote that Habermas’s “global philosophical legacy was to accede to the end of history, in various ways, with consequences that critical theory hasn’t recovered from.” But the animosity toward him was sharpened by the statement that he and several of his colleagues at Frankfurt University produced in November 2023, which criticized the attribution of “genocidal intentions” to Israel.

Centrists have generally been more positive about Habermas’s legacy, though in the last few years some of them have also been willing to trash him — not so much for his position on the genocide in Gaza as for his position on the war in Ukraine. For those who insisted that the war could only end with Russia’s defeat and who wanted Germany to provide Ukraine with more weapons, Habermas’s two interventions in the Süddeutsche Zeitung — one in 2022 in which he criticized the new hawkishness of German elites and another in 2023 in which he called for negotiations to end the war — were enough to completely discredit the nonagenarian philosopher.

However, for many centrists and even some on the Left, especially perhaps in the United States, one aspect of Habermas’s thought that redeems him at least somewhat is his “pro-Europeanism.” More than perhaps anyone, Habermas gave an intellectual basis to the idea of the European Union as a progressive project, though “pro-Europeans” tend to overlook how critical he was of the really existing EU even as he continued to believe it was necessary and possible to transform it. Yet Habermas’s commitment to the EU, even as it diverged further and further from the cosmopolitan project of his imagination, illustrates the deeper parochialism of his thinking.

Postnational?

Habermas’s starting point for thinking about Europe was that globalization had led to a “de-bordering” and ended a historical constellation based on the “territorial principle” and centered on the nation-state — and, in doing so, hollowed out democracy. In a series of essays written in the 1990s and 2000s, he argued that the EU was, or at least ought to be, a way to regain the ability to regulate markets and pursue redistributive policies now that, in the context of what he called the “post-national constellation,” the nation-state was no longer able to do so. But, crucially, he thought that, rather than simply “re-bordering” and reestablishing the “territorial principle” at a regional level, the EU would actually transcend it altogether.

Influenced by Immanuel Kant’s writings on cosmopolitanism, Habermas argued that the EU could function as a kind of basis for, or step toward, the transformation of international politics into domestic politics. In other words, uniting Europe was a precursor to a form of world society. A European federal republic would be the “starting point for the creation of a regime of a future Weltinnenpolitik [“world domestic politics”] based on international treaties.” It would be an “an important stage along the route toward a “politically constituted world society” and could “re-embed” liberalism not just on behalf of Europeans but for the whole of humanity with the “cosmopolitan goal of creating the conditions necessary for a global domestic policy.”

Habermas’s faith in the idea of postwar Europe as a progressive project was part of his wider belief in history — and especially German history, as a paradigmatic case — as a learning process. He pointed to the way that, in the nineteenth century, European states “gradually created national consciousness and civic solidarity” and suggested that doing so again on a European level would be not just possible but a natural evolution. “Why should this learning process not continue on, beyond national borders?” he asked. Yet while seeing the construction of “Europe” as analogous to that of the nation-state, the idea of a learning process also implied that it was qualitatively different and normatively superior.

Rebordered Europe

Habermas was making these arguments at the turn of the millennium in a moment of idealism and optimism — but also hubris — among “pro-Europeans.” In the context of the transformation of Europe after the end of the Cold War and the enlargement of the EU to include Central and Eastern European countries, some of them began to imagine that the whole world could be remade in the image of the EU. It is not just that such optimism about the EU has been shattered since then, but also that the whole nature of the project and its relationship with the rest of the world now looks quite different. Today the EU resembles a Fortress Europe, more than the cosmopolitan Europe that Habermas imagined it was or might become.

In those first two decades after the end of the Cold War, it was still just about possible to believe that the removal of borders within Europe was a precursor to a borderless world. But during the last decade, and especially since the refugee crisis in 2015, the EU has come to see a hard external border as the necessary corollary of the removal of internal border checks. Tellingly, the budget of Frontex, the EU’s border agency, went from €142 million in 2015 to €1.1 billion in 2025. Thus the illusion that the EU was an attempt to go beyond the “territorial principle” has been shattered, and it is now clear that it does not so much “deborder” as “reborder.” In fact, what it seems to have done is to have redrawn borders along civilizational lines.

