Jacobin

Ethiopia’s Trade Union Movement Is Growing Stronger

2026-04-03T14:26:09Z

Over the last decade, Ethiopia’s trade unions have experienced impressive growth, more than doubling their membership. Ethiopia and other African states with growing unions cut against the idea that organized labor is facing global decline.

Chanyalew Aweke, a labor organizer with the Confederation of Ethiopian Trade Unions, during an interview on October 2, 2019. (Eyerusalem Jiregna / AFP via Getty Images)

When the General Assembly of the Confederation of Ethiopian Trade Unions (CETU) met in December 2025, it confirmed that the membership of its affiliated unions had, for the first time in Ethiopian history, surpassed one million workers, organized in 2,653 basic enterprise unions.

This denotes remarkable growth for a trade union movement whose membership figures hardly changed between the mid-1980s and the early 2010s, remaining stagnant at around 300,000 members.

In the most recent Ethiopian calendrical year alone, a net total of 97,081 new members joined the trade union movement and 274 new basic unions were founded. Meanwhile, CETU established five new branch offices in different regions, bringing the total to twelve, with plans to expand to seventeen during the current year.

The explosive growth of trade unions in Ethiopia comes against the backdrop of recurring labor unrest from below. In 2025, several high-profile strikes took place, including those among DHL workers and employees of a labor contractor for Safaricom.

Public health workers across the country, who are classified as civil servants and thus denied the right to unionize, also undertook an unprecedented strike that, while technically a wildcat action, was coordinated by the Ethiopian Health Professionals Association.

The Latest Phase

The current round of worker mobilization in Ethiopia represents the latest phase in a process that stretches back to the mid-2010s. It builds upon earlier cycles of mobilization while achieving a quantitatively higher scale.

It unsettles two widely held assumptions that operate at different levels. First, it challenges the idea that ethnic solidarities constitute the sole meaningful axis of mobilization in Ethiopia’s contemporary predicament. In doing so, it opens space for us to consider the reemergence of cross-ethnic class solidarities as a basis for reconstituting Ethiopia’s torn social fabric.

Second, it challenges the simplistic, indeed rather banal, yet predominant notion of a global decline of labor movements, which draws upon a selective range of cases. The generalized declinist argument is mainly substantiated with reference to developments in Europe and settler-colonial societies. China, for example, which has roughly 400 million unionized workers, must be excluded from the picture for the notion of a global decline to make numerical sense.

From Empire to Revolution

To make sense of the contemporary phase of labor mobilization in Ethiopia, one has to place it in the context of the movement’s long-term trajectory and past phases. When the Ethiopian labor movement emerged as a countrywide force in the late 1950s and early ’60s, it did so under the rule of an absolute monarchy that presided over a centralized empire-state composed of diverse nations and nationalities, with a political economy dominated by agrarian landlord interests.

The segments of the waged working population that were permitted to unionize were small and largely confined to urban centers and foreign-owned enterprises. Large sections of the workforce, including agrarian laborers, civil servants, and small-scale service employees, were legally barred from doing so. Nevertheless, the movement’s small size did not prevent it from developing strong militant traits, and strike activity was commonplace.

In 1963, the first central confederation of Ethiopian labor was formed. It immediately became a flash point for competing pressures: state repression (which forced the confederation’s popular leadership to resign the year after its founding), foreign intervention (particularly from the AFL-CIO’s African American Labor Center and the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions), bureaucratic consolidation at the top, and rank-and-file pressure from below. Within this tense constellation, an increasingly radical current emerged and gained strength during the 1960s and early ’70s.

By 1973, the radical opposition, largely composed of younger labor activists and workers from Addis Ababa and Eritrea, was ascendant and seriously challenging the moderate leadership. That year, strike activity, which had been a constant feature of the 1960s, exploded. In March 1974, this militancy culminated in a highly successful general strike against the imperial state, dramatically raising the movement’s prestige and triggering a membership surge. Whereas total union membership had stood at 73,000 in 1973, it now almost tripled, reaching 200,000 the following year.

Meanwhile, the popular movement that would culminate in the Ethiopian Revolution of 1974 was gathering force. By September, the emperor had been deposed and the military junta known as the Derg had come to power. It immediately came into conflict with a confident and radicalized labor movement that took a position far to the left of the Derg, demanding that it hand over political power to representatives of the masses, along with control over workplaces to the workers themselves.

After escalating confrontations with the regime, including general strikes in September 1974 and September 1975, the confederation was banned. Several years of militant resistance and strikes followed, organized at the basic union level by clandestine networks. The radical labor movement was eventually crushed amid intense and violent repression. In 1977, the Derg established an entirely state-controlled trade union organization. Instead of representing labor, it was tasked with controlling it, a task that it performed effectively until the end of the 1980s.

After the Derg

By the late 1980s, unrest had begun to reemerge among workers whose real wages had declined precipitously since the 1974 revolution, dropping by more than half in real terms. This collapse was no accident. While the revolution had profoundly transformed Ethiopia’s political economy by nationalizing all land and abolishing landlordism, it had shifted demands for surplus extraction onto waged workers, ushering in conditions that were conducive to renewed labor militancy.

Nevertheless, it was not until the fall of the Derg regime and the coming to power of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) in 1991 that the labor movement began to revive in earnest. This revival was triggered by new purges of unions and repression of workers carried out by the new authorities as well as factory closures and mass retrenchments.

Unlike the Derg, the EPRDF made no pretense of representing labor. It saw itself instead as the representative of oppressed nationalities, embodied in an idealized depiction of the peasantry. The labor movement’s refusal to mirror the EPRDF and the federal state it sought to construct — in other words, to organize along national or regional lines rather than countrywide sectoral ones — further deepened the regime’s hostility.

Workers and labor activists, meanwhile, networked in impromptu constellations and sought to erect defensive barriers against encroachments on unions and workers’ rights in the new political environment of EPRDF rule. These efforts culminated in the formation of a new, countrywide labor center in 1993: CETU.

Containment and Revival

The EPRDF’s assault on the already precarious position of labor was always on the cards, but two developments hastened it. First, the government’s program of deregulation, liberalization, and privatization was accelerated by its agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for loans that were conditional on structural adjustment measures, increasing pressure on workers. Second, in September 1994, CETU voiced concerns over the implementation of the IMF-backed program and its structural adjustment goals. The EPRDF interpreted this as open opposition and set about removing CETU’s leadership and installing a loyalist one.

The reconstituted CETU that emerged in 1997 was a yellow, thoroughly state-controlled union that did not even protest the most blatant violations of trade union and labor rights. Over the following decade, it was widely seen as irrelevant by workers and external observers alike, and it was ridiculed in the press for failing even to feign independence or show any meaningful interest in defending workers’ rights.

By the 2010s, as state control eroded and rank-and-file militancy revived, a more vibrant movement began to emerge. This revival unfolded alongside government efforts to expand export-oriented manufacturing, including industrial parks, which created new pockets of concentrated wage labor and new sites of contestation. Strike activity rose precipitously as union officials advanced more assertive demands.

Meanwhile, organizing efforts gathered pace, resulting in a significant uptick in union membership. By 2017, unrest had developed into a full-fledged strike wave, and that year CETU demonstrated its newfound independence by warning that it would call a general strike unless the government withdrew and renegotiated a new labor law bill before parliament.

Taken aback by this display of assertiveness, the government conceded and withdrew the bill, which was later renegotiated and passed on terms that were far more favorable to labor. This, in turn, produced another surge in membership and accelerated workplace unrest.

The Current Conjuncture

In 2020, the global pandemic and the outbreak of civil war in Ethiopia disrupted labor mobilization. Industrial action slowed, organizational expansion stalled, and the terrain became markedly more hostile.

Yet all signs suggest that the setback was temporary. By 2022, CETU, aided in part by wildcat strikers, had succeeded in prying open industrial parks to unionization — a long-standing strategic objective.

Since then, unions have pushed to organize new segments of the workforce, including domestic workers, and to press for the implementation of minimum wage provisions. Dispersed collective action continues across sectors, and the more assertive posture of organized labor has attracted growing ranks of members.

These advances are all the more striking when considered against the structure of Ethiopia’s political economy. The economic base consists predominantly of peasant agriculture. In urban areas, workers in the vast informal sector are excluded from unionization.

Even within the formal economy, significant restrictions on freedom of association persist. Public servants — a broadly defined category that in Ethiopia includes teachers and public health workers — are likewise prohibited from forming unions.

Surpassing Expectations

These structural features narrow the terrain on which organized labor can operate. Such problems are compounded by pronounced ethnic polarization and conflict, which has been consistently instrumentalized and fanned by a predatory ruling class, further complicating prospects for cross-national class mobilization.

Because of these structural and political constraints, reinforced by the widespread assumption of global labor decline, the expectations observers have placed on Ethiopian labor in recent years have tended to be modest, if not openly negative. Numerous accounts have portrayed the movement as persistently weak and inconsequential. Yet those expectations have proven wrong.

The strike of health workers provides a clear example of how mass collective action can resonate with Ethiopian working people. Because they are predominantly state employees, they labor under broadly similar conditions across regions. In striking, they drew attention to these woeful conditions, reminding working Ethiopians of all nationalities that they share a common predicament.

The proliferation of armed conflicts and the intensification of state predation through forced expulsions, land seizures, and punitive taxation have revealed that Ethiopians share a common subjection to the same predatory ruling class and regime. At the same time, the health workers’ strike has underscored the fact that working people also share common social and material conditions and interests.

Beyond the Decline Narrative

As noted above and as the Ethiopian example confirms, the claim that the global labor movement is in decline rests on shaky foundations. More important than its empirical weaknesses, however, are its political effects. This perspective introduces a distorting filter: by treating decline as the universal pattern with particular advances as exceptions to the rule, it conceals the real potential of labor movements in our time and breeds defeatism.

Moreover, when we generalize assumptions derived mainly from developments in Europe and settler colonies to the rest of the world, it has two effects. First, those assumptions impose a Eurocentric lens on the global labor movement, treating a context-specific experience of decline as if it were universal. Second, they flatten the stark variation and sharply contrasting tendencies that characterize labor movements within and across regions, including between neighboring African countries.

In Africa alone, there are several countries where contemporary labor movements are vibrant — Ethiopia being just one of them — and have been quite successful in different ways recently. In Ghana, for example, union membership has grown and unions have secured significant wage increases through coordinated national action, while in Nigeria, mass strikes have forced both the government and major private employers such as Dangote to make significant concessions to union demands.

These are only illustrative cases. But there are also countries, such as Zimbabwe and Tanzania, in which labor movements indeed appear to have grown weaker in recent times, with membership in decline. In many African countries, moreover, there is an urgent need for concrete investigation into the contemporary conditions of labor movements and the prevalence of labor militancy — an area of inquiry that receives far too little attention.

Beyond the dominant narrative of global decline, there is still, to use Mike Ely’s evocative words, “a beautiful blue planet crammed with contradiction and life” out there. Rather than forcing that reality into a flattened, ultimately Eurocentric account, the real question we should ask is why labor movements advance in some places and falter in others — including in comparable and even neighboring countries. That could reveal what is possible and where — not to mention what can be done to consolidate gains, strengthen, and grow the movement where conditions permit, or rebuild it where they do not.

The Ethiopian case demonstrates that labor movements do not merely advance or decline according to universal trends. Their fortunes are determined by strategic choices made within specific political economies, class configurations, and historical conjunctures. The question is not whether labor is in global decline but under what conditions, how, and where it can mobilize, expand, and exert power.

Stephen Lewis’s Complicated Legacy for the Canadian Left

2026-04-03T13:02:00Z

Stephen Lewis, leader of the Ontario NDP, son of founding NDP member David, and father of current leader Avi, has died. He leaves a complex legacy: he helped bring the NDP into the mainstream but at the cost of expelling a socialist faction from the party.

Stephen Lewis, who died this week at 88, was leader of Ontario’s New Democratic Party and father of Avi Lewis, current leader of the federal NDP. For some on Canada’s left, he did his best work after he left politics, as a humanitarian and global advocate. (Boris Spremo / Toronto Star via Getty Images)

Stephen Lewis may be the best ex-politician Canada ever had.

Lewis passed away aged eighty-eight on March 31 after a long battle with cancer. News of his death came just two days after his son Avi Lewis won a majority of votes at the federal New Democratic Party (NDP) leadership convention in Winnipeg.

Stephen Lewis led the provincial branch of the NDP to official opposition status in Ontario in the mid-1970s, a considerable feat for a relatively new party in a province long dominated by “big tent” conservatives.

But it was outside of politics that Lewis made his greatest contributions, first as Canadian ambassador to the United Nations — where he pushed Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney to take a hard line against apartheid South Africa — and then as a global leader in the fight against HIV/AIDS.

Lewis leaves a complicated legacy for Canadian leftists. Though he is well remembered as a diplomat and humanitarian, he also played an instrumental role in expelling a left-nationalist, democratic socialist movement from the federal and Ontario branches of the NDP in the 1970s.

“Stephen Lewis was one of the best leaders the Ontario NDP ever had,” says Steven High, a professor of history at Montreal’s Concordia University.

He was a brilliant man whose oratory skills were second to none. But just as Lyndon B. Johnson’s legacy as one of the most progressive presidents in US history was forever marred by his going all-in on the Vietnam War, Stephen Lewis’s time as NDP leader will always be associated with the expulsion of the left-nationalist “Waffle” movement.

Lewis vs. the Waffle

The Waffle was a short-lived but influential caucus within the federal NDP that advocated for democratic socialism and Canada’s economic and military independence from the United States. According to cofounder Mel Watkins, “the members’ choice of name was self-consciously ironic,” perhaps reflecting the movement’s irreverent and antiestablishment ethos.

Funny names notwithstanding, the Waffle’s ideology was serious, sympathetic to the liberation struggles of the 1960s and ’70s. They supported women’s liberation as much as independent labor and Quebec’s desire for self-determination. They argued for Canadian public ownership to replace private American control of key industries, as well as for leaving NATO. The Waffle Manifesto was prescient, anticipating the likely long-term and deleterious effects of American corporate control of Canada’s economy, let alone its political sovereignty. The manifesto took aim at the distortion of Canada’s development by US-based corporate interests.

“To be fair, the youthful leaders of the Waffle movement were brash and arrogant,” says High, author of The Left in Power: Bob Rae’s NDP and the Working Class.

They rubbed many people the wrong way. Most were university educated and middle class in a party that was still anchored in the labor movement with a large working-class base. The Waffle’s own intolerance of international trade unionism — US-based unions that continued to dominate the Canadian labor movement — was the issue that drove Stephen Lewis to expel them. It was an intolerable situation.

When, in 1971, the Waffle made a concerted effort to win top positions in the party’s governing bodies at that year’s federal leadership convention, they had approximately 2,000 members out of the NDP’s 90,000. The leadership contest was between Waffle cofounder James Laxer and labor lawyer and one of the NDP’s founders David Lewis (father and grandfather to Stephen and Avi, respectively). Though David Lewis won on the fourth ballot with strong union support, the Waffle movement had proven itself competent and capable. Newspapers began calling the Waffle a “party within a party,” and the leadership felt threatened by its “radical” ideology at a time when the NDP was moving into the political mainstream.

At a June 1972 Ontario NDP Provincial Council meeting, these tensions reached a head. Stephen Lewis obtained a resolution ordering the Waffle’s members to either disband or leave the party. The resolution passed with strong union support. The Waffle became a separate political group after that, before being voluntarily dissolved by its members in 1974.

“The decision closed off the party to a new generation of activists and contributed to the party increasingly closing in on itself,” High says. “It scarred the party and contributed to the lingering intolerance of internal dissent that was still present in the late 1980s.”

The Lewis Legacy

Ironically, despite being the heir to the Lewis political dynasty, Avi Lewis was the antiestablishment candidate in the recent leadership convention. On two crucial issues — Israel’s genocide in Gaza and Canada’s leading role in accelerating climate change — Lewis stuck to his guns, condemning both in equal measure. Despite being the only Jewish leader of a federal political party in Canada, a columnist at Canada’s centrist Globe and Mail newspaper performed incredible feats of mental gymnastics to explain how Lewis’s election was apparently proof of the NDP’s “antisemitism problem.”

On climate change, Lewis’s staunch opposition to continued fossil fuel consumption and production led to immediate rebukes from the leadership of two provincial NDP wings, those of Saskatchewan and Alberta. Those statements were loaded with fossil fuel industry–approved talking points far removed from reality (including the absurd claim the oil and gas sector employs 900,000 Canadians — the actual number is, by some estimates, under 180,000 and falling).

But perhaps Lewis’s real break with recent party orthodoxy is less his opposition to fossil fuels than his standing firm for the decommodification of essential goods. Lewis’s campaign revolved around a suite of public options — from groceries to telecoms to housing to “head-to-toe” health care.

His embrace of decommodification is the most explicit from an NDP leader in decades, and while it may not replicate the Waffle movement, it does recall its advocacy for public ownership and economic sovereignty.

Where Avi Lewis and the Waffle align ideologically may be where a resurgent federal NDP can make the most gains. The Waffle recognized Canada’s unequal economic relationship with the United States as a source of vulnerability. This diagnosis still stands today — perhaps even more so, given the frostier relations between the two countries. Canada is still very much vulnerable to Washington’s whims, and its resource-heavy economy has few defenses to external shocks and internal cost pressures.

The Waffle took pains to highlight Canada’s foreign ownership. Lewis emphasizes the problem of affordability and fossil fuel dependence. If he ties these issues to a broader case for economic sovereignty, he may further connect to the politics of the Waffle — politics the party discarded decades ago.

Steven High argues that, in making the decision to break with the Waffle, Stephen Lewis was “probably on the ‘right’ side of the issue but the ‘wrong’ side of the expulsion decision” because it did long-term damage to the Ontario NDP.

“It was all so unfortunate, as Stephen Lewis was otherwise an inspiring leader who had real vision,” says High.

This leadership and vision was perhaps best demonstrated after Lewis left politics. “Just as Jimmy Carter is often referred to as the best ex-president the United States ever had — given his subsequent work with Habitat for Humanity — so too Stephen Lewis, who went on to become a global leader at the United Nations on important issues like HIV/AIDS in Africa,” says High.

“He continued to fight the good fight right up to the end, condemning Israel’s ongoing slaughter of civilians in Gaza and elsewhere.”

Canadian leftists have good reason to be hopeful the apple didn’t fall too far from the tree.

Choose Class War, Not Boomer Resentment

2026-04-03T18:37:23Z

The generational warfare promoted by centrists and the Right, who have long been desperate to cut and privatize Social Security, is a fool’s solution to what ails the system. Taxing the rich is the answer.

“Total boomer luxury communism” is the Right’s latest attempt to convince younger Americans to slash their own future benefits under the guise of sticking it to older generations. (John Taggart / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

A specter is haunting the United States — the specter of “total boomer luxury communism.” Or at least that’s what conservative pundits want younger generations to think.

Conservative writer Russ Greene coined the term “Total Boomer Luxury Communism” (TBLC) in July 2025 as a cynical riff on the utopian left’s vision of a post-scarcity “fully automated luxury communism.” Greene elaborated on the TBLC idea in a December essay in the American Mind, one of the house organs of the Claremont Institute.

Founded in 1979 as a quixotic fusion of Barry Goldwater’s free-market fundamentalism and Leo Strauss’s conservatism, Claremont has become one of the most influential institutional champions of Trumpian “national conservatism.” When parts of the Right questioned Donald Trump’s conservative bona fides in 2016, the institute published Michael Anton’s viral essay, “The Flight 93 Election,” which urged conservatives to “charge the cockpit” — that is, vote for Trump — or “die.”

In return, Trump stocked his administration with Claremont alumni — the self-styled “Claremonsters” — across both terms. The institute’s largest donor, hedge fund manager Thomas Klingenstein, believes that conservatism is locked in a “cold civil war” against “woke communism” and “social justice.” As Vice President J. D. Vance recently quipped, Claremont is “the only group maybe in California that makes me seem like a reasonable moderate.”

Greene is CrossFit’s former director of government relations and the current head of the Prime Mover Institute, an energy-industry group that has called for repealing the Environmental Protection Agency’s Carbon Pollution Standards.

“The essence of TBLC,” Greene writes, “is that it redistributes wealth from younger families and workers to seniors, who are on average much richer.” The result, he argues, is a cohort of retirees living in a “Marxist paradise of hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, rearing cattle in the evening, and criticizing after dinner.”

This “generational injustice,” Greene claims, is “driving every aspect of American decline — from skyrocketing national debt and the erosion of the defense industrial base to the despair of young people.” His remedy is to “radically overhaul America’s entitlement regime” by cutting Social Security and Medicare, even if it forces recipients — whom he calls “welfare queens” — back into the workforce or compels them to sell their homes.

Greene’s TBLC framework has been endorsed and amplified by figures affiliated with a range of billionaire-backed think tanks — including the conservative Capital Research Center, the neoliberal Institute for Progress, and the right-libertarian Cato Institute and Reason Foundation — as well as by centrist blogger Matt Yglesias, white supremacist Jordan Lasker, and conservative columnist George Will.

Taken at face value, the timing of the TBLC discourse might seem strange. After all, the oldest boomers are turning eighty years old this year, and millennials are now the largest generation. That’s because the real motivation behind the emergence of the TBLC argument is the looming exhaustion of the Social Security trust fund in 2032, which will provide opponents of the old-age safety net with their best opportunity in decades to cut it.

“Total boomer luxury communism” is the Right’s latest attempt to convince younger Americans to slash their own future benefits under the guise of sticking it to older generations.

It’s manufactured generational warfare dressed up as legitimate class conflict, meant to distract from the cross-generational economic inequality — and the policies that have fueled it — at the root of younger Americans’ economic anxieties.

A Leninist Strategy for Privatization

From its inception as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, Social Security has faced conservative opposition. Business groups such as the US Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), and the Du Pont–backed American Liberty League lobbied aggressively against government-provided old-age pensions. Testifying before Congress, NAM’s Noel Sargent argued that Social Security would “increase dependency and indigency” while eroding the “individual energy and efficiency” of the elderly to “take care of themselves.”

Republican James W. Wadsworth Jr struck a more apocalyptic tone, warning that Social Security “opens the door and invites the entrance into the political field of a power so vast, so powerful as to threaten the integrity of our institutions and so pull the pillars of the temple down upon the heads of our descendants.”

Medicare received a similar reception from the Right when enacted under Lyndon Johnson. Barry Goldwater, Johnson’s Republican challenger in 1964, made a proto-TBLC case against Medicare, quipping, “Having given our pensioners their medical care in kind, why not food baskets, why not public housing accommodations, why not vacation resorts, why not a ration of cigarettes for those who smoke and of beer for those who drink?”

Most famously, Ronald Reagan committed his opposition to Medicare to vinyl. He predicted that if Medicare became law, “you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.”

Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine LP cover (1961).

Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, Reagan talked up Social Security privatization, only to distance himself from the idea during his 1980 presidential campaign. Once in office, however, he proposed a roughly 10 percent reduction in future Social Security outlays. The Reagan era ultimately produced the Greenspan Commission and the Social Security Amendments of 1983, which raised the full-benefit retirement age from sixty-five to sixty-seven, among other changes.

The Right’s failure to impose deeper cuts on the old-age safety net during the Reagan era led the Heritage Foundation’s Stuart Butler and Peter Germanis to call for what they bluntly described as a “Leninist strategy” to privatize Social Security. The obstacle, they conceded, was simple: the public liked the program. Conservatives, therefore, needed to be “ready for the next crisis in Social Security,” which “may be further away than many people believe.”

Preparing to exploit that crisis moment, they wrote, would require mobilizing “the banks, insurance companies, and other institutions that will gain” from privatization while waging “guerrilla warfare against both the current Social Security system and the coalition that supports it.”

Foreshadowing TBLC and other generation-based privatization appeals, Butler and Germanis argued that “the young are the most obvious constituency for reform and a natural ally for the private alternative,” provided they could be convinced through a “comprehensive program of economic education” that “the prospects for a reasonable return on one’s ‘contribution’ [will] continue to fade.”

Boomers as Victims

In the decades that followed, a seemingly endless series of “deficit hawk” organizations — including the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, Americans for Generational Equity, the Concord Coalition, Lead… or Leave, Third Millennium, The Can Kicks Back, and Fix the Debt — worked to convince younger Americans of the need for radical cuts to Social Security and Medicare. Each was backed by pro-privatization investment banker Peter G. Peterson, along with a predictable coalition drawn from business, finance, and conservative think tanks.

Drawing on the dubious writings of William Strauss and Neil Howe, these organizations understood that framing economic issues generationally — rather than in terms of class or other categories — was crucial to their success. As Republican Senator David Durenberger, chair of Americans for Generational Equity (AGE), put it, “The more America’s leaders talk about and think in terms of generational equity, the more effective AGE will be in its education program, and the better chance we will have of making the difference on crucial legislative issues.”

While the generations in question changed, the message these organizations delivered to the youth of the day remained the same: retirees are greedy, Social Security and Medicare won’t be there for you, and it’s time to cut and privatize.

Strauss and Howe’s early work cast baby boomers as the victims of the Silent Generation’s profligacy, and early pro-privatization groups claimed to speak on their behalf. As AGE’s Phillip Longman wrote in the New York Times, “The Baby Boomers as a whole are far from ‘upwardly mobile’. . . . A declining proportion of younger Americans own their own homes, and those who do are typically encumbered by unprecedented mortgage payments.” The problem, according to Longman, was that “Baby Boomers are paying an unprecedented share of their income to support the current older generation.”

With the backing of Peterson, Exxon, and General Motors, among other corporate heavy-hitters, AGE garnered widespread media coverage throughout the 1980s. In the 1988 presidential primaries, AGE endorsed the two candidates — former Republican governor Pete du Pont and televangelist Pat Robertson — willing to call for the privatization of Social Security. But only a few years later, AGE collapsed after investigations into Durenberger’s use of the organization to boost his own reelection campaign.

AGE wasn’t alone in marshaling empathy for the boomers for conservative ends.

The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), a corporate-funded “New Democrat” organization, invoked “the question of equity among generations” as it lobbied for both cuts to and partial privatization of Social Security. The DLC argued that “millions of retirees, without regard to their need, reap windfalls from Social Security beyond the interest-adjusted value of their tax contributions into the system” at the expense of “millions of baby boomers” who “have paid steep payroll taxes for two decades and are struggling with their parents’ retirement needs even as they worry about their own.”

But despite being saddled with Reagan’s cuts to Social Security, boomers resisted entreaties to turn against the program. So opponents of Social Security and Medicare shifted course, pinning their hopes on Generation X.

Boomers as Villains

As the 1990s began, Strauss and Howe updated their generational theory for a younger audience. In 13th Gen, they now argued that boomers and previous generations had “push[ed] every policy lever conceivable — tax codes, entitlements, public debt, unfunded liabilities, labor laws, hiring practices — to tilt the economic playing field away from the young and towards the old.”

13th Gen reinforced this narrative with a series of heavy-handed political cartoons: a tidal wave of national debt looming over twentysomethings (“HONEY, I SOAKED THE KIDS”); lunching boomers debating the purchase of a “second Beemer” while complaining about the Gen X waitstaff; and an elderly couple tossing the keys to a Cadillac — license plate “I-URND-IT” — to a teenage country-club valet without dropping a dime into his “COLLEGE FUND” tip jar.

A new target generation meant new organizations, too. With backing from Peterson and Ross Perot, recent college grads Rob Nelson and Jon Cowan founded Lead… or Leave (LOL) in 1992. LOL billed itself as “the largest grassroots college/twentysomething organization in the country.” In their manifesto, Revolution X, Nelson and Cowan called for cutting Social Security benefits for current retirees and transitioning future generations to mandatory private accounts.

Though Nelson and Cowan appeared on ABC’s Nightline, CBS This Morning, and CNN, and were profiled by dozens of print outlets, LOL proved to be a house of cards. Its vaunted membership numbers counted every student at any college where it had a single member. Though it managed to wrangle five hundred people for a “Dis the Deficit” protest on capitol hill, LOL’s other high-profile plans — including a promised “Rock the Debt” concert and 1996 election protests at which Gen Xers would burn their Social Security cards — never materialized. LOL soon folded.

LOL was succeeded by Third Millennium (TM). With funding from Peterson, the Prudential Foundation, Merrill Lynch, and several business groups, Third Millennium marketed itself as a “post-partisan” Gen X version of Students for a Democratic Society, complete with a self-important “Third Millennium Declaration” that labeled Social Security “a generational scam — fiscally unsound and generationally inequitable.”

Like AGE and LOL, the media and sympathetic politicians lavished attention on TM. Its leaders — including Meredith Bagby, Richard Thau, and Maya MacGuineas — appeared on NBC’s The Today Show and CBS This Morning and testified before Congress. Warning of “generational warfare,” TM called for the privatization of Social Security. It organized a “Call Your Grandma” campaign urging young people to persuade their grandparents to oppose the addition of prescription drug coverage to Medicare and instead support “comprehensive Medicare reform that relies on a public-private partnership of competition and choice.”

TM also bought ads on MTV as part of the “Coalition for Change.” One commercial featured a young woman lamenting, “At this rate, I’ll be spending my whole life paying off the bills run up by our parents and grandparents. Without change, programs like Medicare won’t have any money left by the time I retire.”

TM’s most successful stunt was hiring Republican pollster Frank Luntz to gauge young people’s attitudes toward Social Security. Rather than field a traditional survey, TM’s board pushed for the inclusion of an unrelated question about UFOs — a setup that allowed them to disingenuously pit young people’s confidence in Social Security against their belief in life from outer space.

In an era when major publications were dubbing Social Security a “Ponzi scheme,” referring to seniors as “greedy geezers,” and giving Peterson cover space to argue for replacing Social Security with “mandatory” private savings, the press eagerly amplified the resulting talking point. It appeared in some five hundred news stories and reached the White House. In a 1998 speech at the University of Illinois, President Bill Clinton quipped “that young people in their twenties think it’s more likely that they will see UFOs than that they will ever collect Social Security.”

“If we had done nothing else, that was our signal achievement,” TM’s Thau recalled to journalist Eric Laursen, “perhaps more important to the culture and the Social Security discussion than anything else we did.” In fact, the talking point hinged on a misleading juxtaposition of two unrelated questions. When asked directly whether UFOs were more likely than collecting Social Security, young Americans chose Social Security by a two-to-one margin.

Despite the efforts of Wall Street and groups like LOL and TM, the Clinton-era push to cut or privatize Social Security ran headlong into political reality.

In 1995, Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey and Republican Senator Alan Simpson proposed raising the retirement age to seventy and partially privatizing Social Security. The plan made waves in the press — Kerrey even cited TM’s UFO poll in defending it — but it went nowhere in Congress.

Following Clinton’s reelection in 1996, the DLC pushed him to pursue a “fundamental restructuring” of Social Security and Medicare by bringing both “into marketplace.” Will Marshall, the president of the DLC-affiliated Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), called for a “grand bargain” based around “personal accounts [that] would refashion Social Security from a system of wealth transfer into one that also promotes individual wealth creation and broader ownership.”

In late 1997, Clinton met secretly with House GOP leader Newt Gingrich and Ways and Means chair Bill Archer to hammer out a plan to partially privatize Social Security and Medicare. “I’m prepared to take the political heat to provide political cover for the Republicans,” Clinton assured Archer. For Social Security, the outlines of the deal included a hike in the retirement age and the diversion of a portion of payroll tax dollars into private accounts. Fortunately, the revelation of Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky derailed the talks.

