In 2024, one day after the shocking assassination attempt on Donald Trump at a campaign stop near Butler, Pennsylvania, Bernie Sanders went on NBC and said something curious. “Politics should be kind of boring,” he said. “Our healthcare system is dysfunctional. How do we fix it? Well, it’s kind of a boring discussion. We have massive income and wealth inequality. Well, maybe a boring discussion: should three people own more wealth than the bottom half of American society?”

That Sanders would be boring in this tense moment and in precisely the way that he has been lampooned for, all while claiming that politics should be boring, is just another example of his political singularity. His statement was also, in retrospect, an unwitting commentary on the state of left politics today.

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While the Left has historically been anchored in political organizations and unions, today’s Left is strongest in a different set of institutions. Bungacast host Alex Hochuli has aptly named the activist core of the Left today “MANGOs”—people in the media, arts, academia, and NGOs. Not all left-wing activists fit the description, of course, but a significant portion of them do, and their embeddedness in these institutions gives rise to a specific set of incentives. Left opinions are circulated through savvy media entrepreneurs, hoping for clicks and subscriptions as much as the next, and through organizations that can be quite insulated from popular opinion. For this reason, there is an understandable desire to make being on the Left as “interesting” as possible, but in a way that—consciously or not—resonates primarily with coastal blue-city dwellers.

In the process of realizing this desire, lefty rags, Substackers, podcasters, and streamers have produced a library of content demarcating the left opinion on every topic under the sun (including Thanksgiving!), which often take the form of provocative “takes” that, again, are interesting to MANGOs, with their eclectic and rootless sensibilities, but simultaneously end up somewhere between odd and alienating to most other people. These in turn get absorbed into the cultural ether and eventually become political liabilities for a Left that would be a far more effective force were it not for the persistent maximalism that I’ve critiqued elsewhere in these pages.

So when Sanders said that politics should be boring, he could have just as easily been making a grander statement about this particular conjuncture. But, to slightly modify this sentiment, it’s not simply that politics should be boring; it’s that socialist politics should be boring.

Politics as such, the politics of the ruling class, needs, in fact, to be quite entertaining as a way of dressing up the raw, anti-human corruption at its heart—Rousseau’s “garland of flowers over our iron chains.” The incensed talking head, showmanship in committee hearings, attempted assassinations, seedy affairs, public bathroom goings-on, “Of course he knew what that tattoo signified”—that’s all politics! Not in the narrow sense of elections and legislative fights, but in the broader sense that Americans have come to know the term. The kinds of things people will mention in casual conversation before stopping themselves short in disgust, and then saying, “Ugh, let’s not talk about politics.”

So the fuller version of Sanders’s statement would be something more like: “While contemporary American politics is a thick mixture of the titillating and the repellant, a politics that actually aimed to make life better for the vast majority of people would, by contrast, be quite boring.” And as his chosen appellation for that better politics is democratic socialism, it seems worth drawing the natural conclusion that fighting for socialism is (or should be) a fundamentally boring endeavor.

As Sanders indicated on NBC, a discussion of the rationality of Medicare for All or socialized medicine is not an exciting one. It involves the administrative bloat of private insurance companies, the tapeworm effect of insurance costs on businesses, the monopsony purchasing power of the government, and other topics that are the conversational equivalent of watching paint dry. The same is true of any plank of the Sanders platform, even a topic as infuriating as wealth inequality. You can only say that “X number of people having the same amount of wealth as Y percent of the population” before you get into the nitty gritty of progressive taxation, and the emotional swell of rage at injustice subsides into cold calculations.

One might grant me this point that a discussion of the details of socialist policy can often be quite boring but still believe that the fight for socialist politics should get the blood going. Undoubtedly there are moments of excitement in the life of anyone on the Left, but in a time of broad defeat for working-class politics, either those moments are fleeting or delusions of grandeur have taken over. Besides, much of one’s time on the Left is spent in endless meetings—some productive, some not so much, many where people complain there are too many meetings. Outside of meetings, when people finally get to “doing the work,” monotony again is the norm. Organizing, whether it is rank-and-file organizing or salting or canvassing, entails a lot of going through spreadsheets and having repetitive conversations. It can be gratifying to do boring work in concert with others, but this does not detract from the fact that the work itself is essentially plodding.

There are some leftists who, sickened with the typical doldrums, take on a more revolutionary attitude and start talking of direct action. Their justification for doing so is that the “meeting leftists” are complacent and compromised, unwilling to make the bold moves that true anti-capitalist action requires. In reality, they are just unwilling to tolerate the boredom that collective action requires. They are engaged in an activity as noble as breaking off a conversation to scroll through your feed on your phone.

I know that the instinct here is to grate against such claims, under the notion that the cause of the Left must be sold to people as an inspiring thing to be a part of. Though the desire to inject “fun” into the Left often comes from the same place as Kamala Harris wanting to find “joy” in her campaign, it’s perfectly understandable that people need social events in an antisocial age. And maybe there are organizers out there who are truly jazzed every day doing list work and having one-on-ones.

My point here, like Sanders’s, is more strategic: at this particular moment, when everyone is seeking short hits of gratification on social media, and primed to see the actual stakes of left politics in television shows like Andor or films like One Battle After Another, it’s worth defending a deflationary account of life on the Left. It’s better to say that socialism is boring than to always dress it up under the attention-grabbing incentives of the left mediasphere. Worse, the latter more often than not involves unflattering complications. It’s apparent to most people that living under the churn of capital is immiserating and degrading, and that people should have healthcare and housing as a right. Trying to make these things inspiring within the narrow confines of the MANGO mindset makes them less rather than more appealing to the majority of people.

Not everyone can be the exemplary labor leader John Brophy, who was so boring that even close friends reported wincing before going into long meetings with him. But we can try. Deleting social media is low-hanging fruit. Pitiless self-censorship whenever the urge to petty moral condemnation rears its head is always good. But the key, to my mind, is cleanly separating entertainment from politics. Watch sports, read the news, enjoy shows, hang out with friends, pontificate loudly about your opinions in a crowded bar, but don’t confuse any of these activities for the long-range commitment of socialist politics and the inevitably boring nature of much of what that involves. Indeed, it’s a positive good to find entertainment elsewhere, so that it is not expected of political activity. The socialist project is certainly meaningful, but it’s a long, frustrating, vexing, monotonous slog. And in his talent for persistent repetition, Sanders still—boringly—guides the way for socialist politics in the twenty-first century.

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Benjamin Y. Fong is the co-editor of Rustin’s Challenge and keeps a Substack on labor and logistics at ontheseams.substack.com.

This interview is from our sixth (and final) print issue, “Trains,” which is out now. Order your copy here.

Just two decades ago, China had no high-speed rail network. But today, China boasts the largest high-speed rail system in the world, making up more than two-thirds of the global total by kilometers of track. The US, by contrast, has been completely incapable of building at all. Despite California’s successful vote in 2008 to build a high-speed rail line in the state, there is none yet in operation after nearly two decades of administrative wheels turning. In his recent bestseller, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, analyst Dan Wang conceives of China as an “engineering state” that builds rapidly with abandon and the US as a “lawyerly society” that blocks all change, good and bad. We sat down with Wang to understand how the Chinese engineering state’s high-speed buildout of high-speed rail. This interview has been edited for clarity.

Daniel Cheng: Your book, Breakneck, is centered around your novel conception of China as an engineering state. What is the engineering state, and how does it relate to China’s high-speed rail system?

Dan Wang: The engineering state is a state run by engineers. Throughout the 1980s, Deng Xiaoping decided to promote many engineers into the top ranks of the Central Committee as well as the Politburo. And what do engineers like to do? Build a ton of shit. My book is about how China in the last 40 years has really engaged in this giant spasm of construction. China has built homes, highways, bridges, solar, coal, wind, and a lot of high-speed rail as well. China started its first line in 2008 and completed it three years later, linking the megacities of Beijing in the north and Shanghai in the east. Over the next 15 years, it built a high-speed rail network that is 15 times the length of Japan’s. It now has two-thirds of the total amount of the world’s high-speed rail track.

DC: China today is still a middle-income country. When it started building out its high-speed rail network in 2008, it was even poorer measured by GDP per capita. How did a relatively poor country build out such a massive network so quickly?

DW: In part because they’re an engineering state. When they attempted to build this high-speed rail project in 2008, there was a lot of skepticism from economists because China was still a lower middle-income country by World Bank classifications, and they didn’t think China needed this sort of project. But China decided to do it anyway in part because the country was trying to grapple with the Global Financial Crisis, just as everyone else was.

The railway minister at the time was a highly entrepreneurial figure who told the Chinese leadership that this is exactly what we need at this moment. He ended up being so corrupt that the state claimed that he had fifty mistresses, and he was sentenced to death with a reprieve. But despite his corruption, he drove this process forward in a way that surprised much of the leadership. The state had just released the 12th Five-Year Plan, which actually had no provisions for high-speed rail. So it became a kind of economic emergency measure pushed by this highly entrepreneurial guy as a way of dealing with a financial crisis. That was the primary political factor at play.

But the economic factor is that a lot of these economists were wrong about China not being suited for high-speed rail. China actually was a good candidate at the time because it had long underinvested in rail infrastructure. When they invested in high-speed rail, they could free up a lot of [their existing, lower-speed] network for commercial freight. That doesn’t mean that it remains a good investment to build more high-speed rail today. The engineering state can’t stop. But for a while, it was a good investment.

DC: In the West, we often hear stories of China overbuilding its high-speed rail system and bleeding money on unnecessary white elephants and unused train lines and stations. Do you think that’s a fair characterization?

DW: According to a World Bank study completed a few years ago, the system on net makes money. On a narrow economic basis, the conclusion of the World Bank was that the system has been able to pay for itself. And then there are the non-pecuniary benefits of having an extensive high-speed rail network, which is that there seems to have been higher rates of innovation as measured by patent filing along cities that are connected to the network. Now, there are all sorts of non-pecuniary costs with building high-speed rail, namely displacement of people, destruction of the environment, and these have to be tabulated as well. But strictly from a pecuniary standpoint, it seems like this has been a good investment.

But when engineers are in charge, there’s also the political benefit of high-speed rail. High-speed rail was not purely an economic project with purely economic costs and benefits. Extensive infrastructure is also a political project. China can declare to its people: “Look at our gleaming infrastructure, you’re able to get around the country easily. This so-called rich nation, the United States, plus the so-called wealthy province of California, are unable to connect San Francisco and Los Angeles. In addition, it’s unable to connect them decades after this democracy delivered a referendum that the state must build a high-speed rail line.”

But unlike high-speed rail, China’s really tall bridges in places like Guizhou are losing money, and the state has trouble meeting its bond payments. They really are uneconomical in a strictly pecuniary sense. But the state takes a longer term view of these projects. You might be building a bridge to nowhere. But after you have a bridge, maybe two nowheres become two somewheres. When the state declares that they’ve transformed transportation times from three hours to three minutes, villagers feel good about these time efficiencies. They feel like they’re part of a growing, thriving, strong country. Frankly, I think that’s something that states everywhere ought to deliver to their people.

DC: What about the social costs of China’s high-speed network? Could you talk a bit more about displacement, environmental damage, and any other such costs that we should be aware of?

DW: I’m not sure how many people the high-speed rail network displaced. When it comes to something like hydroelectric dam projects, the figures for something like the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s single largest power station, are hundreds of thousands of people displaced. People simply moved higher into the mountains because their valley had been flooded by the reservoir that the Three Gorges Dam created. Roads often require displacement, though this doesn’t always happen. For example, if there’s a farmer who doesn’t want to move, they build the roads around the farmer’s house and these are referred to as “nail homes” because they stick out like nails. That’s sometimes taken as evidence that the state does not have full power to actually displace everyone. The reality is somewhere in between.

For certain major prestige projects like the Three Gorges Dam or high-speed rail, the central government will not suffer anyone to put up a home in the middle of the train tracks. So human displacement is definitely one cost. Not everyone wants to move high into the mountains to eke out a living on mountain land. There is also an environmental cost in terms of the ecologies that are rammed through with concrete and steel. There’s a carbon cost because concrete and steel are very carbon-intensive. These are all trade-offs. And then the only question is how do we judge these costs against the actual usage of high-speed rail, which has delivered value as well.

DC: What’s been the Chinese public’s response to its high-speed rail network? Do people like taking it?

DW: People really love being able to get around relatively cheaply and comfortably. Even though flying between Beijing and Shanghai is faster, plenty of people prefer to take high-speed rail, enjoy the extra space, and do some work on the train. I was taking it pretty extensively from Shanghai to Hangzhou and Suzhou. Hangzhou is now China’s major AI center, and Suzhou is one of China’s big manufacturing hubs. Being able to take a train to these big cities from Shanghai felt great. I loved that I was able to take my bike on the train to go to Guizhou. It took about 7 hours, but it would have been much more difficult to take a bike on a plane.

Generally what I’ll say is that transportation and logistics in China are really amazing. It’s not just the trains too. The airports work very well; there’s very few flight delays. The highway system is excellent. When you order something on China’s equivalent of Amazon, there’s usually next-day delivery even across the country, because the trucking system is fantastic. You can hop on these ride-sharing bikes and easily get around the city. For a 20-minute ride, you’ll spend something like seven US cents. You can order a croissant from a bakery in Beijing, and it would be delivered to your home in 30 or even 15 minutes, which is fairly difficult to do even in New York. Ease of mobility is really excellent in China and that feels brilliant and exciting when you’re there.

