Tim Libretti is a professor of U.S. literature and culture at a state university in Chicago. A long-time progressive voice, he has published many academic and journalistic articles on culture, class, race, gender, and politics, for which he has received awards from the Working Class Studies Association, the International Labor Communications Association, the National Federation of Press Women, and the Illinois Woman's Press Association.
When one starts to put two and two together, it starts to sound like this kind of “anti-socialist†ideology is the problem, trying to fool Americans into being afraid of real political and economic democracy.
We need to flip the script so expert economists’ first instinct isn’t to attack workers, where the pain will be felt the most, but rather to legislate limitations on corporations
The gang of extremists, who controlled the process of deciding the Speaker, did not so much elect McCarthy as much as they tamed, domesticated, and subordinated him.
While far from perfect, A League of Their Own, like Biden’s speech, tries to push the soul of America to embrace a more perfect union.
Biden’s plan is an effort to create fairness and equity when it comes to access to higher education.
If these hateful Christian nationalists want to secede and form their own fascist state to tyrannize over themselves, why don’t we let them?
The 1/6 Committee hearings have not changed Republican minds about reality, only about Trump’s viability.
This is a form of government not of, by and for the people, but one against the people. This is the government the Republican Party, the Supreme Court it built, and Trump are delivering.
We can’t really judge or evaluate Biden’s meeting with MBS without properly assessing the outright and serious threats to democracy and to overall global well-being and survival the world is now facing.
They aren’t dumping Trumpism, just Trump. Indeed, what some pundits have termed Trumpism is really just what mainstream Republican politics have been for decades.
Rather than assess our history and re-think traditions that are unhealthy, indeed lethal, for us, SCOTUS, lead by the illogical minds of Alito and Thomas, use tradition to validate laws and decisions that are harmful to–deadly for–Americans.
While the celebration of Title IX was certainly planned ahead of the release of the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v Wade, the Supreme Court decision nonetheless colored the discussion of the important legislation that advanced women on the basketball court, among other social arenas.,
We have to recognize that the Supreme Court is now currently operating not just as an enabler of domestic terrorism in America but rather as a chief terrorist organization and a chief purveyor of anti-intellectualism in American culture.
Media coverage blinds us to the fact that Biden’s Build Back Better plan contained the very policies that promise to move the U.S. economy in a more democratic direction and to address in fundamental ways economic inequality and the high costs of living Americans face.
The gun, in many ways these days, has become the symbol and means of tyranny, a tool for taking down democracy.
All of these issues—women’s right to choose, gun control, the rights of people to love how they want and marry whom they want, and much more—depend on one issue: democracy.
She expands the debate beyond student loan forgiveness to give us a broader lesson in civics and reality.
Forgiving student loans is an opportunity for the nation to create policy rooted in a recognition of the importance of investing in one another.
If we want to end inflation, we have to recognize how this dynamic is bound up in assaults on democracy around the globe and at home.
Less attention has been given, in discussions and analysis in the media, to the actual text of Alito’s opinion, especially the heinous cultural assumptions and curiously faulty historical analysis and reasoning
We hear—and can certainly observe—how the wheels of international justice turn with agonizing sluggishness or simply don’t move at all, to the point of being, to be most frank, practically inconsequential.
The surest way to secure a strong economy that works for the majority of Americans is to support—and vote—for democracy, not right-wing autocracy,
Democrats need to focus intensely on loudly telling the story of what life in America will really be like if Republicans rule.
We need to recognize the role of labor and collective organizing in achieving democracy.
We must recognize the authoritarian threat directly and clearly, and highlight the continuities between Putin’s anti-LGBTQ politics and those in Republican America.
we shouldn’t refer to their acts of barbarism and wholesale mass murder as “war.†We need to call it what it is: an act of genocide
I’m not just saying fighting alongside Ukrainian soldiers is the moral thing to do. I’m saying it’s the smart political move to defend democracy globally and domestically.
Want to stop autocracy? Want relief from inflation?
Democracy is the theory of everything.
Biden and the Democrats need to counter with the very true narrative that electing Republicans will hurt Americans
The NFL that publicizes ending racism, presumably to sell its product, also deeply believes in the intellectual inferiority of Black players,
This amnesia threatens to push Americans back to the authoritarianism we so narrowly escaped–by a hair!–in the 2020 election.
The past week has telescoped America’s history of racism and genocide in the intensest of ways, highlighting too that it’s the highest governing offices in the land that are promulgating the most virulent racism and leading the genocidal charge.
While Biden is trying to fix problems and steer the ship of state in the right direction, these substantial Republican counterforces continue to undermine the U.S. economy and put Americans’ lives and health at risk.
We need to tell the story of unionization and collective action at least as much as we tell the story of resignation.