As the scandal exploded, Clinton picked up a proposal made by former Social Security Administration (SSA) commissioner Robert Ball and other members of the mid-’90s Advisory Council on Social Security for the government, rather than individuals, to invest payroll taxes in higher-yield equity index funds. The Advisory Council argued it would be “possible to maintain Social Security benefits for all income groups of workers, greatly improving the money’s worth for younger workers, without incurring the risks that could accompany individual investment.”

An independent federal fund could offer low administrative costs and socialized risk — in sharp contrast to individual private accounts, whose fees would vastly outstrip Social Security’s minuscule administrative costs and whose holders would face the danger of seeing their savings wiped out by a market downturn just as they were about to retire.

Clinton proposed investing approximately 15 percent of Social Security’s surplus into index funds. Experts like Robert Reischauer, Alan Blinder, Robert Greenstein, and Henry Aaron endorsed the plan. As Aaron told the Senate Budget Committee in 1999, “Because administrative costs would be smaller, investment of part of the trust funds in equities would yield higher returns than individual accounts, while protecting beneficiaries from the risks they would bear under a system of individual accounts.”

Clinton also proposed Universal Savings Accounts, a supplementary program outside of Social Security that would automatically deposit $300 per year into retirement accounts for lower- and middle-income workers, with the government matching additional contributions.

Some progressive Democrats were understandably skeptical of the plan, and the public’s reaction was lukewarm, at best. But Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, congressional Republicans, and other conservatives ultimately sank it. They saw the federal fund as socialistic and the external individual accounts as insufficient. For the Right, individual private accounts within Social Security were the only acceptable solution.

The Right’s best shot at privatization came during President George W. Bush’s administration. Bush spent the “political capital” he claimed to have earned from his narrow reelection in 2004 on a plan to partially privatize Social Security, which he claimed would be “a better deal for younger workers” who’d been “stuck with an enormous tab” by baby boomers like him.

Bush’s plan was boosted not merely by conservative think tanks like Cato — whose Michael Tanner told Congress that “more privatization is better than less” because “you don’t cut out half a cancer” — but also by the Peterson-backed Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) led by former TM board member MacGuineas.

The problem was that, as one account noted, “the more the President talked about Social Security, the more support for his plan declined,” and Bush ultimately dropped the plan.

Pro-privatization forces were more successful with Medicare. The 1997 budget bill passed by Republicans in Congress and signed by President Clinton included Medicare+Choice, which opened Medicare to private plans. Medicare+Choice was expanded and renamed Medicare Advantage as part of the Bush-era legislation that created Medicare’s prescription drug coverage.

Manufacturing Millennial Outrage

Though the cost of the Bush tax cuts far exceeded the long-run Social Security shortfall, and Vice President Dick Cheney famously declared that “deficits don’t matter,” Republicans predictably rediscovered their fiscal hawkery once Democrat Barack Obama entered the White House.

Taking that concern at face value, Obama foolishly pivoted to deficit reduction in 2010, even as the economy was still reeling from the Great Recession, and appointed the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform — better known as the Simpson-Bowles commission, after its two chairs, the aforementioned Alan Simpson and President Clinton’s former chief of staff, Erskine Bowles.

From the outset, the Simpson-Bowles commission tilted toward a conservative vision of deficit reduction. It proposed cutting top corporate and individual income tax rates even as it called for cuts to Social Security, including raising the retirement age to sixty-nine and shifting to a slower cost-of-living adjustment that understates the inflation faced by retirees. The result was a roughly 2:1 ratio of spending cuts to new revenue.

At the same time, Rep. Paul Ryan rolled out a series of Republican budget blueprints that would have sharply reduced taxes on corporations and high earners by cutting individual rates, scrapping the corporate income tax in favor of a border-adjusted consumption tax, and eliminating taxes on investment income and estates. Ryan paired those tax cuts with proposals to privatize Medicare and shift Social Security toward individual accounts.

This Obama-era push for cuts to Medicare and Social Security brought with it a new wave of Peterson-backed groups, along with yet another downward shift in the target generation.

The most prominent of the new Peterson-backed groups, Fix the Debt (FTD), enlisted Simpson and Bowles as its cochairs. CRFB functioned as its de facto parent organization, and its president, MacGuineas, also headed FTD. While Bowles — by then a Morgan Stanley board member — lent the effort a bipartisan veneer, the eighty-six CEOs on its Fiscal Leadership Council were overwhelmingly Republican donors.

FTD’s public relations blitz stumbled early when one of its CEO backers, Goldman Sachs chief Lloyd Blankfein, told CBS in November 2012, “You’re going to have to undoubtedly do something to lower people’s expectations [about] entitlements and what people think that they’re going to get, because it’s not going to happen. They’re not going to get it.” The remark triggered a wave of reporting on the outsize compensation and retirement packages enjoyed by Blankfein and other executives backing FTD, as well as their behind-the-scenes lobbying to shield their own tax preferences from any deficit deal.

Shifting onto firmer ground, FTD began airing commercials in December that leaned heavily on the idea that the national debt represented an albatross around the necks of younger generations. In one, a teacher laments, “I would love for everything to start getting resolved now so that I can tell my children and the children that I teach and not be lying to them when I say to them that there is a bright future and you can do anything that you want to do.”

FTD also launched a youth affiliate, The Can Kicks Back (TCKB), to gin up generational outrage. Billed as a “millennial-driven campaign to solve America’s fiscal crisis,” TCKB’s stated goal was to “organize over 100,000 young people” to demand “fiscal sustainability and generational equity.” Although TCKB’s staff consisted largely of people in their twenties and thirties, its advisory board included both Simpson and Bowles as well as LOL’s Cowan, who was now serving as the president of Third Way, a centrist Democrat think tank with deep Wall Street ties.

Sandwiched between Occupy Wall Street and Bernie Sanders’s youth–powered 2016 campaign, TCKB pressed generational conflict as a substitute for class politics more forcefully than any of its predecessors. Through its “Swindled” project, TCKB warned of an “economic crisis” caused by “inequality beyond anything we’ve ever seen before.” This was “not the gap between the rich and the poor,” according to TCKB. Instead, it was “the one between the young and the old,” which was “threatening for the first time in our history to leave one generation worse off than their parents and grandparents.”

TCKB’s policy prescriptions were predictable. It called for a “grand generational bargain” built around “reforming the tax code” and “slowing the growth of entitlement spending.” Unsurprisingly, given its advisory board, it endorsed the Simpson-Bowles plan. TCKB heaped praise on Paul Ryan’s budget, ranking it first in its March Madness–style “Budget Madness” bracket and applauding Ryan’s “courage and leadership on budget issues.” It also proposed the Intergenerational Financial Obligations Reform (INFORM) Act, which sought to codify inherently inaccurate and misleading “generational accounting” as an alternative to the federal government’s traditional income-based distributional analyses.

In addition to TCKB, Peterson poured nearly half a billion dollars between 2007 and 2011 into a range of initiatives aimed at convincing Americans — especially younger ones — of the need to cut or privatize Social Security and Medicare.

Partnering with MTV’s campus network, mtvU, he launched the Indebted campaign, whose website featured a “Debt Ski” video game and deficit-themed pop-up videos for songs by artists like Kanye West, Lily Allen, and Fall Out Boy. Like TCKB, Indebted warned that government deficits were dooming young people “to be the first generation that won’t enjoy the same growth in standard of living as their parents.”

Reaching for an even younger audience, Peterson also funded an “Understanding Fiscal Responsibility” curriculum through Columbia University’s Teachers College. Six of its fifteen lessons focused on Social Security and Medicare, while just one zeroed in on taxation. It was distributed for free to high schools nationwide.

Few of Peterson’s efforts had the desired effect.

Like LOL and TM, TCKB sought to project the image of a mass movement. It brought its “AmeriCAN” mascot — literally “a giant can character” meant to “represent the young Americans who are kicking back to reclaim their future” — on a “Generational Equity Tour” of college campuses, where organizers hoped to launch local chapters and dramatize millennial concern about the “growing economic inequality between younger and older Americans as a result of current fiscal policy” by collecting aluminum cans from students.

The tour did not go as planned.

TCKB was exposed for planting identical, ghostwritten op-eds in college newspapers nationwide. Critical editorials in the Georgetown and University of Virginia student papers accusing TCKB of being an “astroturfed” campaign “misrepresenting” itself to students. A leaked internal email revealed TCKB staffers lamenting, “We generated 800 cans through our national tour at a cost of about $3,000 per can.”

TCKB’s only genuinely viral moment came when it persuaded the eighty-one-year-old Simpson to dance “Gangnam Style” in a video alongside “AmeriCAN.” But the video gained attention more for its absurdity — with Simpson telling the press that he “made a perfect ass” out of himself — than for its message, perhaps because it consisted of Simpson scolding youth to “stop Instagramming your breakfast and tweeting your first world problems” and instead “start using those precious social media skills to go out and sign people up on this baby,” otherwise “these old coots will clean out the Treasury before you get there.”

By early 2014, TCKB’s funding had dried up, and one member of its dwindling staff privately conceded that “Fix the Debt is increasingly seen (I think in a lot of ways justifiably) as a mouthpiece for corporate America, and particularly Wall Street.”

The Obama-era push for a deficit deal collapsed as well. Despite proposals calling for anywhere from a 2:1 to a 6:1 ratio of spending cuts to revenue increases, Republicans balked at any tax hikes, while pressure from progressives such as Sanders and Elizabeth Warren pushed Obama to retreat from cutting Social Security.

Phony Generational War

With the TBLC discourse, Greene and like-minded conservatives appear to view the Social Security trust fund’s projected depletion as the “next crisis” foretold by Butler and Germanis — a moment to force through cuts or privatization that had previously proved politically toxic, despite the efforts of AGE, LOL, TM, TCKB, and the veritable alphabet soup of other groups.

Indeed, Greene’s playbook reads like a modernized version of Butler and Germanis’s “Leninist strategy.” As Greene has written:

To terminate TBLC we need to:

Raise awareness of mass generational injustice.

Align Wall Street, the defense industrial complex, corporate America, and the media against TBLC (the alternative is tax hikes, cuts to discretionary spending and a debt crisis).

Form a counter-AARP.

Greene sees the growing number of articles “aligned“ with his TBLC framework as proof that the strategy is working. While its ultimate success remains to be seen, there’s no doubt that an effort to paint boomers as the new “greedy geezers” is gaining traction.

The key to the TBLC narrative is the idea that, as Greene has put it, baby boomers are “the wealthiest, most privileged generation in America,” consisting of “retired millionaires [with] country club lifestyles.” Yet this impression rests on misleading data that simultaneously exaggerates the wealth and understates the needs of the average boomer, while ignoring the deeper inequalities within and across generations that point toward income-based redistribution rather than generational demagoguery.

Most articles that emphasize baby boomers’ wealth rely on measures of mean wealth by generation or each generation’s share of total wealth. Because these measures ignore inequality within generations, they can be misleading. If Jeff Bezos, a baby boomer, were to transfer his wealth to Mark Zuckerberg, a millennial, both metrics would suddenly make boomers appear poorer and millennials richer — even though nothing about the actual economic circumstances of either generation would have changed.

Looking at wealth by percentile using the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) provides a much more realistic picture of each age group’s net worth.

Older households are wealthier. That’s no surprise, given that they’ve had longer to save.

But wealth inequality within age groups swamps wealth inequality between them. The median household aged sixty-five to seventy-four has three times the wealth of the median household aged thirty-five to forty-four. But the 99th percentile of households aged thirty-five to forty-four has fifty times the wealth of that group’s median, and the top 1 percent of households aged thirty-five to forty-four average 134 times the median.

The 99th percentile of households aged sixty-five to seventy-four holds forty-seven times their age group’s median, while the top 1 percent averages 147 times the median. The lack of wealth at the bottom is just as consistent. The 25th percentile never exceeds half the overall median in any age group.

Making matters more complicated: even though older households are wealthier, on average, for most households over sixty-five, that wealth isn’t liquid. Instead, it’s equity in their primary residence.

Nearly 60 percent of the roughly $375,000 in wealth held by the middle wealth quintile of over-sixty-five households is composed of home equity. For the bottom 60 percent of elderly households, the primary residence accounts for most of their net worth. It’s only within the top fifth of households over sixty-five that a significant portion of wealth comes from something other than their primary residence.

Non-white older households are especially likely to have their wealth tied up in their home they occupy. Moreover, the percentage of homeowners over sixty-five with a mortgage has nearly doubled, from 21 percent to 39 percent, since 1989.

Things look even worse for older households when it comes to income. SCF data is pre-tax, but includes wage income, pensions, Social Security, and other cash transfers.

Households over seventy-five have the lowest household income of approximately $50,000. The sixty-five to seventy-four and under thirty-five age groups are next, both making about $60,000 per year. Individual, rather than household, income data from the census shows the same pattern.

Americans sixty-five and older have the lowest income — approximately $35,000, including Social Security — of any age group besides those between fifteen and twenty-five. This isn’t surprising, given that both age groups largely consist of people who are too young or too old to work. Transferring money from working-age adults to kids and the elderly is one of the main functions of all welfare states.

It’s also worth considering that the elderly — like lower-income people more broadly — face higher inflation rates. The “Elder Index,” published by the Gerontology Institute at the University of Massachusetts Boston, is a county-level estimate of the income older adults need to meet basic living expenses without relying on family support or means-tested public assistance.

Nationally, for a couple in good health, the index estimates annual costs of roughly $38,000 for homeowners without a mortgage, $47,000 for renters, and $52,000 for homeowners with a mortgage. Depending on the data source, between 25 and 45 percent of older households fall below those thresholds. As a result, about a third of midlife adults provide financial support to their parents, underscoring the reality that younger generations’ financial security is imperiled by older generations’ lack thereof.

Even if most elderly households aren’t rich now, that doesn’t settle the question of whether Gen X, millennials, and Gen Z are worse off than boomers were at similar ages. But historical SCF data allows for those comparisons.

While baby boomers fared better than the Silent Generation, younger generations have all done just as well as — or even better than — boomers. Younger households fare even better relative to boomers when including taxes and adjusting for falling household sizes.

There’s good reason not to be Pollyannaish about the economic fortunes of younger generations, however. While the SCF suggests that the median millennial household is wealthier than its boomer counterpart at the same age, studies using other surveys find that poor and middle-class millennials are worse off, while wealthy millennials are much better off, than comparable boomers.

Because these surveys are older than the SCF — and millennials have experienced the strongest wealth growth in recent years — they may paint an overly pessimistic picture of the median millennial today. Nonetheless, they underscore the importance of the within-generation inequality ignored by the TBLC discourse’s cross-generational focus. Indeed, by some measures, millennials are the most unequal generation in US history.

There’s also evidence that millennials are less likely to experience absolute upward mobility — that is, earn more than their parents in real terms — than any generation in modern US history. Moreover, home ownership rates for both millennials and Zoomers lag behind previous generations’ rates at similar ages, regardless of education level or income, thanks to the twin albatrosses of rising housing prices and student loan debt.

Ultimately, there’s little evidence to support the TBLC claim that boomer retirees are living in a “Marxist paradise.” More importantly, the worse off one believes Gen X, millennials, and Gen Z are compared to boomers, the more intergenerationally unjust the cuts to Social Security proposed by conservatives are.

Conservatives’ Generational Myths

As with earlier attempts to persuade younger generations to support cuts to old-age benefits, proponents of the TBLC narrative hope to create the impression that cutting Social Security would allow younger Americans to stick it to supposedly “greedy geezers.”

Last month, conservative Washington Post columnist Ramesh Ponnuru declared, “Don’t Save Social Security.” Echoing the TBLC discourse, Ponnuru argued that the program simply funnels money to already-well-off retirees — citing the common conservative talking point that a rich retired couple could receive $100,000 in benefits each year.

He also contended that Social Security is too generous to middle-income retirees, since “a middle-class worker who retires in the next decade will, on average, receive 47 percent more than the sum of what the person paid in taxes and the interest on that money,” while simultaneously being too stingy to poor ones, given that “even though Social Security paid out $1.6 trillion last year, around 6 percent of seniors still live in poverty.” His solution? Raise the retirement age and replace the current benefit formula with a flat payment of roughly $1,350 per month.

In mid-March, the CRFB’s MacGuineas appeared before Republican Ron Johnson’s Senate Finance Subcommittee on Fiscal Responsibility and Economic Growth. In her testimony, she claimed that “seniors are the richest” Americans, decried the “generational imbalance” of current spending, and warned of “generational resentment.”

Having previously coauthored a plan to cut and partially privatize Social Security, she called for “reforms” to old-age programs and proposed creating another Simpson-Bowles-style fiscal commission to enact them. Following her testimony, Johnson — who has called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme” and proposed privatizing it — posted a video of her remarks on social media, writing, “It is immoral what we are doing to our children and grandchildren.”

Critics thus portray Social Security as a system that is too generous to well-off retirees and too stingy to poor ones, while also being a great deal for boomers and a terrible deal for younger generations. Neither claim holds up to scrutiny.

Social Security is a progressive system designed to provide proportionally higher benefits to workers with lower earnings. Benefits are calculated using a formula that replaces 90 percent of the first $1,024 of a worker’s average monthly earnings, 32 percent of earnings between $1,024 and $6,172, and 15 percent above that level. As a result, lower-income workers receive benefits that replace a larger share of their preretirement income than higher earners.

Despite conservatives’ frequent invocation of couples collecting $100,000 per year in Social Security benefits, most retirees receive far more modest payments. The mean monthly retirement benefit is about $1,975, while the median is roughly $1,195. Just 13 percent of retirees receive more than $3,000 per month, and fewer than 3 percent receive over $4,000.

Among households over sixty-five, the middle quintile receives about $2,400 per month in Social Security benefits. For the bottom 80 percent of households, moreover, Social Security provides a substantial share of total income — a crucial consideration when evaluating any changes to benefits.

How many households actually receive $100,000 or more per year in Social Security benefits? Just two-tenths of 1 percent, according to Current Population Survey data. In fact, only about 5 percent of households receive $60,000 or more. That’s why proposals to establish an inflation-adjusted $100,000 benefit cap don’t save much in the short run but generate growing long-term savings by eroding the share of preretirement wages replaced by Social Security for both the rich and upper-middle class workers, since wages grow faster than inflation.

Contrary to the idea that Social Security is short-changing younger generations, the system is structured to be more generous to Americans born in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s — roughly Gen X and millennials — provided that benefits aren’t cut before they reach retirement age.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) publishes projections for Social Security that include lifetime benefits and lifetime taxes for each decade’s birth cohort and earnings quintiles. The projections include two scenarios: benefits scheduled under current law and benefits payable if Congress takes no action and lets across-the-board cuts take effect upon trust fund depletion.

The benefit-to-tax ratio shows whether each cohort and income group will receive more in lifetime benefits than it contributes in lifetime taxes, with both valued in 2025 dollars discounted to age sixty-five at the average interest rate on federal debt.

With the partial exception of the highest quintile, the three younger cohorts’ benefit-to-tax ratio exceeds the ratios for those born in the 1950s and 1960s, unless benefits are cut.

In other words, cuts to Social Security — not Social Security’s benefit structure itself — would make conservatives’ generational criticism of Social Security true. Other estimates of Social Security’s benefit-to-tax ratio by birth cohort reach the same conclusion.

The CBO’s benefit-to-tax ratio is also the source for claims like Ponnuru’s that workers receive “more than the sum of what the person paid in taxes and the interest on that money.”

Yet this raises an obvious question: If Social Security returns more than workers contribute, how can conservatives simultaneously claim that the program is a “very bad deal” and that, as President George W. Bush put it during his privatization push, workers’ “money will grow, over time, [in private accounts] at a greater rate than anything the current system can deliver”?

The CBO figures assume a real rate of return below 1 percent — specifically, the average interest rate on outstanding federal debt. This is the rate at which the federal government itself borrows money. It is not the rate that the Social Security trust fund earns on its reserves, which is roughly 2.6 percent.

It’s also not the effective rate of return that retirees of various income levels get on their payroll taxes. The Social Security Administration (SSA) does publish those internal real rates of return for workers of various income levels and birth years, though.

The SSA’s data shows that — even before considering market volatility and other downsides — it would be hard for private accounts to exceed Social Security’s returns for lower- and middle-income workers. That’s why studies that account for risk, fees, and transition costs find that privatization wouldn’t deliver better returns for most workers — particularly lower- and middle-income earners.

So the ultimate question is: How do we prevent the across-the-board cuts to Social Security that would, in fact, make it a worse deal for younger generations than older ones?

The answer reveals the central bait and switch of both the TBLC narrative and the entire “generational equity” framework. The only scenarios in which Social Security becomes a worse deal for younger generations are the ones TBLC proponents support, while the proposals that would ensure Gen Xers, millennials, and Zoomers are treated as well as — or better than — boomers are the ones they oppose.

Cutting Social Security (for Younger Generations)

Beyond outright privatization, conservatives’ preferred solution to Social Security’s seventy-five-year shortfall is to cut benefits. Specifically, conservatives have put forward numerous proposals to transform Social Security into a flat benefit, ranging from Andrew Biggs’s $1,025 per month to Ponnuru’s $1,350 to Greene’s $1,250. Biggs, a staffer at the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI), has also endorsed proposals that would set monthly benefits at either 125 percent (about $1,660 per month) or 150 percent (about $2,000 per month) of the federal poverty level. Alternatively, he’s proposed retaining earnings-based benefits while imposing a roughly $3,500 per month cap.

With the exception of the $3,500 cap, all of these proposals would impose drastic benefit cuts on future retirees. Right now, nearly 90 percent of retired workers receive more than $1,025 per month, 80 percent more than $1,250, 75 percent more than $1,350, 60 percent more than $1,660, and half receive more than $2,000.

While flat benefits would boost benefits for those at the bottom, their value would erode over time. Currently, initial Social Security benefits are indexed to wage growth — something that conservatives have often criticized. Only the $1,025 per month proposal maintains that. The others that specify adjustments tie initial benefits to inflation. That means that flat benefit proposals level up fewer and fewer low-income retirees as each generation passes, since inflation tends to grow more slowly than wages. The $2,000 per month flat benefit would boost payments for approximately the bottom 40 percent of the 1970s cohort but only the bottom 20 percent of the 1990s cohort.

In fact, the vast majority of workers in the post-1960s cohorts would actually be better off with the automatic across-the-board cuts than with the lower flat benefit proposals. Even with the most generous flat benefit of $2,000 per month, 60 percent of the 1990s cohort would be better off with the across-the-board cut.

Previous Republican plans don’t fare better in terms of progressivity or “generational equity.” Paul Ryan’s aforementioned “Roadmap for America’s Future” proposed a variety of changes to Social Security. Ryan’s plan would’ve partially indexed initial benefits to inflation rather than wage growth, raised the retirement age for younger workers, and indexed yearly benefit growth to a version of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) that grows more slowly — despite the fact, as noted above, that elderly people tend to face higher rates of inflation. This would all come on top of partially privatizing the program.

The combined effects of the three benefit changes would’ve cut benefits by age seventy-five for retirees born in 1985 by 11 percent for a low earner (approximately $19,000 in 2010 dollars), 26 percent for a medium earner ($43,000), and 33 percent for a high earner (high earner ($69,000). Ryan’s cuts would be deeper for younger cohorts, growing by roughly 4 to 8 percentage points per decade depending on earnings level.

Nor did the private accounts rescue the plan. The CBO modeled the private accounts against the payable, rather than scheduled benefits, baseline; that is, it assumed that benefit cuts would take place upon the trust fund’s depletion. Even then, it projected that most younger generations would be no better off under Ryan’s plan than under the automatic cuts themselves — and worse off compared to what they’d been promised under scheduled benefits.

The Simpson-Bowles proposals changed Social Security’s benefit formula, raised the retirement age, introduced a new minimum benefit, and switched to the same slower-growing CPI used in Ryan’s plan, along with slightly increasing the payroll tax cap.

The commission’s plan went through several revisions, but the final version analyzed by the SSA would have raised benefits at age seventy-five for approximately 30 percent of low-income retirees born in 1985, while cutting benefits for everyone else. A medium earner would’ve seen a cut of 15 percent, a high earner 30 percent.

The cuts deepened both with income and each succeeding generation. Benefits for all workers would converge to a narrow range between $850 and $1,250 per month. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities put it, “In the long run, most workers would end up getting very similar benefits, despite having paid very different amounts in payroll taxes.”

Paul Ryan and President Donald Trump arrive at a meeting with House Republicans on June 19, 2018 in Washington, DC. (Alex Wong / Getty Images)

In 2016, Republican Sam Johnson, the chair of the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Social Security, put out a proposal with many of the same changes as Simpson-Bowles, except that it eliminated cost-of-living adjustments for higher-income retirees and eschewed any tax increases. For those born in 1985, a new minimum benefit would have slightly boosted benefits for roughly 25 percent of low-wage workers but imposed cuts on most — between 17 and 28 percent for a medium earner (approximately $50,000 in 2016 dollars) and 33 percent for a high earner ($80,000). It also proposed raising the full retirement age to sixty-nine by 2030.

Raising the retirement age is, in fact, central to virtually every conservative or centrist Social Security proposal, even though increases in longevity have been concentrated among upper-income Americans. As one study summarized, today “the richest American men live fifteen years longer than the poorest men, while the richest American women live ten years longer than the poorest women.”

In other words, raising the retirement age would concentrate its costs on poor and working-class members of younger generations — the very group that proponents of “generational equity” claim to care about most. It is, in effect, a benefit cut engineered to fall hardest on the millennials stocking shelves and driving trucks, and lightest on those managing hedge funds.

All the same, these proposals were touted by conservative think tanks and Peterson-backed groups focused on deficit reduction and generational accounting. The CRFB, for example, praised Ryan’s “Roadmap,” arguing that he “deserves a blue ribbon for fiscal courage.” The CRFB’s senior policy director, Marc Goldwein, served on the Simpson-Bowles commission’s staff, and the CRFB wrote that Johnson “should be commended for putting forward a serious plan to make Social Security financially sustainable.”

The CRFB’s own 2019 Social Security proposal — drafted by MacGuineas, Goldwein, and Chris Towner — incorporated elements of the Ryan, Simpson-Bowles, and Johnson plans, including an altered benefit formula, a slower-growing measure of inflation, an increased retirement age, and add-on private accounts. The proposal is billed as “maximiz[ing] generational fairness.”

For all their talk of “generational equity,” the originators of TBLC-style narratives have consistently championed plans that impose nearly all of their cuts on younger generations. Few of the proposals they praise would apply changes to current retirees, the demonized boomers.

MacGuineas made this explicit in her recent Senate testimony, assuring Americans that “current seniors do not need to worry about [cuts].” Even cuts that do apply to current retirees, such as the Simpson-Bowles CPI change, would hit younger generations harder, since the boomers have already collected a substantial share of their benefits. Tellingly, the CRFB praised Johnson’s proposal even though it would’ve boosted the incomes of rich boomers by eliminating income taxes on Social Security benefits — a provision that currently only affects upper-income retirees.

What gives?

The truth is that most of Social Security’s critics would prefer that the program didn’t exist. That their reform proposals result in a system that’s a terrible deal for younger generations is a feature, not a bug. The worse Social Security becomes, the more likely it is that future generations will eventually turn against it and embrace privatization.

They’re also anxious to avoid tax increases — at least on the rich. As Greene noted, proponents of the TBLC framework want to “align Wall Street, the defense industrial complex, corporate America, and the media against TBLC,” because “the alternative is tax hikes.”

In a November essay, “Start Demagoguing Against the Old,” which has been cited by Greene, erstwhile far-right provocateur Richard Hanania put the stakes in stark terms. He argued that the popularity of Social Security and Medicare proved that “you should have contempt for the political views of most people.”

According to Hanania, “there’s nobody less deserving of being the beneficiaries of the welfare state than the old,” because “poverty becomes more blameworthy with age.” Hanania warned that unless the public could be persuaded that “the energies of the young and productive are [being] sucked dry to continually make life more and more comfortable for those on death’s door,” the result would be “anti-rich demagoguery” and tax hikes on the well-off.

Indeed, both the CRFB and Third Way have framed raising taxes on the rich as a mythical solution to Social Security’s shortfall, and AEI’s Biggs has written, “If there were an easy way to fix Social Security, it would have been done by now.”

But raising taxes on the rich is the “easy way.” It’s just that these organizations — and, especially, their wealthy donors — don’t want it to happen.

Saving Social Security by Taxing the Rich

The overarching public policy goal of the American political right and the Republican Party for the past five decades has been cutting taxes for the rich. From Reagan’s 1981 tax cuts through Bush’s 2001 cuts to Trump’s 2017 and 2025 cuts, the first thing almost every Republican president does upon taking office is pass a top-heavy tax cut.

As a result, each time Republicans have left the White House, taxes on the rich have been lower than when they entered. Amid shifting positions on issues like trade and immigration, it’s the one thing that Republicans can agree on.

Besides soaring incomes for the rich, the upshot has been worsening deficits over the course of each Republican president’s team since Reagan. Far from accidental, this has been part of a concerted conservative strategy to “intentionally increase the national debt through tax cuts in order to bind the hands of a subsequent liberal government,” as Bruce Bartlett has summarized. This strategy has largely succeeded in turning Democratic presidents into deficit-conscious “Eisenhower Republicans” by the end of their terms, with the encouragement of the aforementioned corporate-backed “deficit hawk” groups.

But in recent years, Republicans’ strategy of passing bills that pair a huge tax cut for the very rich with small ones for lower- and middle-income Americans has hit a snag. After decades of cuts, federal income taxes — as opposed to regressive payroll, state, and local taxes — are too low on most Americans for there to be much to cut. In response, Republicans at the national level have borrowed a strategy from their counterparts at the state level: pairing tax cuts for the rich with tax hikes on the poor.

Just as Ryan’s “Roadmap“ would have dramatically boosted incomes at the top while cutting them for the middle class, both 2017’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) and 2025’s combination of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) and tariff increases have followed the same pattern: lowering federal taxes for the rich while raising them on nearly everyone else.

The TCJA even borrowed a tool from conservative Social Security proposals, switching the inflation measure used to index tax brackets to a slower-growing one, producing “bracket creep” that will gradually push lower- and middle-income taxpayers into higher brackets over time, a stealth tax increase that even the Cato Institute has criticized in the past. The OBBBA and tariffs are starker still. According to the Budget Lab at Yale, the combined effect is a reduction in income for the bottom 90 percent of households and an increase for the top 10 percent.

Republican Senator Ted Cruz is even pushing Trump’s Treasury to unilaterally cut capital gains taxes by allowing taxpayers to subtract inflation from their gains. This proposal has been rejected by several Republican administrations in the past as an unconstitutional usurpation of Congress’s power of the purse, but there’s no telling what might happen today. Slashing capital gains taxes has been one of the Right’s primary goals since the 1970s, and the benefits of Cruz’s proposal would accrue almost wholly to the top 1 percent.

Democrats must break the cycle of top-heavy tax cuts, and the Social Security payroll tax cap is the perfect place to start.

Social Security’s projected seventy-five-year shortfall is roughly 1.3 to 1.5 percent of GDP. To put that into perspective, the United States spends 7.3 percent of its GDP on old-age pensions and survivors’ benefits. Contrary to TBLC proponents’ claim that Social Security is too generous, that’s below the thirty-eight-country OECD average, as is the share of recipients’ pre-retirement income replaced by Social Security.

Where is the US below average? Revenue. The average country of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) collects 34.1 percent of its GDP in taxes, while the United States collects just 25.6 percent, and the gap between the United States and the OECD average has grown in the past twenty-five years.

The SSA publishes a comprehensive list of proposed changes to Social Security, and the CRFB incorporates some of them into its interactive Social Security “Reformer” tool. Looking at either, the inescapable conclusion is that the single easiest way to improve Social Security’s long-term solvency is to eliminate the payroll tax cap without proportionally boosting benefits for the rich. This single change would eliminate two-thirds of Social Security seventy-five-year shortfall. Amusingly, President Bush floated the idea of raising the cap, provided the revenue went toward his private accounts.