DC: You’re known for your memoiristic writing style. Having lived in China for several years, what was your personal experience on Chinese trains like?

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This essay is from our sixth (and final) print issue, “Trains,” which is out now. Order your copy here.

It’s Christmas Eve in Steelton, Pennsylvania, and an elderly woman shakes her head as she gestures toward the sprawling steel mill and railyard, which are eerily dormant. “This place used to be humming; you could always hear it,” she said mournfully. “Now Steelton ain’t Steelton anymore.”

That’s an all-too-common refrain among residents of this struggling borough that lines the banks of the Susquehanna River in south-central Pennsylvania: Steelton is irrevocably changed and has lost its identity. Its death knell sounded in July 2025, when Cleveland-Cliffs, the plant’s corporate owners, opted to idle it and lay off 600 workers—all but 80 of them members of the local Steelworkers union. Six months later, January 13th, 2026, marked its final doomsday, the moment when all the metallurgy ended for good. It’s officially lost its status as America’s longest continually operating steel mill after 158 straight years of operation. How remarkable is that run? Consider that it fired up as the first facility in the United States with the chief purpose for steelmaking in 1867, two years after Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train rode these same rails.

The mill’s closure is a massive blow to the community, both economically and spiritually: Steelton without the steel is like Milwaukee without beer or San Francisco minus the Golden Gate Bridge (which ironically was made using Steelton’s finest).

It begs the question: why now? This was one of only three plants in the United States capable of producing railroad rail. It had survived world wars, the Great Depression, deindustrialization, multiple ownership changes, and decades of globalization. Railroads are still crucial to the American economy. The Biden administration promised nearly $30 billion to hundreds of rail infrastructure projects nationwide, and the new White House insists that domestic steel is “quickly roaring back to life,” with Cleveland-Cliffs touted as a success story.

The explanation from Cleveland-Cliffs for the mill’s demise is “weak demand” and “insufficient pricing,” but that barely scratches the surface. The full answer speaks volumes about the state of America’s manufacturing economy.

A Town Made of Steel

Steelton was born in the fire and flames of America’s first experiment in large-scale techno-capitalism. Steel and rail were the twin engines of the post-Civil War economy, and vast holdings of capital, real estate, equipment, and workers were accumulated through their production. It was a perfectly symbiotic relationship in which railroads consumed enormous quantities of steel—rails, spikes, bridges, cars—while steelmakers depended on rail lines to haul iron ore, coal, and commodities across ever-expanding distances. The expansion of reliable, all-weather rail lines also freed industry from dependence on rivers and canals, allowing factories, mills, and mines to spring up far from navigable waterways.

As America became more economically reliant on this super-industry, steel and railroad barons such as Andrew Carnegie occupied a role not unlike today’s titans of Big Tech; figures cast simultaneously as the kings of national progress and as unchecked concentrations of private power. Their decisions determined where cities would rise and where they would wither. Train lines attracted speculative capital, consolidated corporate control, and demanded unprecedented coordination between private industry and public authority.

Rail and steel also helped fuel the heyday of the company town. As the Industrial Revolution’s new infrastructure spiderwebbed across the nation—from 53,000 miles in 1870 to just under 200,000 miles at the turn of the century—coal barons, cotton magnates, and steel tycoons bought cheap land, erected mills and mines, and built housing near coal seams and frontier manufacturing zones where infrastructure was thin and oversight thinner still. They weren’t traditional communities so much as controlled environments designed to secure and foster a labor force where none had existed before. Between 2,000 and 3,000 such towns dotted the United States at their peak, supporting an estimated three percent of the population, including Hershey, Pennsylvania, the chocolate town a few miles northeast of Steelton.

Towns with rail connections and depots swelled into company towns almost overnight. That’s especially true in mid-19th-century Pennsylvania, where the Pennsylvania Railroad Company emerged as one of the most powerful monopolies in human history, a fact you’re likely to be reminded of when playing the board game. Chartered by the Pennsylvania state legislature in 1846 to connect Harrisburg to Pittsburgh, the railroad created multiple towns out of thin air. In 1849, the PRC founded Altoona, PA—home to the famous rail landmark, the Horseshoe Curve—and infrastructure sprang up around train shops, repair yards, and maintenance facilities.

The town that would be Steelton rose in the 1870s after the PRC and its partners chose a bend in the Susquehanna River a few miles south of Harrisburg as the 97-acre site for a steel mill. What was once farmland and riverbank almost immediately became an industrial settlement, initially named Baldwin after the founder of a steam locomotive company, but by 1880, it was re-founded under a more literal name.

In those early years, Steelton resembled the caricature of the company town as a pure “exploitationville.” Immigrants arrived from Europe and elsewhere, and black workers journeyed from the South during the Great Migration. They rented beds in company row homes and worked alternating shifts in a system of industrial hot-racking. “You’d get out of bed, tap the next guy on the shoulder, and go to work,” said Sean Pisle, a fourth-generation mill worker who also serves as vice president of the local union (United Steelworkers Local 1688). It was brutal work, and there’s a reminder of just how deadly it was in the basement of the steelworkers’ union. There hangs a memorial listing the names of all the workers who died on the job since 1912. A vast majority of the couple hundred names on the list were killed in work accidents in the first half of the 20th century, before the unions and OSHA.

In 1917, Pennsylvania Steel Company sold the Steelton facility to Bethlehem Steel, the company that provided the skeleton of America’s skyline over the next several decades. Its steel framed the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, Madison Square Garden, the Waldorf Astoria, and Chicago’s Merchandise Mart, and carried traffic across the George Washington and Verrazzano–Narrows bridges, and the Peace Bridge to Canada. The company’s success, paired with the rise of organized labor, meant that by the World War II era, Steelton’s relationship with its steel mill had evolved into something more durable and reciprocal than before. It did not simply extract labor and discard it. At its peak, the mill employed more than 9,000 people in a town of about 13,000 and anchored a stable civic ecosystem of schools, churches, grocery stores, parks, and public programs. Pisle described the city then as “middle blue-collar. Nobody got rich, but you survived.” In the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, he said, young men had three options: school, the draft, or “down the hill to the mill.”

But as the twentieth century dragged along, that choice increasingly seemed like a raw deal. Steelton was both a beneficiary and captive of the old economic system, thriving only so long as the expansion of track—and the flow of capital behind it—continued.

The Long Decline

The rail-and-steel economic system held together longer in Steelton than its critics expected. For much of the twentieth century, steel and rail continued to reinforce one another, even as technologies changed and corporations consolidated. Over the decades, the Steelton mill produced nearly every component needed to build and maintain a railroad. “You could get all your railroad products here in Steelton,” Union president LaRue Hess told me. Rail was the flagship product, but far from the only one. The plant made bridge components, rebar, pipe, forgings, and specialty alloys. Parts of the Golden Gate Bridge were fabricated there, as was rebar inside the concrete containment structures at Three Mile Island. The mill rolled submarine drive shafts for the Navy and heavy-equipment components for companies like John Deere and Caterpillar.

The financial fracture came slowly and then all at once. Beginning in the postwar decades and accelerating after the 1960s, the ground beneath the steel-rail loop began to shift. By the mid-twentieth century, heavily regulated railroads were suffering chronic financial losses as competition from highways and trucking eroded their traditional base, culminating in the massive Penn Central bankruptcy in 1970 that helped lead to government-led restructuring. Containerization and the rise of intermodal shipping did increase overall rail traffic, but it was a different kind of traffic: standardized containers moving imported goods over long distances, not the dense, steel-intensive industrial freight that had once bound railroads to domestic manufacturing. The 1980 Staggers Rail Act deregulated the industry, unleashing a wave of consolidation and efficiency-driven management strategies that made railroads profitable and Wall Street-friendly, but not in a way that restored the old industrial ecosystem. As global supply chains expanded, steel was no longer treated as a strategic national product but as a fungible commodity, increasingly sourced from abroad. Railroads responded by merging into a handful of large carriers, cutting costs, running longer trains with fewer workers, and prioritizing precision logistics over tailored industrial service, which boosted margins even as it hollowed out their relationships with customers like steel mills. The result was not the decline of rail itself—intermodal traffic and profitability grew—but the unraveling of the old, self-reinforcing engine of growth.

Like countless other manufacturing communities in America, Steelton experienced this shift not as a single catastrophic moment but as extended and painful attrition. Ownership changed hands repeatedly. After Bethlehem Steel collapsed in 2001, the mill passed through a succession of owners: International Steel Group, Mittal, ArcelorMittal—before landing with Cleveland-Cliffs. Each transition brought with it a sense of uncertainty: equipment aged, and processes that relied on manpower rather than automation became more expensive. The Steelton mill had only 800 workers left by the beginning of the twenty-first century.

The mill survived by specializing. It could roll shapes others had to cast and handled small, high-value orders that required precision rather than volume. “There’s not a huge market for some of the stuff we made,” Pislo said, “but the people who need it don’t have another supplier.” But what it increasingly could not do was make rail in the lengths preferred by modern railroads. As rail companies standardized on quarter-mile sections to reduce joints and maintenance costs, Steelton remained limited to shorter segments—often eighty feet. “If another place can make 320-foot rail, and we can only make eighty-foot rail,” said Hess, “one of them’s got a lot more joints in it than the other—and they don’t want joints.”

What Steelton needed for the future was not a miracle, but capital. Engineers and union leaders had already mapped out the options. A partial modernization—workers jokingly call it a “restomod,” borrowing a gearhead term for a vintage car restored with modern parts—would have cost roughly $150 million. A fuller, from-scratch universal rail mill would run closer to $800 million. Either investment would have allowed Steelton to produce longer, cleaner, more efficient rail in a single linear process, eliminating the inefficiencies that had slowly priced it out of the market. For an industry that routinely spends billions on acquisitions and stock buybacks, these were not unimaginable sums.

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has argued that within ten or fifteen years, the Democratic Party may be known as “democratic socialist” the way it is now known as “liberal.” Judis grounds this prediction in a “Polanyian moment,” a juncture where the collapse of the neoliberal market order forces a rebalancing between capital and labor, and he traces the opening to 2016 and to Bernie Sanders’s decision to define democratic socialism as an extension of rather than a break with the New Deal order.

Judis is far from naive about the obstacles that stand in the way of building a broader base for democratic socialism. He is a DSA member who spends a substantial share of his essay warning that the organization has to abandon its cultural insularity and learn to appeal beyond what he calls Brooklyn’s “Commie Corridor.” Judis criticizes caucuses within DSA who are still formally committed to revolution rather than to Sanders’s New Deal framing, and the tendency within DSA to treat maximal positions on immigration enforcement, policing, and Palestine as tests of membership rather than as strategic choices that carry different costs in different places. The fact that a hard-nosed realist like Judis would still feel such optimism for the potential of democratic socialism should give skeptics pause.

Rather than hearing both the optimistic, as well as the more sobering part of Judis’s argument, however, most progressive commentators have focused only on the former. Five days after DSA’s New York candidates swept their June congressional primaries earlier this year, New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani went on ABC’s This Week and confidently asserted, “I think a democratic socialist can get elected anywhere across this country for any position.” Writing in The Call, the publication of DSA’s “Bread and Roses” caucus, Alex Pellitteri left little doubt about what he sees as DSA’s electoral potential: “The movement in New York City can and must be replicated everywhere,” citing organizing in Portland, Louisville, and northern New Jersey as evidence it already is. And In These Times triumphantly concluded that “Socialists Are Tearing Through the Democratic Party Establishment.”

Are DSA’s victories in New York a harbinger of a coming democratic socialist wave across the country? Just how large is the gap between the districts democratic socialists are winning now and the ones they’d need to win to establish democratic socialism as a viable national tendency rather than a big-city, deep-blue phenomenon?

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In a way, Caleb Liam Vasquez was a very ordinary American teenager. He grew up in a big house in a masterplanned suburb called Eastlake Trails. All the houses there are big. They’ve all got lush front gardens, palm trees practically spilling out of the ground. Eastlake Trails is ringed with exciting retail centers on three sides, but to the east you can drive down to the lake and look out at the empty hills, rising up into the great Californian wilderness. It’s safe there. The weather is perfect and the people are friendly, but Caleb spent most of his life inside, watching a Dutch cartoon about three socially awkward sisters called Ongezellig, posting about Ongezellig online, getting frustrated that the online Ongezellig community was being taken over by normies who didn’t really get it, and fantasizing about death. He wanted to kill large numbers of people. Exterminate everyone he saw, turn all his happy attractive peers into heaps of inert biological pulp. He also wanted to die. That was the best part of the fantasy: after gunning down as many subhumans as possible, he would put the barrel to his head, and finally it would all be over. The indignity of being a shorter than average man. The unfairness that can only be made good in blood.

Most of his heroes were mass shooters, but another was Adolf Hitler. “He is the greatest man to ever walk this Earth,” he wrote. “I only hope that we can finish what he had once started and make him proud.” On the 18th of May, 2026, he and another teenager he’d met online attempted to finish what Hitler had started by murdering three people outside a mosque in San Diego, then getting in their car and shooting at a Samoan landscaper on the street. Finally, still livestreaming everything they were doing, they shot themselves.