After the euro crisis brought to a rather abrupt end the “pro-European” optimism of the two decades after the end of the Cold War and the EU appeared to become what the Italian economist Luigi Zingales called “a bad version of the IMF,” Habermas engaged in an ongoing debate about it with Wolfgang Streeck. With the publication of his book Buying Time, published in German in 2013, Streeck had become Germany’s leading left-wing Euroskeptic. Habermas, like much of the European center left, had long believed that Keynesianism was no longer possible at the national level but was possible at the European level. Streeck thought that the way that the EU had constitutionalized neoliberal economic preferences in the form of the eurozone’s fiscal rules meant that it was now only possible at the national level. Habermas accused him of nostalgia.

Yet centrists who now claim Habermas as a “pro-European” tend to overlook how critical he was of the really existing EU. In fact, Habermas agreed at least to some extent with Streeck’s analysis of the EU as both neoliberal and undemocratic. Further integration along existing lines, which many centrist “pro-Europeans” were arguing for at the time, would produce what Habermas called “market conforming executive federalism.” What he wanted instead was a truly democratic political union that would have the power to redistribute at the regional level. The problem was always how to get there. Already in 2005, voters in France and Netherlands had rejected the European constitution that Habermas said the EU needed.

Germanocentric

Nevertheless, Habermas’s continued faith in the EU, even as it diverged further and further from the cosmopolitan Europe he wanted, was indicative of how Eurocentric — and ultimately Germanocentric — a thinker he was. He seemed to see the world through the prism of European history and Europe through the prism of German history. It is perhaps understandable that someone who was born in 1929 and had grown up during the Third Reich and its aftermath could never quite escape the aspiration for the whole world to learn the lessons of German history, centered on the Nazi past, that he and his generation had.

Like many others in Germany, he had an idealized image of a liberal West pivoting on France, the United Kingdom, and the United States — a West whose political culture, he wrote, Germany had only embraced after its defeat in 1945 (the eastern half of Germany had only been included in it after the collapse of communism; hence his description of 1989 as a nachholende Revolution, or “catching up revolution”). A significant part of his philosophical project was to integrate Anglo-American liberal philosophers like John Rawls into German philosophy as a counterweight to what he saw as an anti-liberal, anti-modern tradition that ran from Friedrich Nietzsche through to Martin Heidegger and influenced French poststructuralism — a tradition that he criticized in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity.

Habermas became more optimistic than his mentors Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. But for him, like them, the dialectic of Enlightenment was one in which the world beyond the West, and, moreover, the West’s entanglements with the world beyond the West, played little part. In particular, unlike French poststructuralism (which Robert Young suggested we call “Franco-Maghrebian theory”), the Frankfurt School was never really interested in, or influenced by, the history of colonialism. (Postcolonial scholars like to point out that, in Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas said nothing about where the coffee in eighteenth-century London coffeehouses came from.)

Similarly, while understanding antisemitism was always central to the Frankfurt School’s work, it had little to say about wider questions of race and racism, even though, as Robin Celikates has argued, it would have been quite well-positioned to make a constructive contribution to them. In the last few decades, for example, there has been an extensive debate among scholars about how to understand the relationship of Kant’s racial theories — often seen as a key influence on, or even the beginning of, what became scientific or biological racism — with his wider thought. Yet while Kant’s writings on cosmopolitanism were so central to Habermas’s own thinking, not least on the EU, this was not a debate in which he participated.

Habermas was skeptical of nationalism because he viewed the nation through the prism of Europe’s experience with it, culminating in World War II. But even as he imagined that a European identity could be constructed in much the same way as national identities had once been, he overlooked the possibility that European regionalism might replicate some of nationalism’s pathologies. He seemed to imagine, as many “pro-Europeans” do, that, unlike national identities, the European identity centered on the EU was a purely civic identity — a continent-wide version of the idea of “constitutional patriotism” that he popularized. He ignored the ethnic/cultural elements of European identity that did not simply disappear after 1945 and influenced what became the EU.

This deep structure of Habermas’s thinking — a kind of universalism but from a Western perspective — may also help to explain his response to the last two controversies in which he intervened before his death. In the case of Ukraine, it made him sensitive to the dangers of escalation of the war and the remilitarization of German society to which it might lead. (Perhaps Habermas also sensed that, against the background of the war, the self-exonerating attempt to equate Russia with Nazism — an approach that had already prompted the Historikerstreit in the 1980s — was being normalized again.) But in the case of Gaza, it made him more focused on the dangers of a renewed antisemitism than on the genocide of a people for whom, it seems, there was simply no place in his thought.

The Afghan-Pakistan War Is Spiraling Out of Control

2026-03-18T14:49:04Z

Clashes between Pakistan’s military and Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers took a bloody turn this week as an air strike in Kabul killed at least 100 people. With world attention focused on the Middle East, there’s little sign of either side backing down.