Why does removing Social Security’s payroll tax cap have such a large effect? Because income inequality has soared in the past fifty years. As a larger and larger share of total income flows to the rich, more of it escapes Social Security taxation. In 1983, 10 percent of income was above the cap. Today, more than 16 percent is. Compared to other OECD countries, our payroll tax cap is low.

While eliminating the Social Security payroll tax cap isn’t a popular change with conservatives, it is with the public. Many Americans don’t even know that Social Security’s payroll tax is capped. Currently, Americans don’t pay Social Security payroll taxes on income above $184,500. Only about 6 percent of workers a year make more than that. In other words, a tax increase that only affects the richest 6 percent of Americans each year would fix 67 percent of Social Security’s seventy-five-year shortfall.

This is also the most popular reform according to polls. Throughout the Bush- and Obama-era reform debates, between two-thirds and 80 percent of Americans supported eliminating the cap. Recent surveys have found similar proportions.

The most notable is a recent National Academy of Social Insurance (NASI) survey that used trade-off analysis “to learn which of various packages of Social Security policy changes Americans want and are willing to pay for, via their impact on the financing gap.” Unlike single-issue polling, this “forces respondents to weigh the costs of options holistically versus considering individual options in isolation.”

The NASI found that eliminating the Social Security payroll tax cap was the most popular reform idea, favored by 68 percent of respondents, including majorities of all income, age, education, and political groups. As NASI summarized, “By far respondents’ greatest aversion is to any reform package that does not change the payroll tax cap.”

The NASI tested both a total elimination of the cap and lifting the cap above $400,000. The latter proposal would leave an untaxed “donut hole” between $184,500 and $400,000 but would comply with President Joe Biden’s foolish pledge not to raise taxes on the middle class, which he preposterously implied extended to $400,000. The NASI’s study, though, found that a total elimination was more popular than the $400,000 threshold.

Even a recent Cato Institute survey question that primed a negative reaction by saying that eliminating the Social Security payroll tax cap “would cover only part of the shortfall and could discourage work” found 2:1 support for its elimination, which is perhaps why Cato left the question out of its report.

The public’s views on eliminating the Social Security payroll tax cap are part of a broader pattern of public support for raising taxes on the rich and opposition to cutting Social Security or Medicare. According to the NASI study, “Respondents also have a strong aversion to any reform package that increases the retirement age to 69 or reduces the cost-of-living adjustment — two policies that would reduce benefits.” Indeed, 64 percent said they wanted Social Security to adjust benefits according to the faster-rising inflation measure that better reflects seniors’ cost of living.

Most Americans would even prefer raising their own payroll taxes to cutting Social Security. The NASI study, for example, found that “only 15 percent of respondents say we shouldn’t raise taxes on any American even if it means reducing benefits.” Fifty-seven percent specifically supported gradually raising the payroll tax rates by 2 percentage points.

This change would eliminate 39 percent of Social Security’s seventy-five-year shortfall. It would also be better for Americans born in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s than automatic cuts or any of conservatives’ flat benefit proposals. An immediate increase of 1.25 points would eliminate roughly a third of the shortfall, while also ensuring that the vast majority of those cohorts would also enjoy higher benefit-to-tax ratios than those born in the 1950s.

The Cato survey ironically ended up reaching similar conclusions, despite seemingly intending to generate a Luntz-like UFO viral talking point. The few news stories on Cato’s survey writeup foregrounded a “generational divide” on Social Security based on a question framed to suggest that younger generations preferred cutting benefits to raising taxes. However, Cato’s report noted that “Americans under age 30 are about as likely as older Americans to support increasing taxes to maintain Social Security benefits.” Only when another question posited a scenario where they “would eventually get back less than they paid in” did younger respondents turn against tax hikes.

Moreover, even if younger Americans were to express a relative willingness to cut Social Security, that doesn’t mean it’s a durable viewpoint. Decades of propaganda have told them the program won’t be there for them, and younger people tend not to worry much about a retirement that’s still decades away. During Bush’s Social Security privatization push, some polls found that most Gen Xers were open to private accounts. But those are now the same fiftysomethings strongly opposed to cuts, according to both the NASI and Cato surveys.

Even if Americans of all ages are willing to raise their own payroll taxes, that option should take a back seat to taxing the well-off, which is essential to addressing the real inequality in the United States — the gap between rich and poor, not young and old.

Distributional Fairness Trumps “Generational Fairness”

Both marginal and effective tax rates on the ultrarich have fallen sharply since the “Great Compression” of the mid-twentieth century, when income inequality in the United States was low and average workers enjoyed strong real wage growth. Today the richest Americans often pay lower effective tax rates than the middle class, whether measured against their income or their wealth.

Soaring inequality has reshaped the income distribution. Since 1979, real incomes of the middle class have grown 65 percent after taxes and transfers, while those of the very richest have grown by more than 600 percent, according to the CBO. This may even understate the gap, considering that the well-off tend to face lower inflation rates than those further down the income distribution.

One recent study found that while the income gap between the richest and poorest households grew 16 percent between 2002 and 2019 according to typical cost-of-living measures, it rose to 23 percent when accounting for the unequal inflation rates faced by different households.

Conservatives have dubiously attempted to downplay these trends. They also insist that raising taxes on the rich will harm economic growth, even if it reduces inequality. But there’s little reason to take these arguments seriously.

Falling taxes on the rich have fueled rising inequality not only by directly boosting their after-tax incomes but also by indirectly incentivizing their rent-seeking behavior — extracting wealth rather than creating it. Research shows that “a lower top tax rate increases the rate of return to efforts demanding greater compensation from boards of directors,” as economist Andrew Fieldhouse has summarized.

These boards are often composed of fellow executives, creating a mutual back-scratching dynamic that professor Edward Lawler has captured well. “You don’t have to be a compensation expert to realize that if you vote for one of your peers to have a higher salary, you are in effect voting for your own salary to go up, because it is based on what will be a higher market,” he notes. CEO pay has skyrocketed 1,322 percent since 1978, pushing the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio from 31:1 in 1978 to 281:1 today.

Making matters worse, numerous studies have found that the ultrarich then use their inflated incomes to lobby for tax cuts and other policies that further enrich them. Since the Supreme Court gutted campaign finance laws in the 2010 Citizens United v. FEC decision, the influence of the rich in US politics has exploded. Prior to Citizens United, the share of spending on federal elections by three hundred billionaires and their families was just 0.3 percent. By 2024, it had jumped to 14 percent.

This has exacerbated politicians’ preexisting tendency to cater to the preferences of the rich. As one team of researchers found that “politicians who receive a larger share of their campaign funding from the top one percent donors are more likely to shift their voting toward the preferences of the wealthy,” especially on economic issues “such as taxation, regulation, and social welfare programs,” where “top earners have more convergent — and mostly conservative — views.”

The result is a vicious cycle whereby each inequality-driven increase in political donations leads to the enactment of policies that boost the incomes of the well-off, which begets a further increase in their donations and another round of inequality-increasing policies.

As political scientists Adam Bonica and Howard Rosenthal have explained, “If Republicans promote policies — such as tax changes — that make their current donors immediately wealthier, they can expect a proportional increase in total donations.” Ultimately, as another study concluded, “The erosion of tax progressivity has contributed to raise the political clout of wealthy individuals, via campaign donations,” creating a “spiral between economic inequality and uneven political influence.”

Nor is it clear that raising taxes at the top will harm economic growth, despite the claims of conservative “supply –side“ logic. The most persuasive evidence finds no support for the idea that low taxes on the rich increased economic growth.

A recent widely cited study by David Hope and Julian Limberg of the London School of Economics looked at the economic effects of major tax cuts for the rich in eighteen wealthy countries over a fifty-year period. They found that cuts reliably boosted the incomes of the rich but influenced GDP and employment at a level that was “statistically indistinguishable from zero.” Indeed, a growing body of research suggests that, contrary to conservatives’ claims, income redistribution and lower inequality actually improve growth.

People protesting the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling. (Bill Clark / CQ Roll Call)

Even if raising taxes on the rich were to pose a trade-off between growth and equality, it’s not clear why most Americans should prioritize the former over the latter. Over the past five decades, the benefits of rising GDP and productivity have flowed to the top. In a 2017 study of the distribution of economic growth in the United States since World War II, economist Pavlina Tcherneva found that “with every postwar expansion, as the economy grew, the bottom 90 percent of households received a smaller and smaller share of that growth.”

The tight labor market and redistributive policies of the COVID-19 pandemic temporarily reversed this trend, but the gains for lower- and middle-income workers have already begun to erode — a trend that President Trump’s regressive tariffs and top-heavy tax cuts have exacerbated.

That trend is directly related to the incentives created by low taxes on the very rich. As Fieldhouse explained, executives’ “successful efforts [to boost their compensation] will come out of workers’ paychecks, not shareholders’ portfolios.” By one estimate, rising inequality since 1979 has cost middle-income households roughly $40,000 per year.

This inequality, rather than too-slow growth, is also the primary cause of younger generations’ declining odds of earning more than their parents in real terms. As the New York Times explained, the research team studying intergenerational mobility

ran a clever simulation recreating the last several decades with the same GDP growth but without the post-1970 rise in inequality. When they did, the share of 1980 babies who grew up to out-earn their parents jumped to 80 percent, from 50 percent. The rise was considerably smaller (to 62 percent) in the simulation that kept inequality constant but imagined that growth returned to its old, faster path [of the early post-WWII decades].

Beyond their economic and political effects, taxes on the rich need to be raised to restore faith in the tax system. For decades, large majorities of the public have told pollsters that large corporations and rich individuals don’t pay their fair share of taxes. With leak after leak exposing the elaborate tax avoidance schemes of the ultrarich and President Trump declaring that escaping federal income taxes “makes me smart,” it’s easy to see why the public is cynical about the fairness of the tax system.

From President Clinton’s “Reinventing Government” initiative to Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) fiasco, both Democratic and Republican presidents have been obsessed with rooting out supposed waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal budget to restore faith in government spending. But what about faith in the tax system? A recent Internal Revenue Service (IRS) survey found that more than 70 percent of Americans said that focusing on wealthy individuals and corporations who exploit tax loopholes would help ensure that other taxpayers “pay their taxes honestly.”

A cynical public might be willing to pay higher taxes for overwhelmingly popular programs like Social Security but not for other worthy policies. Republicans understand this. When President Biden attempted to reduce tax avoidance by the rich by increasing IRS funding, conservative groups organized against it, despite its popularity. Republicans then worked to rescind it piece by piece at the same time that they were inserting new loopholes to benefit the rich.

Congress hasn’t attempted major loophole-closing tax reform since 1986, and even that reform largely undid its loophole-closing effects by dramatically cutting rates on upper-income earners. But unless Democrats restore faith in the tax system, they’ll remain trapped in the anti-tax logic and donor-legislation feedback loop that reliably benefits the Right.

Beyond eliminating the Social Security payroll tax cap, Democrats have plenty of options to address the program’s remaining shortfall and fund other priorities by raising taxes on the well-off.

Viewed yearly, Social Security’s shortfall currently totals approximately $450 billion, with annual deficits closer to $250 billion today and larger ones in later years. The yearly “tax gap” — taxes owed that go uncollected — is somewhere between $650 billion and $1 trillion per year. This gap is driven primarily by tax avoidance among the wealthy, and tougher IRS enforcement could close a substantial portion of it.

Democrats should also focus on eliminating “tax expenditures” that benefit the well-off. The exclusion for employer-sponsored retirement plans and IRAs costs between 0.9 and 1.3 percent of GDP each year. Research shows these tax incentives do little to boost retirement savings, and the benefits flow disproportionately to the well-off. As the CBO has reported, “Households in the highest quintile received more than 60 percent of the benefits of the income tax expenditure. The two lowest quintiles together received less than 5 percent of the benefits.”

A bipartisan trio of scholars has proposed wholly or partially eliminating this tax expenditure and redirecting the savings to shore up Social Security. They note that “rollbacks of the ineffective retirement saving tax preference could fill a substantial portion of Social Security’s long-term funding gap.”

The preferential rate on capital gains is nearly as large as the retirement tax expenditure and tilted even more toward the top, flowing almost wholly to the richest 1 percent. Given how skewed capital gains are, many Americans are likely unaware that investment income is taxed at a lower rate than labor income, and surveys show that most Americans support eliminating the preference.

Effectively eliminating the capital gains preference is challenging, given that the rich can change their realization patterns to avoid higher rates. However, a wealth tax, financial transactions tax, or mark-to-market taxation of investment income are viable responses. In terms of Social Security, the SSA has modeled five different options for taxing investment income to fund Social Security, using rates of either 6.2 or 12.4 percent. Depending on the specifics, these changes could close between 18 and 48 percent of Social Security’s long-term shortfall.

To create real intergenerational equity, Democrats should also fix the estate tax. Currently, only the wealthiest 0.14 percent of estates owe any tax, a share that’s fallen in the past twenty-five years due to a series of Republican-led cuts. But the estate tax is the most progressive tax in the US tax system.

Given TBLC proponents’ professed concern about the unfairness of boomers’ wealth, they should support using the estate tax to capture the upcoming “great wealth transfer” set to occur when boomers pass away. Failure to adequately tax inherited wealth “increases wealth inequality within generations and amplifies the inequality due to intergenerational wealth transfers.” If the United States reverted to its 2001-era tax laws, the inheritance tax would have raised $145 billion, rather than $18 billion, in 2021.

In addition to higher rates, the current system could be improved by converting the estate tax to an inheritance tax, which would “raise revenue, increase progressivity, broaden the income tax base, improve equity, and boost economic mobility,” as a recent Brookings Institution study summarized.

A key piece of effective reform is eliminating the “stepped-up basis” loophole, which allows the wealthy to pass investments to their heirs without ever paying capital gains taxes on the gains accrued during their lifetime. The best way to eliminate that loophole would be to tax unrealized gains at death, which would raise roughly $536 billion per decade, according to the CBO.

Democrats should also undo many of the recent cuts introduced by Trump and congressional Republicans. Beyond reversing cuts to top brackets, Democrats should repeal the corporate tax cut known as 100 percent bonus depreciation, which is expected to cost $362 billion per decade, as well as the hollowing out of Biden’s corporate minimum tax, which was projected to raise $222 billion per decade.

Particularly if the payroll tax cap is removed, only a fraction of the above reforms would be needed to fix Social Security’s long-term shortfall. But policymakers should consider directing some of the revenue raised from progressive tax reform toward rebuilding Social Security’s “Missing Trust Fund.”

The great irony of demonizing boomers as the source of Social Security’s shortfall is that scholars have long known that the real beneficiaries of intergenerational inequity in the program were the Lost Generation and Greatest Generation. Americans who retired in Social Security’s first few decades received far more in benefits than they had contributed, a windfall that consumed not only the reserves that would have accumulated but also decades of compound interest on those reserves. The Silent Generation, boomers, and every cohort that followed have been paying for that gift.

The 1939 restructuring of Social Security that benefitted those early generations shifted the program from a funded system toward pay-as-you-go financing. The cost of those missing reserves has been baked into payroll tax rates ever since.

According to research by Alicia Munnell and colleagues at the Boston College Center for Retirement Research, this “Missing Trust Fund” now stands at roughly $27 trillion. Its absence is why Social Security’s payroll tax rate is approximately 3.7 percentage points higher than it would otherwise need to be. Had Congress eliminated the payroll tax cap in 1939, payroll tax rates might be lower today, and we might not be talking about a shortfall at all.

One ambitious solution would be to rebuild the “Missing Trust Fund” and invest it in assets with higher returns than the low-yield Treasury securities the trust fund currently holds, thereby creating what amounts to a sovereign wealth fund (SWF) for Social Security.

Munnell suggests that a 2.3 percent income tax increase would be the fairest mechanism for funding it. There are other options for creating a SWF. Democratic Senator Tim Kaine and Republican Senator Bill Cassidy have recently proposed allowing the government to borrow and invest in stocks and bonds — a less-than-ideal version of the same concept, since it relies on borrowed rather than dedicated revenue.

Whether any of these plans would be worth the risk would depend on the fund’s political independence, among other factors. But it’s hard to imagine today’s Republicans supporting an idea they deemed too socialistic when it was proposed by President Clinton, or progressive Democrats risking Social Security’s guaranteed character without an ironclad guarantee that the Treasury would backfill any investment losses with general revenue.

These revenue options aren’t merely theoretical. Independent Bernie Sanders and Democrats John Larson, Chris Van Hollen, and Sheldon Whitehouse have put forward plans that combine several of the above elements. All secure Social Security’s seventy-five-year solvency, according to the SSA’s chief actuary.

Larson’s and Sanders’s plans also expand Social Security by boosting the minimum benefit and switching to a cost-of-living index that better reflects the higher inflation faced by elderly Americans, among other changes. Three of the four eliminate the payroll tax cap — while, unfortunately, creating a “donut hole” — and three raise taxes on either investment or inherited wealth.

Sen. Bernie Sanders speaks during a news conference to announce legislation to expand Social Security on February 13, 2019 in Washington, DC. (Mark Wilson / Getty Images)

The CRFB has put forward a centrist alternative to fully eliminating the Social Security payroll tax cap or creating a “donut hole.” It calls for replacing the 7.65 percent employer-side payroll tax with an employer compensation tax, which would apply to all compensation, not just wages. This would raise lifetime taxes by less than 1 percent of income on the bottom 80 percent of the population, increasing to over 3 percent for the richest 5 percent. It would close two-thirds of Social Security’s seventy-five-year shortfall and half of Medicare’s. While less progressive than a full elimination of the cap, it’s more progressive than raising existing payroll tax rates.

Whatever combination of tax increases on the rich Democrats use to shore up or even expand Social Security, it’s crucial that they reject any cuts to Social Security. It won’t be easy, given that both Third Way and the PPI are still churning out proposals to slash the program and maintain the payroll tax cap.

But a recent study touted by Democratic moderates like Yglesias — who’s supported Social Security cuts in the past — demonstrates that this is political suicide for Democrats.

Political scientists David Broockman and Joshua Kalla presented 6,000 registered voters with pairs of hypothetical 2028 presidential candidates. Each candidate had three of their twenty-nine policy positions randomized to reflect either their party’s standard position or what Broockman and Kalla dubbed an “elite middle” alternative.

For Social Security, the standard Democratic position was “cash benefits should remain at their current level forever, paid for by raising taxes on incomes above $400,000 by 12.4 percent.” The “elite middle” position was the same, except that the tax rate above $400,000 was lowered to 5 percent, and it called for “raising the age when people become eligible for Social Security from 65 to 68 years old.”

Switching from the Democratic to the “elite middle” position on Social Security produced the single largest negative effect on Democratic electability of any issue tested, reducing the likelihood that respondents would pick the Democratic candidate by 1.7 percentage points. Moreover, the Republican position on Social Security — “Social Security cash benefits should decrease slightly over time and the age when people become eligible for Social Security should increase from 65 to 68 years old, in order to avoid raising taxes” — was the least popular option among both Democratic and Republican voters.

What’s Left of TBLC?

Proponents of TBLC-style generational warfare have less to say about the other pillar of the United States’ old-age benefits system: Medicare. This is partly because conservatives like Greene are vehemently opposed to Medicare for All, which is the best way to control overall health care costs in the United States and improve both distributional and generational fairness. It’s also because many of Medicare’s current flaws can be traced directly to previous Republican reforms.

Since the creation of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act in 2010, Republicans have struggled to move beyond Presidents Trump’s “concepts of a plan.” That’s largely because “Obamacare” was built on the basic structure of Republican alternatives to single-payer, such as Senate Republicans’ 1993 alternative to “Hillarycare” and Mitt Romney’s 2006 Massachusetts reform.

Republicans’ most prominent proposal in the years since Obamacare was Ryan’s “Roadmap” and its descendants, which called for the voucherization of Medicare under a “premium support” model. The problem was that seniors’ costs would have more than doubled: from $6,150 under traditional Medicare to $12,500 under premium support in 2022, and from $9,159 to $20,700 by 2030 — a crushing burden for those with modest incomes. The trajectory pointed toward something even starker down the road. “By 2050,” as one analysis found, “a Medicare-equivalent policy will be unaffordable for most 65-year-olds.”

Unsurprisingly, Ryan’s plan was deeply unpopular with most Americans. As the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) explained, “There is remarkable agreement on this issue by age, with at least two thirds in each age group supporting keeping Medicare as is. Even among Republicans, a narrow majority (53 percent) say they would prefer to keep Medicare as currently structured.”

Absent popular reform options, proponents of the TBLC narrative have attempted to portray Medicare as overgenerous. According to Greene, “Medicare programs are paying for golf balls, greens fees, social club memberships, horseback riding lessons, and pet food.” The perversity of Greene’s complaint is that he’s referring to Medicare Advantage, which was championed by President Bush and expanded by President Trump.

The Bush administration predicted that Medicare Advantage would harness the magic of the marketplace to provide better care at lower costs, demonstrating the superiority of private insurance over traditional government-run Medicare. As the White House put it at the time, “Private health plans will compete for seniors’ business by providing better coverage at affordable prices — helping to control the costs of Medicare by using marketplace competition, not government price-setting.”

Pointing toward “younger generations of Americans” in 2007, Bush argued that Medicare Advantage pointed the way toward Medicare privatization. “The lesson [of Medicare Advantage] is, is that when you trust people to make decisions in their life, when you have competition it is likely you’ll get lower price and better quality,” he said. “It is the spirit of this reform that needs to be now extended to Medicare overall.

Studies show that Medicare Advantage costs taxpayers at least 20 percent more per enrollee than traditional Medicare without delivering better health outcomes. (Bill Clark / CQ Roll Call via Getty Images)

By any measure, Medicare Advantage failed to deliver on these promises. Study after study shows that Medicare Advantage costs taxpayers at least 20 percent more per enrollee than traditional Medicare without delivering better health outcomes. The perks lambasted by Greene are put in place by private insurers to lure retirees into choosing their inferior plans.

Unsurprisingly, Medicare Advantage hasn’t done anything to curb Medicare’s total costs. Instead, its private insurers collect $75 billion in overpayments from taxpayers each year, and the CRFB estimates that the total could be as high as $1.2 trillion over the next ten years. Those companies then use those taxpayer dollars to bankroll “dark money” groups that lobby to prevent reining in those overpayments. (Amusingly, one of the few remaining conservative health reform proposals is dubbed “Medicare Advantage for All.”)

But it’s also time for Democrats to stop pretending that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is the solution to America’s health care problems. The ACA has at best modestly reduced the growth of health care costs. The United States still spends dramatically more per capita and as a percentage of GDP than peer countries. According to the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker, the $14,775 per person we spend is almost $5,000 more than the next highest peer country and almost twice the peer-country average.

This extra spending isn’t driven by Americans using more health care but by higher prices. Everything from doctor’s visits to pharmaceuticals to individual procedures costs more in the United States. As the lead author of one of the seminal studies of American health care costs put it, “It’s not that we’re getting more. It’s that we’re paying much more.” Because the US system is so heavily privatized, Americans also bear far higher administrative costs — roughly $925 per person versus $245 in peer nations.

The Supreme Court upheld the ACA, in part, by casting the individual mandate as a tax — an apt framing. When health care premiums are added to the federal, state, and local taxes faced by Americans, the US tax system no longer looks progressive nor does the overall burden appear lower than in countries with public systems. As Matt Bruenig has calculated, adding health premiums to formal taxes puts the effective tax burden on average American workers well into Nordic territory. Indeed, even counting only public health expenditures, the United States spends more than any other country as a percentage of GDP, despite lacking universal coverage.

With the Republican-led expiration of the ACA’s enhanced subsidies, one in ten enrollees is losing coverage. The solution is Medicare for All, which even the CRFB has found would lower health care costs for the vast majority of Americans under any defensible funding mechanism.

Medicare for all is also the definition of generational equity. Today low-income Americans under sixty-five who earn just enough to fall off Medicaid face a brutal jump in costs on the ACA marketplace — a coverage cliff that penalizes any small gain in income — while older Americans approaching retirement age count the days until they qualify for Medicare and escape the private market altogether.

Medicare for All fixes both at once, while meaningfully reducing economic inequality and putting the United States on a path toward a health care system that works for everyone.

Needless to say, conservatives — including Greene — vehemently oppose Medicare for All. Centrist groups like the CRFB, Third Way, and the PPI are critical of Medicare for All too. That might have something to do with the fact that both Third Way and PPI are supported by Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), Big Pharma’s trade association.

The one area where TBLC advocates have a point is housing — but it’s also a case that highlights the fundamental flaws of generational thinking.

By any measure, housing is less affordable today than at perhaps any time in modern US history. According to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, “The US home price index is now a whopping 47 percent higher than since early 2020, while “rents remain up 26 percent nationwide since early 2020.” At least one-third of US households are now considered “cost-burdened,” meaning that they spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing each month.

There’s no doubt that unaffordable housing has generational effects, particularly when it comes to the dream of home ownership. In 2024, the “new homeowner penalty” — the gap in housing costs between those who bought years ago and those entering the market today — hit a thirty-four-year high, with predictable results. As the National Association of Realtors reported in November, “The share of first-time home buyers dropped to a record low of 21 percent, while the typical age of first-time buyers climbed to an all-time high of 40 years.”

Building more housing, both by dismantling exclusionary zoning and investing in public housing is the most important first step toward addressing the housing crisis. Interest rates need to be addressed too. As the Consumer Financial Production Bureau reported in late 2024, “Higher rates are significantly decreasing housing affordability, with the mortgage payment on a $400,000 loan rising over $1,200 from trough to peak.” The gap between previous low interest rates and today’s high interest rates, known as “rate lock,” also discourages housing turnover and raises prices.

It’s true that older Americans tend to be more skeptical of zoning reforms and new construction. In part, that’s because they’re more likely to own homes. But driving down housing prices will decrease the net worth of all existing homeowners, including plenty of younger Americans.

That’s okay. There’s no reason to preserve housing values simply to benefit those lucky enough to hold an affordable mortgage, regardless of their age. Indeed, the paper value created by high housing prices should be thought of as a form of collective poverty, not wealth. Everyone would be better off in the long run if housing were more affordable.

For all the TBLC rhetoric, conservatives seem torn on this issue. The Heritage Foundation and Republicans like Senator Mike Lee opposed an Obama-era rule requiring localities that received federal housing funds to reform exclusionary zoning practices that contributed to residential segregation, which Lee warned would allow the federal government to “seize control of local zoning decisions.” But the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, which seeks to boost supply by tying federal dollars to local zoning reform and streamlined permitting, passed with large bipartisan support — albeit with more opposition from Republicans than Democrats.

Just what other assistance conservatives support for young renters and would-be homebuyers squeezed out of the housing market is unclear. In his TBLC essay, Greene criticized “focusing exclusively on supply restrictions.” He has also gone further than most conservatives in openly welcoming high interest rates as a cudgel against “wokeness.” His fellow “Claremonster” Ryan Neuhaus, meanwhile, has gestured vaguely at “assistance options that can reopen the path to ownership without inflating scarcity.”

For his part, President Trump seems to like high housing prices. “People that own their homes, we’re going to keep them wealthy,” Trump said in a January cabinet meeting. “We’re going to keep those prices up. We’re not going to destroy the value of their homes so that somebody that didn’t work very hard can buy a home.”

Beyond a lackluster pair of executive orders and pressuring the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates despite his inflation-boosting tariffs, Trump has proposed cannibalizing retirement security to paper over the housing crisis by letting prospective homebuyers withdraw money from their 401(k) accounts for a down payment on a house.”

Student loan debt has been a key barrier to young people’s ability to purchase a home. According to a 2024 Federal Reserve study, “Millennials and Generation Xers earn as much as Boomers did, but the larger amount of student loan debt the two younger generations carry can reduce their ability to own a home and, thus, accumulate wealth.” More than 7.7 million borrowers — a record number — were in delinquency and default on $181 billion in federal student loans by the end of 2025, and even some conservatives recognize that student debt is depressing homeownership among younger Americans.

A protester calling for affordable housing on July 27, 2017, in Miami, Florida. (Joe Raedle / Getty Images)

The vast majority of Republicans, though, oppose student debt relief. In 2023, the Republican majority on the Supreme Court struck down President Biden’s popular student debt cancellation plan in response to a lawsuit brought by state Republican attorneys general. More recently, Republicans successfully sued to eliminate Biden’s income-driven repayment plan. Reflecting prevailing opinion among conservatives, Claremont’s Inez Feltscher Stepman has called student loan forgiveness “the regressive grift of the woke revolution.”

But student-debt relief is a proven method of boosting younger generations’ homeownership. A 2020 study by a team of Federal Reserve economists concluded that “a $1,000 increase in student loan debt lowers the homeownership rate by about 1.8 percentage points for public four-year college-goers during their mid-20s.” More recently, an analysis of the effects of Biden’s loan cancellation found that homeownership rates increased by nearly 8 percentage points three-years after cancellation.

Given the effectiveness and popularity, at least when tied to economic need, of student loan forgiveness, Democrats should revive the policy when back in power.

Rather than focus on increasing supply, lowering interest rates, or providing debt relief, Greene’s prime exhibit of housing TBLC in action is “special tax breaks for senior homeowners.” He’s right that age-based property tax breaks are an unfair, kludgey fix for increasing property taxes. But those flaws illustrate a deeper problem. TBLC-style thinking elevates generational concerns over distributional ones — and that inversion distorts every policy question it touches.

The share of cost-burdened older Americans has risen significantly in recent years. But income is the most important determinant of who can afford housing. Both the Congressional Research Service and Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies have found that cost burdens decrease linearly with income. More than two-thirds of households making under $30,000 per year are cost burdened, while less than a quarter of those making more than $75,000 are. The regressivity of property taxes only exacerbates the issue.

Historically, the Right’s solution to excessive property taxes was property tax limitation initiatives like California’s Proposition 13, which was proposed by businessman and conservative gadfly Howard Jarvis and touted by Reagan. But since its passage in 1978, Prop 13’s benefits have been concentrated among businesses and well-off homeowners, particularly older ones.

Republicans in states like Florida, Texas, Wyoming, and Indiana have now gone further, championing total property tax abolition. Since Republicans won’t touch progressive taxation, most abolition plans propose replacing lost revenue with budget cuts and sales tax increases — a tax that is even more regressive than the property tax. The result would be Prop 13 on steroids, with the biggest benefits concentrated among well-off homeowners and businesses.

As with all questions of taxation, the best solution is to tie property taxes to ability to pay. “Circuit breakers,” which have long been championed by the grassroots left, do just that by capping property taxes as a percentage of income. Unfortunately, while most states offer some type of circuit breaker, only seven states plus the District of Columbia include homeowners and renters of all ages — and even many of those states’ circuit breakers aren’t generous enough to offer meaningful relief to low- and middle-income residents.

More states should follow Minnesota, which the conservative Tax Foundation considers one of the worst state tax systems, and use progressive revenue sources to fund substantial circuit breakers.

At the federal level, policymakers could help by replacing the mortgage interest deduction — which overwhelmingly benefits wealthy itemizers — with a flat refundable tax credit available to all households regardless of income. This switch would benefit lower- and middle-income households while raising taxes on the rich.

Meanwhile, higher immigration is strenuously opposed not just by elected Republicans but also conservative think tanks like Heritage and Claremont. But the SSA’s actuaries have found that each 400,000-person increase in immigration would cut Social Security’s long-term shortfall by roughly 10 percent. More immigration would also improve Medicare’s solvency and boost housing construction. But despite all the talk of “generational equity,” the Right seems to prefer that younger Americans face higher housing costs and a more precarious retirement rather than live alongside more immigrants.