Liz Cheney does not oppose the authoritarianism and anti-democratic impulses of the Republican Party.
The ongoing public negotiation among Manchin, Biden, and progressive Democrats has made clear that Manchin has been trafficking the same old stale misinformation fiscal conservatives have been peddling for ages.
Manchin’s betrayal has created an opening, an opportunity for Democrats to spur a much broader profound and urgent reflection on which party is seeking to serve to their interests.
The United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) on Monday urged Manchin to revisit his rejection of the planning, highlighting the inclusion in the bill of two key provisions.
If they’re going to act like Republicans, then Biden and the Democrats need to treat them like Republicans.
It’s a huge deal—people standing up a declaring they want a voice at the table in their workplace, to participate in making decisions about their lives.
For whom does the hangman need to come for moderate and conservative Democrats to care?
This type of coverage of the mere politics, as opposed to the underlying reality of inflation, constitutes in its own right a kind of disinformation campaign that risks turning working-class and middle-class voters back to the very Republican Party.
The Rittenhouse verdict is one piece of this larger campaign to destroy democracy and energize white supremacy.
We are not seeing acts of revolutionary uprising. What we are seeing is the rise of terrorism and authoritarianism.
Elements of the Democratic Party have bought into this Republican framing, similarly deploying “wokeness†as a term of slander and dismissal, betraying key constituencies as they flee to the center, looking more and more like Republicans as they court “bi-partisanship.â€
We see the media and many Americans giving the Republicans, who engage in abusive behavior by refusing to do anything to help Americans in need, a free pass while blaming the Democrats.
We know what’s in the bill: attempts to make a more equitable society that sustains and supports the health and well-being of Americans and our environment.
As workers realize and assert their real power, rooted in the fact that we all depend on each other’s work and can’t live without each other’s work in many cases, we can potentially achieve democracy in the workplace.
Republicans are scary, indeed. But the moderates and mainstream media members who aid and abet them, living in denial, are just as scary, if not scarier.
We are at a dangerous moment in America. Republicans have effectively sanctioned violent vigilante justice.
A belief in science supports a socialist philosophy and worldview, and to slander or dismiss socialism may very well undermine the advocacy for believing in science.
Most disturbing about this evidence is the way it highlights just how widespread the acceptance of sexism, and of violence against women, is.
So, Facebook’s behavior is a symptom of alienation, and it shouldn’t be any kind of “jaw-dropping†surprise.
The chief value-driving economic behavior, the U.S. economy itself, is not the meeting of human need, and thus it is designed to fail when it comes to working for Americans’ collective well-being.
For Republicans, freedom means they also get to impose their belief systems, their version of “law and order†on everybody else.
What Republicans call “socialism†isn’t giving away free stuff; it’s smart short and long-term investing.
Scarborough’s logic is exactly that which also enables the anti-vaccination movement and, frankly, movements to undermine democracy.
The founders conceptualized freedom as a social mission, a social obligation, the chief goal of which was to serve the public good, not one’s narrow private interests.
“Folks [are] supposed to have common sense.†These are the now well-known words of Alabama’s Republican Governor Kay Ivey when she called out those hesitant or downright resistant to getting vaccinated, declaring that “it’s time to start blaming the unvaccinated folks, not the regular folks. It’s the unvaccinated folks that are letting us down.†It’s…
Understanding the role white rage has played historically in undermining the economic well-being of people of color as well as white Americans is crucial to overcoming racism to create an economy that serves the needs of all.
We need large organizations that bring people and their power together to insist that people matter and deserve a voice in shaping the world in which we live—in short, in recognizing people’s equality.
Republicans promote an ignorance that delights in repeating history, even it results in deadly massacres.
The war is formalized in legal proceedings as the people are fighting back against Republican governors who prematurely eliminated the enhanced unemployment benefits
Sinema and the Supreme Court, empowered and enabled by the filibuster, have through the supposedly “democratic processes†Congress invented, extra-constitutionally, invited extremism into mainstream American politics.
Again, we have to ask, where and in what shape would Americans and the U.S. economy be without the “radical socialist†agenda of the Biden administration?
On the whole, as a culture, we don’t speak much of the nation’s failure to extend democracy and civil rights to workers, tending to prioritize the rights of private property and capital
Traditional Republican policies do not put country over party but rather turn back the clock on the American Revolution.
His belief that he is still president, or entitled to the presidency, is simply the most honest and overt expression Republican ideology.
Of course, these Republicans, strenuously posing as “principled,†remain quiet about their own election-stealing strategy, even as it sits ponderously front and center as the proverbial elephant in the American political arena.
Trumpism, in fact, has provided a fortuitous opening for the Republican Party establishment to salvage its own perfidious conservatism by providing a kind of straw man for the establishment.