The hostilities between Pakistan and Afghanistan’s Taliban government escalated dramatically this week after an air strike in Kabul killed at least 100 people. Neither of these former allies appears willing to back down from military confrontation. (Aimal Zahir / AFP via Getty Images)

Pakistan’s defense minister, Khawaja Asif, recently said that the country is in a state of “open war” with Afghanistan. Asif issued this statement after Islamabad launched air strikes deep inside its neighbor’s territory. Both countries have engaged in hostile acts against one another.

The confrontation between these former allies has now escalated dramatically after Pakistani forces carried out strikes in Nangarhar province and Kabul on the night of March 16. A drug rehabilitation center was hit in the Afghan capital, reportedly killing at least one hundred people and attracting widespread condemnation.

In the aftermath, Taliban spokesmen stated that the time for diplomacy was over and promised revenge for the loss of civilian life. Pakistani government ministers retorted by insisting that no hospital was targeted and vowing to carry on with their military campaign. Neither side appears willing to back down.

The current escalation began when the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) conducted raids that supposedly targeted hideouts of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), a group that opposes the Pakistani state, on February 23. According to the Afghan Red Crescent Society, at least eighteen civilians were killed in these attacks. The Afghan Taliban then announced that it would respond.

Pakistan has been carrying out air and cross-border strikes inside Afghanistan for the last few years against the background of a rise in terrorist attacks on Pakistani soil. Islamabad has alleged that the perpetrators of these attacks, mainly the TTP, have been operating from Afghan bases with the support of the Afghan Taliban.

That is not what Islamabad had expected from the Taliban when they retook Kabul in 2021, having assisted them in their fight against the US-led forces in Afghanistan. Many Pakistani figures, including former prime minister Imran Khan, believed that with the Taliban back in power, Islamabad would have a friendly regime in Kabul. The growing hostilities between the two states proved them wrong.

A Changed Taliban

Pakistan had clear reasons for its pro-Taliban policy before 2021. One was to stop the Northern Alliance, seen as a pro-India force, from gaining power after the United States and its allies ousted the Taliban in 2001. Pakistan also thought that a Taliban government would be more flexible about the Durand Line between the two states and might even accept it as the official border. The Durand Line was devised by a British diplomat at the end of the nineteenth century, and Afghan leaders have long disputed its legitimacy.

However, within a few months of the Taliban takeover in 2021, the first clash had taken place over the issue of the border. More important, terrorist activities inside Pakistan increased significantly. Pakistan has accused the Afghan government of failing to act against those carrying out such attacks.

Although the Taliban have maintained control and a semblance of order in the country since regaining power, it may be reluctant to take action against groups like the TTP for several reasons. One is its hesitation to go against a former ally, since the TTP supported it in its war against foreign forces in Afghanistan. The Taliban also fears that if it goes after the TTP, the latter may turn against it and even join up with organizations like the Islamic State–Khorasan Province (ISKP), which has carried out attacks in both Pakistan and Afghanistan as well as neighboring states such as Iran.

The third and most important factor is its seeming desire to use the TTP as a source of leverage against Pakistan. Severing ties with the TTP, the Taliban believes, will make the Pakistan government more assertive toward Afghanistan, especially on issues related to the border and trade. That is why it has arranged talks between the Pakistani government and TTP leaders and still suggests that Islamabad talk to the group.

This complicated situation is likely to continue and remain a source of tension between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Such tensions could worsen if the nexus among various militant groups expands, involving some Baloch rebel groups or even anti-Shi’ite groups in Pakistan, which could lead to attacks like the one on the Shi’ite Imambargah in Islamabad in February of this year.

Pakistan’s Challenges

Pakistan’s president, Asif Zardari, has admonished the ruling group in Kabul, claiming that over the last few years, the “ungrateful Taliban regime” has been involved in facilitating TTP terrorist activities across Pakistan. As well as increasing the number of attacks, the TTP has changed its tactics, inflicting heavy losses on the Pakistani security forces while also striking civilian targets.

Pakistan’s former prime minister Imran Khan had started negotiations with the TTP in the hope of persuading them to lay down their arms. In an interview from October 2021, Khan said that his government was offering amnesty and the release of prisoners. In the same period, Khan celebrated the Taliban’s return to power in Kabul, remarking that Afghanistan had broken the “shackles of slavery.”