Same as It Ever Was

When Trump ran for president in 2016, he was eager to distance himself from the Social Security and Medicare plans championed by decades of Republicans and the losing Mitt Romney–Paul Ryan ticket. To win the White House, he foreswore any attempts to cut old-age programs and even praised single-payer health care. That was a sharp break from his past comments, when he called for the privatization of both Social Security and Medicare.

Falling in behind Trump, Republicans temporarily scuttled talk of cuts to Social Security and Medicare, but the TBLC-style talk signals that’s changing. During Trump’s first term, Republican Senator Joni Ernst said that lawmakers should discuss fixing Social Security “behind closed doors.” In 2023, the Republican Study Committee put forward a proposal to cut Social Security modeled on Sam Johnson’s 2016 plan. Later that year, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson proposed another Simpson-Bowles-esque fiscal commission. Despite the aforementioned political disaster that cuts to Social Security would pose for Democrats, several Democrats have recently joined the call — garnering predictable praise from the CRFB.

President Trump, meanwhile, is returning to his old ways. His Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, has referred to the administration’s new “baby bond” accounts as “a backdoor for privatizing Social Security,” and Trump has said that he’s “looking at“ Australia’s system of individual accounts “very seriously.”

The CRFB is providing a boost to the TBLC narrative by hosting an upcoming panel titled “Boomerang: Wealth, Retirement, and the Generational Divide” featuring Greene, Yglesias, Goldwein, and Wall Street Journal writer Greg Ip, whose article “Over 65? Congratulations, You Own the Economy” rehashed all of the misleading measures of “intergenerational inequality” and was praised by Greene.

Given that conservatives and centrist Democrats won’t stop pushing phony claims of generational inequity to distract from the real issues of economic inequality, it’s crucial for younger Americans to remember that the middle-income millennial household making $86,000 has more in common with the median boomer retiree making $60,000 including Social Security than with Mark Zuckerberg.

Insofar as younger generations are struggling to afford homes, health care, and save for retirement, it’s more important than ever to ensure that Social Security and Medicare aren’t cut before they can collect them. Taxing the rich is the best path forward, but it’s the one that deep-pocketed interests want most to avoid.

So stop focusing on generational warfare, and start focusing on class warfare.

End the Blockade on Cuba

2026-04-03T10:56:40Z

As a Cuban American traveling with a recent aid convoy, I witnessed the daily hardship sanctions produce. Washington must lift its devastating blockade.

As a Cuban American, I went to Cuba with an aid convoy and saw what US policy looks like up close: blackouts, avoidable hardships, and a country being squeezed by its massive neighbor. (Yuri Cortez / AFP via Getty Images)

This past weekend, I traveled to Cuba with the Nuestra América Convoy alongside a delegation of Cuban Americans to deliver aid and stand in solidarity with our fellow Cubans as a US-driven fuel blockade pushes the island deeper into crisis.

We brought critical medical supplies to Hospital Hermanos Ameijeiras, one of Cuba’s most important hospitals, where doctors and nurses continue to perform miracles with dwindling resources. We delivered food directly to families in Parque Maceo, where shortages have made even basic necessities difficult to secure. And we partnered with Cuban LGBTQ organizers to distribute aid.

These moments of connection and care are what stay with you. But so does the reality that makes them necessary.

During our trip, we experienced the island plunged into darkness following a collapse of the power grid. Our friends and families were left without light, without refrigeration, without any reprieve from the heat. The silence that followed was striking. It forced a confrontation with the scale of the crisis that no statistic or headline can fully capture.

This is what scarcity looks like, in its lived form.

It is easy, from the outside, to reduce Cuba’s situation to politics as usual — to flatten it into a debate about ideology or governance. But on the ground, the picture is far more human and far more complex. We spoke with Cubans of all political perspectives. Many were candid, even critical, about their government. Those conversations were nuanced and often deeply personal.

But there was also a shared throughline: a fierce commitment to sovereignty and independence. Regardless of political differences, there was a broad understanding that the current crisis is caused in large part by external pressure imposed by the United States. Cubans want the ability to determine their own future, without being strangled in the process.

That perspective is often missing from conversations in the United States.

As Cuban Americans, we occupy a unique and sometimes uncomfortable position in this dynamic. Many of us were raised in communities where returning to Cuba is still seen as taboo, even as betrayal. That stigma, rooted in decades of pain and displacement, continues to shape how we relate to the island and to each other.

But it is precisely because of that history that this moment demands something different from us.

We are told that US policy toward Cuba reflects the will of Cuban Americans. That claim is repeated so often that it is treated as fact. But it obscures a more complicated reality. There are millions of Cuban Americans in this country — and we are not monolithic. Increasingly, many of us are rejecting the idea that policies of isolation and economic pressure speak for us.

On this trip, that contradiction became impossible to ignore.

The crisis in Cuba is not simply about a lack of fuel, though that alone is devastating. It is about everything that follows. When fuel is scarce, transportation slows or stops. Food cannot be distributed efficiently. Hospitals struggle to maintain operations. Garbage goes uncollected. The effects compound, touching every aspect of daily life.

What might look like dysfunction from afar is often, on closer inspection, the result of material constraints.

And yet even in the midst of these challenges, there is something profoundly moving about what persists. Cuba’s social fabric remains strong. There is a deep sense of collective responsibility, a commitment to care that shows up in small but meaningful ways — neighbors sharing food, communities organizing support, artists and activists creating spaces of joy in the face of hardship.

This is the Cuba that is often overlooked: not a caricature, not a talking point, but a living, breathing society grappling with immense challenges while holding onto its humanity.

None of this means ignoring Cuba’s internal problems. Like any country, Cuba faces serious political and economic issues. Those debates belong to Cubans themselves, and they are already happening. But what is too often excluded from US discourse is the role that American policy plays in shaping the conditions under which those debates unfold.

A policy that restricts access to fuel, limits imports, and punishes economic engagement does not create the conditions for openness or reform. It creates scarcity. It creates hardship. It narrows the space in which people can imagine and build alternatives.

If the goal is a better future for Cuba, this approach is not just ineffective — it is counterproductive.

We have seen glimpses of another path before. Periods of limited engagement between the United States and Cuba, however incomplete, led to increased economic activity, greater exchange, and a sense of possibility on the island. Those moments suggest that a different relationship is not only possible, but beneficial.

What is lacking is the political will to pursue it.

We left this trip with deep sadness at the situation in Cuba. It is impossible not to, after witnessing the daily realities that so many are navigating. But we also left with a renewed sense of purpose.

The policies contributing to this crisis are not inevitable. They are choices. And as Americans — especially as Cuban Americans — we have a responsibility to challenge them.

That begins with telling the truth, even when it complicates familiar narratives. It means rejecting the idea that cruelty and deprivation are acceptable tools of foreign policy. And it means insisting on a vision of US-Cuba relations grounded in dialogue, respect, and mutual prosperity.

For too long, the loudest voices shaping this policy have not represented the full spectrum of our community. That is beginning to change.

More and more of us are speaking out, organizing, and saying clearly: this is not in our name.

Cuba’s future should be determined by Cubans. Our role is not to dictate that future but to remove the barriers that prevent it from unfolding on its own terms.

Wallace Shawn’s Road to Socialism

2026-04-03T10:52:59Z

The left-wing actor and playwright Wallace Shawn, currently in two plays in New York, describes a harsh midlife conversion to class politics — transforming from a disengaged liberal to someone who sees himself as “a participant in the world struggle.”

Wallace Shawn describes the subtlety and delicacy of his new play What We Did Before Our Moth Days as “a political rebuke to the crudeness of people like Trump.” (Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images)

A funny kind of energy ripples through a crowd as Wallace Shawn saunters through, as he did on March 9 at Greenwich House Theater. It wasn’t an immersive show, but Shawn, dressed in T-shirt and jeans, entered with the audience and chatted with random people as he made his way to the stage. The evening’s production of his one-man show, The Fever, had not yet begun, but the play was first performed in friends’ living rooms, and Shawn tends toward intimacy in some of his live performances. When he mounted the stage, he addressed the entire audience with small talk — the temperature, the microphone, the trouble with cell phones in the theater — and then stepped from chatter into monologue. We hushed. Having made us comfortable guests in his home, he gave us the signal to focus.

Wallace Shawn has two plays currently being performed in Manhattan, off-Broadway: his new play What We Did Before Our Moth Days, directed by André Gregory and costarring fellow Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member John Early, and his 1990 one-man show The Fever. the latter, which contains distinctly Marxist themes, was performed in January by Shawn as a fundraiser for New York City DSA’s Tax the Rich campaign.

Shawn is today best known for his acting roles. He played the comical villain Vizzini in The Princess Bride (1987) and more recently the eccentric nerd Dr John Sturgis on the TV show Young Sheldon (2017–2024). His inimitable voice, which can leap mid-sentence from serious and gravelly into an excited falsetto, is probably instantly recognizable to you. But theater aficionados might also be familiar with Shawn the playwright and his sixty years of experience in avant-garde theater and collaborations with Gregory, an experimental director. If you are part of the organized left, you might be familiar with Wallace Shawn the socialist and advocate for Palestinians. Eldest child of New Yorker editor William Shawn and partner to the short story author Deborah Eisenberg, Wallace Shawn’s career can seem like a vibrant convergence of cultural and political streams in American life.

Shawn has written plays and essays in a socialist vein for decades, including his 2011 essay “Why I Call Myself a Socialist” and his 1996 anti-fascist play The Designated Mourner. In recent years, he has appeared at demonstrations for a ceasefire in Gaza. The eighty-two-year-old writer was even spotted in Manhattan last year canvassing for Zohran Mamdani.

The Fever is an unbroken monologue by an unnamed character who is in the grip of a harsh internal conversion to class politics. He describes waking in a hotel room in a poor country where rebels are taking over the government. He torments himself by idling over the gruesome details of an execution he had read about.

“They shave his head,” the character describes, “a section of his leg, so the electrodes will fit closely on the skin.” He asks, “Does panic mount in the man’s heart? An attendant covers his head with a hood so none of us will see his pain, the horror, the distortion of his face.” We receive this image in the first seconds of the play.

“I had always thought of myself as a regular liberal,” Shawn says when describing the origins of The Fever. “I didn’t have an awareness of myself as a participant in the world struggle. I thought of myself as an observer and as someone who observed the suffering of others with sympathy. Until I was around forty, it really didn’t occur to me that the suffering of a poor person in Guatemala had anything in particular to do with me, except that it was a sad situation, and I felt sorry for the person who was suffering.”

The Fever dramatizes this experience of radicalization, and the character attacks himself and members of his class for their lies and solipsism.

“I realized that some of the suffering, quite a good deal of the suffering, on the planet was caused to preserve the status quo that benefited me,” says Shawn. “I actually felt a very personal hatred for myself and frankly for the other people in my group. I became unbelievably aware that there was a trail of blood between me sitting in an enjoyable restaurant in New York and someone being tortured or killed in Honduras or Guatemala or El Salvador.”

The play is an excoriating critique of bourgeois liberalism and draws a line from Western capitalist comfort to violence in the Global South. Perfectly nice liberals having concerned political discussions in lovely restaurants are juxtaposed with poverty, kidnapping, imprisonment, torture, and execution in the unnamed countries the character visits.

The play alternates between the man in the hotel room and his thoughts and memories of his comfortable, bourgeois life in a faraway city. Early on in his radicalizing journey, the character reads Volume I of Marx’s Capital and is able to “see the fetishism of commodities everywhere.” Each object he sees becomes the story of the workers who created it. “The cup of coffee contains the history of the peasants who picked the beans, how some of them fainted in the heat of the sun, some were beaten, some were kicked.”

Through a series of random encounters, he is eventually drawn to poor countries where he meets desperately poor people and revolutionaries and encounters wholly different sets of values and ways of living. On his return home, he gradually becomes disgusted with and alienated by his own class. Hearing a friend describe sitting at his own father’s bedside as he died peacefully, surrounded by family, the character says, “I couldn’t help mentioning those others who died every day on the torture table, screaming, carved up with knives, surrounded on their bed of death by other experts who were doing all they could to be sure that the ones they surrounded would die in howling agony — unimaginable agony.” A testament to his considerable acting skill, Shawn was able to deliver this quote as a laugh line.

The play is also an accurate and sensitive portrait of a psychological crisis. It shows a character stuck between two ways of thinking, between passive liberalism and engaged socialism, and experiencing the contradictions of liberalism as an acute depressive episode. Where young people often experience radicalization as liberating, a throwing off of an oppressive ideology, the middle-aged character in The Fever parts with his politics painfully and regretfully. His radicalization is an agony in which he is consumed in self-hatred and cannot experience pleasure or relate to his friends.

The Fever is affecting as a left-wing work of art for how it shows an adult mind rebelling against capitalist values. It shows that you don’t have to be a particular kind of person — a young, idealistic, unsubtle, or ascetic person, for instance — to become a socialist. Shawn’s monologue is absorbing, funny, and self-aware. As harrowing as the experience is for the character, the use of humor and detail humanizes the depiction of a very real, very grown-up psychic rebirth.

About halfway through the monologue, the character gorgeously and sensuously describes the luxurious sights of a night on the town in his city.

Do you know! — there are nights in the city where I grew up, the city I love most of all, when it’s too cold for rain, but the sky can’t snow yet, although you feel it would like to, and so instead it seems that at a certain moment every car and face and pane of glass is suddenly covered in a delicious wetness, like the wetness you see on a frozen cherry, and on nights like that, when you walk through the streets of the nice parts of town, you see all the men, in overcoats that hang straight to the ground, staring harshly with open-mouthed desire at the fox-headed women whose lipstick ripples, whose earrings ripple, as they step through the uneven light and darkness of the sidewalk. And that is the sort of thing that the communists will never understand, just as human decency is the sort of thing that I will never understand.

This last sentence Shawn delivered somewhere between a punch line and a sob, and it has the effect of a gut punch. In language so rich it approaches self-parody, he describes the rainy evening, the wet concrete, the pedestrians lusting after each other. Communists, the bourgeois liberal writer muses, would never understand these observations, “just as” — and here the descriptive language is driven off course by an intrusive thought — ”human decency is the sort of thing” he can’t understand. Posing the strident “human decency” with the conversational “sort of thing,” the character assaults himself and is ripped out of his reverie. The monologue is full of these kinds of misdirections where class analysis asserts itself in the form of a neurotic episode.

Shawn says that the person he became after writing The Fever has remained decidedly radical. The character in The Fever asks himself if he would become an active leftist, someone who demonstrates, chants slogans, and lies down in the street.

“Before I wrote The Fever,” says Shawn,

I never went to a demonstration. I certainly was around in the ’60s when people were demonstrating against the Vietnam War, but at that time, when I was a college student, I found it very, very upsetting that people would be all chanting the same thing at the same time. The idea of a mob was frightening to me. Aesthetically, it was sickening to me.

Today Shawn demonstrates, chants slogans, and has even lain down in the street. “I cheerfully call myself a socialist.”

Moth Days

His new play What We Did Before Our Moth Days, while not an overt interrogation of the characters’ politics, shares an intellectual and emotional space with The Fever. As in The Fever, the characters are bourgeois, work in or near the arts and publishing, and live in a wealthy, unnamed American city. The four characters stare forward into the audience, sharing monologues, their stories gradually building and intertwining. The play is loosely inspired by Shawn’s experience of discovering his own father’s long-term affair with the writer Lillian Ross.

The story begins with the dissolute, sexually frustrated adult son, Tim, played by John Early, having an evening with a sex worker interrupted by the death of his father. We hear from the father, Dick, a popular literary novelist, played by Josh Hamilton, speaking to us from after death about his marriage and the events leading up to his affair and death. Elle, the mother, an English teacher in an impoverished and dangerous high school, describes her isolation within her marriage and her closeness with her son. Finally, we hear from Elaine, the father’s mistress, played by Hope Davis, about her affair and her visit to Dick’s deathbed. Like the father, Elaine is a writer, and like the son, she lives on the margins of polite society.

John Early, as Tim, radiated a nervous luminousness. He was ethereal beside the more solid formations of his parents. The characters are all careful and conscientious and moved by moral concern for each other, even as they sometimes act out of selfishness or narcissism. One of the most moving scenes is between Tim and Elaine following the father’s death. While most of the play is performed as distinct monologues in which the characters only address the audience, in the only actual dialogue in the play, Tim and Elaine turn their chairs toward each other and discover how much they have in common.

The play is infused with Shawn’s affection for the characters. His writing carefully moves us around them, taking in every angle, closely considering each moment’s moral import. The three hours of monologues slipped by quickly on my viewing, the audience held in a trance.

The play was directed by André Gregory, Shawn’s longtime collaborator and costar in the breakout independent film My Dinner With Andre. While most plays in New York City get rehearsed for a few weeks, Gregory rehearsed Moth Days with the actors for over a year. In the resulting performance, the actors appear to have merged with the characters, and their delivery is breathlessly vulnerable and somehow never wrong.

Shawn has described this subtlety and delicacy in Gregory’s direction as “a political rebuke to the crudeness of people like Trump.”

“The care that André Gregory and the four actors have put into every moment of that play is a rebuke to the rushed, brutal approach you might say that Elon Musk quite openly used and boasted about in the first months with his Department of Government Efficiency. It’s a totally different approach to life,” Shawn says.

In its meticulousness and intensity, Moth Days feels both old-fashioned and avant-garde. Shawn’s decidedly adult new play, while not overtly political, does feel like a psychic balm to our current political moment. Shawn’s analysis of Gregory’s direction also shows a subtle approach to the place of art in times of political crisis: a more grown-up engagement with characters who are brilliant, caring, and sympathetic, as well as deeply flawed and wounded. This patient, careful, full-bodied play is a reminder of much of what we are missing as we bull forward into a century defined by Trumpian recklessness and brutality.

“We’re kidding ourselves if we think, oh, the poem that I wrote or the painting that I painted is going to change people’s view of their world and lead them to do great things,” says Shawn. Art, however, can sharpen our brains. It reminds us that there is more to life than the acquisition of money and power, and that there are “beautiful things inside the human monster.”

Between Chinamaxxing and the Kill Line

2026-04-03T09:43:04Z

A viral Chinese meme imagines Americans one mishap away from ruin, while American influencers fantasize about China as a frictionless techno-utopia. Each reveals less about reality than about shared economic anxieties.

A viral Chinese meme imagines Americans one mishap away from ruin, while American influencers fantasize about China as a frictionless techno-utopia. Each reveals less about reality than about a shared anxiety neither country can quite name. (Wang Zhao / AFP via Getty Images)

On my trip to China last month, I was surprised to learn about China’s latest viral meme: the kill line (斩杀线). The term originates from video games and refers to a point at which a player’s health is so low that they’ll be defeated after a single hit. The Chinese internet has reconfigured this metaphor to create an exaggerated view of American economic precarity. According to the meme, Americans are always sitting at the cusp of a precarious “kill line.” Any minor shock such as a layoff or an accident can thrust even middle-class Americans into homelessness and destitute poverty.

Chinese state media (which never passes up an opportunity to criticize the United States) has spread the meme far and wide, including by misattributing an old video about homelessness in London to the US.

If the kill line was simply an exaggerated metaphor for American economic precarity and wealth inequality, there’d be little to object to. But its origins are deeply suspect. The Chinese influencer who coined the term and goes by the name “Squeaky King” claims to be an international student in Seattle who works part-time collecting corpses dumped in the sewer system for the county government. In his (entirely unsubstantiated) telling, these were the bodies of former middle-class corporate executives and professionals who were thrust into homelessness.

Of course, there is no evidence or photos to back up his implausible claim that a Chinese influencer on a student visa found a part-time government job hauling corpses around Seattle. The Chinese depiction of America’s kill line is more unsubstantiated conspiracy than reality.

As I learned about the kill line, I got to teach Chinese friends about “Chinamaxxing,” which befuddled them just as much as the kill line confused me. Chinamaxxing is the latest social media trend where influencers are embracing and idolizing Chinese culture. There are aspects to Chinamaxxing that are, although uncomfortably Orientalizing, mostly innocuous, such as drinking hot water, doing tai chi, and playing mah-jongg. But others that idealize life in China as zooming around cyberpunk cities in a self-driving electric SUV with a robot waiter erase the reality of daily life in the People’s Republic.

Most people in China suffer from similar social and economic crises that afflict Americans today. The United States’ extreme income inequality is well-known, but China’s is comparable. After accounting for taxes and redistribution, China becomes even more unequal because it falls under the US’s (very low) standards for redistribution. While Chinese inequality has gradually shrunk over recent years, this is mostly due to compression between the top and middle of the income distribution. Those in the bottom 30 percent have been left in the lurch.

Gen Z Chinamaxxers are the ones suffering the most from the crushing costs of college and see China as an escape from it. But while American higher education is exorbitantly expensive, the education affordability crisis in China is even more severe. Parents have to pay for high school, and tutoring is a de facto necessity to keep up with demanding curriculums.

The bottom quintile of Chinese families spend a massive 57 percent of household earnings on their children’s education. While China lacks the widespread student debt that afflicts college-educated Americans, the same problem of massive education costs is felt during the precollege years.

The kill line’s credibility has been reinforced by many videos of the very real problem of homelessness in American cities, but homelessness and extreme poverty are also major problems in China. Chinamaxxing influencers are simply blind to them because the government has successfully criminalized homelessness and driven the “low-end population” out of sight. If China’s poor aren’t at risk of falling below the kill line, it’s because they were never above it to begin with.

More critical Chinese netizens have turned the kill line meme on its head and noted China’s own kill line that disrupts the Chinamaxxing fantasy: turning thirty-five. Age discrimination in hiring is legal in China, and many job postings in tech, civil service, and blue-collar work explicitly ban applicants thirty-five or older. In addition, dismissal rates rise dramatically after workers turn thirty-five. This is because employers believe that those over thirty-five can’t keep up with the seventy-two-hour workweeks that 9–9–6 office culture demands. In China, being thirty-five is its own kill line, where an unexpected layoff can permanently condemn someone to underemployment in the gig economy.

Chinamaxxers’ longing for China resembles conservatives’ fantasies about life in medieval times. In the Right’s imagination, they’d be lords and ladies with castles rather than starving peasants working the land. Similarly, Chinamaxxers imagine themselves as China’s urban elite rather than the mass of impoverished gig workers who deliver their takeout.

The truth is that people just like imagining themselves as economically prosperous. For Chinamaxxers, this desire for material security presents itself under the guise of life in a different country.

Both the “kill line” and “Chinamaxxing” are digital projections born of the same dissatisfactions with the present. For the Chinese observer, the American kill line makes domestic struggles feel manageable by comparison. For Americans, Chinamaxxing is an escape to high-tech efficiency and economic security that feels unattainable at home. Behind these parodies lie two societies that face the same crises of alienation, unemployment, and a weak welfare state. Only by moving beyond these fictions can we build the international solidarity necessary to overcome our shared struggles.

Conrad Blackburn, a Socialist to Represent Harlem in Albany

2026-04-02T16:45:19Z

Socialist, trade unionist, and candidate for New York State Assembly Conrad Blackburn: “If you are taking money from real estate developers, then your first instinct is to deliver for those real estate entities, not the people.”

Socialist New York State Assembly candidate Conrad Blackburn: “Why don't we build people up instead of throwing them in jail and breaking them down?” (Courtesy of Andrea Guinn)

After propelling its first two members to public office in districts in Brooklyn and Queens and a part of the Bronx a decade ago with Julia Salazar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York City Democratic Socialists of America (NYC-DSA) chapter has elected ten additional members into city and state office and brought two already elected city council members into the organization. But the organization has yet to win a seat in Harlem.

Conrad Blackburn, a public defender and trade unionist with the United Auto Workers (UAW), is trying to change that. Blackburn, who has been endorsed by NYC-DSA, several of its elected officials, and other progressive groups, is running for New York State Assembly District 70. The district, which is facing an acute crisis of displacement and poverty, has long been occupied by a more moderate part of the New York Democratic Party; it is currently represented by Jordan Wright, whose father Keith held the seat for over two decades.

In 2018, Blackburn moved to New York City to work at The Bronx Defenders, a nonprofit providing legal services for poor people. Frustrated by low wages and a lack of workplace freedoms, he and his coworkers organized a union in the spring of 2020 as a part of the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys (ALAA), a part of UAW Region 9A. A couple of years prior to that, living in Brooklyn for the summer with his family while he studied for the bar exam, he discovered Salazar’s campaign and by volunteering to canvass for her was introduced to DSA.

Jacobin contributor Peter Lucas sat down with Blackburn to discuss the similarities between his upbringing in the South and the current political realities of Harlem, the consequences of corporate negligence in working-class neighborhoods, and suing Eric Adams.

Peter Lucas

Can you tell us a bit about your background?

Conrad Blackburn

I am originally from Florida. I was born in Miami, but my middle and high school years were in Tallahassee. Both my parents immigrated from Jamaica, but my dad left my family when I was five or six years old. I lived with my mom and my little sisters in a single-parent household. We grew up poor. We lived in the projects.

I was fortunate enough to do well in school growing up. I was in classes with a lot of upper-middle- and upper-class children. I was often the only black kid in my classes. When I would visit my classmates’ homes after school, not that far from where I lived, I’d see the big, fancy houses they lived in with both parents. They had food. They had everything that you could ever want. And then, I would go home and see all the things we didn’t have.

We struggled to get food. Sometimes I ate rice-and-ketchup sandwiches for lunch; sometimes I ate bread and butter for dinner. Electricity was not always there. We occasionally had to live without the lights. We would have to boil water to get hot water at times.

I started working at a young age, maybe thirteen or fourteen, just so my mom wouldn’t have to worry about me having some pocket change to ride the bus or get lunch. Growing up in the projects, I was routinely harassed by the police. Walking to school or around the neighborhood, cops would stop me and search me unconstitutionally. They wouldn’t find anything, but they wanted to strip me of my dignity. I never let that happen. I grew up next to people who were drug dealers and made money in other ways in the projects. I saw a lot of destitute poverty.

My mom often struggled to pay our bills. I remember the first time when I realized what it meant when my mom would pick up an envelope and begin to cry. It pained me to see my mother cry over bills, and that was the first thing that radicalized me. I didn’t want to see my mom hurt in that way, and I knew I wanted to do what I could to make sure my mom would never cry again.

Peter Lucas

Do you see a common thread in the struggles that you faced in the South reflected in Harlem?

Conrad Blackburn

I see a lot of the same issues. It boils down to our ability to live a dignified life and all of the oppressive forces — from the state to big developers to corporations — stripping us of that dignity. There are similarities in exposure to pollution and overpolicing. The housing situation is dire here, the same way it was in the hood in Florida.

Many apartments in Harlem are like shoeboxes. When I lived in the South, our place in the projects couldn’t have been more than six hundred or seven hundred square feet. It would take an eternity to get anything repaired by the building. Growing up, they tried to paint over the outside of the building sometimes to cover up the disrepair, like putting a Band-Aid on a stab wound. In Harlem, if you need to make a repair on your apartment, it takes a long time and is often insufficient. Knocking doors for this campaign, we have encountered people who are heating their homes with their stove, because their boiler has been broken for days.

Peter Lucas

How is your campaign reaching these voters? Are you doing something different, as opposed to what you might see in a traditional campaign?

Conrad Blackburn

I am first and foremost an organizer, and I would take that approach in office. In this campaign, we’re not just knocking doors and asking people to support us. We’re knocking doors and asking people what they need.

The most common issue is housing-related: rent, repairs, utilities, and so on. When I met the gentleman who was heating his house with a stove, I asked him: Have you talked to your landlord? Obviously, that’s the first thing you’re going to do if you have an issue. But that doesn’t mean the landlord is going to respond or actually address the problem. Asking this opens the conversation up to further questions like: Have you talked to anyone else in your building? Are they having the same problems? Have you guys made a plan to come together and collectively do something to get your landlord to act?

I often hear that it’s difficult to rely on other people; it’s hard to get them to actually follow up. I get it. Because so many people have to fight so many struggles, they’re too burdened to even think about trying to band together with their neighbors to fight against their landlord.

After these conversations, we put anyone that we encounter having an issue like that in touch with the tenant organizers on our team. The plan is to eventually have the organizations that our tenant organizers work with organize the buildings and lead know-your-rights trainings.

It is a methodical approach to raising people’s collective consciousness, to get them to see they are more powerful together, that they don’t have to accept defeat or accept the fact that landlords are not going to resolve their issues. They can organize collectively and fight.

Peter Lucas

You mentioned the environmental issues facing Harlemites. On your platform, you address business pollution in your “community protection” plank, which isn’t often associated with that.

Conrad Blackburn

I try to include a lot under the umbrella of community protection. Community protection is about protecting the community from things like an abusive police force, the criminal punishment system, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). But it’s also about protecting the community from predatory corporations that buy a building to evict all of the tenants, so that they can knock it down to build a new high-rise where they can charge more exorbitant rent, and then in the process of constructing that new building, engage in a level of negligence that leads to things like Legionnaires’ being spread.

This past year, seven people died, and more than a hundred got sick in Harlem after contracting Legionnaires’ disease, and the biggest source of it was a construction project near Harlem Hospital. Legionella developed in the water in the cooling towers for the HVAC systems after proper testing and maintenance protocols were not followed and then spread into the air, making it toxic to live or work by the hospital.

It’s not the first time Harlem has had a Legionnaires’ outbreak, and there’s been another outbreak since. Last month, another outbreak, this time on 3333 Broadway, was confirmed. We live with the fear of our water having legionella in it because of this. If you knock on doors in this district, people will tell you that sometimes when they turn on their faucet brown stuff comes out. So community protection has to include protecting our neighbors from the corporations that dirty our water or air. I want to hold corporations accountable for this sort of negligence.

Peter Lucas

Harlem has a rich political history. How do you situate your campaign in the context of Harlem’s often-radical politics?

Conrad Blackburn

One of the main things that originally attracted me to Harlem is that my politics were formed by the radical leaders of the past in this neighborhood, who led the civil rights movement — people who were fighting for black liberation. And there was an understanding that in order for black liberation to actually hold, we have to fight a class struggle together.

Malcolm X, A. Philip Randolph, Ella Baker — all black socialist leaders — these were the people that were forming and fomenting radical political activism in Harlem. They were all talking about the class struggle being the foremost struggle that leads to everyone being able to lead a life that is dignified.

Peter Lucas

There’s also a history of political establishment in Harlem. You’re running against a political family: Keith Wright held this seat for twenty-four years and his son, Jordan, has represented the district since 2024. What is the political establishment in Harlem like?

Conrad Blackburn

The establishment’s whole goal is to build and conglomerate power for themselves. They want to continue their family legacy and have their names etched in Harlem history. In that pursuit, they are leaving the community behind, as they court money from interests that are not aligned with the people of Harlem. If you are taking money from real estate developers, then your first instinct is to deliver for those real estate entities, not the people. Listening to those moneyed interests has led to displacement, to Harlemites living a less dignified life.

Displacement is the number-one issue in this community. It is this stripping away the rich history of culture and arts and music and food in Harlem.

Peter Lucas

The broader New York political establishment has attacked socialism and DSA, in particular around the question of identity. What do you make of these criticisms?

Conrad Blackburn

It’s ironic they attack DSA for being a gentrifier organization, but DSA has never run a race in Harlem. Darializa Avila Chevalier and I are the first socialists to run in this district. It’s ironic that the machine would say that DSA is a gentrifying force when there are people who have been in power for decades, overseeing an extreme amount of displacement and gentrification in Harlem, because of the policies they endorse, on account of the special interests they are courting.