The problem Cheney and the other never-Trumpers have with Trump and the current Republican Party is that it has exposed the reality of the traditional GOP, pulled back the curtain of dignified phrases and codes to reveal its anti-egalitarian, racist, and undemocratic character.
The point is that where Trump’s policies furthered death, Biden has affirmed life in his policies, calling out and challenging genocide in unprecedented ways.
We must hold white supremacy accountable and, in doing so, take a hard look in the mirror as white Americans.
The message they send to Americans is clear: “Stay out of politics and leave the destruction of you and your country to us.â€
We may be ready for this discussion as a nation, especially if Biden were to stop eschewing the socialist label and proudly embrace his goal of an economy designed to meet need rather than just produce profit.
We need to weave a cultural narrative that addresses the fact of the world we are making and helps us tell a story that ends differently from the murderous ways our national narratives have been concluding recently.
What we need to recognize is that when returned these verdicts will not just tell us about these individual cases; they will foretell whether we are moving toward a political culture of accountability to the nation’s stated ideals.
John Roberts somehow believed it was his role to usurp Congress’s authority and make this call. He decided, based on what training and sociological research we don’t know, that racism simply wasn’t a problem in America anymore.
Biden has thrown down the gauntlet, showing he will fight against corporate autocracy and for workers’ democracy and welfare.
Building back better, which is how Biden characterizes his agenda of running government to address American’s needs, is, indeed, an effort to de-criminalize government itself.
This sweeping legislation isn’t just about suppressing the vote; it’s about prohibiting collective care and action, criminalizing any sense of human solidarity, any acting upon the recognition that others’ lives matter.
The filibuster is another way Republicans turn reality and democracy and their heads to install a tyranny of the minority.
Meng’s insistence that “We will not let you take our voice†encapsulates the impetus behind the multiple but absolutely connected struggles for democracy and against repression.
It may not sound that catchy to say, “Let’s make American Ok.†In reality, though, it’s an incredibly ambitious and humane goal, and it’s absolutely visionary.
Biden made many promises. First and foremost were those of leading us out of the pandemic and improving the lives of Americans. He is doing that by choosing to see the plight of Americans rather than negotiating with a mean and greedy blindness.
The call to get teachers back into schools has been more insidious than earlier Republican calls to re-open the economy even though it meant loss of life, especially because teachers are in fact working and teaching, often harder and longer hours than ever.
When President Joe Biden recently voiced support for unions, encouraging workers at Amazon currently involved in a vote to unionize or not to take part in this process, Biden was really just standing up for democracy itself.
For Biden to be effective abroad, he must set an example in his own nation. For him to set an example for Americans, he must walk the democratic walk abroad.
Poetry can help us do that, as can a science supported by a poetic sensibility that seeks ever to bring us closer to the creative truth of ourselves and our world.
This is the science we can trust.
While Republicans love to falsely claim that tax cuts for the wealthy pay for themselves through increased economic activity, in the case of increasing the minimum wage, it’s actually true.
If Democrats want to save democracy and work toward unity, they must remove the obstacle of the filibuster.
In a small sentence, Biden made a huge point. Let’s serve people, not presidents or politics.
These critics seem to want blood for their own sport. The House impeachment managers were not playing such games. They were actually trying to work for and play to the American people in a time of crisis.
Plaskett and peers such as Haaland, Ocasio-Cortez, and Velazquez are making it clear the Democratic Party is evolving toward a more critical and reparative confrontation with the nation’s history of racism and colonialism that hobbles us to this day.
In listening to workers and science, Biden is providing an example of how we properly value lives and protect and practice democracy.
The “big lie†is not unique to Trump but rather constitutes a long-standing Republican tradition and political practice that, far from distinguishing itself from Trump’s governance, in fact enabled and even created it.
We keep hearing about splits in the Republican ranks between those who have sold their souls to the extremist arm of the party loyal to Trumpism, embodying white supremacist and anti-democratic values, and those more traditional Republicans who insist on sharply differentiating the ideology of conservativism from Trumpism. The founders of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project…
In the summer of 1800, Gabriel Prosser, an enslaved blacksmith, planned a slave insurrection in Richmond Virginia. Information about the rebellion was leaked, and it was thwarted. Prosser and 25 of his followers were taken captive and hanged. In 2007, in response to a 2006 request from the NAACP, then Virginia Governor  Tim Kaine issued…
Senate Republicans are now gearing up to acquit Trump in an impeachment trial on the specious rationale that putting a former officeholder on trial is unconstitutional, even though legal scholars, including some from the conservative Federalist Society, have broadly affirmed the constitutionality of such a proceeding. While this argument is their most recent political tactic,…
Too many in America, caught in throes of misinformation and conspiracy theories, are busy slaying mythical dragons rather than engaging in the truly wise, loving, and heroic activities of the real revolution for democracy.