In April 2022, the PAF targeted TTP camps inside the Khost and Kunar provinces of Afghanistan. Zabihullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesperson, condemned the attack as an act of “cruelty” that was “paving the way for enmity between Afghanistan and Pakistan.” The attack was carried out a few days after the ouster of Khan as Pakistan’s prime minister, indicating a shift in Islamabad’s policy toward the Taliban.

In October 2023, the Pakistani government decided to expel unauthorized Afghan immigrants, claiming that some of them were involved in carrying out or facilitating acts of terrorism. However, this decision turned out to be a counterproductive one. The government faced criticism for expelling Afghans who had been living in Pakistan for decades, and it cost Pakistan goodwill among Afghans. Even after expelling thousands of Afghans, the number of terror attacks did not decline.

Delegations, such as one led by the pro-Taliban Pakistani politician Maulana Fazlur Rehman, visited Afghanistan hoping to convince the Taliban to take action against the TTP, but they did not yield much by way of positive results. Nor did efforts at persuasion from influential religious scholars like Mufti Taqi Usmani. TTP attacks continued, and Pakistan kept blaming the ruling group in Kabul.

Pakistan’s leaders decided to launch military action in December 2024 inside Afghanistan’s eastern Paktika province against alleged TTP hideouts. Afghan officials reported that forty-six innocent civilians were killed by the attacks. The Taliban responded with strikes of its own inside Pakistan at the end of December, beyond what it called the “hypothetical” (Durand) line.

The situation deteriorated further in October 2025 when the PAF carried out strikes in Afghanistan, including Kabul, where the TTP chief, Noor Wali Mehsud, was the target, although he survived the attack. The strikes took place against the background of the Afghan foreign minister’s visit to New Delhi between October 9 and 16.

This visit was crucial in the context of deteriorating relations between Islamabad and Kabul, not merely over the issue of terrorism but also over the former’s claim that the Taliban was now aligning with India against Pakistan. The Taliban’s goal in engaging with New Delhi appears to be attracting investment for development projects, although it may also be cultivating another source of leverage against Pakistan. India strongly condemned this week’s air strike in Kabul, calling it a “barbaric act.”

What Lies Ahead?

The recent escalation in hostilities has involved direct attacks by the two sides against each other’s security forces and installations. Given the decentered nature of the various factions that comprise the TTP, not to mention the Taliban’s own limitations and calculations, we have to assume that terrorist attacks will keep happening on Pakistani soil and that Pakistan will keep on carrying out strikes inside Afghanistan.

At the moment, Islamabad has taken an offensive position to force the Taliban to abide by the dictates coming from the rulers in Pakistan. That seems partly driven by the failure to contain the rising terrorist attacks.

There is also the question of internal political instability with the government of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who is supported by the military establishment but in constant conflict with Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI). This turbulence is diverting the focus of Pakistan’s ruling elite from the challenging issue of security. Although Khan is in jail, he remains the most popular leader in the country.

Additionally, the PTI holds power in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the province most affected by terrorism. Citing the human and material losses caused by past military operations, the provincial government opposes yet another counterterrorist military operation in the tribal areas. Unable to deal with the problem of terrorism internally and facing growing popular anger, the army establishment and the government appear to have resorted to an offensive across the border instead.

The Taliban’s growing relations with India also seem to figure in the strategic calculations of Islamabad’s policy makers. The Pakistani government has linked the surge in terrorist attacks with this alleged nexus between the Taliban and India. All of these factors combined seem to be driving Pakistan’s military actions inside Afghanistan.

None of the policies that Pakistan has followed so far have addressed the core issues. In fact, they have led to a loss of goodwill toward Pakistan among ordinary Afghans. It would be more effective (and more costly) to pursue alternative strategies, such as improved security at the border, improved intelligence-gathering within Pakistan itself, and the use of local platforms, like jirgas (assemblies of Pashtun leaders) and religious scholars, to woo potential recruits away from the TTP in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa region.

Match Week Is a Scam That Exploits Medical Residents

2026-03-18T13:03:02Z

Every year, an algorithm assigns thousands of medical students to residencies they can’t leave, can’t negotiate with, and can’t refuse. The Match system creates a captive workforce that stiffs residents and generates billions for the health care industry.

Medical residents make about one-sixth of what they would make for doing the same work as regular practitioners. The industry portrays residency as an apprenticeship, but it’s really a windfall for health care corporations at the expense of workers. (Alexandra Garcia / Washington Post via Getty Images)

Every third Friday in March, the American medical establishment celebrates Match Day. There are media walls emblazoned with school logos, clusters of balloons, and an unseen algorithm that calculates the perfect distribution of thousands of medical students among hospital programs that will, for the next three to seven years, hold immense power over their lives. Unlike a conventional job application process, a law clerkship, or a PhD program, the pairings announced on Match Day are, essentially, binding precontracts that strip workers of their negotiating power. Quitting later or even attempting to negotiate terms is treated as a professional breach of contract, punishable by a systemic, industry-wide freeze-out.