Part of why they feel they can make that attack is because DSA is an organization that does have a lot of white people. But there are not only white people in DSA. There have been people of color doing amazing work in DSA for years. Nearly all of NYC-DSA’s socialists in office are people of color. The attacks that they’re making ultimately just don’t ring true. It is incumbent on DSA to build power in Harlem, and that’s exactly what I hope this campaign does.

Peter Lucas

How did you come to join DSA?

Conrad Blackburn

In 2018, when I first moved to New York after law school, I lived with my aunt in Brooklyn for a summer to study for the bar. I didn’t know anyone in New York other than my aunts and my family that lived here. It was the same summer that Julia Salazar was running her first campaign for state senate. Seeing somebody openly running as a socialist for a state office was inspiring, so I volunteered. That was my introduction to DSA.

But originally, my conception of DSA was that it was a white-led organization. As someone whose politics are rooted in a black radical tradition, I did not look behind the veil to see what was going on internally in DSA for a long time. But I kept hearing about all of the amazing socialists that they were able to elect to office. I continued to pay attention to what was going on in DSA, supporting socialists who were running for office in the ways that I could.

It wasn’t until later that I got a better sense of the organization. I signed up to be a member; I started going to meetings. I attended the endorsement forums and saw DSA’s democratic process in action. It reminded me of my union, and in seeing that, it clicked for me. I was like, okay, this is great, this is my political home. This reminds me of my union — how democratic it is, how member-led it is.

Peter Lucas

How did you get involved with the UAW?

Conrad Blackburn

I got involved with the UAW through organizing the union in my office. I work at a public defense organization. In my second year working there, a few of my close friends and I got together. We talked about how we were living paycheck to paycheck and couldn’t make ends meet. We didn’t have the protections and freedoms that we wanted in our workplace. We decided that the best option would be to form a union.

It is crazy because there is so much work that goes into making that happen, and we were just a bunch of young kids saying, oh yeah, let’s do it. But we made it a reality by organizing. We went to the ALAA, which represents all of the indigent service providers in the city, and it fortunately had the institutional knowledge to know who to go to unionize. That’s how we got connected with the UAW, of which ALAA is an affiliate, and one of its union organizers led us through the process.

Peter Lucas

Can you tell us a little bit about your legal work?

Conrad Blackburn

I’ve been doing this for eight years now. I started as a criminal defense attorney, which I still practice, and I also did a year of immigration. I worked on deportation defense during the first Trump administration. I did three years of policy work. At my office, policy work is a dual role, so I did my own criminal defense case load at the same time as I was doing policy work, lobbying and legislating trying to get bills changed.

Peter Lucas

And you sued Eric Adams?

Conrad Blackburn

My focus was on prisoners’ rights, which led me to work on the city’s anti-solitary confinement bill, which is now Local Law 42. I worked closely with grassroots organizers and groups like the Jails Action Coalition that have been organizing to stop the ills of solitary confinement for decades. I helped them draft the bill. We knew Mayor Adams was going to veto it, so we successfully secured a veto-proof supermajority.

Once it passed, Mayor Adams issued a whole bunch of illegal executive orders to stop the implementation of the bill. In doing this, he violated the separation of powers doctrine and engaged in executive overreach. I brought this to the impact litigation arm in my office and pressed to take the research to the city council. Initially skeptical, it decided to take the case and sue the mayor. We knew for this case that the city council would be a more credible voice because we know that our clients’ stories often get discounted and shot down. We won; a judge ultimately found that what Mayor Adams did initially with those executive voters was unconstitutional.

Peter Lucas

What is the current state of prisons and solitary confinement in New York?

Conrad Blackburn

Right now in New York City, there are people who are complaining that there’s no heat in some of the housing units at Rikers Island. There are people who are being locked in cells for hours and hours of the day, in violation of Local Law 42, not being fed, the cells that they inhabit are tiny. The beds are not real beds — it’s a piece of metal with a little pad on top of it.

People don’t have regular access to their family members; sometimes visiting hours are constrained because a building will go on lockdown, where people are kept in their cells for twenty-three hours a day and not able to get out. People are not taken to their medical appointments. There are people with significant mental health complications in Rikers that aren’t getting the medications or the mental health care that they need. A lot of young people who are at Rikers Island are not receiving the schooling that they need because of fear of leaving their cell and being attacked. These are the lives people are leading inside of these institutions, and they scream at the top of their lungs but nobody hears them.

Mind you, there are people who are in Rikers Island because bail was set on them, not having been found guilty of anything — legally innocent but still sitting in these types of conditions. Oftentimes this adds to the cycle of violence, because the things people experience when they’re in jail, the kind of torturous things that I was talking about, where you can’t get food or are locked in your cell, and you take that with you when you leave. People suffer so much trauma and torture that is then brought back to the community, back to the home.

If you look at Kalief Browder‘s story, he was sitting at Rikers Island because he allegedly stole a backpack. He was repeatedly found not guilty, taken to court, and taken back to Rikers Island, but then was put into solitary confinement. There,he developed mental health complications from being placed into solitary confinement. After the case was dismissed, he got out, not found guilty, but because of what he went through, he ended up taking his own life. Those are the conditions and the consequences that people face living in jails and in prisons.

Peter Lucas

Where do you think that money should be invested instead?

Conrad Blackburn

We know that poverty drives crime. When people don’t have economic opportunities, when people can’t afford to live a dignified life, they turn to what they know or to what’s easy. Sometimes that is harming other community members, and that’s how crime is formed and fermented.

Instead of spending money on throwing people into cages, instead of spending money on overpolicing our communities, why don’t we spend money on ensuring that there’s free education for people who live in the city? Why don’t we fully fund the City University of New York? Why don’t we build people up instead of throwing them in jail and breaking them down? The more educational opportunities we provide people, the more levers of society they will have access to and can then pursue whatever field of education and work that they want. We have to be able to provide these opportunities to people.

The Right Has a Lofty Vision for Schools. Where’s Ours?

2026-04-02T15:51:55Z

The Right is selling a vision of classical education that promises to build character and nurture wonder. Liberals are stuck aiming for higher test scores and employability. Public education defenders need our own inspiring take on the meaning of school.

Conservative classical schools promise wonder, virtue, and the life of the mind. Liberal education pundits want higher test scores. The Left needs to articulate its own expansive vision for public education — before the Right claims that territory for good. (Brett Coomer / Houston Chronicle via Getty Images)

On a January webinar for Chalkbeat, Lindsey Burke, a senior education official in the Trump administration, faced an audience question about the administration’s rationale for moving K-12 programs to the Department of Labor — part of its ongoing effort to dismantle the Education Department.

“Arguably schools have broader purposes — civic, moral, and social — rather than just preparation for employment,” read Chalkbeat national editor Erica Meltzer. “Can you speak to some of these broader purposes of education and how they might be safeguarded?”

“You know, I actually couldn’t agree with that more,” Burke, who authored Project 2025’s education section, replied with a smiling glance at the ceiling. “Education really is about forming human souls, right? And about preparing individuals to inherit the blessings and liberties of a free society.”

You’d be hard-pressed to find a Democratic analog to this exalted vision for K-12 schooling. Liberal education punditry is instead relentlessly negative, painting a grim picture of deluded parents who refuse to admit that our dumb kids can’t read or do math. Coddled by “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI), the chorus of columnists laments, American students are hopelessly unprepared for today’s job market. Their solution? A full return to the punishing high stakes of No Child Left Behind — the apparent raison d’être of Rahm Emanuel’s 2028 presidential flirtations.

The idea that school should mainly aim to boost human capital (by raising test scores) dominated bipartisan education reform efforts from Ronald Reagan through Barack Obama. Those days of neoliberal bipartisanship feel like a distant daydream now, but the centrist intelligentsia is increasingly eager to reimpose that version of accountability on our public schools, perhaps forgetting the profound, bipartisan unpopularity of standardized curriculum and test-obsessed schooling.

Meanwhile, the Right has graduated from highlighting skills gaps and industry demands to openly pursuing the demolition of universal, secular public education. Since Donald Trump’s first election, we’ve seen a phenomenal expansion of statewide (and now federal) voucher programs, which divert taxpayer money from traditional public schools and funnel it into unaccountable, often religious and discriminatory, private options.

Along the way, MAGA intellectuals have been arguing that schools should aim for something much loftier than job training. Here’s Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn, of 1776 Commission fame, describing his institution’s brand of conservative classical education (coming soon to a Christian-flavored charter school near you):

Students need to understand the fundamentals of the natural world as well as have a wonder-filled grasp of its complexity, detail, and exuberant variety. The humanities, too, are neither superfluous nor decorative. They are the stuff whereby we become most fully human, whereby we “stretch out” toward ourselves at our best and truest.

In today’s distracting world of cheap content and screen-driven meaninglessness, it’s not hard to grasp the appeal of a pedagogy that transcends market forces, nurturing our human quest for truth. The MAGA-powered right’s previous iteration of K-12 messaging — à la Moms for Liberty and Libs of TikTok — largely ran out of steam and turned its cultural battalions toward higher ed, finding the parent masses vexingly skeptical that our kids’ guidance counselors were coaching them to use cat litter. But this talk of classrooms brimming with wonder and purpose seems perfectly pitched to attract families disenchanted with an education system that’s been yoked to bloodless industry standards.

For those of us who wish to protect our public schools from the existential threats posed by people like Lindsey Burke, it’s worth asking: What’s our countervision? Can we articulate our own expansive philosophy of K-12 learning that makes us more fully human? Are we interested in forming souls or merely forming STEM-steeped résumés? If we’re serious about the future of public education and democracy, we can’t afford to continue neglecting these questions.

The Classical Revival

Conservative classical academies have proliferated in the MAGA era, with at least 264 new charter and private schools branded as “classical” opening between 2019 and 2023, per one sector analysis. These schools herald the so-called transcendentals of Beauty, Goodness, and Truth, with a heavy emphasis on virtue. Their websites and promotional materials describe students and teachers “drinking deeply” from time-honored texts that usher them into conversation with the greatest thinkers of Western civilization. Syllabi revolve around ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, biblical and early Christian writing, and US founding documents, which are treated with a religious reverence. That’s no coincidence, as many of the right-wing strategists pushing the expansion of classical alternatives to public school subscribe to the view that the United States was founded on Christian principles, and that only scriptural morality can reverse civilizational decline.

The largest of the classical charter chains, Great Hearts Academies, claims approximately 30,000 students in public charter schools across Arizona, Texas, and Louisiana (as well as explicitly biblical private schools that direct parents to apply for public funding through one of Arizona’s generous voucher programs). Great Hearts promises, on its website, to cultivate wisdom through “shared inquiry and honest discussion.”

“We don’t want [students] to be merely chasing a carrot or running from a metaphorical stick,” explains Brandon Crowe, superintendent of Great Hearts Arizona. He continues:

We want them to live a full life, where they want to understand the human condition and all that the world has to offer — not just, what’s the grade on the next test, or how do I get into that college or that job?

Great Hearts mathematics instructor Clifton Keiser goes on to explain, in the same Phoenix local news segment, that teaching isn’t merely about transmitting discrete, testable skills. For Keiser, it’s a matter of sharing his deep and abiding love of math.

Sometimes I feel like these bright-eyed classical ed evangelists are reading my mind. I became a public-school English teacher because I wanted to share my deep love of stories. A teacher’s passion is infectious, and I found that when I was able to convey mine to my students, they were inspired — even if the material was hard. I was excited by the challenge of luring a group of checked-out seniors into boisterous debate over Aaron’s role in Titus Andronicus, or making room for the fraught loyalties in Octavia Butler’s Kindred to coax self-conscious ninth-graders out of their shells. I taught in underresourced districts where students faced significant poverty-related barriers to academic learning. But the juicy human questions framed by great literature held just as much power for them as they do for me, regardless of their abysmal standardized test scores.

Time and again, though, my desire to share my love with my students was frustrated by the technocratic constraints imposed by education reform. We rarely had time to immerse ourselves in whole works of fiction, due to state standards’ emphasis on “informational texts” and scripted curriculum’s tendency to serve up literary classics as decontextualized excerpts. I remember feeling crushed one day after helping my tenth-graders prepare for our state’s standardized English language arts exam. They’d gotten hung up on a practice question involving a passage from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein — a thrilling page-turner that’s well-suited for tenth-graders, who, in my experience, are fighting to defend the romantic idealism of early adolescence from the encroachment of cynical adulthood. But in their test prep packet, Shelley’s awesome monster novel appeared as a dull, sterile fragment, seemingly selected to alienate them with its abstruseness.

“We teach the standards, not the books,” I was told on another occasion, when I protested having to move on to the next unit before my students had completed their riveting journey through the darkness of Macbeth. They hadn’t believed they could read a Shakespeare play, and yet in spite of everything they were up against, it had captivated them. Whose fault was this tragedy, and how could the witches’ impossible prophecy be realized? They desperately wanted to understand, and now I was forced to tell them that that didn’t matter. Moving on to RL.9–10.10 was more important.

Claiming the Canon

The ethnonationalist right doesn’t own the concept of classical education, despite energetically claiming its mantle, and it’s worth stressing that not all classical schools affirm right-wing values. Indeed, there are compelling leftist cases for the Socratic study of time-honored texts. The great books of the Western canon — always a politically contested terrain — offer as good an entry point as any into conversations that disrupt the powers that constrain and divide us. And allowing young people to engage in shared inquiry about what it means to be human can go a long way toward supporting democracy in a time of civic crisis. Using this mode of study to promote a right-wing agenda is more the exception than the rule in the postsecondary great books world, even among conservative scholars.

Still, it makes sense that the veneration of old books and ancient wisdom can be put in service of reactionary projects. Hillsdale, Great Hearts, and other classical charter chains maintain cozy relationships with Republican lawmakers and routinely weigh in on right-wing legal causes even as they profess to keep politics out of the classroom. And while these kinds of schools may claim to welcome everyone, they’re free to make choices, like not offering free lunch or English learner programs, that have the effect of weeding out marginalized students. In any case, it’s hard to say how you can be value-neutral about the sanctity of Western heritage at a time when our leaders are working out a genetic definition of Americanness and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are violently detaining nonwhite US citizens.

Notwithstanding these concerns about the illiberal, or postliberal, uses of classical schooling, I can’t deny that these guys make a powerful pitch. The belief that old writing contains esoteric keys to unlock soul treasures is certainly exciting — which is more than you can say for reading to “find the main idea and three supporting details.” Ironically, the extractive form of reading that counts in the wasteland of perpetual test prep is precisely the kind of reading that LLMs are rendering obsolete. But LLMs don’t have a consciousness that can be altered by timeless prose.

For many students today, reading means staring at dry passages in order to answer formulaic questions, to pass the test, to get the credential, to (hopefully) get a job, where they can spend their days waiting to clock out. Small wonder that adolescents are struggling with nihilism and despair, when we’ve taught them that nothing they do during their six-hour school day can matter for its own sake.

In response to declining test scores and rising absenteeism, Democratic voices are calling for “common sense” solutions like holding back poor readers and threatening parents of truant children with jail time. But what are we doing to make school a humane and nourishing place where young people actually want to be?

Public Education Renewal

We’re living through a period of acute instability. The neoliberal bipartisanship that powered education reform through the early 2000s has all but vanished, and populist and authoritarian approaches are vying to take its place. Trump’s underwater poll numbers suggest that Americans are not prepared to give up on the common good just yet or abandon pluralistic democracy, messy though it can be. As various thinkers have pointed out, this transition period offers an opportunity for us to advance a more robust, sustainable vision for public education.

The intense backlash to vouchers in states like Texas shows that the GOP’s school choice platform is a particular weakness, capable of pushing voters across party lines. Although traditional public schools have been battered by defunding and punitive reforms, they remain near and dear to the communities they serve. They’re arguably the only institutions that still bring us together across our differences, making it possible for us to see ourselves as part of a common enterprise — “We the People” — with common understandings about the world. At a time when basic facts are contested and polarization has fractured our body politic, this collaborative endeavor represents our clearest hope. But it won’t work if we pay families to opt out and pursue boutique private ideological and religious alternatives. And it also won’t work if we embrace accountability systems that revolve around standardized tests, which, by definition, only value the things that students can do in isolation.

What might a lofty and inclusive vision for K-12 look like? It would make sense to start by asking what matters to students, who are feeling less and less motivated to come to school at all. Those who have spent time with today’s young people know that they are much more than the illiterate cell-phone addicts we see caricatured in media portrayals. They deserve to reach for something more rousing than standardized definitions of “proficiency,” which have been forced on them with little regard for their agency or interiority. They deserve to read a gripping novel in its entirety, not because it will help them get into college but because their time on earth is precious and good stories can spark joy.

They deserve to come together for rich dialogue and deep deliberation simply because they are human beings, with beating hearts, and searching minds, and yes, souls that long for meaning.

The War on Iran Is More Expensive Than You Think

2026-04-02T13:11:18Z

In the first two weeks of its war on Iran, the US spent an estimated $2.1 billion a day. It’s no wonder Donald Trump is saying that the cost of war means the federal government can’t afford to spend money to help Americans meet their basic needs.

The Trump administration refuses to disclose how much its war on Iran has cost and prefers the topic not be discussed. The best estimate is that the US spent $28.7 billion in the first two weeks of the conflict, or $2.1 billion a day on average. (US Navy via Getty Images)

If Donald Trump can be depended on for anything, it’s saying the quiet part out loud.

At an Easter lunch event at the White House yesterday, the president explained that the cost of war meant the the US government couldn’t afford to spend money on helping Americans meet their basic needs:

The United States can’t take care of daycare. That has to be up to a state. We’re a big country. We have fifty states. We have all these other people; we’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of daycare. You’ve got to let a state take care of daycare, and they should pay for it too. Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things. . . . You can’t do it on a federal [level]. We have to take care of one thing: military protection — we have to guard the country.

Trump: We can't take care of daycare. We're a big country. We're fighting wars. It's not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these things. pic.twitter.com/vLGpp7KJnm

— FactPost (@factpostnews) April 1, 2026

The vast majority of Americans will likely be none too thrilled to hear that the US government has to forgo paying for health care and childcare because it is spending all our public money on the military. But Trump’s comments likely reflect his awareness that the United States’ current war on Iran has been extremely expensive.

How Much Has the US Spent on the Iran War?

The Trump administration won’t say and prefers the cost not be discussed.

The United States spent an estimated $28.7 billion in the first two weeks of the Iran war, or $2.1 billion a day on average. This is based on my analysis of officials’ statements, federal procurement and operations data, and reporting on military deployments and armament use. This estimate refers only to direct war costs — near-term expenses for military operations, munitions, and the like — and not indirect costs, which include broader and longer-term factors like economic impact and veterans’ care.

This might be a higher estimate than you’ve seen elsewhere. Those estimates are too low. This one could be too.

Why Most Estimates Are Too Low

In a recent closed-door briefing with select lawmakers, Pentagon officials estimated the war had cost $11.3 billion in the first week. That figure, despite not accounting for much besides munition expenses, is the closest the Trump administration has come to saying how much it’s spending on the Iran war. Mainstream media outlets repeat the figure over and over, as their compulsive need to cite figures from government officials clashes with officials not giving any. It’s also the basis for popular cost estimates from think tanks.

For example, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) originally said the war had cost $3.7 billion over the first one hundred hours, which became one of the most widely cited estimates, though probably not for the reason CSIS intended. In the media, the chasm between the CSIS and Pentagon estimates became a popular trope for how the cost of the Iran War was smashing expectations. CSIS then released another estimate — this one built pretty much entirely around the Pentagon’s — which became popular in its own right, even serving as the basis for estimates by news outlets and other think tanks.

The prevailing war cost estimates have two things in common. First, they’re all better than the dozens of artificial-intelligence-generated war cost trackers, which are empty calories empirically. Worse, they’re unaccountable. Numbers wrong? Blame the model. There’s no one to hear your justifiable criticism; it’s like being cut off in traffic by a driverless car.

Second, because the prevailing cost estimates are ultimately based on the Pentagon’s, they reproduce its inherent flaws. The biggest is munition expenditures (which are pretty much all the Pentagon’s estimate included, given all the other types of war costs it left out). The result is a pervasive understatement of how expensive the Iran war actually is.

The Pentagon tracks munition “burn rate” costs by merging operational logistics (what’s being fired in what quantities) with financial values (what each one costs). My beef is with how it determines unit costs. I don’t think the Pentagon’s method is wrong; I do think it’s irrelevant — so immersed in the internal logic of departmental bookkeeping that its conclusions are too insular to be of much use. The war costs that show up on the Pentagon’s ledger are different (read: lower) than the war costs the US public will be asked (read: forced) to pay.

For example, the Navy logs the number of SM-2 interceptors it’s firing into the Ordnance Tracking System; that quantity gets fed into the Navy Enterprise Resource Planning system, which multiplies the reported quantity by the SM-2’s current unit cost; that figure goes into the Agency Financial Report, which eventually gets rolled up into the Pentagon’s consolidated financial statements. The cost to fire one SM-2 is based on something called moving average cost, which determines unit cost by dividing the total value of the SM-2’s stockpile by the number of SM-2s in it. The value of a munition’s stockpile is a historical average that changes with every new purchase of that munition. If its unit cost is $1.1 million and 50 are withdrawn from the stockpile and fired, the Pentagon’s ledger would show $55 million in expenses from consuming those munitions. The war cost estimate unnamed Pentagon officials gave lawmakers likely reflects this accounting method, as it’s the department’s standard.

How does this standard lead to underestimates of war costs? The aforementioned interceptor illustrates the mechanics perfectly: the US military has reportedly fired lots of SM-2 interceptors during the Iran war, but the Pentagon doesn’t buy SM-2s anymore; they’re being phased out. The SM-6 — the more advanced and expensive successor — is purchased instead. So each time an SM-2 is fired in the ongoing war, the Pentagon’s accounting system registers a cost closer to the SM-2’s $1.1 million unit cost from 2011 than the $5.3 million unit cost in 2026 for the SM-6 that will replace it. For US taxpayers, the cost of firing 50 SM-2s isn’t $55 million; it’s $265 million.

Some prevailing estimates have used replacement costs, but for estimates they designed to fit within the Pentagon’s $11.3 billion figure, which reflects moving average cost. Using replacement costs doesn’t correct much when you’re working within a vastly understated pot of funds.

Why This Estimate Could Be Too Low Too

Three reasons, among several others:

US military assets and personnel poured into the Middle East and Europe as part of a historic buildup ahead of the war. I haven’t yet accounted for the prepositioning of assets, and my estimate for personnel is probably too low. The only prewar personnel cost I included is for activating reservists, which reflects mobilization at the scale of last year’s war with Iran, adjusted for the 3.8 percent troop pay increase in 2026. For the June 2025 war, the US mobilized 17,193 reservists — 12,396 deployed to CENTCOM and 4,797 to EUCOM — totaling $1.96 billion, based on my analysis of Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force budget documents. This money came from the $8 billion war fund made available by Sec. 1421 of P.L. 119-4 and executed on June 16, 2025, a day after Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth announced the United States was surging forces into the Middle East in a “defensive” maneuver. The US bombed Iran five days later (using funding from Joe Biden’s Israel aid bill — one of the more obscure reasons why concern over Palestine doesn’t make one a single-issue voter). I haven’t yet found data indicating specifically how much higher my 2026 estimate should be.
The single most expensive military asset reportedly damaged or destroyed by Iranian forces is a $1.3 billion AN/FPS-132 early-warning radar at a US base in Qatar. Because the radar was originally funded by a US foreign military sale to Qatar, I did not include any potential restoration costs for it in my estimate. Methodologically, this is a questionable decision, as it assumes Qatar has the appetite to pay the United States to replace a billion-dollar radar destroyed in a war the US basically started for fun. (It certainly wasn’t out of necessity.)
Hegseth said the ongoing war “has seven times the intensity of Israel’s previous operations against Iran during the 12-day war.” If that translates to anywhere near seven times the cost, I’ve badly underestimated US war costs.

Israel spent an estimated $6.7 billion on the Twelve-Day War in June 2025, based on my analysis of Israeli budget documents. In September 2025, the Knesset approved a supplemental bill to cover military costs related to its June war with Iran and its planned “conquering” of Gaza in May. A table from the explanatory section of the bill (below) shows 22.7 billion shekels for the military (lit. “Ministry of Security”), 245 million for national insurance allowances, 6.2 billion for intelligence agencies, and 1.7 billion for interest payments. Ignore the rightmost column with budget codes.

Excerpt from a September 2025 supplemental bill in the Israeli Knesset covering military costs. (The Knesset)

Including the funding for intelligence agencies, there were 28.94 billion shekels in total military spending in the bill, including 6.4 billion for IDF personnel — the bill increased personnel expenses (“הוצאות כח אדם”) to 39.02 billion shekels, up from the 32.66 billion in the original 2025 budget. The Israeli government attributed the additional personnel funding to the May–August 2025 Gaza offensive and the remaining 22.5 billion shekels — $6.7 billion — to the war with Iran.

This is plausible. The original 2025 budget assumed Israel’s March assault (during the purported ceasefire) but likely did not account for the full costs of its May assault (also during the purported ceasefire). Israel called up tens of thousands of reservists for the May operation, which was plagued by setbacks and ultimately failed, hinting at significant overruns in personnel costs. It’s also plausible that the bulk of the supplemental funding was for the June 2025 war, which quickly went over budget due to operations (including the tens of thousands of flight hours for bombing missions and Mossad actions in Iran), munitions (like the thousands of bombs Israel dropped on Iran), and an estimated $1.25 billion in interceptors.

If by “seven times the intensity” Hegseth meant seven times the cost of the June 2025 war, my estimate is about $20 billion too low.

Methodology and Itemized War Costs

Operations

Estimated cost: $4.25 billion

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has data showing how much it costs to operate various combat units. I estimated the type and quantity of units participating in the Iran war by referring to open-source intelligence and media reports. For example, using USNI’s fleet tracker, I counted fifteen destroyers operating in the Arabian Sea, Persian Gulf, Red Sea, and Eastern Mediterranean at the start of the war.

However, CBO’s data is calibrated to peacetime and not wartime, and war makes everything more expensive, including war.

To estimate how much more expensive war makes military operations expenses, I analyzed operating (specifically, Operation and Support) spending in the regular or “base” Pentagon budget and in the supplemental war budget from 2003 to 2014.

To isolate the proportional increase in operating costs attributable to war, I did two things. First, I measured wartime operations spending relative to base operations spending rather than in absolute terms to help control for cost growth not directly related to war (base operations spending rose by roughly 13% above inflation in 2003–2014). Second, I measured operations spending on a per-active-duty-troop basis to help control for cost growth solely attributable to the scale of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

War increased operating costs by 33% on average from 2003 to 2014, which translates to a 1.33 wartime operating cost multiplier that I used to convert the CBO data from peacetime to wartime costs. Although the multiplier is derived from data for a particular time (2003–2014) and place (Iraq, Afghanistan), it provides a benchmark for how sustained combat has historically increased operating costs. I suspect this multiplier is low, based on my more granular research. To name just one example, the inflation-adjusted increase in operating costs for three helicopters — CH-47D, UH-60L, and AH-64D — from 1998 (peacetime) to 2007 (wartime) was 140%, 262%, and 541%, respectively.

Weapons

Estimated cost: $20.77 billion

The weapons itemized below are grouped into offensive and defensive munitions. I make this distinction because each group requires its own methodology.

Offensive

The last time the Pentagon provided a figure on the number of munitions it dropped or fired during the war was on March 3, when CENTCOM Commander Bradley Cooper said the United States had “struck nearly 2,000 targets with more than 2,000 munitions.” On March 4, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine told the press, “I know there have been a lot of questions about munitions. . . . I want to tell you, teammates, as a matter of practice, I don’t want to be talking about quantities. . . . We consider it an operational security matter.” You know the Trump administration really doesn’t want people talking about war costs when they deny transparency into the vaguest of metrics.

However, the Pentagon discloses the number of targets it has struck, albeit imprecisely — “over 6,000” as General Caine said in a March 13 briefing — which can be used to infer munition expenditures.

How do you estimate munition costs based on the number of targets alone?

First, guess what General Caine meant by “over 6,000” targets. My guess: 6,400.

Second, multiply the estimated targets by the average number of munitions US and/or NATO forces used per target during a recent war. Or three wars, if you’re a show-off with poor time management.

Operation Iraqi Freedom (first thirty days only), Iraq, March 19, 2003–April 18, 2003
- 29,199 munitions released / 19,898 targets struck = 1.47 munitions/target*
- *Adjusted to 1.01 munitions/target to account for non-precision-guided munitions, though this might be an overcorrection.
Operation Unified Protector (NATO), Libya, March 31, 2011–October 31, 2011
- 8,112 munitions released / ~6,000 targets struck = 1.35 munitions/target
Operation Inherent Resolve, Iraq & Syria, October 16, 2014–January 20, 2017
- 65,461 munitions released / 39,608 targets struck = 1.65 munitions/target

Average of these wars’ average munitions per target = 1.36 munition/target. 6,400 targets times 1.36 munitions per target = 4,624 munitions.

Of these 4,624 munitions, I assumed a 35–65% split between the very expensive, long-range, “stand-off” munitions used en masse during the early days of the war and the less expensive, short-range, “stand-in” munitions the United States has used more frequently since. The estimated split is based on officials’ statements.

Stand-Off Munitions

Quantities were estimated based on media reports, open-source intelligence, historical data, and forensic analysis of arms and munitions use. Munitions (unit cost) include: Tomahawk ($2 million), ATACMS ($1.6 million), PrSM ($2.5 million), AGM-88 HARM/AARGM/AARGM-ER ($1.9 million for the AARGM-ER, which replaces the AARGM, which replaced the HARM), JASSM ($2.9 million), JSOW (shares JASSM’s $2.9 million unit cost, as JASSM replaces the JSOW. However, I halved the associated cost to account for JASSM having twice the payload of JSOW.)

This includes 725 Tomahawk missiles, matching the rate at which they were fired during the first two weeks of Operation Iraqi Freedom — approximately 400 were fired during the first four days of both the 2003 Iraq War and 2026 Iran War. Other estimated quantities: 75 ATACMS, 55 PrSM, 1,016 JASSM, 600 AGM-88, 575 JSOW.

Stand-In Munitions

The estimated quantities of the following guided bombs are based on the distribution of guided bombs dropped during the first 30 days of the 2003 Iraq War (2,000-pound bombs, 36%; 1,000-pound, 17%; 500-pound, 47%).

2,000-pound GBU-31 (MK84/BLU-109 warhead + JDAM)
- Quantity: 674
- Unit cost: $107,266 (warhead $39,250 + JDAM $68,016)
1,000-pound GBU 32 (MK83/BLU-110 warhead + JDAM)
- Quantity: 330
- Unit cost: $78,923
500-pound GBU 38 (MK82/BLU-111 warhead + JDAM)
- Quantity: 877
- Unit cost: $74,975

Estimated Hellfire expenditures were based on media reports and open-source intelligence.

Hellfire missile
- Quantity: 200
- Unit cost: $249,506 (JAGM replacement cost, as JAGM is replacing the Hellfire)

These figures exclude the unspecified but reportedly large number of LUCAS one-way drones fired (~$35,000 each) as they were likely used predominately to saturate enemy defenses rather than destroy specific targets (Cooper likely excluded these drones from his munitions count on March 3). Also excluded are many of the “tens of thousands of pieces of ordnance” General Caine said were dropped on March 2.