What made this attack unusual is not that American boys from the sunny suburbs are turning into Hitler-worshipping mass murderers; that’s more or less expected. The strange thing is that this one was called Vasquez. A large chunk of his inevitable manifesto is devoted to “shitskin immigrants,” the “spics” who “come with complete disregard for the country they come to” and “DO. NOT. FUCKING. BELONG. HERE.” His only religion, he said, was the white race. But he was Mexican. He wasn’t unaware of this fact. “You’ll probably just see me as a larping spic,” he wrote, “but that’s honestly fine and I could care less.”

The other strange thing about the attack has to do with one of the victims. Amin Abdullah was the mosque’s security guard; when the two shooters approached the mosque, Abdullah triggered the alarm and tried to fight them off. His actions might have saved the lives of the 140 students inside the building, and he sacrificed his life in the process. Which is why only the most frenzied of right-wing commentators have felt the need to point out that he was, on Facebook, liking pictures of Adolf Hitler captioned with sentiments like “Do you now understand, why I did what I did!?” The implication is that whatever dodgy private opinions he held should invalidate his actual personal heroism, which seems desperate. Still, it’s weird. During the Cultural Revolution in China, rival Red Guards units would attack each other with clubs and guns, both sides screaming “Long live Chairman Mao!” In the West, we do things differently. Here, we have politically motivated firefights between two non-white people, both of them devoted to Adolf Hitler.

It used to be possible for progressives to claim that there was some kind of clear ethno-political line running through the world. On one side, the politics of whiteness, which are regressive, exclusionary, resentful, the cold withered hand of a dying order, based in fear of the other and the desire to chop the world into neat little parcels surrounded by white picket fences. On the other side, the politics of the global majority, which are warm and joyful, open to everyone, and based on principles like community and laughter and using lots of interesting seasonings in your food. The reality has turned out to be much weirder than that. The 2024 election really did seem to go down along racial lines: the places where Kamala Harris improved on Biden’s vote share tended to be leafy, affluent, and overwhelmingly white. Meanwhile, in immigrant communities, and Latino border towns, and multicultural metropolises, the voters shifted decisively towards Trump. Here in Britain, the most fiercely anti-migration Home Secretary in recent history is called Shabhana Mahmood. One of the leaders of our insurgent right-wing party has promised to protect Britain’s Christian heritage; one of his proposals is a law to prevent churches being converted into mosques. He’s a Muslim named Zia Yusuf. One of the party’s shadowier ideologues is called Raheem Kassam. Whatever psychological swamp is out there, producing these politics, it isn’t quite fear of the other.

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Still, the rise of the non-white white supremacist is surprising. It feels wrong that the most influential rapper of the 2000s is now releasing tracks titled “Heil Hitler.” Or that you’ll have a group of what are essentially children’s entertainers, some of the most popular children’s entertainers in the world, most of them conspicuously non-white, singing along to it in the back of a limo in Miami and throwing Nazi salutes. Or that people with names like Mauricio Garcia or Sai Varshith Kandula keep decking themselves in Nazi paraphernalia and then going out to commit acts of terror. How on earth did we end up here?

Until recently, Adolf Hitler had a very particular meaning in mainstream European and American society. He stood for a kind of moral test. What would you have done, when the Nazis were on the march? Would you have hidden people? Would you have stood up against them? Or would you have lived quietly and pretended not to know what was going on? Hitler is the name for the human capacity for weakness in the face of evil. That test already existed while Adolf Hitler was still directing tank columns from the Wolfsschanze.

In her 1941 essay “Who Goes Nazi?”, Dorothy Thompson tried to imagine what kind of person would be tempted by the consolations of fascism, and which would not. Her conclusion is that happy, confident, popular people who are content with their position in the class system will never go Nazi, but any kind of disaffected striver or anyone with any kind of inward restlessness is in danger of succumbing to hate. “Mr. C is a brilliant and embittered intellectual. He was a poor white-trash Southern boy, a scholarship student at two universities where he took all the scholastic honors but was never invited to join a fraternity. His colleagues have admired his brains and exploited them, but they have seldom invited him—or his wife—to dinner. He would rise high in a Nazi regime.” This is a very cruel portrayal. She might not have been wrong.

In other places, though, he doesn’t carry the exact same moral dread. Quick: what’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think about former Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler? If you answered something other than “blue jeans, reasonably priced polo shirts, and a wide selection of international footwear brands,” it’s likely that you’re not from the city of Nagpur in India’s Maharashtra State. Nagpur is home to three outlets of a menswear store called Hitler The Brand Fashion, plus another called The Hitler Point. Or Haldwani in Uttarakhand, where you can get a wide selection of leisure and athletic clothes at Hitler Reloaded. Or Kurnool in Andhra Pradesh, where you can pick up something wavy at either Hitler & Planet or Hitler Denim. Or Ahmedabad in Gujarat, which might be India’s capital of Hitler, featuring a Hitler Men’s Wear, a Hitler Menz Wear, and a Hitler Shoes. For India’s most intriguingly-named menswear store named after Hitler, though, you need to go to Hyderabad, where you can drop into a modern mall near Kacheguda station and explore the premium brands at Hitler The Symbol of Passion.

Occasionally an Israeli tourist will run into one of these exciting emporiums of Hitler and throw a fit, and then the Anti-Defamation League or some other group will helicopter in a bunch of tactical lawyers and PR representatives, to engage in a comprehensive campaign of hectoring until every shopkeeper on every dusty back-street in Uttar Pradesh understands and acknowledges the suffering of the Jews of Europe. And maybe they’ll even pretend to, for a while, but it’s a losing battle.

Say someone who happens to not be Indian runs into… let’s say it’s an ice cream stand named after Aurangzeb. You can explain what he did to Guru Tegh Bahadur and Sambhaji and half his own family, but they won’t really get it. That’s just history; that’s just the past, which is where all the dead people are kept. For every menswear store called Hitler Delicious that gets shut down in Telangana, there’s a bookshop somewhere else that’s just started promoting Mein Kampf as a guide to getting ahead in business. In India, comparing someone to Hitler doesn’t mean that they’ve failed the great moral test of their lives. Hitler means someone who’s a bit bossy. Someone basically decent but who seems to get an inordinate kick out of telling other people what to do. The people who think differently are less and less significant every year. The more Europe recedes from the international stage, the more the great demon of Europe’s own history is loosed on the world.

This kind of cheerful ignorance is probably not why there’s now a universal global youth monoculture consisting of games, anime, sped up pop music, AI-generated videos of Charlie Kirk hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein, using the word “bro” as a pronoun (“Bro thought bro was cooking”), Adolf Hitler, murder, and dying. There’s something much more sinister at work. But hopefully it should demonstrate the deep insufficiency of the standard progressive explanation for this kind of thing, which is that when non-white people start identifying with Nazism, it’s because they’re trying to make space for themselves in a deeply racist world by establishing some kind of “proximity to whiteness.” Which is, in fact, deeply provincial—by and for white people who still think they’re the center of the moral universe. If an ugly rhetorical instrument like “whiteness” is useful at all here, it’s because it names the normative project that used to prevent large numbers of people from idolizing Adolf Hitler, and which is now faltering. Maybe you could get a better idea of what’s behind the non-white neo-Nazis by just finding out what they themselves have to say on the subject. Here’s the unofficial anthem of the movement, Kanye West’s “Heil Hitler”:

With all of the money and fame
I still can’t get my kids back
With all of the money and fame
I still don’t get to see my children
So I became a Nazi
Yеah bitch I’m the villain
Nigga Heil Hitler
Nigga Heil Hitler
All my niggas Nazis
Nigga Heil Hitler

It’s an amazing track. A hundred years of work on the psychology of fascism, and he just comes out and says it all. Why did you become a Nazi, Mr. West? “Well, you have to read all my ideological statements as a psychosexual symptom; what’s really going on when I talk about Hitler is that I feel emasculated, my narcissism’s been wounded, I’ve been rejected by women and cut off from the principle of paternity; despite my own personal strength and potency I’m powerless before a state that has the ability to reach into my private life and tear me out of the patriarchal family structure; in a sense I’ve been cucked by the state, which is something I find simultaneously infuriating and erotically compelling; and I’m dealing with this profound woundedness by identifying myself with the forces of all-powerful violence that I privately know myself to lack, reframing my personal humiliation as a willing act of subordination to the collective; if you want to know more about why I’m doing this, please consult Reich (1933), Fromm (1941), and Theweleit (1977).” In the video he arranges a crowd of half-naked animal-headed men in military formation, all barking “Heil Hitler” in unison. Here it is at last, the homoerotic masculine collective, all hard gleaming flesh, into which you can subsume your injured subjectivity. But Kanye had to pay them all to act out this particular scene. A lot of them are probably very glad the video’s been all but banned online.

People don’t get wrapped up in this psychic structure despite the fact that they personally happen to not be white; if anything, it might make you more susceptible. Not all cases of wounded subjectivity end up expressing themselves as fascism; the world is full of totally deranged people, the hollow ranting shells of human beings, whose madness has managed to take the form of a totally inoffensive politics acceptable at any dinner party. But if you’re from an ethnic minority background, then it’s much more likely that race—which is, after all, something you experience more often than other people—will start to involve itself in whatever psychosis you’re brooding.

Of course, not everyone’s fascist psychosis is as rich as Kanye’s. The new generation of multiracial white supremacists aren’t really that interested in economic corporatism or the unfairness of the Treaty of Versailles; even the herrenvolk stuff is malleable and optional. The thing that really gets them going is naming the Jew. As far as I can tell, every single child on the planet is spending twelve hours a day watching ethnically ambiguous streamers chatter away about Jews. When a group of teens encounters one of their online idols in the flesh, they all gather around him and spontaneously start chanting “Fuck the Jews!” over and over again. Youth culture is just anime and antisemitism now; it’s in the deep grammar of how these people experience the world. Cheap bad food is goyslop. People who don’t look at the exact same deranged websites as you are goyslaves. The Jews are everywhere and behind everything; they’re why your life is like this, instead of something better. If you step on a turd in the street, it’s because this is how the Jews have chosen to fuck with you today. The only thing you can say for certain isn’t part of their plan, the only point of stability in a Jew-haunted cosmos, is Adolf Hitler.

It’s very tempting to blame all this on the war in Gaza. Two years of kids in filthy tents, body parts in the rubble, medical crews executed and buried in the desert: it’s been enough to wear out whatever remained of the post-Holocaust taboo on this kind of thing. It doesn’t help that Israel really does seem to have manipulated the United States into fighting a war on Iran that’s not even slightly in the American interest. But these antisemites aren’t appalled; most of the time they’re not even angry. They’re enjoying their antisemitism. It’s fun to ferment dark theorems about the Jews until your whole brain’s fizzing; thinking this way comes with some kind of payoff.

Antisemitism is a loser ideology. The best antisemites are all bitter, thwarted, resentful losers. Louis-Ferdinand Céline, a sexual and artistic failure, was hounded by critics whenever he tried to produce a new work. “The great French critics!… The finest flower of criticism!… Those who decide upon the Grand Prizes!… Aren’t they all Jews? All a bunch of stupid bastards, those Jews! All of them are losers, suckers, oddities! each one of them is responsible for the killing of at least fifteen works… They exert their vengeance… They crush…” There’s a reason antisemites tend not to be sunny, cheerful people; it’s why someone like Nietzsche could never have been an antisemite, and why Kanye West—whose best music is all in a Nietzschean mood of total hyperbolic self-confidence, first declaring himself a genius and then a god—stopped making bangers at exactly the same time as his Hitlerite turn.

Antisemites imagine themselves as victims. But the Jews are victims too: the officially designated victims of the twentieth century. Jews are the people whose entire identity has come to revolve around victimhood; we’re the ones who will skydive into a Third World rice paddy to make sure the locals understand the horrors of Auschwitz. By hating the Jews, you get to enjoy all the consolations of victimhood, while also safely displacing your own sense of being a loser onto someone else. It’s the Jews, not me, who are always whining about their racialized suffering. They’re the annoying ones. Why are they so self-obsessed? Which is why, around the world, antisemites of every hue and creed are writing resentful screeds about all the women who’ve wronged them, following in the footsteps where Philip Roth and Saul Bellow led.

This nasty little mirror at the center of antisemitism is, more or less, the entire mechanism behind the non-white white supremacist. How do they deal with the obvious contradiction in being an immigrant nativist or a non-Aryan Nazi? They don’t; that contradiction is what keeps the whole thing running. Look at Caleb Liam Vasquez‘s manifesto. It’s hard to read the thing without noticing just how much he’s obsessed with the notion of his own biological inferiority. He is, as he puts it, a victim of “genetic cursing.” One built-in hereditary trait—being short—has determined the whole scope of his life, even though it’s not his fault, even though he had nothing to do with it. “Those who don’t make the cut from not being quite attractive enough are cursed to an existence of perpetual torture just because a couple centimeters in their face weren’t a certain way, they got the wrong chromosomes, or they got unlucky with their genetics which were passed onto them by their parents. Genetic determinism is the most cruel, unfair, brutal reality to accept and women don’t make it any easier.”