Medical students who aspire to practice have little choice but to enroll in a medical school that registers with the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP), a nonprofit organization that has overseen nearly every accredited residency placement since 1952. Over the summer and fall before Match Week, medical students apply and interview for programs where they wish to train; afterward students and programs submit a ranked list of their preferred partners to the NRMP and its algorithm, which purportedly exists “to make the best possible match for all participants.”

Once matched, residents enter a liminal period of their lives, during which they might work eighty-hour workweeks but are still considered trainees rather than full-time workers. Because of that assigned status, programs often feel justified in offering poor compensation without overtime pay, while residents burn themselves out in the hope of being rewarded with a stable, well-paying, and respected job in the future.

However, as medical school debt and the cost of living climb far beyond what their stipends can cover, residents are perceiving the limits of the arrangement. They’re growing emboldened to unionize and fight their employers. And they’re starting to see the Match system not as an acceptable requirement that culminates in balloons and a wave of relief but as a highly exploitative structure that extracts maximum work from residents for minimum pay and abysmal working conditions.

“The Match is an incredible gatekeeping mechanism, because it boxes residents into a position where the program they’re matched with holds much more power,” Lydia Mazze, a second-year resident and bargaining team member at Temple University’s Committee of Interns and Residents unit, told Jacobin. “There are more medical students than residency positions, and so you’re fighting with thousands of people, interviewing with twenty-plus places, and the fear of not being matched drives you into making decisions without full knowledge or any real comfort.”

The NRMP would have aspiring doctors believe they are actually spoiled for choice, claiming to “empower” the physician workforce using terms like “applicant proposing” to frame the process as balanced. But this institutional rhetoric belies a highly stilted dynamic. In reality, larger hospitals and the private companies that run smaller community hospitals are often flush with cash, while would-be residents saddled with student loans cannot enter the medical practice and effectively pay off their loans without first graduating from a residency program. Because failing to match results in financial and professional ruin for medical students, the process of submitting a rank list is fundamentally coercive. The real choice for most residents is between risking their entire potential career by applying only to a few programs where they genuinely want to work, or risking egregious exploitation by padding their lists with safety programs to, hopefully, guarantee a match.

No genuinely free exchange of labor exists when the alternative to working is destitution, as it is throughout our economy. But the match system takes it to an extreme. Workers in most other industries can, in theory, pit competing offers against one another, negotiate a starting wage, or quit a toxic workplace without facing long-term or permanent exile from their profession. Beyond the illusion of choice presented at the beginning of the match process, the resident only receives one offer and cannot negotiate a higher stipend or transfer to a different residency program without their current program director’s approval or an NRMP waiver that only makes exceptions for “unanticipated serious and extreme hardship” like terminal illness. If a resident quits without either of those documents, the NRMP slaps them with a “match violation,” a shameful label that blacklists them from the system — and any chance of finding another residency — for one to three years.

Greg Care, a lawyer who has represented resident physicians, told Jacobin that while contracts vary across programs, the match system itself and various rules imposed by the Accreditation Council of Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) naturally skew contracts in favor of the employer. “When the contract recites what the institution or program is obligated to do, you see all kinds of squishy language, like ‘we will use our best efforts’ as opposed to concrete or unqualified promises to provide something. It’s meant to give themselves an out for one reason or another,” he said. “When it comes to what a resident is required to do, it is worded in mandatory terms. There is no wiggle room. It is definite.”

A Captive Workforce Worth Billions

Residents’ captivity is good fortune for the entities that manage US health care systems. First-year residents working in the United States earn a stipend worth only $68,166 on average, with medical institutions framing the wage as an act of charity for mere apprentices “receiving very valuable training that is expensive for institutions to provide.”

If hospitals actually had to compete with one another for medical graduates to staff their floors, the “apprentice” justification for suppressed wages would collapse. Thankfully for them, the match algorithm locks in a safe pipeline of highly skilled but undervalued labor; while hospitals present themselves as gamely accepting the cost of eager trainees at their own expense, the data reveals a different story. In 2020, the Journal of Neurosurgery calculated a single junior neurosurgery resident’s billable value at $344,757 annually – roughly six times the amount of the average resident’s stipend. In 2018, the Journal of Surgical Education found that replacing a standard thirty-person residency program with other providers would cost the hospital anywhere between $3.1 million and $9 million. Meanwhile, the federal government pours billions of dollars into teaching hospitals every year. In 2019, that money accounted for a total of about $150,000 per resident.