Defensive

Counter-missile

Number of missiles Iran fired: 1,224
Share of Iranian missiles that survived the boost phase: 93%
- During the June 2025 war, 93% of Iranian missiles (546/588) survived the boost phase.
Share of surviving missiles considered threats and engaged by American, Israeli, or Gulf air defenses: 81%
- The share was 62% during the June 2025 war, but with the reduced distance between Iran and US bases in the Gulf — which reduces the time for determining whether a missile is a threat — I assumed that half the missiles assessed as nonthreats in 2025 are considered threats in 2026.
Missiles US and US-friendly forces attempted to shoot down: 922
Average number of interceptors (missiles used to shoot down incoming missiles) used to shoot down each Iranian missile: 1.7
- Although 1.1 were used per Iranian missile in the June 2025 war (361 interceptors for 339 missiles), US forces averaged two interceptors for each Houthi missile in 2024–25, and used 30 Patriot interceptors to shoot down 13 Iranian missiles fired at Al Udeid Air Base that Iran warned were coming.
Interceptors fired at Iranian missiles: 1,567
Share of interceptors fired by US forces: 86%
- The United States fired 72% of the interceptors during the June 2025 war (Israel fired 101; the US fired 230 defending Israel and 30 defending al-Udeid). For the 2026 war, I estimated conservatively that the US would assume half of the non-US burden from 2025, given Iran’s focus on attacking US military bases, and the relative decline in air defense capacity of Gulf countries compared to Israel.
Interceptors fired by US forces: 1,348

I assumed a reverse mix of the interceptors the United States fired in June 2025 (with SM-3 split evenly with SM-6/SM-2s) because of the emphasis on US military bases as targets, where Patriot batteries are prevalent. This yielded an estimated 778 Patriot interceptors fired, which I later adjusted slightly to 800 to match the figure given by officials. I offset the resultant increase by subtracting twenty-two from the SM-3 total, due to the interceptors being in comparatively fewer stockpiled quantities.

Patriot
- Quantity: 800
- Unit cost: $4.6 million
THAAD
- Quantity: 156
- Unit cost: $15.5 million
SM-3
- Quantity: 185
- Unit cost: $28.7 million
SM-6/SM-2
- Quantity: 207
- Unit cost: $5.3 million (SM-6 unit cost, as it replaces the SM-2)

Counter-drone

Number of drones Iran fired: 2,700
Share of drones determined to be a threat and engaged by air defenses: 87%
- It was 73% during the June 2025 war, but I halved the number of nonthreatening drones due to the significantly shorter distance from origin to target.
Percent of drones shot down by the US: 70%
- The United States shot down 18% during the June 2025 war, but I quadrupled the rate for 2026 due to the targeting of US bases.
Drones shot down by US forces: 1,648
Interceptors required to shoot down each drone: Two
- This might be generous, considering it took US fighter aircraft two Sidewinder missiles to shoot down a balloon over Lake Huron in 2023.
US munitions used on Iranian drones: 3,297

The approximated mix of the 3,297 munitions is based on the mix (also approximated) that US forces used to shoot down Houthi drones. For example, 40% of Houthi drones shot down during Operation Rough Rider were felled using APKWS, so I assumed the same figure here.

AMRAAM
- Quantity: 330
- Unit cost: $1.4 million
AIM-9X Sidewinder
- Quantity: 989
- Unit cost: $485,000
APKWS
- Quantity: 1,319
- Unit cost: $39,494
Coyote
- Quantity: 330
- Unit cost: $126,538
Other
- Total cost (est): $1.6 million*
- *This includes a range of other munitions reportedly used to down Iranian drones, like 30mm rounds fired from Apache helicopters and 20mm fired from C-RAMs. This is a very rough estimate.

Losses

Estimated cost: $2.71 billion

Most of it is due to damaged infrastructure (largely radars) on US bases in the Gulf. The damage initially reported is usually revealed to be much worse once satellite imagery is examined. Unfortunately, satellite imagery can be on tape delay or worse, per ABC: “Since the conflict began, Planet Labs imposed a 14-day delay in releasing images from the region, while Vantor does not share imagery of U.S. military locations.” This is servile, cowardly, and ultimately undemocratic behavior. These companies should reassess their policies, including those that allowed invertebrates to assume leadership positions.

A notable loss of equipment was the three F-15 fighter aircraft shot down over Kuwait on March 1. How much each one costs depends on the media outlet. Good Morning America, for example, says they’re $31 million each. The Pentagon paid $103 million each in 2025.

Subsidies

Estimated cost: $1.01 billion

The US-Israeli war with Iran is for the sole strategic benefit of Israel. It is against the strategic interests of the United States. What’s more, the US is covering a significant chunk of Israel’s war costs. That is apparent in pending arms sales that include tens of thousands of bombs, many of which come directly from US stocks (rather than waiting months or years for a contractor to produce them). These are classified as sales, but they aren’t sales in the conventional sense. US military aid functions like a gift card, where Israel is the purchaser but not the funder. Americans pay for these arms deals.

The $1.01 billion estimate reflects the value of bombs and interceptors Israel has expended that can be covered by military aid.

Bombs

Israel reportedly dropped 11,000 bombs during the first two weeks of the war. To estimate the cost, I multiplied the reported quantity by an even mix of the following precision-guided bombs (unit costs reflect 2026 procurement data and include the cost of the warhead and guidance kit, if applicable): 2,000-pound GBU-31, $107,266; 1,000-pound GBU-32, $78,923; 500-pound GBU-38, $74,975; 250-pound small diameter bomb, $67,000.

Interceptors

Israel fired an estimated 820 interceptors from its David’s Sling, Iron Dome, and Arrow 3 platforms through roughly the first two weeks of the war. In 2025, the United States provided $40 million, $110 million, and $50 million in missile aid, respectively, for these systems, enough to fund 40 interceptors for David’s Sling, 2,750 for the Iron Dome, and 17 for the Arrow 3. Expect Trump to include billions of dollars for Israeli interceptors in any war funding request.

I may revisit this methodology. For bombs, why didn’t I just put the value of the pending arms deals? For interceptors, why did I only include the $200 million in US missile aid earmarked for procurement and not the other $300 million for R&D, when the latter frees up Israeli funding for missile procurement?

There’s always time for methodological adjustments during endless war.

Chapo’s Comic Book Is a Riveting Political Horror Show

2026-04-02T14:22:47Z

The Chapo Trap House comic book, Year Zero #1, is a collection of horror stories with a clear political message: liberal capitalism is not failing accidentally — it is functioning as designed, producing horror as a by-product of stability.

The Chapo Trap House team has produced its first comic book anthology — a set of political fables for a system that increasingly resembles dystopian fiction. (Laura June Kirsch / Chapo Trap House)

Review of Year Zero #1: A Chapo Trap House Anthology by Chapo Trap House (Bad Egg Publishing, 2025)

This March marks the ten-year anniversary of Chapo Trap House, the wildly irreverent and surprisingly influential podcast. Hosted by Will Menaker, Felix Beiderman, Matt Christman, and Amber A’Lee Frost, and produced by Chris Wade, the podcast embodied a new political tendency that Frost dubbed the “dirtbag left.” The Chapos have now published Year Zero #1: A Chapo Trap House Anthology, the first of a projected three-part comic book series.

The character of the dirtbag left has been more aesthetic than programmatic: anti-moralist, hostile to professional-class liberalism, contemptuous of institutional respectability, and comfortable treating American capitalism not as a policy failure but as a civilizational pathology . . . yet always believing that a better world is possible. While reveling in vulgar and scatological humor, the Chapos remain deeply committed to meaningful mutual aid, supporting social democratic campaigns such as those of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, and platforming critically engaged journalists.

Year Zero #1 crystallizes a moment in the development of the American left when irony, vulgarity, and genre excess fused into a coherent political sensibility. The anthology’s five comics do not merely reference that discourse; they translate it into narrative form, using horror, science fiction, folklore, and historical vignette to dramatize the core dirtbag intuition that liberal modernity is incapable of governing the forces it has unleashed.

Weaponizing Ridicule

The dirtbag left emerged in the wreckage of the Barack Obama years and the shock of 2016, when the managerial liberal consensus revealed itself as politically impotent and structurally incurious about class power. Its critique was not subtle: the Democratic Party was a graveyard of movements, the professional-managerial class functioned as capitalism’s cultural immune system, and the language of moral uplift served primarily to discipline dissent.

Chapo Trap House popularized this critique by weaponizing ridicule and genre pastiche against the sanctimonious habits of elite liberalism. Year Zero #1 extends that project into comics by abandoning topical satire and leaning instead on allegory. The result is not a collection of jokes but rather a set of political fables for a system that increasingly resembles dystopian fiction even when described straight.

As this is the first volume of a serialized trilogy, each installment introduces a world, set an engaging story in motion, and then, in classic comic form, leaves us hanging, eager for the next installment. True fans of the podcast — “grey wolves” to those in the know — will recognize the stories as coming distinctly from an individual Chapo.

Menaker draws us into an intersection of history, horror, and his beloved New York City; Biederman boyishly indulges in a mix of straight-to-video action films and esoteric late Cold War politics; Frost embraces the cultural quirks of the American rural working class; Christman, whose comic was cowritten with Frost and Josh Androsky, takes a deep dive into revolutionary history; and Wade uses science fiction to lampoon the insane reality of contemporary techno-feudalist billionaires.

Cosmic Horror

Menaker’s “Clinton Hill Horror” sets the tone. Drawing explicitly on H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Red Hook,” the story burrows beneath a rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood to uncover a literal accumulation of historical violence. This is Menaker’s politics rendered into graphic art.

On the podcast, he often treats history as a palimpsest — imperial wars, racial terror, and class domination never disappear; they simply change zoning laws. In comic form, that sensibility becomes cosmic horror. The monsters are not metaphors for capitalism so much as its geological aftereffects, the residue left behind by centuries of extraction and conquest.

The choice to play the horror straight, rather than as parody, is instructive. The politics of dirtbag left politics are often misread as nihilistic, but Menaker’s story insists on causality: the present is horrifying because the past was never resolved.

Biederman’s “Loopjumper” is the anthology’s most kinetic piece and its most nakedly conspiratorial. Structured as an ’80s-style action narrative, it imagines a perpetual time war against the CIA and the executive branch, fought by an operative who repeatedly dies and resets through quantum mechanics. This is Biederman’s political imagination at full throttle.

Where liberal discourse treats state violence as aberration or scandal, Biederman treats it as infrastructure. The time loop becomes a narrative expression of a core dirtbag diagnosis: there is no final exposure that will end the system, no decisive revelation that collapses elite power. Instead, there is repetition, attrition, and exhaustion. Victory, if it exists at all, lies not in reform but in survival and sabotage.

Hell of a Job

Frost’s “Beat the Dang Devil” offers the anthology’s clearest class allegory. Set in Appalachia and drawing on folk horror, the story follows a coal miner who makes a pact with the devil — only to discover that damnation is less supernatural than contractual. Frost’s recurring political interest has always been the lived experience of class domination rather than its abstract description. Her formulation — that hell is not a place but a job — distills a Marxist insight into the vernacular of an action/horror film such as The Evil Dead series.

Labor under capitalism is not oppressive because it is immoral but because it is compulsory, coercive, and enforced by violence both overt and bureaucratic. The devil’s minions function like strikebreakers or debt collectors. Exploitation in late-stage capitalism is not an external event but an intrusion into the most intimate spaces of life. Frost’s story is the dirtbag left at its most earnest, stripping away irony to confront the brute fact of class power.

Christman’s “No Pasarán” departs sharply from the anthology’s genre mode. Adapted from his work on the Spanish Civil War, it unfolds as a series of illustrated historical vignettes, closer to a militant pamphlet than a horror comic. This reflects Christman’s long-standing role within the dirtbag constellation as its resident historical materialist. While others diagnose the present through satire or genre excess, Christman insists on grounding politics in concrete struggles and defeats.

The Spanish Civil War appears here not as romantic legend but as instruction manual and warning. Mass movements are built, betrayed, and crushed by identifiable forces. Liberal democracy, when pressed, sides with reaction. The inclusion of this piece functions as a corrective to the anthology’s more speculative stories: history is not just nightmare fuel; it is evidence.

A Political Mood Board

Wade’s “Crew Expendable,” cowritten with Joel Sinensky, brings the anthology back to science fiction. Set on a privatized martian colony, the story skewers the elite fantasy of exit, the idea that technological advancement will allow capital to abandon the social wreckage it has created on Earth. Wade dissects the logic of privatization by extending it into space.

Mars becomes a company town with thinner air and fewer safeguards, where human life is expendable by design. The fantasy of a fresh start collapses into the same relations of domination, merely relocated. It is a concise rebuttal to techno-libertarianism: there is no frontier beyond class struggle.

Taken together, Year Zero #1 reads less like an anthology than like a political mood board. Each story refracts the dirtbag left’s central claims through a different genre lens, but all converge on the same conclusion: liberal capitalism is not failing accidentally. It is functioning as designed, producing horror as a byproduct of stability.

What distinguishes the anthology from much contemporary left culture is its refusal of therapeutic language. There are no lessons about self-care, no appeals to civility, no belief that better messaging will resolve structural antagonism. Instead, there is dread, repetition, violence, and memory.

The only thing missing from this volume is the Chapo commitment to collective action. Hopefully the later installments won’t wallow in nihilism but urge a call to action. A better world is possible, and our comic books should tell us that.

New Yorkers Want to Tax the Rich. Julie Menin Doesn’t Care.

2026-04-02T15:00:26Z

Zohran Mamdani has called for taxing the rich to close New York City’s large budget deficit. His position is popular with most New Yorkers, but wealthy City Council Speaker Julie Menin is giving cover to Gov. Kathy Hochul’s refusal to raise taxes.

Julie Menin’s refusal to push for higher taxes on the wealthy is of a piece with her other moves as the highest-ranking member of the city council. (Jim Spellman / WireImage via Getty Images)

It was not an April Fool’s Day joke.

On the morning of Wednesday, April 1, New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin, the most powerful member of the fifty-one-person legislative body, made an announcement regarding the contentious city budget. Rather than work with the mayor to find new revenues, Menin has continued to dig in her heels in opposition to Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s progressive budget priorities.

Menin is promising to balance the city’s budget by revising estimates of revenue from existing sources and achieving savings through cuts (“right-sizing”), but she continues to oppose taxing the rich and refuses to join forces with the mayor to pressure Governor Kathy Hochul on the issue.

New York State is currently in budget season, with the state budget constitutionally mandated to be passed by April 1 and the New York City budget due by the end of the fiscal year. But this year, the state budget will be late, due to the ongoing battle between Governor Hochul’s defense of the fiscal status quo and the growing statewide movement to tax the rich. The majority of New Yorkers, including 72 percent of New York state Democrats, support raising taxes on the rich, but Governor Hochul remains steadfast in her refusal to seek new revenue sources among the growing ranks of ultrawealthy New Yorkers.

The stakes are high. Even setting aside the devastation Donald Trump’s federal budget cuts will impose on the most vulnerable New Yorkers, Mayor Mamdani has inherited an estimated $5.4 billion deficit due to the mismanagement of the previous administration. Comptroller Mark Levine has called it the “biggest budget deficit since the Great Recession.”

Mamdani has already found some savings within the budget, which Menin’s counter-budget doesn’t acknowledge. But together with the Trump cuts that will impact almost half of New York City residents, who rely on some version of Medicaid, Hochul’s refusal to tax the rich — and Menin’s support for the governor’s position — is a matter of life and death for many New Yorkers. As the Trump tax cuts represent a regressive redistribution of wealth from middle-class and low-income Americans toward those with the highest income and assets, we should understand the governor’s and speaker’s unwavering opposition to taxing the rich as making them complicit with Trump’s oligarchic agenda.

Ironically, Hochul maintains a web page where New Yorkers can “tell their story” about how the federal budget cuts are affecting them personally and lists a variety of affected programs, including reductions to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits and billions in funding for hospitals. This messaging conveniently deflects responsibility for public service provision from the state to the federal government. But as the New York State Tax the Rich campaign has always pointed out, great wealth already exists in New York, and there is no reason for the state government to allow New Yorkers’ health care and social service needs to go unmet.

There are many reasons why Hochul and Menin are opposed to taxing the rich. As the governor relies on the billionaire donor class — including many named in the Jeffrey Epstein files — to fund her campaigns, she is obligated to prioritize their interests. And Hochul likely feels vulnerable in an election year, as she faces a challenge from Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman. While Hochul held a comfortable lead of 20 points in February, that lead fell to 13 points in late March.

This electoral heat will probably mean Hochul continuing to parrot Republican talking points in an attempt to placate her donors — but likely further alienating her base. In 2022, Hochul barely squeaked out a victory of 5 points over a MAGA Republican, former congressman, and now Trump administration acolyte Lee Zeldin in a historically low-turnout general election. Hochul failed to recognize then, and still seems not to recognize, that inspiring the Democratic base to turn out is a more promising electoral strategy than tacking to the center and providing an uninspiring “Republican lite” ticket.

Menin’s refusal to push for higher taxes on the wealthy is of a piece with her other moves thus far as the highest-ranking member of the city council. In addition to public pushback against Mayor Mamdani’s extremely popular call to tax the rich, Menin has so far used her political capital to promote extremely controversial protest “buffer bills” that would limit public assembly and create police work around protests in areas surrounding houses of worship, schools, universities, and other educational institutions.

These bills passed, with some revisions, despite objections from civil liberties and human rights experts. These laws violate basic democratic rights of public assembly and freedom of expression under the guise of public safety, but they explicitly attack those who protested at universities during the height of the Gaza solidarity movement.

Menin’s leadership on the council appears to represent a form of magical thinking, an attempt to undercut the momentum around and popularity of Mamdani’s demand to tax the rich to create a sustainable source of revenue. Menin’s announcement on Wednesday shows her refusing to engage with the material conditions facing New York. Whether it’s because of pure ideological commitment or her own class interests, Menin seems willfully blind to the real options for dealing with the country’s largest city’s big budget problem.

A case in point: during the April 1 budget presser, when asked if New York should raise taxes, Menin stated that she does “believe in progressive taxation” but wants to avoid a situation where “you’re pitting states against each other,” referring to the right-wing and factually inaccurate talking point that the rich would move from New York should their taxes be raised.

Menin and the city council’s counter-budget is a last-ditch effort, in collaboration with Governor Hochul, to weaken the growing consensus around the importance of taxing the rich in New York State and beyond. This is not just a local fight but also increasingly a national one, as efforts such as Illinois’s and California’s billionaire tax proposals show; Michigan, Rhode Island, and Washington State are similarly debating more progressive taxes on their richest residents.

Menin fails to understand that more than her personal financial interests are at stake: much of the future of our fragile multiracial democratic experiment hangs in the balance. She may try to dress up her intervention in New York City’s “tax dance” as a “reasonable” response to Zohran’s agenda, but history will judge her and her allies as engaging in a final, desperate attempt to shore up Reaganomics — a fading and unpopular doctrine that New Yorkers and Americans broadly seem ready to abandon.

The Biggest US Meatpacking Strike in 40 Years Is Still On

2026-04-02T09:51:01Z

At the sprawling JBS beef processing plant in Greeley, Colorado, 3,800 workers from around the world have united to carry out the largest US meatpacking strike in 40 years.

Immigrant workers from around the world are on strike at one of the nation’s largest beef plants. (Essential Workers for Democracy)

In less than a quarter-mile stretch of sidewalk, chatter in fifty-seven languages overlaps with the sound of dancehall, bachata, Thai pop, Haitian kompa, and Micronesian hip-hop. At sunset, dozens gather for iftar, breaking their Ramadan fast; the music, pulsing from boom boxes and cell phones held up to megaphones, swells into one shared hum.

In this sliver of land across from the sprawling JBS beef processing plant — among the largest in the country — workers from around the world have united in the largest US meatpacking strike in forty years.

The 3,800 workers at the JBS beef processing plant in Greeley, Colorado, walked off the job on Monday, March 16, launching an unfair labor practice strike.

This is the company’s flagship beef plant in the United States. Its previous contract with Food and Commercial Workers International (UFCW) Local 7 expired last July.

Strikers say JBS has been increasing the speed of the production line while cutting work hours from forty a week to thirty-five, squeezing out more work for less money. A thousand Haitian workers at the Greeley plant have filed a class action lawsuit against JBS for discriminatory practices that push them to work at dangerously fast line speeds.

Line speed is a major issue in the meatpacking industry. The UFCW recently spoke out against a new proposal from the US Department of Agriculture to remove federal limits on line speeds entirely.

“We’re demanding our rights, both in terms of wages and working conditions, because before the strike, they really took advantage of us,” said a worker in the brisket trim department, who spoke in Spanish and asked to remain anonymous. “They want the same output, but fewer hours and fewer people.”

After eighteen years working at JBS, he said, “Everything is so expensive. Everything has gone up, except our wages.”

“One Wrong Move Can Take Your Life”

Workers are also demanding that the company stop charging them out-of-pocket costs for personal protective equipment like mesh vests and arm guards — essential because they work with knives, saws, and other sharp, dangerous equipment.

JBS garnishes workers’ wages when equipment needs to be replaced due to daily wear and tear, damage, or theft. This gear can cost workers up to $1,100, taken directly from their paychecks without their consent.

“I have never experienced anything harder than this in my life,” said Teshale Dadi, who works on the chuck line. JBS was his first job after moving to the United States from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. “One wrong move can take your life away.”

The various jobs mentioned in this article are all similar: cow carcasses are moving along on a conveyor belt, and workers are very quickly cutting them into smaller pieces and trimming off fat with knives.

“Access to the equipment is essential for us,” said Brett Tanner, who moved here from Arkansas and has worked as a ribber at JBS since 2024. “Personally, I love my job. I really do. We feed America. But it’s stressful sometimes, the hours we work and the physical toll the job does take on your body.”

Meatpacking jobs are among the most dangerous in the country. Workers on the picket line showed cuts, deep callouses, and chemical burns on their hands from years at the plant. Repetitive motion injuries are also common. Slips, falls, and machinery crushes can even be fatal; in 2021, a worker at the Greeley plant died after falling into a vat of chemicals.

“Our hard work makes JBS a profitable company, the biggest [meatpacking] company [in the world],” Dadi said. “Doing this hard work, everyone deserves the highest respect. Our pay is generally good, relative to [the rest of] the country, but for this specific job, I don’t think it’s even close to what we deserve.”

“It feels empowering that we have so many people standing together to send a message that we want better pay, we want more access to equipment,” Tanner said.

Facing Down a Corporate Giant

Organizing across many languages and cultures has been a historical constant in the meatpacking sector. Union drives in the 1930s brought together black, Mexican, and Eastern European immigrant workers to build some of the earliest meatpacking unions in the United States.

This is the first strike ever at the Greeley plant, and the first major US meatpacking strike since the 1985–56 strike at the Hormel plant in Austin, Minnesota. (There were wildcat walkouts at Smithfield Foods in Tar Heel, North Carolina, in 2006 and 2007.) At Hormel, 1,500 members of UFCW Local P-9 struck for thirteen months, refusing concessions that their international union was pressing them to accept. The Hormel strike galvanized grassroots support from around the country, though ultimately the workers were defeated by the powerful forces arrayed against them.

Over the last few years, UFCW Local 7 has built up a fighting reputation, with some of the largest strikes in the union. Last year 10,000 Kroger grocery workers in Local 7 went on strike for two weeks in February, followed by another 7,000 grocery workers at Safeway in June.

But meatpacking workers face a steep uphill battle as they fight for better conditions. Union density in the industry has fallen precipitously. Up to 90 percent of meatpacking workers belonged to unions in the postwar era, but only 15 percent did by 2019, as the industry consolidated and shuttered unionized plants, only to restart production in nonunion plants.

The meatpacking industry is now so concentrated that the “Big Four” companies — JBS, Tyson, Cargill, and National Beef — control 85 percent of beef processing in the United States. JBS acquired the Greeley plant when it bought Swift & Co. in 2007, one of many acquisitions and mergers on its road to becoming the world’s largest meatpacker.

Meatpacking companies have been reaping record profits since the COVID pandemic (notwithstanding fines for price fixing), even as communities suffer from plant closures and beef prices soar for consumers.

JBS, a multinational based in Brazil, is the United States’ largest beef processor, and also owns the second-largest chicken processor, Pilgrim’s Pride. It provides meat products for fast food chains like McDonald’s and Burger King as well as wholesalers and grocers like Costco and Kroger.

Even in an industry known for greed and lawbreaking, JBS has a notorious reputation. The company paid a $4 million fine last year after the Department of Labor found that cleaning contractors at the Greeley plant were using child labor. It also paid $55 million in a $200 million meatpacking industry settlement over collusion to repress wages.

For a long time, the company’s effort to get listed on the New York Stock Exchange was held up by the US Securities and Exchange Commission due to extensive corruption scandals and the company’s role in deforesting the Amazon rainforest.

In January 2025, Pilgrim’s Pride made the single largest donation to Donald Trump’s inauguration committee, $5 million, leading to allegations of a quid pro quo. A few months later, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approved the stock exchange listing.

National Negotiations

The Greeley plant is one of dozens of JBS plants represented by the UFCW. Fourteen of these plants, which includes 26,000 workers in twelve locals, are now covered by a national contract that was settled for the first time last May. Local 7, which opted out of national negotiations, is pushing beyond this agreement, citing higher costs of living in Colorado.

The national contract included wins on regulating line speeds, including steward training and provisions for walking stewards (who are empowered to move around the plant to proactively enforce the contract, and who are paid by the company rather than the union), and improvements to wages and sick leave.

A particular triumph was the establishment of a new Taft-Hartley pension plan. Pensions used to be standard within meatpacking; the UFCW touted this one as the first to be offered by a meatpacking employer since 1986. (At least one news report speculated that JBS agreed to a pension as an optics move to get its stock listing approved by the SEC.)

That said, the national JBS pension plan is relatively modest, starting at contributions of 10 cents per hour worked in the first year of the contract, and increasing by 10 cents per hour each additional year. Local 663 and Local 1846 negotiated separate language to give individual members the choice whether to continue with their previous 401(k) or opt into the pension.

Nearly a dozen UFCW locals have been showing up in solidarity at the picket lines in Local 7, including Local 663 from Minnesota and Local 431 from Iowa, which were part of national negotiations.

The unfair labor practice strike has extended into a third week as workers demand JBS cease its unfair labor practices and return to the bargaining table in good faith.

“I hope that we get justice, and that other meat processing plants stand up and get justice too,” said the anonymous worker, who is originally from Mexico, “for the good of the Latino community, and for the workers above all.”

Dems Claim to Want a Hasan Piker — Then Try to Cancel Him

2026-04-02T11:34:44Z

Democrats spent the last year asking where their Joe Rogan was. Hasan Piker is one of the few left-wing figures with the audience they covet — but the party is deeply hostile to the spontaneity and independence that make figures like him appealing.

YouTuber Hasan Piker is one of the very few left-wing media figures who actually has the kind of large, young, mostly male audience Democrats claim to desperately need. (Noushad Thekkayil / NurPhoto via Getty Images)

When Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed announced that Hasan Piker would join him at campaign rallies this spring, the Democratic establishment reacted as if someone had lit a cigarette inside a Whole Foods.

Rep. Brad Schneider of Illinois, who chairs the moderate New Democratic Coalition and cochairs the Congressional Jewish Caucus, called Piker “an unapologetic antisemite.” Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Senate candidate Rep. Haley Stevens piled on with their own condemnations. Meanwhile, Mallory McMorrow, El-Sayed’s Democratic primary opponent, compared Piker to Nick Fuentes, the far-right influencer and leader of the so-called “groyper” movement. “[Piker] is a provocateur, to put it lightly, who says things that are misogynistic and antisemitic,” said McMorrow. Senators Cory Booker and Ruben Gallego both told Politico they wouldn’t go on Piker’s stream.

Third Way, the milquetoast centrist think tank where left-wing energy goes to be euthanized, published a Wall Street Journal op-ed demanding that no Democrat engage with Piker, calling him a bigot whose association is “morally repugnant and strategically self-defeating.” On Wednesday, they sent El-Sayed a letter saying he owed it to Michigan voters to distance himself from Piker’s “hateful views.” You will not be shocked to learn that Piker’s “antisemitism” boils down to criticism of Israel; unlike Fuentes, Piker never hints at any dislike of Jewish people, only a hard-line distaste for the state of Israel and its partner in crime, America.

No one, including Piker, is beyond reproach or criticism — but this campaign against him is telling. Republicans are naturally seeking to make Piker a symbol of left-wing extremism by dredging up every inflammatory remark he’s ever made over the course of a career that has involved talking off the cuff about politics for hours in public every day. But Republicans’ behavior is hardly surprising. What’s more revealing is how eager mainstream Democrats are to take that ball and run it to the end zone. In the last week, Democrats have made it their mission to destroy him.

That’s ironic because just eighteen months ago, in the postmortem of Donald Trump’s 2024 victory, Democrats and their allies were wringing their hands about the fact that young men had veered sharply right, thanks in part to a sprawling media ecosystem of male comedians and influencers that included Theo Von, Adin Ross, and the Nelk Boys. All liberals had was Pod Save America, a kind of group chat for former Barack Obama staffers that escaped containment and became a wonky media brand. Suddenly party operatives, consultants, and aligned media figures all began asking the same question: Where was the “Joe Rogan of the Left”?

Enter Piker, who is one of the very few left-wing media figures who actually has the kind of large, young, mostly male audience Democrats claimed to desperately need. With 3.1 million Twitch followers, he describes what he does as “basically AM radio, but for Zoomers.” He plays video games and offers political commentary on the day’s news to an audience of mostly young men.

When Zohran Mamdani ran for New York City mayor last year, Piker supported him vociferously and hosted Mamdani on his stream. But ultimately, Piker’s socialist politics and independent persona are more alarming to Democratic operatives than losing an entire generation of young men. They said they wanted a Joe Rogan of their own, yet they reject anyone who isn’t a focus-tested, stick-to-the-talking-points media figure. They actually wanted a branded content asset.

Democrats have been trying to engineer one in a lab of sorts. One $20 million plan put forward, titled “Speaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan,” promised to study the “syntax, language, and content” popular among young men online, then develop content spreading “an aspirational vision of manhood that aligns with Democratic values.”

Last year, they tried to actualize this plan with Jaime Harrison. The fifty-year-old former Democratic National Committee chair launched a supposedly BS-free podcast and YouTube show called At Our Table. The Democrats are throwing all their “stars” at it — Kamala Harris, Rachel Maddow, Hakeem Jeffries — and even tossing in mild profanities once in a while (“Send Lindsey Graham’s ass home!”).

But no one’s watching or listening, almost literally. Most of the recent episodes have hundreds, not thousands, of views, a tiny fraction of Piker’s viewership. As of Wednesday, Harrison’s new episode, in which he calls speaker of the House Mike Johnson “feckless” (oh, snap!), had twenty-four views.

Piker’s own diagnosis is blunt. “The Democrats have no story,” he told Newsweek. “Right-wing influencers like Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro reach young men by meeting them where they are, while Democrats ask those voters to meet the party on its terms.” Piker himself has the same juice, but at the same time, he represents everything the Democratic establishment fears: genuinely popular, outside the donor class’s orbit, and impossible to manufacture.

That gets to the heart of the problem. The party’s response to Piker isn’t hypocrisy exactly so much as part of a bigger structural problem. The party’s culture is deeply hostile to the kind of spontaneity, ideological syncretism, intellectual flexibility, and raw independence that make someone like Theo Von a fun listen. The moment a personality becomes too unruly or provocative, the knives come out. What they actually seem to want is not a Joe Rogan of the Left, but a housebroken imitation. And that is why they never had one.

Private Equity Firm Apollo Has a Labor Abuse Problem

2026-04-01T15:22:44Z

The AFL-CIO is calling on private equity firm Apollo — whose CEO has come under fire for ties to Jeffrey Epstein — to investigate growing reports of labor abuses at its subsidiaries, including union busting and intimidation of immigrant workers.