Vasquez thinks this is unfair, and that women ought to give him a chance, but they never will; the verdict of nature is so absolute that, at eighteen, Vasquez doesn’t see any point in waiting to see if things get better in adulthood. He will always be “treated like a subhuman.” The best thing to do with his worthless life is use it to destroy as many other people as possible. Because of their cruelty, the tall, happy, well-adjusted, and sexually normal all deserve to die. “Truly a righteous retribution is needed.” At the same time, though, he also insists that, for instance, the “problems of the negro race stem from their genetic inferiority.” Thousands of words of murderous rage against the subhuman hordes, the Third World invaders, life unworthy of life, genetic refuse, half-animal: the people who are infinitely beneath him, precisely because they’re exactly the same.

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Sam Kriss is a writer and dilettante surviving in London.

This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the 1996 Labor Party, an ambitious experiment in building a working-class political institution grounded in organized labor and independent of either the Democrats or the Republicans. “The bosses have two parties. We need one of our own,” founder and labor leader Tony Mazzocchi often said. At its height, the Labor Party counted six national unions and more than 500 regional and local unions among its affiliates, representing “probably close to 20 percent of the institutional labor movement,” in the words of former Labor Party national organizer Mark Dudzic.

One of the earliest core members of this effort was Adolph Reed, Jr., who was invited to a talk Mazzocchi was giving on the Labor Party at the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) union hall in Chicago by UE official Carl Rosen. “I went,” said Reed, “and that was the next fifteen years of my life.” Though the Labor Party wound down its official operations in 2007, the platform that members adopted in 1996—which included universal health care, free public college, and expanded collective bargaining rights for workers—would resurface most notably in the Bernie Sanders campaigns of 2016 and 2020.

In 2026, the toll that decades of bipartisan neoliberal governance has taken on workers is starker than ever. Economic inequality has soared, union density continues to decline, and public trust in the government has cratered. As a result, more voters now identify as independents than as Democrats and Republicans combined. Damage spoke with Reed about the lessons from the Labor Party and the state of left-wing politics in the US today.

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Jennifer C. Pan: You recently were on an episode of the Class Matters podcast with fellow Labor Party members Katherine Isaac, Mark Dudzic, and Bob Wages discussing the Labor Party and the conditions that led to its founding in 1996. Given the worsening disillusionment among Americans with the two major parties—and the subsequent calls for third parties that circulate every year—what can we take away from this effort three decades later?

Adolph Reed, Jr.: Katherine and Mark wrote a great piece in 2012 called “Labor Party Time? Not Yet” that’s worth revisiting, and the three of us are working on another article about the Labor Party for a nonsite symposium that’ll be out later this year.

We all still think that the Labor Party’s approach to politics was the proper one to take. Tony [Mazzocchi] would often say, “We’re in a class war, and you don’t go to war without building an army.” So we’ve got to build the army first. In recent years I’ve been saying until I’m blue in the face that I think the electoral realm is the domain for consolidating victories that have been won on the plane of social movement organizing. Some people think it’s like a Field of Dreams thing—that if you declare a new party or put some candidates out there, people will come. But that’s not the way it works, and it doesn’t work that way because of ruling class hegemony. When the ruling class sets the terms of political debate, anything that’s not within the ruling class’s terms of political debate sounds crazy.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the Labor Party was born in a moment of insurgency within the labor movement, after the concessionary bargaining blitz of the 80s, and on the cusp of the travesty of NAFTA in the early 90s. And so our effort grew rapidly out of this moment of insurgency within the institutional labor movement, but then when that moment faded at the end of the century, we faded, too. All of our funding came from unions—I confirmed that we had 350 to 400 local affiliates that paid an annual affiliation fee, and we only ever lost one by active disaffiliation. We lost a lot more of them through mergers and going out of business.

So if you start out from the conviction that, politically, we’re now at the equivalent of the beginning of union organizing drive, then you know that it’s going to take a long time—and lot of labor-intensive and slow-cooked efforts—to build a movement that’s capable of altering the terms of the political debate. So much of progressive politics now is like an ad campaign—like if you just get the message out there, then people will buy your fucking toothpaste or whatever. But we didn’t get in this position overnight, and we’re not going to get out of it overnight.

Of course, it’s necessary to move to counter the authoritarian fascist Trumpist juggernaut, to challenge its control of government. And the only way that’s going to happen for the foreseeable future is through electing Democrats. That’s necessary, but the ultimate reason it’s necessary is to create space and time for the deeper organizing that’s required to alter the terms of political debate. We’re in this situation partly as a result of a half-century of bipartisan revanchist neoliberal capitalism, often enough led and shaped by Democrats, even Democrats representing themselves as “progressives,” Democrats who, since Clinton, have operated under the mantra, as my son put it at the time, “Me too, but not so much.” Elections will become a domain for effecting significant changes in policy orientation once they become platforms for dynamic, popularly based movements anchored in the working class that demand altering the terms of political debate in line with a principle guiding political engagement like our Debs-Jones-Douglass Institute motto of pursuing “what the country would look like if it were governed by and for the working class.” And the short-term objective of electing Democrats to stop the bleeding is not an alternative to the longer-term organizing we need. We need a Left that’s capable of what the Maoists used to call “walking on two legs.”

In the US, even with the ways that Trumpism seems to be faltering now, the Right can congeal and mobilize its base much faster than we can produce the counterweight. What that means, unfortunately, is that the work that there is to be done now is work that may not produce the kind of results that we want until this right insurgency has run its course. What you’ve got to do is connect with people who don’t already agree with you and try to find points of commonality and build on those. That’s what the Labor Party was all about. And at a time when so much of the Left basically rests on an imperative of “I have to do something,” I think there’s a fault line that divides the people who see themselves as part of a larger project of just trying to move the ball a few yards down the field and those who need to feel like they’re doing something and be recognized for it.

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JP: Why were there so many lapsed Catholics in the Labor Party?

AR: [Laughs] Well, I’ll tell you how we found out about that. We had a national council meeting in Pittsburgh before our second convention in 1998, and the US Council of Catholic Bishops just happened to be meeting at the same hotel at the same time. So we ended up spending a lot of time in elevators with them and whatnot, and it eventually came out that among the dozen or so core people in the leadership of the Labor Party, all but one had been raised Catholic. Some were still practicing, and one had even been to the seminary for a while. It was weird.

There are some cultural aspects of having been raised Catholic that might predispose one to certain politics, like the belief that works are more important than faith, or liberation theology, or growing up on stories of the publicans and the Pharisees. But to give the question more of a serious answer, it likely had something to do with the generational representation of Catholics within the unionized working class—think of the relative strength of communist parties in Catholic countries in Europe and Latin America.

JP: There’s been a lot of excitement around Zohran Mamdani in New York. Do you see him as a continuation of the sort of universalist, social democratic project that Bernie Sanders undertook in 2016 and 2020 (which, as you’ve noted in the past, was itself nearly identical to the Labor Party’s platform)?

AR: I’ll say that I’ve always liked Mamdani. And I like his dad—I know him a little bit because we were both recruited by the New School around the same time, and, more than that, I’ve been reading him since I was in my mid-twenties, and I love his work. I like Mamdani’s mother’s work, too, for that matter. And it’s no question that Mamdani is good as a political figure. If I still lived in New York, I would’ve given him money, I certainly would have voted for him, and I probably would’ve worked on his campaign.

But one question I have for the people who are creaming in their pants over Mamdani is: Wasn’t Bill de Blasio a less exciting version of him just a few years ago? It wasn’t that long ago that de Blasio was mayor—I’m not asking people to recall Fiorello LaGuardia here. So why do you think Mamdani will succeed with an agenda that’s not radically different from de Blasio’s agenda? People point out that Mamdani had enough of a popular base to win, but so did de Blasio. And de Blasio was more of an insider politician, which would have given him some institutional advantages once in office.

A lot of the response seems to be the standard problem of hyper-enthusiasm, and, again, the thinking that you build a movement like you run an advertising campaign. And so the spirit in which I watched the Mamdani campaign was laced with a reasonably heavy dose of “Here we go again.”

And it’s the same when it comes to the chatter over Mamdani’s identification as a socialist. I may have told you the story before, but not long after the Labor Party’s founding convention, I was visiting friends in the Bay Area and accompanied one to the campus where she taught. On a lark, she asked me to make a presentation to her anthropology class on the Labor Party campaign for a constitutional right to a job and a living wage for all residents; concretely that meant $10/hour in 1996, indexed to inflation. And at the end of the talk, one student accused me of being disingenuous in not calling this program socialism and claimed that he might even support it if I admitted it was a socialist proposal. I said to him that “socialism” didn’t have any clear, recognized meaning to people at that point, so taking the label would only add confusion and spawn distracting debate, and that there were two simple premises of the campaign: 1) that everyone willing and able to work should have a right to a job and 2) that everyone who works for a living should earn enough to live on. To polish it off, I said he could call that socialism if he wanted, or social Keynesianism, or capitalism with a human face or even call it Teddy Pendergrass if he wished. I think about that encounter every time I hear some blather to the effect that it’s important that people are saying the word socialism.

It reminds me as well that at the apogee of the Occupy Wall Street moment, I had lunch on two consecutive Thursdays with different lefty colleagues in the Penn history department. Each lunch went exactly the same way: the colleague praised Occupy for at least encouraging people to talk about inequality as a problem. I asked who was talking about inequality that they knew who hadn’t been talking about inequality before Occupy. Each responded, “The New York Times.” And in each case I responded, “Okay, but six months ago the New York Times was talking about Kim Kardashian’s divorce from the basketball player.”

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JP: You’re currently working on a book that traces the evolution of black politics after 1965. Can you elaborate on why 1965 was a significant turning point? People probably know that this was the year that the Voting Rights Act passed, and a year after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, but progressives are also quick to point out that racism and voter repression persisted after that. So how should we think about these pieces of legislation and what came after?

AR: It’s become more and more difficult to get across why 1965 was such a watershed year because people have become increasingly less inclined to think about politics as a practice that’s rooted in institutions and in institutional behavior rather than in feelings and expression. So the significance of the formation of a stratum of the black American population that participates in making laws and can exercise actual power to make decisions—and non-decisions—that have impact on people’s lives just gets lost from the collective understanding.

More than a decade ago, a historian named Peniel Joseph wrote a history of the Black Power movement called Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour. And I was surprised when I read the book, because it goes through what my son calls the costume party expressions of black nationalism, up through the Black Panthers in the early 70s, and then skips to hip hop as the continuation of the legacy of Black Power, which means that he pays no attention whatsoever to the emergence of a steadily growing stratum of black elected officials—mayors, city council members, state legislators, and Congresspeople—who shape both what we understand black politics to be—what Cedric Johnson has described as black ethnic interest group pluralism—and the environment within which political expectations and aspirations can be formed. Crucially, sidestepping those institutional developments also has meant that the race-reductionist politics, which rests on one version or another of the premise that “nothing has changed” for black people since 1965, 1865, or 1619, obscures the facts of sharply increased class stratification among black Americans, including the significant growth of a black investor class. And that is the foundation of the bizarre notion that the most pressing issue for racial justice is closing the “wealth gap” between the richest ten percent of black people and the richest ten percent of white people.

What we think of as black politics has become a narrow expression of an activity over who gets elected to what offices and when, and how we can facilitate that, and what the stakes of those elections are supposed to be. And on the other side of that coin is a performative or expressive activity that’s more like kayfabe, or reenactments of the direct-action phase of the Civil Rights Movement in the late 50s and early 60s that are disconnected from any specific objectives. One glittering example of the latter was the summer of George Floyd, which prompted people to talk about the largest civil rights demonstrations in the history of the world because there were protestors gathering on street corners all over the planet or whatever. Well, in reality, these protests were not unlike the color revolutions in the former Eastern Bloc countries—they were made-for-TV performances, and they weren’t directed toward any concrete objectives like full employment or, say, passing the Voting Rights Act.

This is one of the things that Bayard Rustin pointed out so trenchantly in his critique of Black Power in 1966. He argued that the only thing it was likely to produce was a new political establishment, which is exactly what it produced. And in the more than half-century since then, the focus of black political discourse has been more on trying to preserve a racial understanding of the needs and concerns of black people than it has been with trying to make black people’s lives better.

JP: Speaking of the summer of George Floyd, do you think progressives’ race politics have changed at all since 2020, especially in light of the reelection of Trump in 2024 and the Democrats suffering significant losses among Hispanic, Asian, and even black voters?

AR: The short answer is no.

Recently Letitia James made a snarky comment about how Mamdani and the three DSA types who recently got elected in NYC were naïve and didn’t understand how race and class work in the city. So it’s the same dynamic over and over again. I did recently say to Touré that the caterwauling coming from the antiracist Left over these types of attacks feels like a victory for Team Class Reductionist, because the mainstream Dems are making it clearer and clearer that their first go-to weapon against any left tilt is going to be identitarianism. As you well know, there’s still a political economy of identity out there.

Finally, one of the casualties of the half-century of unchallenged capitalist hegemony—and, as you know, I’ve defined neoliberalism as capitalism that has effectively neutralized working-class opposition—is undermining even leftists’ abilities to imagine how society can be qualitatively better than it is and the emergence of what we might call a “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good” Left, to which the critical response should be “don’t let what seems possible deflect what’s actually necessary.” Radicals forever have proclaimed that we’ve reached the moment of capitalism’s inescapably sharpened contradiction; people have proclaimed the slogan “socialism or barbarism” as the only possible options facing us for all my adult life, but the ruling class has found ways to finesse the contradictions with a measure of carrots, sticks, and bullshit, increasingly relying on sticks because of the requirements of accumulation and also because of its sense of entitlement.