When a hospital’s labor costs are suppressed, the surplus generated by residents does not translate to lower patient bills or higher wages for mid-level practitioners. Instead, they pay for multimillion-dollar compensation packages for the executives of for-profit and nonprofit hospitals alike, as well as private equity firms that have been turning smaller community hospitals into moneymaking machines. More than two-thirds of the federal money for teaching hospitals is designated as indirect medical education (IME) payments for the express purpose of covering the perceived inefficiencies of hiring residents; much of it ends up paying for opaque administrative overhead, aided by the fact that such funding comes with almost zero transparency requirements.

Meanwhile, the NRMP and the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), which runs the application part of the match process, levy a no-match anxiety tax by supplementing their baseline fees with penalties on each additional program a student might apply for or rank. According to the NRMP website, students must pay a $70 registration fee to enter the Match and rank twenty programs. Each additional program costs an additional $30. Students driven to desperation by the NRMP’s own all-or-nothing system might rank more than one hundred programs, which in addition to costing them $2,400 in extra-rank costs, will run them another length-of-list surcharge that ranges from $50 to $200. If two medical students are married or in a relationship and want to stay in the same geographic area, they have to enter the Couples Match, which costs another $45 per partner. The AAMC also charges an $80 fee to unlock the student’s medical school transcript. Collectively, the charges account for a large portion of the NRMP’s $12.5 million and the AAMC’s over $300 million in revenue per year.

Breaking the Match System’s Hold

Because the Match blocks residents from individually shaping their own contract, the only effective recourse available is collective action.

In May 2023, over 150 resident physicians at New York City’s Elmhurst Hospital, in the borough of Queens, went on strike over low pay — the first resident strike in New York City in thirty-three years. When they walked out, the hospital found itself scrambling to hire temporary attending doctors just to keep the facilities functioning. Within three days, the Mount Sinai Health System accepted their demands for wage parity with their colleagues in the Manhattan branch.

Even the mere fact of unions may help applicants regain some agency in the match process. According to Cary Lane, a union representative for University of Buffalo residents, the growth of unionization has given them a decision-making variable that exists independently of the medical establishment and can tangibly affect their working conditions.

“After we went on strike two years ago and got a better contract, the university got really worried about the upcoming Match because they thought their reputation might be tarnished,” he told Jacobin:

Well, we did attack their reputation because it was not a good workplace. It was not a safe and supportive workplace. But lo and behold, Match went really well. And what I told management was that I thought it went really well because this program is now unionized, and residents were able to negotiate for safety and support and respect in their workplace through the union contract.

While unions can even the balance of power, critics of the Match say that unions, in their current form and alone, cannot outweigh the underlying exploitation. “Unions act as a safeguard, bridging the gap, but it’s a narrow bridge. It doesn’t always have the means necessary to support everyone completely,” Mazze said. “Some of the defenses are literally just bringing people from different specialties together to sit in a bargaining meeting in front of the administration and say, this, this, and this are not working. And then the administration says, how come no one has brought this to our attention before? As if the problem hadn’t existed for years and they hadn’t noticed.”

What really needs to change, Mazze continued, is “the way that we think of what a resident is, what their training and skills are worth, what their time is worth. And the Match doesn’t do that.”

The seemingly obvious antitrust violation inherent to the Match has invited high-profile lawsuits in the past. In 2002, a group of former residents sued the AAMC, arguing that the Match functioned as a massive price-fixing conspiracy that artificially depressed wages and forced exhausting work conditions on young doctors. The federal district court initially allowed it to proceed, but before the case could actually reach trial, the hospital lobby used its political leverage. In 2004, Congress quietly attached to the Pension Funding Equity Act an unrelated rider that explicitly shielded the Match system from federal antitrust laws, forcing the court to dismiss the lawsuit and essentially legalizing monopsony in the medical field.

In recent years, some legislators have proposed repealing or weakening those protections, but such efforts have made little headway so far. Unionization, however, continues to expand not only in numbers but also in demands and rhetoric that increasingly criticize the medical establishment as a whole, rather than just members’ individual residency programs. Behind every unfair contract is the Match, and the manufactured wholesomeness is far less convincing than the realities of labor exploitation.