America’s largest labor federation is calling on the global private equity firm Apollo Global Management to investigate worker surveillance, wrongful terminations, and intimidation of immigrant workers at its subsidiaries. (Lionel Ng / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The union is also sounding the alarm over Apollo CEO Mark Rowan’s connections to child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, as well as to President Donald Trump’s push to condition university funding on adoption of conservative policies, including strict gender definitions.

In a March 11 letter, the fifteen-million-member American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) detailed a “growing list of unaddressed workers’ rights violations” that allegedly occurred at three Apollo-owned companies.

The AFL-CIO is urging Apollo’s board to “take action when red flags indicate potential wrongdoing” and to review its subsidiaries’ compliance with the company’s stated “Responsible Workforce Principles.” These principles state that companies will support discrimination-free workplaces, respect unionizing rights, and uphold other worker protections.

In a written response to the union dated March 18, Apollo noted, “Neither Apollo nor any of its portfolio companies have ever interfered with an existing collective bargaining agreement.”

The company response, which was shared with the Lever, also noted, “Your letter cherry picks three isolated examples (two of which were not even originally equity investments) and ignores hundreds of other portfolio companies over the years, many of which have had productive and successful union engagement.”

Through the various companies they own, private equity firms like Apollo employ roughly 10 percent of the private sector workforce, and many of these jobs are in high-risk, low-wage industries. Companies acquired by private equity firms have gone on to be associated with workforce neglect and anti-union tactics.

Disputes at Apollo-Owned Firms

Among its list of concerns, the AFL-CIO highlighted incidents at a Kentucky-based facility run by Maker’s Pride, an Illinois-based food manufacturer acquired by Apollo and another private equity firm in March 2025. According to the union, workers at the company allege that managers surveilled unionization efforts, reported such activity to the police, and fired four organizers, among other actions.

In September 2025, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal agency tasked with overseeing unions, agreed with workers, ordering Maker’s Pride to cease anti-union efforts and reinstate the terminated workers.

While the labor violations took place before Apollo acquired the company, the private equity firm has kept the same management in place and is now appealing the NLRB ruling.

“Appealing the decision will delay justice for the fired workers, further deteriorate worker morale, and embolden management to stay the course,” the AFL-CIO noted in its letter to Apollo. “The union avoidance activities described in the . . . decision are in direct conflict with Apollo’s Responsible Workforce Principles.”

In its response to the union, Apollo noted that its funds cannot “dictate members of the management team.”

According to the AFL-CIO, other labor rights violations occurred at Apollo-owned Heritage Grocers Group facilities in Illinois and the Southwest. That allegedly included hiring a union-busting consultant and running an anti-union website and text campaign.

The AFL-CIO letter suggested that some of the anti-union messaging seemed designed to intimidate immigrant workers, noting that the local union has “no special relationship with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and that signing a union card will not help with immigration issues.”

Heritage Grocers Group facilities have also settled prior class action lawsuits alleging pay, overtime, meal break, and rest time violations.

“Without addressing each labor claim that has been made against the company, we note that the [local union] has withdrawn several labor-related complaints, and the [NLRB] has dismissed others,” the firm wrote in its letter to the union, adding that some of the actions predate Apollo ownership.

Finally, at the 5 Times Square skyscraper in Manhattan, AFL-CIO representatives say Apollo-owned companies have employed subcontractors in an attempt to bypass the firm’s competitive wage and benefits standards, which Apollo subsidiaries are required to pay.

Apollo told the union it does not control the business operating at the site, and that “the team was responsive to labor concerns and . . . pulled awards after receiving third-party verification of a subcontractor’s labor related violations.”

The AFL-CIO noted that Apollo has a duty to adhere to its own workforce policies not just for the sake of the millions it employs but also for the millions more who have pension funds and retirement savings invested in the firm.

“Billions of dollars of workers’ hard-earned pension assets are invested in Apollo or Apollo-managed private funds,” the letter states. “These workers rely upon the responsible stewardship of their investments for their retirement security.”

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

Capitalism Had a Beginning and Will Someday End

2026-04-01T14:11:36Z

Historian Sven Beckert on where the capitalist system came from, what keeps it alive, and what it would take to bring it down.

“Everything that has a beginning also has an end.” Harvard historian Sven Beckert on a thousand years of capitalism and what comes next. (Leemage / Corbis via Getty Images)

The past several decades have been turbulent ones for the world system: the financial crisis, the rise of new middle powers in the Global South, and the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, to name a few, have placed greater strain on the postwar order than at any other time in its history. Yet despite growing apprehension that said order may be on the verge of collapse, its economic foundation — namely, capitalism — remains remarkably sound. For the first time in human history, a single mode of production dominates the world almost without exception. No political force, not even the remaining party-states that embrace the “communist” label, offers a plausible alternative to market-based economics.

But how did capitalism come into being, and what makes it such a uniquely dynamic — and thus tenacious — form of social and economic organization? This question has occupied scholars for two centuries, beginning with thinkers like Adam Smith and Karl Marx. Some, such as the American Marxist historian Robert Brenner, point to the transformation of property relations in England in the middle of the last millennium, while others like Jairus Banaji see the beginning of capitalism much earlier in human history — namely, with the emergence of commercial trade networks hundreds of years prior.

Historian and Harvard University professor Sven Beckert recently published his own contribution to the debate, Capitalism: A Global History, in which he weaves together various strands of historical scholarship across more than 1,200 pages to craft a comprehensive and sweeping yet detailed narrative of capitalism’s rise to global dominance over the past thousand years. He spoke with Jacobin about his intellectual formation, how his own work fits into debates on the history of capitalism, and how — if at all — this notorious mode of production might one day disappear from the stage of history.

Loren Balhorn

As a historian, you’ve studied the emergence of capitalism a long time. Your last book, Empire of Cotton: A Global History, was also a history of capitalism in some ways, or at least specific aspects of it. What did you seek to accomplish with this new history of capitalism?

Sven Beckert

The motivation to write the book came partly from the academic response to my book on cotton production. One of the criticisms was that capitalism is more than a history of cotton, which is obviously true. Empire of Cotton puts forward quite a few arguments about capitalism, but the book naturally only covers a small part of its history — temporally, spatially, but also in terms of what the industrialization of cotton represents in the history of capitalism. There was, naturally, a lot more I wanted to say about capitalism.

Beyond that, however, I noticed two things about how we talk about capitalism today. First, capitalism plays a very, very important role in political debates. There are many very strong arguments about capitalism, but the understanding of capitalism itself is often not particularly well developed — both on the Right and on the Left. My aim, therefore, was to write a history of capitalism from a historical perspective in order to enrich contemporary debates by gaining a better understanding of capitalism itself.

Second, the project developed out of a critique of existing attempts to understand capitalism. A very prominent school of thought about capitalism is an ahistorical one that views capitalism as the quasinatural state of the world. Changes happen, of course — we produce more than we used to; we produce differently — but in principle, the capitalist logic is universal and has existed in all societies throughout history. The book fundamentally challenges this argument.

Moreover, the history of capitalism is also still very much shaped by Eurocentric perspectives. My study of the history of cotton already made it clear to me that capitalism cannot be explained from a purely European perspective. This is especially true in the twenty-first century, when even the most superficial observation would lead one to conclude that it is impossible to understand the modern global economy without also taking into account other parts of the world beyond the European continent. Thus, it seemed important to me to analyze this in greater depth. A central argument of the book is that capitalism was born global, so to speak, and can only be understood from a global perspective at every moment in its history — even in its most Eurocentric moments.

Loren Balhorn

As a scholar, which intellectual traditions or schools of thought do you draw on? You mention Fernand Braudel in the book’s introduction. Would you consider yourself a student of the Annales School?

Sven Beckert

I find it difficult to define myself as a student of one particular school. Fernand Braudel’s work on the history of capitalism has perhaps influenced me more than the works of other historians or thinkers. My emphasis on the importance of merchant capital, trade — including with the non-European world — and the radical transformation of economic life by the capitalist revolution, yes, these are all ideas that can also be found in Braudel, even though my book is completely different from Braudel’s. The emphasis on the importance of the state in the history of capitalism is definitely also something I share with Braudel.

But that’s only one of many works that have influenced me. Reflections on the history of capitalism are at least 200 or even 250 years old. There are important traditions in a wide variety of disciplines, from Adam Smith to Karl Marx to Rosa Luxemburg, which are also important for the book. In that sense, I’m influenced by a wide variety of sources. Last but not least, there are libraries full of very specialized works that often attract very little attention — but without them I could not have written Capitalism.

The book is not about showing that Smith or Marx was right or wrong but rather about telling and analyzing the history of capitalism over the last five hundred years in order to better understand it — and, of course, to give us an opportunity to think about the world we live in today in a new and perhaps more creative way.

Loren Balhorn

You just mentioned the last five hundred years of capitalism, but the book itself refers to a “thousand years” of history. While reading, I was a little surprised that you start centuries before what most historians would consider the birth of capitalism.

Sven Beckert

That may be a misunderstanding. The second chapter of the book is called “Capitalists Without Capitalism.” The first chapters are not about arguing that capitalism originated in the eleventh or twelfth century but about two other things. First, they are about showing that there were other forms of economic life and that these followed a fundamentally different logic than that of capitalism. That allows us to see the radicalism of the capitalist revolution.

The second thing is that I see the emergence of capitalism as a fundamentally historical process that cannot be precisely dated or localized on the world map. Many scholars are searching, in a sense, for the seed from which capitalism sprang: some find it in Florence, others in southern English agriculture. I believe that this is doomed to failure. Capitalism emerges as a globally networked process that unfolds slowly. In a sense, it is also an ongoing process that we can still observe today in certain regions of the world or in certain spheres of our lives. The capitalist logic is still in the process of emerging.

Nevertheless, the emergence of capitalism is a historical question that to some extent should and can be located in time and space. To this end, I felt it was important to identify the actors who introduce this new, so differently structured logic into economic life. Here I agree with Braudel or Jairus Banaji that they can initially be found among owners of capital. Until well into the nineteenth century, these were largely people who organized long-distance trade or banking.

When I look at the world in the first half of the second millennium, I find that even at that time there were a number of places where merchant communities organized their economic life according to a different logic than tributary rulers or subsistence farmers. These groups can be found in many different parts of the world, but they are concentrated in urban “islands of capital.” They often enter into relationships with noncapitalist agriculture and tributary rulers, which give them opportunities to further spread the logic of capital.

This logic has existed for a long time, even before the first half of the second millennium, but it was marginal to the economic life of the world. The answer to the question of the emergence of capitalism is therefore when this logic spread and had a stronger influence on economic life. For me, this ultimately happened — and perhaps that is very traditional — at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries, with the European expansion.

Loren Balhorn

That’s the point at which capitalist logic moved from the periphery to the center?

Sven Beckert

Exactly. This happens first and foremost in agriculture. Robert Brenner is right: capitalism first emerges in the countryside. This process can be found in different forms in different regions. It is problematic to say that the place where this transformation really matters is exclusively southern England. It’s problematic for two reasons: For one, even in these rural transformations we can see the importance of merchant capital. And second, this merchant capital is, of course, also directly involved in the expansion of production in the Caribbean and the Americas more broadly. The development of capitalism can therefore only be understood as a networked global process that cannot be grasped from a local perspective.

It’s crucial to look at the Atlantic world here: because European capital owners were able to radically and rapidly change the logic of production in the Caribbean or on the West African islands, they had considerable capital at their disposal, which in turn enabled them to transform the much more conservative social structure of European agriculture, often against significant resistance from both elites and the peasants themselves. Therefore, my argument is that Europe changed not only from within but also from the outside in.

Loren Balhorn

Capitalism can only be understood as a global process, but nevertheless one in which violent conquest by the West played a central role?

Sven Beckert

Absolutely. One of my central arguments is that capitalism is not only based on contractual regulation of social and economic relations, or merely a realization of human freedom, but also relies heavily on extraeconomic coercion. This observation was not very popular in the neoliberal era, but when we look at the world today, it unfortunately confirms some of the arguments I make about the history of capitalism.

The history of capitalism, at least in one of its important phases, is a history of violent conquest. Europe was central to this history. The book argues against a Eurocentric reading of the history of capitalism, or one that virtually ignores the rest of the world. But on the other hand, I am similarly skeptical of arguments that Europe should be marginalized. On the contrary, as you say, Europe played a very central role, especially from the end of the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, and that must also be reflected in our thinking about capitalism.

But even in capitalism’s most Eurocentric moments — say, the mid-nineteenth century, when a great deal of attention must be paid to Europe — European developments can only be understood by embedding them in a more global history. Here again, cotton is a good example: we cannot understand the Industrial Revolution in England without understanding the transformation of agriculture in the Southern United States. The two belong together and must be explained together.

Loren Balhorn

In the chapters on the mid-nineteenth century, you provide vivid descriptions of how the upper class emerged in the metropolises and publicly displayed its newfound wealth and power. In your view, when did a coherent, conscious capitalist class as such come into being?

Sven Beckert

I’m glad you noticed the chapters on the nineteenth century. Often people notice the chapters on early history and then those on neoliberalism, but not everything in between. But I think some of the more original arguments in the book can be found precisely in the chapters on the history of the nineteenth century.

One of the results of the capitalist revolution is the emergence of a class society, and indeed a specific type of class society. I call it “capitalist civilization.” Of course, this also means a self-aware bourgeoisie that understands itself as a class emerges. These social classes are a complicated issue at every point in the history of capitalism, because they are never completely uniform, neither culturally nor politically, and of course they have competing economic interests. This cannot be overemphasized. The same is true among workers: we can observe the emergence of a working class in the nineteenth century, but there are still many differences and conflicts within this working class. It is never a homogeneous social formation.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, a society emerges in some parts of the world that is very much subject to this capitalist logic, but in a sense it is still surrounded by precapitalist forms of political power, social life, and labor organization. Tensions arose between the very dynamic capitalist-organized economy and these older traditions of political and labor organization, tensions that exploded in the mid-nineteenth century. This is the moment when the older forms of political rule or the older forms of labor mobilization, such as slavery, are marginalized. I refer to this in the book as the age of rebellions.

Loren Balhorn

Similarly central to both the upper class of the nineteenth century and earlier capital owners in your book is the patriarchal family, both for the transfer of property and for the social structure of the class itself. At the same time, we can observe contradictory tendencies toward the dissolution of family structures in capitalism. Given these tensions, could there be capitalism without the family?

Sven Beckert

Whether it would be possible in the future for capitalist civilization to do without the bourgeois family is a good question, but one that is difficult to answer. I would say there are reasons to assume that the family will continue to play a very important role. First, because the bourgeois family is central to the production of bourgeois culture and the creation of social connections and networks, which in turn are central to the constitution of the bourgeoisie but also to the organization of the capitalist economy itself. Of course, the family is also central because it allows for the transfer of accumulated capital, which is difficult to imagine conceptually without the family.

But beyond that, as we know, the family is not only central to the bourgeoisie but also to the reproduction of the workforce and thus to production. Therefore, there are no examples of capitalism that are not based on an ideologically and socially important idea of the family, and I don’t think that this is fundamentally different today. At the beginning of the interview, you asked which authors have influenced me. One author who has definitely influenced me is Nancy Fraser, who explains why the nonmarket is so important for the constitution of the market and for the constitution of capitalism. I would agree with that 100 percent.

Loren Balhorn

There is a long-running debate among Marxists on precisely this question of the external or outside that capitalism must constantly incorporate. In your book, you describe the era of European colonialism, for example, as a kind of “war capitalism.” Given the rapidly escalating geopolitical tensions today, are we heading back toward such a period?

Sven Beckert

The nonmarket and coercion have played an important role at every point in the history of capitalism. I am somewhat skeptical of an interpretation that says: yes, there is a violent early history of capitalism, but it ultimately gives way in the nineteenth or twentieth century to a peaceful history of contract and human freedom. I would question this narrative.

Of course, the way in which this violence is exercised and the forms it takes change. There is sometimes a tendency to lump everything together and say: okay, slavery is not really that different from what textile workers in Cambodia have to endure today. I disagree with that. It is important to see how these forms of coercion have changed throughout the history of capitalism.

Today many observers are shocked and disoriented because they adhered to a narrative that assumed that this early history of capitalism had been permanently overcome and we had entered a completely different moment of capitalism. In the age of neoliberalism, the idea that contracts and markets could and should best structure all human relationships became, so to speak, a law of nature. Now we see that what some observers regarded as natural over the past fifty years was in fact only a particular moment in the history of capitalism. And to the surprise of almost all of them, we are returning to a moment in which the rhetoric, the issues, and even the politics of the late nineteenth century are suddenly reappearing in the present.

From the perspective of the ideology of the last fifty years, this is surprising, but from the perspective of the long history of capitalism, it’s not surprising at all. In a way, one of the core arguments of the book is that capitalism has taken very different political forms in the past — but also very different forms of labor regimes, very different forms of territorial organization — and that these differences have always combined and recombined in new ways. They were sometimes relatively stable for long historical periods but never permanently.

Now we are witnessing another moment in which these things are being recombined. In a way, it reminds us of the late nineteenth century or the beginning of the twentieth century. But history does not repeat itself. Europe is no longer at the center of the global economy — today the most dynamic capitalist economies are found in Asia. Thus, it is not a return to the nineteenth century, but rather certain themes and strategies are being revived, albeit in a different global configuration.

Loren Balhorn

In the epilogue, you refer to Erik Olin Wright’s concept of “real utopias,” islands of noncapitalist relations, and link them to your image of the early “islands of capital” that gradually spread as a possible way in which capitalism could one day end. But if we accept your argument that the state was a central factor in establishing capitalism, wouldn’t any noncapitalist logic also need such a relationship with the state?

Sven Beckert

That’s not in the book, but it’s an excellent point, and exactly right. Social democracy embodied that as well; it pursued precisely this strategy. No one can predict the future. I have only tried to make two arguments: first, that capitalism is historical. Some years ago, Immanuel Wallerstein attempted to date the end of capitalism. I was even there when he did so. I don’t have that kind of confidence. That said, everything that has a beginning also has an end.

When I reread Erik Olin Wright, I was amazed to see — I had completely forgotten — that there is a certain parallel between his arguments and my argument about the emergence of capitalism. This is purely speculation, but perhaps there is something in this history of “islands” that is useful for our thinking about the future.

Loren Balhorn

Perhaps one key difference between today’s capitalist civilization and historical capitalism is the absence of a powerful adversary in the form of the workers’ movement. The rise and fall of the movement that once contested capitalism in the heart of Europe also plays a major role in your book. Do you now view it as an inevitable historical phenomenon that emerged from a specific moment in history?

Sven Beckert

The workers’ movement that shaped the twentieth century in Western Europe and North America is, I believe — and perhaps this is a depressing lesson of history — also historical. It is very strongly tied to the moment of its emergence — a moment that not only rested on heavy industry and male industrial workers but also a moment in the history of capitalism when the nation-state played an extremely important role, and the trade unions and social democratic and socialist parties focused on that very nation-state.

In a sense, capital freed itself from that nation-state in the late twentieth century, while trade unions and social democratic and socialist parties remained rooted in it. Of course, this was not only due to strategic miscalculation but also because it represented a source of real power. It is therefore not particularly surprising that these institutions continued to cling to the source of their power.

A central theme of the book is to show that capitalism has changed significantly throughout its history. It has not only changed as a result of the logic of capital itself, or because entrepreneurs suddenly saw other preferences, interests, or profit opportunities, but also due to the collective and individual resistance of social movements that altered central aspects of capitalism. I discuss in detail the slave rebellions in the Caribbean, which brought an end to an essential component of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century capitalism, namely plantation slavery. The other example is the labor movement of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries that we just discussed.

Therefore, if I extrapolate this historical lesson into the future, I would assume that social movements of varied kinds will continue to play a crucial role. However, it is difficult to predict exactly what form they will take. Nevertheless, it is certainly a productive question worth thinking about.

Abdul El-Sayed’s Senate Opponent Is a Phony Populist

2026-04-01T12:49:10Z

Mallory McMorrow, who is running against Medicare for All champion Abdul El-Sayed for US Senate, recently went viral presenting herself as a populist crusader against surveillance pricing. Her record as a Michigan state legislator tells a different story.

Mallory McMorrow appears to assume that she can make an influencer video depicting herself as a leader of a cause all while refusing to actually fight for it. (Jacek Boczarski / Anadolu via Getty Images)

In her high-profile campaign for Michigan’s Democratic Senate nomination, Mallory McMorrow has suddenly gone viral with an explainer video depicting herself as a crusader against surveillance pricing. It’s a solid video boosted by legacy media and online lefty groups, and it touts a crucial cause pioneered by leaders like former Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan as well as by state and federal lawmakers who are bravely challenging the power of Big Tech.

So, as I watched my own state’s legislators this week doing the hard work to advance a bill to curtail surveillance pricing, I went looking for how McMorrow has championed this cause as one of the top leaders of her own state’s legislature. She purports to believe deeply in stopping corporations’ practice of spying on consumers and then using the data to charge different consumers different prices. So surely she must have a detailed voting record on the matter that will tell us exactly how she’s going to change the game in the US Senate, right?

So I looked. And looked. And looked — and I ultimately found nothing other than what appears to be a cartoonish level of cynicism . . . and a series of McMorrow votes to provide state tax incentives to build the data centers that power the surveillance-pricing system she’s now going viral for saying she opposes.

I started my search in the Michigan legislature and found a whole list of bills that reference pricing. I did find HB 5771 and HB 5222: Democratic legislation in the state’s GOP-led House that’s designed to curtail surveillance pricing. McMorrow is not listed as a sponsor of these bills nor do there appear to be versions of these bills in Michigan’s Democratic-led Senate, where McMorrow serves as the chamber’s majority whip.

Was I looking in the wrong place? I decided to ask the surveillance system itself: I logged on to ChatGPT and asked. Here’s what it told me:

OK. ChatGPT sometimes gets stuff wrong. Was it wrong here? Apparently not.

“There’s a bill to ban surveillance pricing in McMorrow’s legislature right now. She hasn’t sponsored it,” tweeted the American Economic Liberties Project’s Lee Hepner, one of the architects of such legislative proposals popping up across the country. “McMorrow’s own Congressmember, Rep. [Rashida] Tlaib, introduced a ban in grocery stores. Sen. [Ruben] Gallego and Rep. [Greg] Casar have economywide bans. Bizarre to say she’ll ‘introduce a bill.’”

I called up Hepner to double-check about his tweet.

“The Michigan bill is very much on our radar, and it resembles bills we’ve been working on in other states and it would be a good one to support,” he told me, and then added that “it’s just so weird” for her to promise to introduce legislation in the US Senate . . . that she hasn’t introduced in the state senate that she currently leads.

Cynical All the Way Down

Having worked in and around politics for decades, I believe in the better-late-than-never axiom: If a politician is belatedly arriving to a righteous cause, then maybe don’t treat them as a great leader of that cause but definitely welcome them. See them joining the cause as a sign the movement behind that cause is gaining momentum. And so on that level, it’s good news that McMorrow is centering the anti-surveillance-pricing cause in one of the country’s most important US Senate races.

What’s not good news is that she appears to assume that as a US Senate candidate, she can make an influencer video depicting herself as a leader of a cause and be lauded as a hero by credulous media and the clickslop attention economy. . . all while refusing to actually take on Big Tech and lead the fight for that cause in her current position of very real power. Instead, she used her power to help pass data center tax breaks for Big Tech (her spouse reportedly had ties to an energy company that aimed to power the data center boom).

Taken together, this is a deep level of cynicism that stands out even in this political era defined by cynical politics. In this case, the influencer candidate gets to present themselves to voters as a fighter against a wildly unpopular tech industry while not actually doing anything to antagonize Big Tech donors (and instead supporting tax incentives that enrich those donors). It is a wink-and-nod move that assumes that inside the attention economy, nobody will bother to interrogate any piece of content that’s slickly packaged for the algorithm.

Of course, perhaps McMorrow’s assumption will prove correct in a society that forgets its entire world every fifteen minutes and barely ever scrutinizes anything on our screens. But if the assumption is validated — if candidates can pull off that kind of trick and be rewarded for that deception with a victory in a US Senate Democratic primary — then we shouldn’t expect them to do much to change anything when they win office. After all, they’ve learned that Democratic voters will reward their cynicism.

The Rise of Clickslop Campaigns

To me, this example illustrates not just the cartoonish cynicism of one candidate but also the larger downside of so-called influencer candidates who rely on online virality rather than their records as the backbone of their campaigns.

Digital sophistication and fluency are important for modern campaigns, and those assets can be used for good when they are used to boost a candidate’s substantive record (see Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign). But those assets can also be used to deceive.

In this particular case, there’s a link between the issue itself and the soft deception-by-omission. The same algorithms, AI systems, and data centers that let corporations engage in surveillance pricing also add virility to slickly deceptive videos from influencer candidates — all while downgrading and shadow banning substantive reporting that might debunk those influencers’ clickslop.

The original democratic promise of the internet was that it would give voters more access to more information so that they could cast more informed votes. But here we see the opposite is now the case: in the age of influencer politicians exploiting the attention economy, deceptive information is often rewarded online by clicks, likes, and algorithmic boosting — while inconvenient truths about what’s happening here in the offline world are ignored.

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

Palestine 36 Reclaims a Buried Anti‑Colonial Revolt

2026-04-02T09:05:08Z

Annemarie Jacir’s Palestine 36 resurrects the mass anti‑colonial revolt that Britain crushed with overwhelming force — and shows how its legacy still shapes the present.

Still from Palestine 36. (Watermelon Pictures)

Bethlehem-born writer-director Annemarie Jacir is at the cutting edge of a new generation of Palestinian filmmakers breaking through to Western audiences and beyond with undeniably powerful movies. Jacir’s 2008 Salt of this Sea received two nominations at the Cannes Film Festival, while her 2012 Palestinian refugee drama, When I Saw You, costarring Saleh Bakri, won an award at the Berlin International Film Festival. Now, her latest feature, Palestine 36 — which also costars Bakri as well as Academy Award winner Jeremy Irons — is having the national release Jacir’s epic richly deserves.

As its title suggests, Palestine 36 — which was Palestine’s official selection for Best International Feature at the Academy Awards and winner of the Tokyo International Film Festival’s Best Film Award — fictionalizes a key period in the ongoing Palestinian liberation struggle. According to Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, by 1939, the British military dispatched “a hundred thousand troops in Palestine, one for every four adult Palestinian men. . . . It took the full might of the British Empire, which could only be unleashed when more troops became available after the Munich Agreement in 1938 . . . to extinguish the Palestinian uprising.”

In this candid conversation, Jacir lays out the historical context and framework within which she dramatizes the mass uprising that began when Yasser Arafat was only seven years old — a revolt that shook the mightiest military in Europe. Jacir was interviewed for Jacobin by film historian and critic Ed Rampell.

Ed Rampell

Tell us about your personal background and how you got into filmmaking?

Annemarie Jacir

My parents are Palestinians from Bethlehem. My father is turning ninety, he was born in 1936, the first year of the revolt. My mother was born in the last year of the revolt in 1939.

Ed Rampell

Your family is Christian?

Annemarie Jacir

I am an atheist.

Ed Rampell

But you were born into a Christian family?

Annemarie Jacir

Yes. After Palestine was occupied, the West Bank was occupied in ’67, they stayed there for a couple of years, they decided, they found work abroad and didn’t want to bring up a family under occupation. I grew up in Saudi Arabia, lived there for the first sixteen years of my life. I came to the US after that and my undergraduate was political studies and literature, at the Claremont Colleges in California, at Pitzer.

I graduated from Pitzer with a double major, I was interested in film my final year and thought of switching majors. And my father said, “You just did a double major. Get out of school and finish.” So, I moved into LA where I lived a few years trying to learn about how to make films. I was contacting everybody about a job, production assistant, whatever. Those were very rough years and I found that LA really wasn’t my kind of city. I didn’t have the connections, couldn’t get into the film industry, so I was doing crappy jobs that were not really teaching me about filmmaking.

I ended up at a literary agency representing screenwriters and started reading lots of scripts. I still didn’t feel like the whole machine of Hollywood was the kind of cinema I wanted to make. Then I went to graduate school in New York at Columbia and studied film. After that, I went to Palestine and have been living in Palestine ever since.

Ed Rampell

Palestine 36 brilliantly dramatizes history, especially events that few Westerners have ever heard of. Americans tend to think that between the two world wars, Britain was at peace, until it went to war with the Nazis in 1939. Your film shows otherwise. So, what happened in 1936 in Palestine?

Annemarie Jacir

In 1936, the British have already been in Palestine for almost twenty years. There’s already a lot of disgruntlement to begin with. The early years of British control [as a League of Nations Mandate], there was probably some kind of feeling that things were going to get better. But they didn’t. It was a project to control the resources and people.

Also, there was, and I’m surprised how few people know this, there was Jewish emigration. But it was before the Holocaust. Yeah, because there was antisemitism, pogroms, and fascism, and Jews were fleeing Europe way before the Holocaust. Everybody thinks it happens later, when Palestine is flooded with refugees. Jews were emigrating — of course, there’s an indigenous Jewish population in Palestine, it was very small. Palestinian society is Jewish, Muslim, Christian, very mixed.

So you look at the numbers of [Jewish emigration], and you see this influx. These things were all coming together and creating a tense atmosphere. There was the beginning of the first mass revolt against British colonialism in 1936. It included a national strike that was really the longest strike in history at that moment, a six-month strike.

The revolt was really in two phases. It begins in ’36, and the British are losing control. Because it’s a farmer-led revolt. They couldn’t figure it out and began to lose control. Then there’s the Peel Commission, and they’re trying to figure out a diplomatic solution. And it becomes clear that there’s going to be no resolution.

Then there’s the second phase of the revolt, which begins after the Peel Commission in 1937. That’s when the British brought in thousands and thousands of troops, weapons, tanks, planes — they were strafing the countryside. The purpose was to crush the revolt as quickly as possible. Many historians feel that was done as quickly as possible because World War II was on the horizon, so they had to crush this revolt and get out of there, basically.

Ed Rampell

That’s the historical background for the real-life events that you dramatize in Palestine 36, largely through focusing on at least two Palestinian families. Amir and Khuloud are urban intellectuals in Jerusalem, and the villagers of rural Al Basma. The two families are connected by Yusuf. Tell us about these characters and how fact-based they are?

Annemarie Jacir

The heart of the film is the Palestinian villagers. Yusuf and his family, and Rabab [Yafa Bakri] and her daughter Afra [Wardi Eilabouni, with Nazareth-born Hiam Abbass, who was Emmy nominated for the HBO series Succession, playing the grandmother Hanan], and the little boy Kareem [Ward Helou] and his father, the priest [Jalal Altawil plays Father Boulos]. These are our villagers.

There’s Khuloud [Lebanon-born Yasmine Al Massri, costar of the ABC-TV FBI series Quantico] and Amir [Tunisia-born Dhafer L’Abidine] in the city. And there’s Khalid [Saleh Bakri, a frequent collaborator with Jacir and star of Cherien Dabis’s All That’s Left of You], a dockworker.

These characters all link up. For me, it was important, I didn’t want to have a hero — the one hero to do this classic story; you follow this person from here and there’s one hero. There’s no hero, they’re just regular people that are living through this very intense moment and they make a decision. All of them make a decision, whether it’s very small or big, wrong or right. They’re all confronted with history and they do something, they make a decision about how to move forward.

The Palestinian characters are all fictional, they all come from different places. Khuloud, for example, the female journalist, she’s sort of a mix of upper-class female journalist, a socialite that was living in Jerusalem at the time and she was known very much for her parties with the British. The Palestinian elite was mixing with the British a lot. And women who were journalists at the time and founding printing presses — and not just in Palestine but also in Lebanon and Egypt — they’d write under male names, for two reasons. Yes, to be taken seriously in a patriarchal world, but also because these places had colonial governments and to write under a name when you were being critical, actually it’s protection.