However, that socialism or barbarism moment may be here finally. The dangers of climate change, for example, can be addressed only by states strong enough and committed to disciplining markets in ways that ruling classes will not accept. We’ve run out of—or should have run out of—room for hustles like carbon credits or investment incentives to work even as pretenses to address the crisis. How do we create a state capable of doing what’s necessary? I’ve compared this political moment to being at a T-intersection, at which moving in only one or two diametrically opposed directions is possible. As a Left, we know which direction is necessary. The very pragmatic question is, taking into account the vicious forces we’re up against, how do we organize to move effectively in that direction?

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Adolph Reed, Jr. is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and Distinguished Visiting Professor of Politics at Mount Holyoke College. He is author, most recently, with Kenneth W. Warren of Black Studies, Cultural Politics, and the Evasion of Inequality (Routledge, 2026) and is completing When Compromises Come Home to Roost: The Decline and Transformation of the Left in the United States. He has been engaged in working-class politics for more than half a century, was part of the effort to build an independent Labor Party in the US during the 1990s and early 2000s, and currently serves on the board of Food and Water Action and is a founding board member and functionary of the Debs-Jones-Douglass Institute, which pursues the question “What would our country look like if it were governed by and for the working class?”

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!

— Langston Hughes

Americans have been giddy watching World Cup tourists marvel at American patriotism. On social media, foreign nationals have gone viral for expressing their admiration, and maybe even envy, at American culture and the unabashed national pride on display in gigantic flags in Walmart, ubiquitous star-spangled bunting, and red, white, and blue flyovers.

The trouble is, it’s all a little fraudulent. One America-admirer, a Swedish woman named Elsa Thora, briefly became an internet sensation for her enthusiastic appreciation for ranch dressing and down-home American patriotism. It was later revealed that Elsa was self-marketing for her OnlyFans account and pimping a Curacao-based online casino that only accepts cryptocurrency. But this is oddly fitting, because the patriotism she supposedly admires is, in many ways, also a false front.

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A 2023 survey from the Wall Street Journal found that only 38% of Americans viewed patriotism as very important, down from 70% in the late 1990s. A Gallup poll from this year noted a double-digit drop in the rate of people who claim to be “extremely” or “very” proud to be American. No doubt the slump in national pride reflects our general social and economic malaise, where achieving the American dream only gets more difficult by the year. Progressives, unsurprisingly, are feeling especially pessimistic: while 92% of Republicans surveyed proclaimed their American pride, only 36% of Democratic voters said the same.

You may agree that there is little to be proud of right now, given the country’s senseless war against Iran, oligarchy at home, and a widespread sense of social unraveling, to name just a few of our current problems. But the distinct lack of progressive patriotism is a problem, because an expression of belief in, and love for, the American project remains essential to winning the political loyalty of the majority of Americans. Even in moments where people feel a bit of flag fatigue, they won’t flock to those who have no love for their country. As Michael Harrington once argued, “If the Left wants to change this country because it hates it, then the people will never listen to the Left and the people will be right.”

The progressive distaste for patriotism wasn’t always a given. In fact, patriotic fervor was once principally associated with root-and-branch reform. So identified with rebels and rabble-rousers was patriotism that in 1773, Samuel Johnson amended his dictionary definition to note that the word “is sometimes used for a factious disturber of the government.” True to form, American revolutionaries of 1776 proudly called themselves “Patriots” against King George’s “Loyalist” sympathizers. Patriotism even came to define what it meant to be “Left.” During their own revolution, opponents of the French monarchy—organizing themselves in les sociétés patriotiques—famously sat on the left-hand side of the National Assembly, inaugurating our tradition of referring to progressive factions as ‘the Left.’ During World War II, resistance fighters battling fascism in Europe had no trouble declaring themselves patriots and draping their squadrons in republican colors. The Nazis, by contrast, shunned the very notion: “I was a nationalist,” said Adolf Hitler, “but I was not a patriot.” Where patriotism appeals to love of one’s homeland, its culture, and the people who live there, nationalism instead appeals to tribal, ethno-mythological and racial bonds. To that point, Hitler, an Austrian, was willing and eager to destroy his own patria for Aryan glory.

In the United States, patriotism was a thoroughly bipartisan value following the war. FDR’s Four Freedoms were most famously depicted by Norman Rockwell, the premier painter of Americana, and yet another Norman—Norman Thomas, who ran for president six times as the Socialist Party of America’s candidate—frequently characterized his socialist appeals as the “truest form of patriotism.”

But then came Bull Connor’s dogs, the Vietnam War and Watergate. During the tumultuous 1960s, the New Left burned draft cards and some students stomped on the flag. Around the world anti-colonial movements made domestic progressives feel embarrassed or ashamed of their country, which suddenly appeared to represent less-than-noble ideals. Meanwhile, increasingly visible political corruption at home made promises of fairness and democracy ring hollow. In the wake of such upheavals, the Democrats, the catchall party of progressives, became more closely associated with national pessimism than pride.

As a consequence, today patriotism is firmly the province of conservatives. This is an unfortunate and dangerous development because once patriotism is owned by one faction or party it degrades into the grotesque. It becomes chauvinist nationalism. Instead expressing love of country, of plebeian culture, and of citizen compatriots, the nationalist looks for enemies within.

Acknowledging the dangers of ceding patriotism to the Right, left-leaning political commentators will periodically implore their comrades to again wrap themselves in the flag; to recover slogans dripping with stars and stripes; to not be so embarrassed of the country they claim they want to lead. Maybe because 2026 is a year of national spectacles—the Winter Olympics, the World Cup, and now the Semiquincentennial—such exhortations have reappeared lately. In an Atlantic article titled “The Left Needs to Rediscover Its Patriotism,” Michael Kazin made the case for appealing to the best of the American tradition in its most progressive forms. At The New Yorker, Arthur Krystal encouraged national pride built on the notion that the founders wrote in a failsafe injunction for citizens to make “a more perfect union.” The massive No Kings rallies earlier this year had no shortage of American flags, nor of left-leaning commentators celebrating that very fact.

Yet, as much as I agree with these sentiments, and as much as I wish for a more patriotic populism, rebuilding the patriotism of the Left can’t be done simply through rhetorical appeals or symbolic reclamation. Patriotism cannot be willed into being when the present social and economic conditions militate against fostering a deep love of country.

The dearth of patriotism on the political left today isn’t only the product of the received anti-colonial wisdom and cynical slogans of ‘60s radicals. The deeper problem is rather the underlying political-economic transformation that altered the social makeup of the Left and the foundations of progressive ideology; a transformation that drove educated progressives away from the flag and, in equal measure, from the working class of the “left behind” regions. Such progressives, incredibly, now even shy away from the very mention of America. As Kazin has recounted: “In 1998, the president of the American Studies Association rejected the very name of the organization she headed. Dismissing the ‘notion of a bounded national territory and a concomitant national identity,’ Janice Radway wondered whether it made sense to ‘perpetuate a specifically ‘American’ studies’ at all.”

That critique of “bounded national territory” expresses more than a passing post-colonial academic fad. It reflects the basic economic philosophy of the decade. With the fall of the Soviet Union, governments across the globe commenced a mad dash to tear down walls and usher in a new and ever more global economy. The de-nationalization of national economies, driven by high-finance, free trade, and digital communications, helped degrade the social basis for patriotism by recasting progress as a process of reaching greater heights of globalization. Center-left parties on either side of the Atlantic, beginning with Bill Clinton and continuing apace through Barack Obama in the US, embraced this global turn, aggressively courting highly-educated and high-salaried “knowledge economy” professionals to their political tent.

Today, in a stark reversal of the political battle lines of the twentieth century, the Democratic Party now controls two-thirds of all top-income districts. These elite liberals, roughly the top 20% of the income ladder, own the vast majority of the nation’s wealth and account for nearly 60% of all consumption. While they do many things for work, they are loosely connected by a Brahmin, cosmopolitan outlook. They are global citizens, or, more accurately, world consumers. As Philip Cunliffe argued in his 2025 book The National Interest, these well-to-do liberals who once clung “tightly to chauvinistic visions of nationhood” have since “renounced the nationalism while keeping the chauvinism.” These are the types who pretend to be Canadian when on international vacations, and who fret aloud, without a hint of self-awareness, about how embarrassing American popular culture is. (It’s embarrassing, of course, to an audience of other cosmopolitan elites, not to those “flyover” Americans whose approval they have no interest in winning.)

And what of the working class? The race to globalize succeeded in aggressively disorganizing union movements all over the world. Working-class associational life was dissolved through the solvent of free-market fundamentalism. And as civic institutions ceased to play a meaningful role in social, political, and economic life, the efficacy of, and popular faith in, domestic democracy eroded. Meanwhile, free trade-induced deindustrialization generated new class frictions, which, as the German political sociologist Wolfgang Streeck argues:

…can be understood as a result of divergent interests vis-à-vis globalisation: a definition of the new middle class as a group who are believed to, or actually do, profit from globalisation, who have an interest in open international markets for their human capital, and who do not want to be held responsible for satisfying the parochial demands of the losers of globalisation for material or cultural compensation.

It’s this essentially globalist view that smothers rhetorical appeals to patriotism from the Left. Take the attitude of Jerusalem Demsas, publisher of the leading liberal outlet The Argument. Demsas, frustrated with Trump’s tariff regime, complained recently of how “insane” it was that she couldn’t just buy a cheap Chinese electric vehicle. From her vantage point, Chinese vehicle tariffs (imposed by both President Trump and President Biden) are no less than an economic crime against consumers concerned about climate change. No thought is given, however, to what might happen to American autoworkers if ultra-cheap EVs flooded the domestic market. Nor does Demsas consider it a priority that Americans ought to build those EVs right here. And she is hardly alone—virtually any discussion of attempts to reindustrialize our national economy is met with mockery by the liberal press. Even if these liberals were to cover their appeals in Fourth-of-July fireworks, their economic commitments demonstrate a profound ambivalence toward American industry, American workers, and American ingenuity. For them the goal of domestic policy is not to steer America to make again, but instead to fling the doors open to global commerce in order to allow the cosmopolitan consumer class to take what they can from the world market, American jobs be damned.

Even some left-wing populists who wish to rescue patriotic appeals have often failed to reckon with the depth of the thoroughly globalized outlook of the Left. In France, the left populist leader Jean Luc-Melenchon, for instance, has encouraged citizens to reframe patriotism, arguing, “Being French does not mean belonging to a particular religion or having a given skin color, cooking certain dishes, or loving specific works. To be French in the Republic is to subscribe to the program ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’ and respect the law.”

But believing in some set of Républicain political ideals doesn’t make one French anymore than believing in First Amendment Rights makes one American. While these lofty political values are certainly something the French (and we Americans) ought to be proud of, so too are baguettes and Bresson. In 1831 Alexis de Tocqueville complained of Americans’ “irritable patriotism,” which he described as a defensive posture devoid of any apparent affection for the United States; he attributed this to the still-young country’s lack of local customs, traditions, or even a culinary culture. A patriotism of reason alone is thin gruel. It took centuries for America to develop its distinctive culture, and the truth is that it’s the love of that culture that animates patriotic passion—when you’re abroad you don’t get homesick for the Constitution as much as for barbecue (and American tobacco).

That’s why it was depressing to learn that Melenchon’s party, La France Insoumise (LFI), has reportedly been incensed by the wildly successful “patriotic banquets” staged across the country. For a small fee, attendees of these banquets join hundreds of others to eat traditional French local fare, while singing folk songs and downing red wine. Critics of these gatherings have pointed out that the events are sponsored, in part, by deep-pocketed conservative activists. But the resentment seems to run deeper: if their primary concern was unsavory political ties, why couldn’t the LFI just host patriotic banquets of their own? I worry that it’s because the display of any kind of national pride is considered too much an embarrassment to the thoroughly globalized Left.

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To be sure, the plastic patriotism of the Right is cynical. Worse, it’s funded by the very billionaire globalists that right-wing populists purport to oppose. While their broadsides against mass migration and globalism have helped drive hard-right parties to power all over the world, these pseudo-patriots have no vision for restoring popular sovereignty. Today’s nationalists might be happy to crack down on immigrants, but, at the same time, they have gleefully endorsed the global pillaging of national economies by the financial and tech oligarchy.

Consider tech titan Peter Thiel, who plowed some $10 million dollars into JD Vance’s 2022 Senate campaign. That investment turned out exceptionally lucrative for Thiel, with Vance becoming Vice President and Thiel’s company Palantir securing some $687 million in government contracts in 2026 alone. Still, despite how very good America has been to him—including subsidizing his largesse through taxpayer funding—the German-born, South African-raised, Stanford-educated libertarian has recently purchased a house in Buenos Aires in order to evade any tax liabilities stateside. Whither patriotism?

