Destructive Myths
Romanticized stories about the Second World War are at the heart of American exceptionalism.
Spring 2025
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The Public Sector We Need
To have any chance of implementing popular left-wing ideas, we need to restore the capacity of democratic government to serve working people.
A Short History of American Empire
Stephen Kinzer is one of the few mainstream voices reminding Americans of our imperial identity. In The True Flag, he takes us back to where he thinks it all began—1898, when the U.S. political class pushed off on the quest for global domination.
American Futures: The Shortcomings of the Governing Class
If tomorrow the GOP agreed to everything in the agenda that Barack Obama laid out in his February State of the Union address, the progress in dealing with the dramatic changes in the economic prospects of most Americans would be close to zero.
Big Dollar, Little Democracy 
Republic Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It by Lawrence Lessig Twelve, 2011, 381 pp. Money talks. It is also a conversation stopper. Almost any discussion among progressives of what is really needed to solve the nation’s …
The Shaky Case for Optimism
Rebound: Why America Will Emerge Stronger from the Financial Crisis by Stephen J. Rose St Martin’s Press, 2010, 288 pp. The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050 by Joel Kotkin Penguin Press, 2010, 320 pp. The Next 100 Years: A …
To the Deficit Commission: First Puncture the Myths
Jeff Faux: Deficit Myths
Obama’s Mexican Challenge
When Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton pledged to Ohio Democrats last spring to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, they were immediately charged by the mainstream press with pandering to labor, thus re-igniting the simplistic “free-trade vs. protectionism” debate …
The Democrats’ Opportunity: Are They Ready?
After World War I, a French general was asked how one fights the Germans. “Retreat and retreat,” was the reply, “and wait for the German mistake.” So it has pretty much been with the Democratic Party generals after the watershed …
Flat Note from the Pied Piper of Globalization
Thomas L. Friedman’s The World Is Flat
Without Consent: Global Capital Mobility and Democracy
Shortly after he became the first general secretary of the World Trade Organization, Renato Ruggiero observed, “We are no longer writing the rules of interaction among separate national economies. We are writing the constitution of a single global economy.” The …
Global Economics Classes
The Politics of Freeing Markets in Latin America: Chile, Argentina,and Mexico by Judith A. Teichman and Managing Mexico by Sarah Babb
The Politically Talented Mr. Greenspan
A few short days after Bill Clinton vacated the White House this January, Federal Reserve Board head Alan Greenspan publicly endorsed the new tenant’s $1.6 trillion tax cut. Democrats who had been convinced by both Clinton and Greenspan to give …
Globalization and the Left
Our relentless evolution toward a global economy will clearly require new institutions both to regulate unstable markets and to protect ordinary citizens from the brutalities of worldwide, dog-eat-dog capitalism. Eventually, like national economies, the global marketplace needs the equivalent of …
Lost on the Third Way
Bill Clinton’s climb in the polls—a gift of the self-destructive Republican handling of the Monica Lewinsky scandal—has reinforced the punditry’s conviction that Clinton’s centrist politics define the only sensible path for Democrats to follow into the twenty-first century. It is …