Ed Rampell

And when we first see Khuloud, she’s cross-dressing. Why?

Annemarie Jacir

Yes, exactly. Why not? [Laughs]

Ed Rampell

It’s surprising. My interpretation is that as a woman in patriarchal society, she was assuming male roles that were denied to women.

Annemarie Jacir

Yeah. She’s writing under a male name. She’s having some fun with it, takes Amir’s suit. Who’s wearing the pants? [Laughs]

The four British characters in the film are all based on actual historical characters. Wingate [a British officer and Christian Zionist played by Robert Aramayo] was a real guy, a really violent, unhinged man. They just released some papers with some new stuff about him; he was really much more crazy than my film shows. For me, his long hair was my poetic license but not historically accurate.

He was always dirty, his uniform was always dirty, he never showered. He was known for being that way. Later, he had long hair, after he gets dismissed from the British Army, he was dismissed from Palestine actually. For me I wanted to indicate he was outside of the system, doing his own thing in the countryside. His unkempt hair was a way to signal that — but you can’t smell him onscreen.

Thomas, the secretary [to the high commissioner], is based on a real guy who actually quit and became a Marxist. It’s an amazing story. He went there thinking there were good intentions, that they were doing something for the native population and it was helpful, then slowly, in his diaries, he realizes it is a failed project with an agenda, and he doesn’t want to be a part of it. He ends up quitting and becoming a Marxist and anti-colonial activist for the rest of his life. In my film he’s Hopkins [played by Billy Howle], but his real name was Hodgkin.

Ed Rampell

Oscar winner Jeremy Irons portrays Sir Arthur Grenfell Wauchope, Britain’s high commissioner for the Palestine Mandate. How did you manage to cast such a high-profile movie star?

Annemarie Jacir

Because he has an Irish wife, and we were on the Berlin film festival’s jury together. Irons was president of the jury. So we spent a lot of time together and became friends. I was writing this project at the time and telling him about it one day over breakfast and [his wife] was like, “This is amazing! Jeremy, you’ve got to be in this!” He was like, “Is there a role for me?” I was like, “Yeah there’s a role for you!” And he said, “Let me read the script. And if it’s helpful, I’d like to be part of it.” It was a beautiful role.

Ed Rampell

Liam Cunningham, costar of Ken Loach’s 2007 drama about the Irish War of Independence, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, and of HBO’s Game of Thrones, plays [Charles] Tegart, the real-life counterinsurgency expert who explains to the high commissioner and other British officials in your film the necessity of extremely brutal counterterrorist tactics to suppress the Arab Revolt.

Is this scene a direct reference to the scenes of the pacification specialist in Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film, The Battle of Algiers?

Annemarie Jacir

People have brought up The Battle of Algiers a lot with this film. But you’re the first person [to connect it to] that scene. Yes, you’re the first person to put your finger on it.

Charles Tegart was Irish. They reference Ireland in the dialogue. That’s why Liam got such a kick out of playing that scene. This expert, he was in India, then they brought him to Palestine. He made a whole career out of this. He was the first one to come up with the concept of a wall, not the Israelis — they did it later. Everything the British did, the Israelis just copied the blueprint of it. And there are military forts all across the country, in order to create this system of control, called “Tegart’s forts.” They still exist.

Ed Rampell

Is that similar to the Strategic Hamlet Program in South Vietnam?

Annemarie Jacir

Yeah. Absolutely.

Ed Rampell

Are the period clips actual archival footage?

Annemarie Jacir

Yeah. Every time you see the [original screen ratio], that’s real archival footage — it’s not manipulated. We restored it and I colorized it; I didn’t want black and white.

Ed Rampell

Your film seems to suggest that two peoples were victimized by the Holocaust. Obviously, the Jewish people; but also, the Palestinians were impacted by the immigration of more and more Jews fleeing Nazism. Many came to Palestine. Especially as other countries around the world, including the US largely —

Annemarie Jacir

Shut their doors. Absolutely.

Ed Rampell

But of course, it wasn’t the Palestinians who perpetrated the Holocaust.

Annemarie Jacir

The European Aryans did it. They did the most vile thing: the Holocaust. Then didn’t want to take responsibility for it. And instead of dealing with their own racism, they threw it on Palestinians, who have no history of antisemitism. We are Semites also [laughs]. That was the [Westerners’] way of dealing with it: that we would deal with it. They shut their doors, the US shut their doors, and thought, “OK, the way we deal with our racism is to put these people somewhere else.” Which is just ridiculous.

The Zionist project considered many other places besides Palestine: Argentina, Uganda, Palestine. There were many proposals. I think it would have been the same thing in Uganda, if the Zionist project was about dispossessing the native population. Palestine ended up being what was chosen.

Palestine has never been closed to Jews. Jewish pilgrims have been coming to Palestine — I said there’s an indigenous population. There are also Jews who have been coming to Palestine for hundreds of years, as well as Muslims and Christians. Bosnians fled persecution and came to Palestine. Circassians fled persecution and came to Palestine — I’m talking about in the 1800s. Armenians fled persecution and came to Palestine and lived among the Palestinians and became part of the fabric of life.

And if Jews had done that — escaped, had nowhere to go, needed to be protected, and they came like so many communities — we would be in a very different place today. The Zionist project wasn’t about that. It was about control and dispossession.

Ed Rampell

Which the British facilitated for their own imperial interests?

Annemarie Jacir

Of course. They played both sides.

Ed Rampell

Earlier, you mentioned the Peel Commission. One of the most dramatic, pivotal scenes of your entire film is a dinner party where the Peel Commission’s results are announced over the radio at the Jerusalem home of the intellectuals Amir and Khuloud.

Palestine 36 clearly shows that the British, under the mandate as the colonizers, gave preferential treatment to the Zionists to pursue London’s own colonial interests. In retrospect, considering the massive suffering of Palestinians with the events in the 1930s depicted in your film, continuing with the Nakba, and most recently with the Gaza genocide and the ongoing persecution in the West Bank, do you think that even though it was a bad deal, that in retrospect the Palestinians would have been better off if they had accepted the partition offered? As the British radio announcer says when they’re broadcasting the Peel Commission’s results: “Half a loaf is better than no bread.”

Annemarie Jacir

I think it would have led to exactly the same thing. I don’t know why anybody would agree that a colonial or outside power would decide. The British and French partitioned the whole Arab world and all of Africa. They had no right to do so. So why anybody would accept that — it’s never going to happen. Now, you’re asking would we be in a better place today had they accepted that? The Peel Commission and that announcement that’s on the radio is word for word the conclusion of the Peel Commission, it’s not my creative writing.

The Peel Commission was not giving Palestinians independence. It wasn’t just partition, it was also that the Palestinians would not be ruled by Palestinians —

Ed Rampell

And they’d be forcibly removed.

Annemarie Jacir

Yes, but they’d be ruled by Transjordan. Even if they split the Palestinian part, it wouldn’t be run by Palestinians — it would be run by the Transjordanian government, a pro-British creation. It wasn’t even independence in that way. It’s very important. Arabs aren’t this big blob, twenty-two countries are not all the same. It’s not monolithic.

Ed Rampell

Where did you shoot Palestine 36?

Annemarie Jacir

We shot in Jordan, Palestine, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Bethlehem. This film was made under such difficult conditions. We had to stop shooting four times. It was terrible. And we continued. What was supposed to be three months ended up being almost two years struggling to make this film, because we made it during the genocide. This film is really a testament to what Palestinian creativity is and what Palestinians can do, even in the worst of conditions.

We almost died making it. Now we give it to the world. We hope they can meet us; we make films to connect. It’s all about connecting. That connection cannot be severed. We’ve got to fight for it.

Ed Rampell

More films are being released now in the West by Palestinian and Arab filmmakers, such as The Voice of Hind Rajab. Why do you think that’s happening now?

Annemarie Jacir

[Laughs] I don’t think it’s happening now. It’s been happening for a long time. There’s a new wave of Palestinian directors, there have been lots of films over the years. I think there are less now. However, it’s because of Watermelon [Pictures] distributing the films — that has always been the obstacle in America, it has always been difficult for our films to be seen in the US, to be shown.

We have been left out of the distribution in the US. We’re blocked from reaching our audience and we’re prevented from being in cinemas. There are the gatekeepers — now, because of Watermelon, there is distribution of those films that others have been afraid to touch. Or if they did touch — I have had distribution with my other films but getting them into cinemas is a battle. You have to have a distributor ready to take on that battle. Watermelon is committed to doing that.

Ed Rampell

At the Academy Awards this year, presenter Javier Bardem said: “No to war. Free Palestine!” What did you think of that?

Annemarie Jacir

I loved that and I thought it was so much needed. I was wondering why, in general, the Oscars were so quiet and nobody was saying anything. And not even just about Palestine. The state of the world is beyond awful. It’s the darkest times everywhere. Thank God for Javier, that he said something. And I wonder why more people didn’t say anything.

Canada Is Redefining Who Can Seek Asylum

2026-04-01T10:28:05Z

Forty-one years after the Supreme Court of Canada affirmed the right of every refugee in the country to fundamental justice, Canada’s federal government is denying certain classes of refugees the right to an oral hearing.

An officer speaks to migrants as they arrive at the Roxham Road border crossing in Roxham, Quebec, Canada, on March 3, 2023. (Sebastien St-Jean / AFP via Getty Images)

Hidden on the eighth floor of a white-gray building, with a massive “For Rent” sign above the door, is Welcome Collective, one of Montreal’s many clinics dedicated to supporting the thousands of refugee claimants who call the city home. It is also where Sara, a mother of three originally from Morocco, sought help after the Algerian woman who translated and filed the family’s asylum claim disappeared with all copies of the application (names have been changed to protect anonymity).

With the very real possibility of deportation hanging over the family now that their point of contact with immigration officials was gone, they arrived at Welcome Collective at their wits end. The clinic’s social workers jumped into action.

They filed an access to information request with Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) to get a copy of Sara’s application and began the process of registering the two youngest children for school. The oldest daughter would have to forgo registering for postsecondary education because, without official refugee status, she is subject to international student fees that the family cannot afford. The family also needed psychosocial support to begin processing the persecution they faced back home and the trauma of uprooting their entire lives.

For a month or two, those seemed to be the only struggles the family would face as they waited the estimated ninety-two months for their hearing. But when the Canadian government tabled Bill C-12 on October 8, the little remaining hope Sara had for a peaceful future in Canada was shattered.

Bill C-12, also known as the Strengthening Canada’s Immigration System and Borders Act, was introduced in Parliament by the Minister of Public Safety Gary Anandasangaree “to combat transnational organized crime and those who seek to exploit our immigration system,” the minister explained at the second reading of the bill. The act would do so by tightening the Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA), expanding government powers, and introducing new limits to asylum eligibility.

The Safe Third Country Agreement

The Safe Third Country Agreement between Canada and the United States has been in effect since 2004 and mandates that refugees make their asylum claim in whichever of the two countries they first land in. The agreement rests on the principle that both countries recognize the other as safe for refugees to seek protection in.

The Canadian government currently considers the United States a safe country — despite widespread calls to end the designation — because it “is an open democracy with independent courts, separation of powers and constitutional guarantees of essential human rights and fundamental freedoms.”

There are limited exceptions to the STCA that allow someone in the US to make a claim in Canada. The most common is the family member exception, which allows claimants with a qualifying family member who has official status in Canada to make a claim there. The only option for refugees in the United States who do not meet any of the exceptions is to cross into Canada between official ports of entry. They must then avoid detection by border officials for fourteen days, after which they can file an inland claim and cannot be sent back to the US.

At least, that was until Bill C-12 was approved by the House of Commons and the Senate. While exceptions remain unchanged, the fourteen-day loophole has been closed. Also, anyone who makes a claim more than one year after their first arrival in Canada, if that arrival was after June 24, 2020, is now ineligible for asylum.

The bill also gives the governor in council — that is, the governor general acting on advice from Cabinet — the authority to cancel, suspend, or modify immigration documents like work, study, and permanent resident visas so long as it is “in the public interest.” The IRCC will also be able to share immigration-related information like a person’s status and other identifying information with federal and provincial agencies and crown corporations.

The federal government argues that these new provisions and powers will revitalize a system bogged down by fraud and abuse while also giving “border, immigration and law enforcement agencies modernized powers to be more effective now and in the future.”

But to hundreds of civil society groups and refugees like Sara, the government’s attempts to address major problems with the country’s asylum system will only inflict more harm on those seeking safety.

“No Longer Eligible”

Karim came to Canada about two years ago with his wife and three kids when threats to his life reached a peak. He had been attacked with a blade and suffered deep gashes to the side of his face. Karim knew if he did not leave Morocco then, he might not survive the next encounter.

The family first landed in Edmonton, Alberta, and eventually moved to Montreal in the hope of finding better work opportunities. But the city was not what they expected. Work was still impossible to access, and getting their youngest child into daycare was complicated. It was not until they were introduced to Welcome Collective that life started to look up.

Karim’s social worker, Selma Mezdaoui, who is also Sara’s social worker, had to intervene with the daycare and negotiate an agreement so mom and dad could look for work, prepare their claim, and find better housing — their landlord was withholding hot water even as winter settled in.

When Welcome Collective learned that the government might eliminate different eligibility categories for asylum seekers and that Karim’s family would be affected by the retroactive application of the one-year limit, Selma had to break the news.

“I helped them do the internal claim, and when I explained the law to her [Karim’s wife], she cried for hours in the kid’s area with her child playing around her,” Selma told Jacobin in an interview. “We still don’t know what’s going to happen, and the unknown is absolutely terrifying.”

One thing is certain. Every application filed after June 3 that would not be eligible for asylum under the new rules will be moved from the wait list for an oral hearing at the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada (IRB) to the list for pre-removal risk assessments (PRRAs), a paper-based application that has historically served as the last stopgap before someone is deported.

PRRAs have been heavily criticized since their inception. For one, decisions in these cases are made by immigration officers instead of the independent adjudicators that oversee IRB hearings. There are also no avenues to appeal a negative PRRA decision. An appeal can be made to the Federal Court, but unless a stay of removal is issued, petitioners must leave the country. When it comes to positive decision rates, the IRB currently sits around 73 percent, while PRRA rates are 6 percent for those whose claims were rejected by the IRB and 30 percent for those who were ineligible for an IRB hearing.

Karim and his family are now at risk of being sent back to Morocco if their PRRA application is unsuccessful. Karim told Jacobin in an interview that if they go back, the man who attacked him “is going to wait for me at the airport.”

In Sara’s case, her husband may be facing deportation. The family could be looking at prolonged separation while also being without status, a situation that “has been documented by researchers as being akin to torture,” said Gwendolyn Muir, a lawyer reached for comment at the Migrant Justice Clinic.

Another of Welcome Collective’s social workers, Marie Cadilhac, told Jacobin about two Haitian sisters she is currently working with who had to leave the US because their humanitarian parole, granted under President Joe Biden through the Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans (CHNV) program, was coming to an end.

Cadilhac explained to the sisters at the time of their application that, because of Bill C-12 and their nationality, their case would be complicated. Haiti is one of fifteen countries for which Canada currently has an administrative deferral of removal (ADR) order in place. The government cannot deport anyone to a country with an ADR due to ongoing humanitarian crises. For refugees from one of the fifteen countries with an ADR whose claim is denied, they may ultimately stay in Canada but without status and with extremely limited access to public services, waiting for the government to deem it safe to deport them.

A Rushed Review and Limited Public Consultation

When the Liberal Party first tabled the Strengthening Borders Act, more than three hunded civil society organizations banded together to oppose it. The coalition is historic in both the number of organizations that collaborated and the breadth of industries they came from.

It was clear to many of them, lawyers like Muir and frontline workers like Karen Cocq, that the bill was not about improving a system underwater but rather reintroducing powers the government has not had since the interwar period.

As Cocq, the co–executive director of Migrant Workers Alliance for Change, sees it, “we are now facing a situation where the government has given itself and these police agencies the power, the leeway, the lack of oversight and the money to be able to ramp up immigration enforcement on a massive scale.”

The common front held press conferences, published briefs, and organized in their communities to show the government just how harmful Bill C-12 would be. Their criticisms focused on the new ineligibility rules, the private information sharing powers, and the new powers to cancel, modify, or suspend immigration documents.

But when the bill was sent to the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security for review, the committee opted to go against standard practice and not issue a call for briefs. It took an email from Tim McSorley, national coordinator for the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group, to alert coalition members of the committee’s decision.

McSorley was told by the committee clerk to submit briefs, now limited to one thousand words versus the usual five thousand, as soon as possible.

Canadian Drug Policy Coalition Policy Director Nick Boyce submitted his organization’s brief a week before the clause-by-clause review thanks to McSorley’s heads-up. But Boyce was later notified that the brief was not translated in time. As a result, “they forwarded our brief to members out of interest, but it was not formally submitted as a brief and does not appear on the website.”

One government committee did hear from Azadeh Tamjeedi, a senior legal officer for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), who said that “to comply with international and domestic law [the UNHCR] recommends that a mandatory hearing be added.”

The Senate’s Standing Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology even recommended that the controversial elements of the bill be removed in their entirety. Yet the bill has now received Royal Assent, despite Senate attempts to increase oversight.

Cocq is already thinking about how to protect refugees when the government decides to wield its new power. “I think on that, we should be looking to the US, and we should be looking to, for example, in Minneapolis, where you had people from all walks of life, from all sectors, classes, races, coming out onto the streets and saying no, and getting in the way, putting their bodies on the line to protect their neighbors.”

Meanwhile, Sara’s oldest daughter still thinks about studying electrical engineering. Mezdaoui says she is a smart girl who could do it, especially after mastering Canada’s refugee claimant system.

Karim is starting to see his children open up at school and is starting to imagine what they could achieve if they stay in Canada. As for finding work himself, “I just wishes that people would give him a chance,” Mezdaoui said, translating. “Like, just hire me for a week and see for yourself; give me a chance.”

The US and Israel Are Making Gaza-Style War the New Normal

2026-04-01T09:40:01Z

In Iran and Lebanon, the US and Israeli militaries are bombing dense residential blocks, destroying civilian infrastructure, slaughtering children, and assassinating health workers. If it sounds familiar, it’s because this is the Gaza playbook.

The way Israel’s US-backed war on Gaza was waged felt uniquely horrifying in recent history. But the way the US and Israel are waging war on Iran suggests that those horrors are quickly becoming the norm. (Majid Saeedi / Getty Images)

One of the most appalling aspects of the Gaza genocide — besides its near-unprecedented slaughter of children and other innocents and its near-obliteration from existence of an entire society, unpparalleled in the modern era — is that officials in both the United States and Israel were overtly hoping to make it the new, horrifying standard for modern war. As we’re seeing right now in Iran and Lebanon, they’re not wasting any time applying that standard elsewhere.

Last year, as Gaza lay in ruins with more than 10 percent of its population killed or injured, the New Yorker ran a chilling story related to the Gaza genocide. The magazine reported that a variety of US military lawyers and legal experts viewed Israel’s spree of murder and destruction in Gaza as not just a completely acceptable way to prosecute a war but as “a dress rehearsal” for a future conflict with a US adversary like China: namely, one free of restraint, adherence to international law, and squeamishness about killing civilians.

What Israel did with full US backing in Gaza, in other words, should be the new normal for war, at least when “our side” does it.

The report sat uncomfortably alongside a pattern of US and Israeli officials incessantly invoking the Allies’ carpet bombing campaigns during World War II to justify the genocide they carried out. For almost the entire period after the war, those bombing campaigns were universally understood to be war crimes and a moral horror — including by Curtis LeMay himself, the psychotic general who led the firebombing of Japan and later itched for nuclear war with the Soviet Union — and one that the civilized world immediately outlawed after that war, when it created the system of international law that today clings on by its fingernails.

It was so appalling that even Richard Nixon felt the need to pretend to the press in 1972 that the Dresden firebombing had gone too far and that he would never do such a thing to Vietnam, even though he would be totally justified if he did. (He did do it, for the record). Yet for the past three years, American and Israeli hawks have no longer even bothered to pretend.

What is now playing out in Iran and Lebanon is this doctrine in action.

Iran as Gaza

While estimates vary, there is a rough consensus that the United States and Israel dropped somewhere around a thousand munitions a day on Iran in the early days of the war, a similar rate to the first few days of Israel’s unprecedented bombing of Gaza. In fact, if Israel’s own estimate of having dropped 15,000 bombs on Iran over the first twenty-six days is accurate, then the daily average of 577 bombs Israel dropped on Iran outstripped the first month of its bombing of Gaza in 2023, where it reportedly dropped just under five hundred bombs a day.

According to Airwars, the independent watchdog group that tracks civilian bombings, if we use the slightly different measure of the number of targets struck, the first hundred hours of the US-Israeli war on Iran was twice as ferocious as the same period in Gaza three years ago. Israel hit around half as many targets in Gaza as it and the US military struck in Iran in the first four days of this current war (four thousand).

Bear in mind that Gaza, particularly its earliest days and weeks, had been the most intense bombing campaign of this century, outstripping Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, the war against ISIS, and Russia’s war on Ukraine — and even many wars of the last century.

As a result, the US-Israeli method of war in Iran shares a number of characteristics that, at the time, were considered unprecedented and unique to the Gaza war.

The war began with a massacre of children, in what has now been confirmed to have been a targeted US bombing of a school that killed more than a hundred young girls. We now know it also began with the bombing of a sports hall and a different elementary school that killed twenty-one people, including two children, using a new short-range missile whose first-ever use in combat was this war. The US and Israeli militaries have since then dropped heavy bombs on entire residential buildings and destroyed whole residential blocks despite the obvious danger to civilians, burying ordinary Iranians under the rubble.

According to the Iranian Red Crescent Society, basically the local Iranian equivalent of the Red Cross, Israel has damaged or destroyed a total of more than 90,000 residential units around Iran, more than three hundred health and medical facilities, more than seven hundred universities and schools, and a range of other civilian structures. That includes pharmacies, scores of police stations and other security sites, and the infrastructure used to pay officers, as well as a desalination plant that helps provide drinking water and centuries-old heritage sites. It has also targeted Iranian nuclear facilities with bombings at least three times since the start of the war, risking a terrible accident. Both Israel and Donald Trump have since threatened to destroy Iran’s other energy infrastructure.

Israel has bombed oil facilities in Tehran in what amounted to a chemical attack, causing clouds of toxic fumes to linger over the city and choke its air for days and black acid rain to pour onto those below. It has now also targeted infrastructure crucial to Iran’s food supply and a cancer drug facility, as well as its steel production, critical to both the country’s economy and its ability to rebuild after the war.

There is strong evidence that at least part of the reason for the indiscriminate and lawless carnage is the reliance on artificial intelligence for targeting, while Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced the US military, running low on precision munitions, would start using massive five-hundred-, one-thousand-, and two-thousand-pound bombs that do more indiscriminate damage.

This should all sound familiar. Bombing with no regard for danger to civilians, the use of AI and massive bombs in densely populated places, the seemingly casual slaughter of children, the use of chemical warfare and hunger as weapons of war, attacks on civilian infrastructure crucial to the basic functioning of society, including energy production, health care facilities, and heritage sites — these were all the hallmarks of Israel’s war on Gaza.

It’s not just the methods of the Gaza war that are being replicated — on the US side, it’s also the rhetoric. Hegseth has dispensed with the kind of lip service that US officials used to pay to ethical warfare and concern about civilians and is instead increasingly uttering dark, Israeli-style warnings about collective murder of all Iranians, threatening that “death and destruction from the sky all day long” would be visited on the country and warning that “the only ones that need to be worried right now are Iranians that think they’re gonna live.” Just a week ago, he literally prayed for God to “break the teeth of the ungodly” and bring “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy” in this war.

Lebanon as Gaza

It would be bad enough if this was limited to Iran. But we’re seeing the same thing in the war Israel is concurrently waging in Lebanon.

There the Israeli military has illegally been giving Lebanese civilians forced evacuation orders in the face of likely death in indiscriminate bombing, leading to the displacement of more than one million people, or an unfathomable 20 percent of Lebanon’s population. It plans to indefinitely occupy a large swath of Lebanon’s territory as a “buffer zone,” for which it is leveling all the now-emptied homes and buildings left by their former residents — though not before Israeli soldiers gleefully loot the homes first.

In the process, Israel has been seemingly deliberately targeting Lebanese health care workers and journalists, killing dozens the former and five of the latter so far, including nine paramedics it killed across Southern Lebanon this past weekend in a series of strikes on health care sites. There is also evidence it has used white phosphorus over residential areas.

All of these were previously beyond-the-pale crimes that became appallingly regular features of Israel’s razing of Gaza. And they come alongside other Gaza parallels we just went through with Iran that have been repeated in Lebanon, including attacks on health care facilities, residential buildings, and other civilian infrastructure like power plants, water and sanitation sites, and the agricultural land it relies on to produce food.

Israeli officials have actually been explicit about this, pointing to their actions in Gaza to explain their war plans in Lebanon and even invoking Israel’s genocidal destruction of the territory as a threat. Maybe most chilling, one of the most vile statistics of the Israeli forces’ conduct in Gaza — that they had killed a classroom’s worth of children every day, according to the head of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) — is almost the exact same statistic the deputy chief of UNICEF just used to describe what Israel is doing in Lebanon right now.

We Are All Gaza Now

What we are witnessing right now in the Middle East is the Gazafication of warfare. It is clear that Israel and Washington are determined to make some of the most repellant Israeli behavior in Gaza, the actions we thought of as unique, world-historical exhibits of human sadism, the new normal for all of their wars going forward.

This is abominable on a basic human level. The point of international law is that everyone tacitly agrees on certain ground rules, as a way of ensuring certain behavior in warfare is off limits no matter who is involved. But once you start making exceptions for yourself, your adversaries can do it too, and the result is far from pretty — as we are seeing with Iran’s own retaliatory strikes on civilian infrastructure and the sudden cries from neocons and Israeli officials that by imitating them, Iran is carrying out war crimes.

Adherence to international law is not a light switch you can turn on and off at your convenience. By doing their best to shred the concept, Israel and Trump officials are not just engaging in heinous crimes. They’re creating a more brutish world where their own people are at higher risk of the very wrong they’re busy committing now: a world in which future US adversaries, for instance, will have less compunction about attacking Americans’ food supply or the infrastructure that keeps them warm in winter, or destroying or disabling the health care facilities they rely on when they’re sick, all because of an unpopular war started by leaders that most Americans don’t even like.

The Gazafication of war by Trump and Israel is a big gamble. And it is our lives, and the lives of our children, our families, and other loved ones, that they are putting up as collateral.

The Trump Library Is Going Full-On Supervillain

2026-03-31T16:08:35Z

Eight million people showed up at last weekend’s No Kings protests. Donald Trump’s response? Release footage of a skyscraper bearing his name, a golden statue of himself, and a throne room with paid parking — and call it a “presidential library.”

Donald Trump’s presidential library will contain a golden statue, a golden escalator, some jets, and replicas of places he likes. (Eli Hiller / AFP via Getty Images)

There is a certain kind of man who, upon being told that people are marching in the streets with signs reading “No Kings,” responds by announcing plans to build a glittering glass skyscraper-palace, complete with golden idols of himself. Civilization may yet survive, but irony clearly has not.

That man is, of course, President Donald Trump, who rolled out AI-generated renderings for his future presidential library by way of Truth Social. The library, if that word retains any meaning, will be a roughly fifty-story tower rising over downtown Miami, specifically over a nearly three-acre plot of land that Miami Dade College gifted to the Trump Foundation, in a shady backroom deal, valued at more than $67 million.

It’s essentially another Trump Tower that’s been given a MAGA makeover, with the word TRUMP glowing near the top and a red-white-and-blue spire jabbing at the clouds (though, no doubt a red baseball cap on top was considered). The ninety-second AI video rendering includes a replica Oval Office in its current garish splendor, a posh ballroom, rooftop gardens, and the luxury jet gifted by Qatar. There is also, naturally, a golden escalator deliberately evoking the one Trump descended at Trump Tower, New York, in 2015 to announce his first presidential campaign.

What it does not yet appear to have? A construction start date, an end date, or much of the humble archival seriousness one normally associates with a project like this. A presidential library is supposed to conjure images of the boring essential paperwork of governance: papers, records, memos, cables, meeting notes, the bureaucratic detritus of actual decision-making. Trump’s, by contrast, will contain a golden statue, a golden escalator, some jets, and replicas of places Trump likes.

The word “library” is doing an extraordinary amount of work in that title, though in fairness, a man whose literary canon consists of Sun Tzu and his own ghostwritten memoirs was never going to build the New York Public Library. It will likely contain fewer books than an airport Hudson News.

As someone who worked undercover in Chicago’s Trump Tower (and got kicked out on Inauguration Day 2017), let me offer my own prediction for what the finished building will actually contain: forty-seven floors (he is, after all, the forty-seventh president, and no branding opportunity shall go unexploited), a casino, condos marketed to foreign investors at prices that constitute their own kind of diplomatic overture, a handful of tourist shops selling MAGA hats and “Trump 47” shot glasses, a couple of mid-tier restaurants with gold-leaf menus, and — tucked somewhere on the upper floors, charging a not-insignificant admission fee — the presidential library proper.

You can imagine the gift shop already: commemorative coins, branded golf towels, “presidential” steak knives, maybe a MAGA snow globe of the Situation Room. Modesty, as ever, is not a Trump family value.

The Trump Presidential Library looks exactly like the lair of who Donald Trump has always secretly wanted to be: the bad guy from a 1985 action film. Possibly a James Bond villain. It has the mirrored surfaces, the in-your-face luxury, the sense that somewhere on the forty-seventh floor a henchman is being informed that “Mr Trump is displeased.”

It’s a well-worn trope among filmmakers to house a supervillain in an imposing glass-and-steel modernist structure — we might as well put our B-movie president there. Miami, of course, is the perfect setting for such an enterprise. New York gave Trump his original tower, Chicago gave him his riverfront chrome obelisk, but Miami — a tacky oceanfront city already awash in speculative wealth, which may eventually sink into the ocean due to climate change — makes for the perfect trifecta. A hat trick befitting of our plutocratic commander in chief.

Once again, it is worth marveling at the timing. Eight million people showed up at last weekend’s No Kings protests, holding signs that simply say the United States was founded as a republic, not a monarchy, and that its president should probably act like it. Trump’s response, delivered the very week the visibility of the movement was peaking, was to release footage of a skyscraper bearing his name, a golden statue of himself, and a throne room, with paid parking. So, yes, faced with age, scandal, protest, history, and the ordinary indignities of mortality, Trump’s instinct is once again to build upward — taller, shinier, louder, more phallic, and more impossible to ignore, erected against the terror of smallness. Overcompensating? Perhaps. But that may be a question for Stormy Daniels.

And yet there’s a case to be made that this is the most honest presidential library ever proposed, that it simply makes explicit what all these temples of self-commemoration are doing. Trump has never been in the business of pretending that the point of a skyscraper emblazoned with his name is anything other than building a skyscraper bearing his name. Though it resembles the world’s biggest avant-garde tombstone, Barack Obama’s Presidential Center in Chicago, opening later this spring, promises to be full of gee-whiz-it’s-all-about-you-folks faux humble bullshit on the inside.

Trump’s is an unironic self-celebratory monument, complete with a towering golden statue of the president standing with fist raised, recreating the famous image from the July 2024 assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. It’s to be visible from the ocean, daring you to tell him he’s not a king.

The people with the protest signs will have their work cut out for them.