If the global consumer class is ambivalent toward the flag of their own country, the global ownership class loves all national flags, in exact inverse proportion to their tax rate. And so, each in their own ways, the educated elite and the global superrich conspire to make a mockery of patriotism. The result is a generalized cynicism. The rich really are in charge and willing to impoverish the domestic population just as they send their money on vacation to Caribbean tax-havens, and fortify themselves in faraway lands. No, neither the chauvinism of the hard Right nor the superficial idealism of the Left will birth a new future for genuine patriotism.

It won’t be enough to declare oneself an adherent of American ideals, and wrap oneself in the flag when giving a stump speech. To restore patriotism we need to build social, industrial, and cultural achievements worthy of national pride. And in order to do that we need political appeals that aim to renationalize our economy out of an expression of genuine affection for America and its people.

Just as globalism has sapped national sovereignty, any genuine patriotism must start from the premise that the nation-state isn’t just some unfortunate waystation on the road toward some future borderless utopia, nor is it merely a convenient place for a corporate tax identification number. Instead, the nation is the one and only home of democracy. This is one reason why the dominated classes all over the world express both a heightened sense of national pride, and a sense of palpable rage at the usurpation of popular sovereignty. The patriotism of the working class, so often derided by cultural snobs, is not an expression of backward superstition, but a recognition that the nation-state remains the only major site where plebeian control still, potentially, exists. As such, our commitment to patriotism ought to be more than idealistic or rhetorical but instead rooted in our distinct interests as citizens and a demand to restore national sovereignty over the market-rule dictated by the global financial and technological oligarchy.

The politics of populism must be a politics of place and a divestment from globalism must imply a concomitant investment in America. This country is beautiful and we’re blessed with all that is needed for a broadly shared prosperity. Yet, thanks to the pilfering of our rapacious ruling class, our built environment is crumbling, our industry flagging, and our social world is frayed. American-made products are an endangered species. Thanks to automation and offshoring, American workers have been robbed of the skills and wages needed to build personal esteem. Restoring pride, then, will mean literally retooling the American economy to accommodate American workers. While patriotism will not be constructed by symbolic acts, it can be physically rebuilt. Our pride ought to rise from a genuine appreciation, not only of abstract ideals, but of realized national achievements—of excellent infrastructure, exceptional schools, robust industry, safe affordable neighborhoods, beautiful parks and public places, and a skilled and confident domestic workforce.

To do any of this we need to domesticate—in both senses of the word—the global superrich by denying them subsidies, incentives and lucrative public contracts until they are prepared to declare their citizenship and pay their taxes. This, too, is patriotism, for it’s in no nation’s interest for the world to remain a borderless playground for the elite. We ought to adopt new Made-in America industrial policies, and complimentary trade agreements; we ought to impose new capital controls, and levy new taxes on the oligarchs. We’ll need new public factories, and to nationalize, or renationalize, firms in the national interest. Why shouldn’t America be able to build affordable electric vehicles at scale? While we’re at it, why not electrify the entire school bus, mail truck, and police cruiser fleets? And since all of this will require a new and improved electrical grid, why not invest in that as well?

No patriotism of the Left, however, will succeed if it fails to celebrate American culture and custom. A cornerstone of the New Deal was the government’s extraordinary investment in preserving and patronizing local culture and folk art. This was not by accident; reformers then understood that in order for popular economic sovereignty to be politically felt it also had to embrace and elevate the cultural achievements of the popular classes. A step down from the global stage should also allow us room to renew our seemingly exhausted cultural reservoirs. The reinvigoration of steel towns and fishing villages is no less a program of cultural conservation—a program devoted to the preservation of distinctly American ways of life—than of economic development. It is through this combination of political and programmatic patriotism that we can again renew our national pride. And here is populism’s great promise—not to belittle America for her faults, nor to mythologize her, but to have the vision and capacity to achieve what no meaningful political current has yet aimed to do: To make America, again.

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Dustin "Dino" Guastella is Director of Operations for Teamsters Local 623 in Philadelphia and a Board Member of the Center for Working-Class Politics.

This essay is from our sixth (and final) print issue, “Trains,” which is out now. Order your copy here.

Tonio Guajardo’s twenty-one-and-a-half-minute YouTube video, “I Took America’s Worst Possible Train,” is a rare instance of clickbait delivering on its promise. The video’s premise is simple: travel across the country—from Miami to Alaska—via public transit (no planes or cars). This mostly meant riding Amtrak, the unsaid but obvious referent of the video’s title. Still, the idea holds a certain romance: taking in the country’s majestic landscape by train, as Americans did a century ago. Not everyone would sign up for it, but how bad could it be?

Four minutes into the video, Guajardo heads to the train’s dining car for a burger, in which he finds a hair. He eats it anyway. Moments later he discovers he can’t shower because the shared bathroom is stuffed with janitorial supplies. Later, he heads back to the dining car only to learn that it’s closed. Apparently the train’s electricity had been shut off after the café car caught fire and, in what becomes a mantra of his trip, he’s told there will be a delay. Remarkably, that is not the only instance of fire. Faced with another bout of flames, the train runs a whopping sixteen hours late.

But hey, you can’t keep a YouTuber down—especially when there’s great content to be made! Undeterred, Guajardo spends his time befriending fellow riders, especially his valet (apparently you have access to a valet if you book a private or semi-private room; that’s nice!). In typical can-do content creator fashion, Guajardo takes pains to explain to his audience that, sure, this is all annoying, but isn’t life really about the friends you make along the way?

“I Took America’s Worst Possible Train” has over three million views, because stuff like this is perfect fodder for internet addicts like myself, who enjoy watching strangers merrily traipse across the globe. And there is no adventure more unpredictable, no mode of transport more unreliable, than America’s rail service. This may partially explain why “Amtrak sucks” videos have enticed a growing community of “foamers”—a term for train enthusiasts so passionate they’re said to foam at the mouth—who delight in watching content creators suffer every fresh indignity visited upon American rail.

There’s a masochism inherent in being an Amtrak-YouTube fan. Even the sweetest “The Most Scenic Trains in North America”-type videos, which promise sweeping views of America’s sublime landscape, can’t help but highlight the truth about Amtrak: its trains are old, its accommodations are lacking, its tickets are expensive, its food (assuming you’re lucky enough to get some) sucks, and, above all, you will be late—and not just a little late, but, like, really late.

What’s saddest about “I Took America’s Worst Possible Train,” and indeed many of the subgenre of “Amtrak is terrible” videos of which Guajardo’s forms a part, is that Guajardo went into the trip knowing it was going to be terrible. Like so many of us, his expectations were low—maybe not as low as they should have been—but he certainly didn’t expect five star service. He didn’t believe that Amtrak was capable of providing a good trip, or even an adequate one. You can’t let a man down who has no expectations in the first place.

And that’s the most tragic thing about Guajardo’s experience: he isn’t really bothered by the many mishaps that plague his journey. If people used to speak about an “American Century,” in which, to quote the publisher Henry Luce, the United States “would become the powerhouse from which the ideals spread throughout the world… lifting the life of mankind from the level of the beasts to what the Psalmist called a little lower than the angels,” today we’ve come to expect a hair in our burgers. The American century of humiliation has begun.

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What Never Could Have Been

The failures of Amtrak, like the failures of so many of our nation’s utilities, aren’t simply accidents. They’re the result of privatization, chronic underfunding, and deliberate policy choices that prioritized cars over trains. Seventy percent of America’s train tracks are privately owned, which is one of the reasons why passenger trains are consistently late. While federal law requires freight companies to give right of way to passenger trains, track owners routinely ignore the rule. The problem is compounded by the freight companies themselves, who have increased the length of their trains to maximize profits. These longer trains mean longer wait times for passenger trains, increasing delays across an already-busy network. As a result, more than one-in-four Amtrak trains are late to their destination, a number that climbs to sixty percent for long-haul routes like the Southwest Chief.

The United States used to be the world leader in rail service. The country was once traversed by some 254,000 miles of track, used for both passenger and cargo service. Today, we’re down to 140,000 miles of freight rail and just 22,000 miles of passenger rail. The decline coincided with a dramatic fall in passenger train use, as cars—which, after the construction of the Interstate Highway System, were able to easily traverse the nation—and planes—whose commercial use exploded after World War II with the emergence of a large middle class—quickly replaced rail travel.

In 1970, President Richard Nixon delivered the death blow to US rail service when he signed the Rail Passenger Service Act. Known for the birth of Amtrak, the legislation simultaneously removed the legal requirement obligating private railroad companies to provide passenger services. This left Americans with few options for rail travel. But even as one of the last passenger rail options, Amtrak had to fight to keep itself afloat by competing for Congressional funds and grants while pushing ticket sales for a lackluster product.

Amtrak continues to face an uphill battle. In recent decades, the company has been operating in the red. In 2019, Amtrak faced a $1.4 billion deficit, forcing the company to raise ticket prices while service quality deteriorated. Recently, Amtrak also introduced “dynamic pricing,” which, according to The New York Times, is “a system that rewards early planners and charges a premium for flexibility and last-minute travel.” This has resulted in riders reporting ticket costs several times the price of planefare or gas. Would you pay $572 for a round-trip ticket between New York City and Washington, DC? Probably not, but Amtrak wants you to pay that to travel it on the ground.

Assuming you do cough up the dough, don’t expect any frills. Most of Amtrak’s cars were built between 1979 and 1996, meaning that even the newest cars are at least thirty years old. If you’ve ever watched any of these Amtrak YouTube videos, the age shows: backed-up toilets, missing soap dispensers, and depleted water heaters are commonplace. And the horrors of Amtrak transit aren’t limited to the cars themselves.

Take, for instance, the YouTube channel Fourth Place’s video, “The Amtrak Station in the Middle of Nowhere,” about the inexplicable placement and near unusable condition of Amtrak’s Palm Springs, California station. The station is miles away from downtown Palm Springs. As Palm Springs has no bus service, the only way to get there is to drive or walk miles through the Sonoran desert. But don’t worry: the station is not only underutilized, it’s been effectively condemned since 2021, due to the completely predictable and well-known sandstorms that are a constant at the border of the Sonoran and Mojave Deserts, where Palm Springs visitors and residents have made their peace with choking on a haboob now and then.

One wonders what inspired Amtrak’s planners to build a station there. On a good day, it looks like the end of the world. When the roads are clear enough of drifts for a motorist to get to it, sand invades the outdoor shelter as dunes cover the walkways, benches, and tracks. The Palm Springs city government tried to build a wall to give parked cars some protection, but the wind just glides around it, depositing the sand anyway. The station itself is haunting. It’s not something that was and is no longer, but something that never could have been anything in the first place.

Only Six Minutes Late Is Almost On Time

So it’s fair to say our passenger train system is struggling. And these depressing scenes are made even more desperate when compared to other countries. The United States has exactly 0 miles of true high-speed rail. China, by contrast, has constructed some 30,000 miles. Even little old France, has nearly 2,000 miles. It turns out large-scale, modern passenger rail projects are possible—just not in the United States.

Amtrak is bad on its own terms, and it’s really bad when you compare it to rail service in other countries. Riding Amtrak is an exercise in voluntary suffering—if you’re not monetizing the experience like Guajardo, then the only point of it is the pain. I’ve only found one creator who’s mastered the art of enjoying Amtrak hell without the performance of pretending they’re in heaven: the always charming YouTuber Miles in Transit.

Miles genuinely loves riding on public transit. In fact, as he explained to me, he started his channel as an excuse to ride every bus and train he could—just because. Miles has embraced the “foamer” sobriquet, exuding genuine excitement as he shares his train-riding experiences with viewers. Only Miles could travel across the country, in coach, for days, and remain in good spirits.

At first blush, Miles’s chipper demeanor seems reminiscent of your typical content creator. But unlike other public transportation YouTubers, he never assures the audience not to worry. He may laugh at the five days expired Amtrak lunch, but he doesn’t romanticize it (and, yes, that really did happen to him). Instead, each of his rapid-fire, quick-cut assemblage-styled videos includes countless harrowing tales of American decay. Like the time he bemusedly filmed a bus driving away from a station just moments before the train—containing the people that the bus was supposed to pick up—arrived. Or the time when, in disbelief, he reported that Houston—the fourth largest city in the United States—“is only served by Amtrak three times a week.” Or the time he let us know that one Amtrak station has more overhangs to protect cars than overhangs to protect people. He regales us with these stories, smile intact, not because he’s performing for YouTube but because he’s a true foamer—one who documents American rail’s failures precisely because he believes they don’t have to be permanent.

Ultimately, then, Miles’s videos are not only about American decline; they implicitly suggest that there is a different world in which transit actually makes our lives easier. Miles never discusses this counterfactual world, but it’s evident in his unapologetic enthusiasm. He loves trains so much that he celebrates when one arrives only six minutes late. He leaves these small moments of triumph in his videos because they showcase that things could in fact be better.

Perhaps all is not lost for American rail service. Intriguingly, after decades of decline, Amtrak’s ridership just reached a record high, up over 50% since 2022. And the company hopes to reach some sixty-six million annual riders by 2040. This is a lofty goal, but not impossible. Officially, experts credit the increase in ridership to a post-Covid rebound, but the explosive popularity of new routes may point to a demand that has always been there, but was not being effectively supplied.

According to a recent Los Angeles Times feature on Amtrak’s “Southwest Chief”—a 2,265-mile, 43-hour train ride that, like Route 66 of old, takes you from Los Angeles to Chicago—“people like it” the way it is. There’s a lot to like about rail travel. There’s no TSA, it provides a break from the hurried pace of modern life, and you can get views of America’s landscape that aren’t available to the car bound.

As driving becomes more dangerous and work becomes more flexible, perhaps more people are willing to overlook Amtrak’s many pitfalls. Or maybe those pitfalls could even be reversed with proper funding. The 2021 infrastructure bill passed by “Amtrak Joe” Biden gave the service in just five years what it had received over its lifetime. As a result, the passenger rail service has promised new routes, new facilities, and—importantly—new cars.

But US history resounds with many an infrastructure promise withering on the vine. For now, I’ll keep watching train videos. The question remains whether people like Tonio Guajardo and Miles in Transit are documenting a permanent decline or a subtle comeback.

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Courtney Rawlings is an art historian, critic, and host of the podcast Always at War.

This essay is from our sixth (and final) print issue, “Trains,” which is out now. Order your copy here.

Paranapiacaba is almost permanently shrouded in fog; maybe the Victorian Englishmen who worked in the town would have felt right at home, were it not for the mountains and the dense Atlantic rainforest—denser than the Amazonian—and the humidity, the bugs, and so on. The railway village, built in the 1860s by the São Paulo Railway Co., would thirty years later put up a Big Ben-style clock tower at the station. It’s unclear whether this represented a symbol of modernity or civilization to passers-through back then, but today it looks both tacky and iconic, out of place but evocative.

Paranapiacaba is perched 800 meters up on the scarp of the jungle-covered Serra do Mar mountain range and means “place whence one sees the sea” in Tupi-Gurani. Below it at sea-level is the petrochemical hub Cubatão—in the 1980s one of the world’s most polluted places, generative of health problems so severe babies were birthed still-born. Beyond this erstwhile “Valley of Death,” on an island facing the open ocean, is Santos and its port, today the largest in Latin America but one which barely sneaks into the global top 40 of maritime hubs—a fact indicative of the region’s diminished global economic standing.

Paranapiacaba was built to house workers and engineers on the railway, which was built to transport coffee, whose agriculture was then booming—an economic dynamism based on commodity production and export, the use-values of which would pass through Santos on its way to Europe and North America.

From the Santos lowlands, the tracks scaled the Serra do Mar through a funicular railway and rack and pinion system, and continued onwards, through São Paulo’s eponymous capital (50 km inland) and on to Jundiaí (another 50 km). On its way up, it carried millions of Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, German, and Japanese immigrants who would work on the coffee plantations and other farms, and eventually in São Paulo’s burgeoning manufacturing industry. Indeed, that train line stopped in Brás, central São Paulo, where a guesthouse functioned as the first place of arrival for migrants: Brazil’s Ellis Island. Like Paranapiacaba, the disused train station and its environs now hosts events and festivals, serving educational and memorialization functions, a part of the industrial-heritage industry.

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Road Over Rail

The birth of Brazilian railways is evocative of the country’s colonial mentality, even decades after independence. As Odilson Nogueira de Matos explained in his noteworthy Café e ferrovias (1973), it was the English who primarily built the railways because “it was madness to suppose that a Brazilian could be the initiator of such an undertaking. There was no capital, no men, nor could there be ideals in a commercial and industrial body whose base of operations was the importation of slaves from the coast of Africa.” It took the 1850 Eusebio de Queiroz law restricting the slave trade to free-up capital to for the first railways to be built, before the British came in with more significant investment and know-how.

Brazil’s first railway was inaugurated in 1854 and from the 1870s the country (or at least the southeastern state of São Paulo) experienced “railway fever,” as the imperial government guaranteed returns of seven to ten percent over declared capital. But rail was not actually a pioneer, as it was almost everywhere else in the world. It did not open new frontiers but rather accompanied those being cleared by coffee. “Built to serve the interests and conveniences of the farmers,” Matos explained, “the São Paulo railway network, in its arboreal aspect, gives us today the impression of a total lack of planning, which explains why, once the economic basis that motivated it was overcome,” the railway decayed. Rail in Brazil was just a means of getting raw materials out of the country. Corridors generally run West to East, draining out to sea. There was no attempt at building an integrated network, only at funnelling wealth out. The agrarian elite responsible for railway fever had no interest in a strong internal market nor in national integration, which resulted, for example, in a range of different track gauges adopted across the country. It was the political fragmentation of the First Republic (1880-1930) manifested in iron.

The contrast with the US is stark. As Noam Maggor has observed, “What set the US apart from other peripheries was the capacity of the state, empowered by a mobilized agrarian population, to politicize economic policymaking and harness capital in favor of broad developmental priorities.” Organized agrarian interests drove regulation that balanced less-profitable local rail against long-distance trains, whereas in Mexico—though this applies, mutatis mutandis, to Brazil—one would see peasants walking alongside rail lines, rather than being carried upon them. This disregard for local service “contributed to a pattern of uneven development, with a few booming import and export hubs surrounded by vast areas of poverty. Comprador elites, embedded in existing extractive sectors and trade relations, helped defeat political efforts to remake these economies along more balanced lines.”

The 1929 economic crash was also coffee’s bust, and in turn that of the railways that conveyed the beans to ports. Getúlio Vargas’ nationalist government, brought to power by the 1930 Revolution that put paid to the oligarchy, reflected its Bonapartist homologues elsewhere (FDR, Mussolini…). But the nationalization of railways here was more of a bailout, a rescue operation to ward against the knock-on effects that abandoned or bankrupt railways would have across the economy.

Already in 1928, Washington Luis, the last president of the Old Republic, had signalled a change in direction: “To govern is to open roads” he declared, inaugurating the Rio-Petropolis highway, symbolizing a new idea of progress. The corporatist Vargas era that followed (1930-45) centralized the management of railways at the same time as laying the groundwork for the pivot to road, made good upon by Juscelino Kubitschek’s modernizing government (1956-61), which promised “fifty years in five.”

Kubitschek enticed General Motors, Ford, and Volkswagen to set up factories in Brazil through policies such as tax exemptions with stringent local component criteria imposed in return. The automotive industry has a more important multiplier effect than rail, and employed skilled labor to a degree that had not existed in Brazil until then. Moreover, road rendered more immediate political benefit than rail: it was quicker and cheaper to build, explains Talita Lessa Melo, a researcher into the past and present of Brazilian railways, and it sold a vision of speed, autonomy, and popular accessibility. Throughout the developmentalist 1930-80 period, the roadway simply offered more possibility than rail. It was a fortuitous confluence between capitalist interests, developmentalist vision, and a sellable idea.

It was then that the country built and inaugurated a new, modernist capital, Brasília, on a plateau nearly 1000 km inland of the old capital, Rio de Janeiro. The country was undergoing industrialization and urbanization at a blistering pace, and the working class’s share of income was rising. “Centuries ago, cities were built where men decided to stop. Today, man decides where he wants to build,” a government brochure declared. Pointedly, the New Yorker’s story on this “fitting symbol of the country’s future” was entitled “Man Decides Where.” But it was the elevated bus station that served as the centerpiece of the new capital’s non-governmental architecture, not a rail terminus.

The military dictatorship that seized power in the 1964 coup and held it until 1985 rode through the 1973 oil crisis, doubling Brazil’s bet on the car, through oil exploration and the massive expansion of the sugarcane ethanol industry in 1975. What investment in rail was left ended up serving as an argument against it: delivery of the giant Ferrovia do Aço (steel railway) was promised in 1000 days, but it was never completed, consolidating the notion that rail was costly and impracticable.

By the time the Brazilian growth machine halted at the start of the 1980s, the network was in terrible shape, and then came neoliberal counter-reforms which dealt their usual coup, especially once the reins of government were handed over to civilians to do the dirty work. Rail was privatized, the network was disaggregated and fragmented, and new concession-holders were divested of any obligation to invest. Cross-subsidization of less profitable lines was ruled out, so rail persisted as a means to transport soy and iron, while the rest of the network decayed even further.

Today, rail is controlled by big agribusiness, mining, and financial interests; it is only built where it is profitable and ownership is hugely concentrated. Rumo Logística owns about half the network (14,000 km); Vale—formerly a state-owned enterprise set up by Vargas, today one of the biggest mining companies in the world—owns another 2,000 km. Many lines have extremely slow operation speeds, made worse by the occupation of lines by poor communities—a favelization that speaks to yawning developmental gaps in the country. Passenger rail is at best 4% of the network—mainly urban commuter trains and a few lingering tourist trains going nowhere important. It is another snapshot of Brazil’s exemplary “premature deindustrialization”—a shift to services at income levels well below those of Britain or the US when they underwent similar processes.

Iron Fetish

From 1900 to 1980, Brazil averaged economic growth of over 5 percent per annum (3 percent on a per-capita basis), accelerating to 7 percent in the 1950-80 period, making it the fastest growing country in the world after Japan. It was an icon of modernization, but anyone predicting then that this “country of the future”—as Stefan Zweig had dubbed it a decade before—was getting there on iron tracks was greatly mistaken.

In many other countries, rail is rightly associated with industrial progress and modernity. But in Brazil’s growth period, roads had already supplanted rail. Rail never led; it merely followed, and then limped along. It was never an agent of national integration, and is barely even a memory anymore.

Still, rail, unlike other industrial structures, sticks around. Brazil has no good reason to be wistful for rail, but while the rest of the brick and iron remnants of manufacturing are gone, rail and railroad structures still stand. According to Eduardo Romero de Oliveira, a professor at UNESP and coordinator of the Memorias Ferroviarias (Railway Memories) project, this makes the railway iconic and idealized, even if it deserves neither.

The more extensive passenger rail of the early twentieth century was a means of conveyance in a still mostly rural Brazil, carrying people from small town to small town. The urban Brazil that emerged from the 1960s on had less need for inter-city passenger rail. Today Brazil is 86% urban, and over half of the population lives in mid-size to large cities.

The city of Rio Claro is exemplary, for Oliveira, of an ambivalent relation to rail. It is a “small” city (population: 200,000) in the agricultural interior of São Paulo state. The old Companhia Paulista trunk line runs through it, now serving freight coming from the agribiz heartland of Goiás. “Modernity” is to be found in that agroindustry—technologically advanced, hugely capital-intensive, Brazil the world’s breadbasket…—but in a way that “does not touch the lives of ordinary people.” Residents complain about the traffic-generating level crossing, but when asked if passenger rail should “return,” they think the idea “great, lovely, cute.”

This is probably inspired by memories of riding a Maria Fumaça—the steam locomotives that long ago earned the nickname “smoking Maria”—at one railway heritage site or another. Or there’s the fact that the first line of the book all Brazilians study in school, Dom Casmurro, by the literary master of the periphery, Machado de Assis, starts off with a reference to an unexpected encounter that happens on a train. Already in 1975, Milton Nascimento, one of Brazil’s most celebrated musicians, released a track called Ponta de areia, in which he laments the abandonment of the Estrada de Ferro Bahia e Minas line which had run from 1882 to 1966. They ordered the railroad to be torn up / The old machinist with his cap / Remembers the cheerful people who would come celebrate it / The steam engine doesn’t sing anymore. If that was nostalgia then, today Brazilians can only be nostalgic for nostalgia—akin to the third stage in Baudrilliard’s terms of distance from the real, where the sign masks the absence of a profound reality.

So when the residents of Rio Claro inveigh against the state’s dereliction of duty for not sustaining railway transport, Oliveira hears something else: words that don’t sound genuine, that are more like a repetition of someone else’s, the thing you’re supposed to say.

The train, for Brazil, is a fairytale: a fetish, not a transit solution; an image of a past modernity, now turned quaint, not a vision for the future.

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Do, Just Do

Business mouthpieces love to go on about the Custo Brasil, the high cost of doing business in Brazil associated with the drag created by labor legislation, trade unions, public bureaucracy, taxation, and so on. These complaints are usually about cutting workers’ entitlements. But they also, rightly, concern underdeveloped infrastructure. If 61% of all cargo is being trucked around a continental-size country by road (75% when you discount iron ore), that would seem to be an easy target for upgrading—through rail. The fact that it isn’t speaks to an economic irrationality from the perspective of capital itself; a failure of the state to act in the interests of capital in general.

Talita Lessa Melo puts this down to the force of “rodoviarismo,” or highwayism, an entrenched commitment to the road and automobile and all that is associated with it. But we should look beyond isms. The reality is that there are a lot of vested interests in road, notably road-builders and bus companies, and truckers and their bosses. The last of these brought the country to a halt in 2018, in the lead-up to Bolsonaro’s election, in a divisive, politically ambivalent nationwide strike over fuel costs. But again, there is a greater rationality here—the efficiency of rail—which should have buy-in from business interests. Those that prevail, though, are those like finance and the extractive industries, interests that are directed outward, not inward to national development.

Some steps are being made at rationalization, such as the Legal Framework for Railways (2021), which facilitates private investment in the construction of railways and in the use of idle stretches of existing lines. 11,000 km of projects have so far been approved. But this is merely accelerating down the same track of facilitating commodity exports—or as one study put it, it is “reinforcing the market power of incumbent operators and failing to significantly promote intramodal competition or cargo diversification.”

Meanwhile, the 400 km span between São Paulo (metro area population: 23 million) and Rio de Janeiro (14 million) remains unconnected by high-speed rail (HSR). The line has been projected since the late 1980s—and talk ramped up in the lead up to the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics—but without so much as a spade having been buried into the ground. Construction of the latest project, conceded to private company TAV Brasil and aiming for 300 kmh speeds, was due to begin in 2027. It has now been pushed back a year, with the Workers Party government careful to emphasize that this is a purely private project (a global rarity in such ventures), in turn drawing complaints from TAV Brasil about lack of state support.

More significant is the fact that the global winds are changing: state capitalism is the coming order of the day. Megaprojects are back, and with it, rail-building. But evidence of a change in mentality in Brazil is still very sparse. There is the small, if growing, camp of neo-Stalinists eager to “do a China” in just about any area of policy, but they have little institutional representation. And the fact remains that Brazil is the only non-signatory to China’s Belt and Road initiative among large Latin American countries, together with Mexico. The current planning minister’s enthusiasm for a rail link through the Amazon to Peruvian ports is just a means of selling more commodities to China, not some imitation of its deep and wide infrastructural investment. If backward-looking train nostalgia drives no political action, neither does future-oriented rail build-out.

Of course, China’s own massive build-out of rail is not easily replicable elsewhere, and would not even be economically justifiable in China, without the huge amounts of excess capital that the state can mobilize. But once you have it, you have it. And what China has done is undoubtedly astounding, a marvel of capitalist development. It is a vision of modernity—understanding the network as an integration project—that has been adopted both East (China) and West (Europe); it is a yardstick of development, one by which countries such as Britain and even Germany now measure up poorly. France, which kept rail under state ownership and invested in its network, came out the other side of neoliberalism much better off. A similar story could be told about its nuclear power plants. For Tim Abrahams, host of the Superurbanism podcast, historical vulnerability (Alsatian coal might be taken by the Germans!) cultivated a planning culture of not relying on one thing.

This is an important lesson. Brazil needs to upgrade its infrastructure in toto. What, for instance, is the role of electric vehicles (EVs)? As Benjamin Bradlow, a Princeton scholar studying Chinese EVs in Brazil points out, EVs may not represent futurity in a conventional way, as a transport revolution, but rather as a geopolitical one. For instance, Chinese automakers, led by BYD, are investing heavily in Brazil, to the tune of $1 billion to establish manufacturing, including in electric trucks and buses. Brazil, increasingly talked about as an energy superpower, with ninety percent of its matrix from low-carbon sources, stands to do well out of this new disposition. This is especially the case if claims prove true that electrification is the avatar of the new in a way exceeding whatever small developments there may be in means of transportation.

So it is a matter of doing more, not of never building another highway until a high-speed passenger rail network is built. Britain’s vexatious inertia over building HS2 connecting London and Birmingham is a case in point. It may not be “economically justifiable” in the narrow sense, but the act of delivering such a project proves to the state and citizens both that such a thing is possible, and creates a demand for more of it—and more importantly, it builds capacity. There are those, such as Oliveira, who argue that this misses the point: what good is high-speed rail in a country in which a third of the population still lacks basic sanitation? But this would be precisely that “either/or” vision that misses what comprehensive development is, or should be.

Ultimately, development cannot be reduced to a quaint account of steampowered Brits bestowing modernity, nor of electrified Chinese buying up one’s commodities and delivering rail in return. There is no savior from the outside that will simply bypass the impasse of anti-developmental class forces. In turn, what is required is a national story of overcoming that can energize the populace at large—one that is neither the Cubatão horror story of dirty industry, nor the extractive slash-and-burn that has so often characterized Brazilian development, but one that taps into the utopian energy of the 1950s and 60s.

When this happens, the residents of Rio Claro will no longer think of the idea of trains as “great, lovely, cute.” They will think of them as merely one component of a vast transformation that has changed their lives and that has relegated to the properly historical past the half-century of stagnation and its neoliberal fairytales.

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Alex Hochuli is a political analyst and writer in São Paulo, Brazil. He hosts the global politics podcast, Bungacast, and is co-author of The End of the End of History (Zer0, 2021).

This essay is from our sixth (and final) print issue, “Trains,” which is out now. Order your copy here.

The dread is minimal, but it’s there: that the train autists will read this issue and, if not rally the troops to swarm us with angry emails, then stampede r/trains and work each other into a mass frenzy, possibly resulting in strokes, heart attacks, or suicide. Since it is my sincere goal to prevent anyone from harming themselves or others, I will resist the temptation to reflect on my own family’s three generations in the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen. I won’t get misty-eyed about my mother’s—and later my—childhood cat, Chessie, named for the mother of the two sleeping kittens who joined her as the mascots of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway, where some of the men I come from kept America moving, and whose face dons the vintage wool Chesapeake blanket thrown across the chair across from me right now.

And I won’t talk about my generous support for Los Angeles’s own Travel Town, an outdoor railroad museum—with tourable restored antique freight and passenger cars—where I dedicated a donation to my great grandfather—”Beloved husband, father, grandfather, great grandfather, and proud union man”—and whose name is now on the “Restoration Partners” plaque in the Travel Town Arcadia Depot. No, I will speak nothing of that, nor any of the other ways that trains love me more than they love you, you hissing little Deviant-Art freaks.

I’m just here to dance.

A People’s Dance

The transition from steam to diesel train engines began in the mid-1920s, and although there is some pedantic quibbling about what constitutes “retirement,” the 2006 issue of Canadian Pacific Steam places the final year of the steam engine locomotive in the US, save for a few passenger trains, around 1960.

So when Little Eva sang “Come on, come on, do the locomotion with me” in 1962, the technology the dance was pantomiming was already anachronistic. You might assume the reference precluded its christening of a young dance. But you’d be wrong.

The arms, parallel and bent at the elbows, forming two right angles against the body, moved in a single dimension, the hands tracing ovals on either side of the torso, extending forward with the beat before taking an arc backward, like the rotation of the eccentric rod and drive and connecting rods that mobilize the wheels of a steam engine train (you know it’s a steam engine that’s being mimicked because the newer diesel trains don’t have eccentric rods). The Locomotion was as simple as that. Or as complex as you wanted it to be.

It’s what I refer to as a “Peoples’ Dance,” which involves four factors:

1. They travel well. Whether they originated in gogo clubs, dance halls, discotheques, or Tin Pan Alley, they made their way to the masses and eventually permeated popular culture. These are moves that move.

2. They’re “appropriate” in mixed company—at least eventually. There was outrage about “The Twist” that is now generally attributed to a combination of racism, a moral panic over “juvenile delinquents,” general prudishness, and—hand to god—public health concerns, with multiple doctors attesting publicly to the ostensible injurious harm potentially incurred by moving one’s hips. But all that burnt off pretty quickly. And while the Twist can be fun and slutty, its foundational micro-gyration is well-accepted as G-rated, unobjectionable to the minister’s wife in a way that twerking never will be.

3. They are done in public (though not exclusively), with more than one person present. If you see someone doing the dance by themselves, you’re looking at either the artist who popularized it, or a mentally ill person. Or you’re a Peeping Tom (shame on you).

4. And the most important one (this is essential): You do not have to be a good dancer to do them. Or even know how to dance. Improvisation and variations may be extremely advanced, but there is always, always an entry-level foundational move or moves that your mom could—and definitely did, at the Jones’s tiki barbecue after a few Mai Tais—perform with some proficiency.

Moving in Place

Around the mid-50s, America was leaving behind swing dance and it’s highly locomotive (yes, it’s an actual adjective) use of the floor, in favor of more planted, space-saving moves like the Mashed Potato, the Pony, the Bird, the Watusi, the Alligator, the Jerk, the Swim, and a whole bunch more, including the nearly forgotten Locomotion. Think about it: you remember the song, but have you ever learned the dance? Did you even know it was a real dance?

As rhythm and blues music mainstreamed, and Rock ‘n’ Roll began to dominate the radio, dance moves from black Americans were “toned down a little bit” for television consumption, along with desexualized adaptations of the 21-and-up urban night club go-go dancers, who generally weren’t actual strippers or topless dancers but were definitely still titillating enough to be scandalous. Go-go girls had to dance on tiny elevated stages for optimum visibility in a meandering barcrowd, a blocking method that also worked well for performers and dancers on TV, an increasingly common appliance in American households. Cameras kept close to the performer, and while faces were good TV, full body shots let you see how they moved. Sometimes they would even do close-ups of feet.

If you had dance halls or school dances, or just a conducive public space, you might learn to dance with your peers. If you didn’t, you could watch Dick Clark every Saturday at 3 and practice at home. In fact, your local TV station might have their own dance show, featuring local amateurs, just like you. And if you got good enough, you might be able to audition yourself, and be on TV, because if that girl from your rival high school over in South Baltimore can do it, why can’t you?

These new dances—or cutesy’d up old ones—were ready-made for teenybopper programming. A new shoe even came on the market, optimized for the moves, if you were willing to be a little scandalous: go-go boots, with their lower, thick, chunky heels, for a little bit of height and bounce, and virtually no tread, eliminating any friction that might anchor your feet and make it harder to slide or rotate your feet in place. Go-go boots weren’t prohibitively expensive, nor were any of the other fairly quotidian ensembles sported by the kids on American Bandstand and The Buddy Deane Show. You didn’t need a special wardrobe, equipment, or lessons.

You could learn to dance in your living room, right in front of a nineteen-inch TV screen, because while the dancers might be moving a lot, they were usually moving in place. Again, essentially, you didn’t have to be a good dancer! An awful dancer could make the Locomotion look good! And a great dancer could make it look transcendent, embellishing their interpretation to the level of fabulous choreography. But you could keep it bare bones, and no one would laugh at you.

And Little Eva was there pumping you up.

“My little baby sister can do it with ease
It’s easier than learning your A-B-C’s”

You got this! I mean the choreography is in the lyrics.

“Jump up, jump back”

You can do that! That’s as minimal foot movement as anyone could possibly ask of you, and we’re gonna’ make it look good, right? Right! Ok, let’s work the room.

“Now that you can do it, let’s make a chain now”

See what that girl in front of you is doing? Just do that. Actually, I think she’s looking at you for tips. You look like such a pro! Ok, now, don’t forget your hands.

“A chug-a chug-a motion like a railroad train now”

If you feel like challenging yourself, and maybe shootin’ yer shot—no pressure!—you can throw this one out to impress that chick in the slutty go-go boots!

“Do it holding hands if you get the notion”

For a moment, everyone, everywhere, could dance. Then we switched trains.

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In 1935, in the lead-up to a general election, Canadian Prime Minister R.B. Bennett called for a “New Deal,” on the US model of the same name. Voters weren’t convinced by Bennett’s last-minute conversion to economic populism, and Bennett was ousted, along with any future for a Canadian New Deal.

This fact has not stopped Canadian political leaders from calling for a Canadian Green New Deal as shorthand for an all-consuming climate policy. There is no greater advocate for a Canadian Green New Deal than Avi Lewis, who now leads the New Democratic Party. Lewis famously collaborated on the short, viral video about AOC and the GND, “A Message From the Future With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” and has made a CGND one of the key platforms of his campaign for the NDP leadership.

There are aspects of his vision that are well thought out and in many cases, uniquely Canadian. Lewis calls for the expansion of “green” crown corporations to “mass-produce and install electric heat pumps, rooftop and balcony solar and backup batteries; support new neighbourhood energy utilities that provide geothermal heating and cooling; manufacture electric-battery delivery vans and buses, and farm equipment.” Most Canadians interact with crown corporations—what Americans would know as state-owned enterprises—every day when they want to buy beer, take the train, or send a piece of mail. They are explicitly framed in the language of resisting US tariffs and strengthening the Canadian economy.

So why frame this as part of a “Green New Deal”? In the US itself, the GND framing is of questionable use: while voters like the concrete policy proposals often raised in association with it, the idea of a Green New Deal itself has arguably failed as a rhetorical strategy. Few unions actually ended up supporting it, it lacks the class basis of the Rooseveltian New Deal, and right-wing disparaging combined with the general political inexperience of many of its boosters damaged its reputation.

But at least in the US, there is a foundational American nation-shaping event to point to as a reference. In the New Deal, the country itself was remade, both politically and physically. Infrastructure projects like the Hoover Dam have left a lasting impression and serve as a physical reminder of the promise of the New Deal in the American psyche. This is the theoretical strength of the Green New Deal in the US. It appeals to what people already know: memories of their grandparents, infrastructure projects they pass on their way to work, and policies that they interact with every day of their lives. Even where the GND is polarizing, it establishes itself within a clear lineage of American history.

The Canadian Left’s obsession with a GND, by contrast, is simply bizarre. There is no foundational event of an original New Deal to draw on, or Depression-era infrastructure to point to; it is a policy based on an imported logic, framing, history, and politics.

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Everyone seems pretty miserable, and journalists, economists, and scholars want to know why. The trouble is they can’t seem to blame the most obvious culprit: the economy.

, the leading liberal chronicler of our emerging “Anti-Social Century,” dismisses an economic explanation for our social malaise: “Americans are rich and getting richer, by most conventional measures.” , a popular conservative demographer, similarly blows off the economic explanations: “young men in 2024 saw their highest inflation-adjusted earnings since the 1970s!! It hasn’t been this good to be a young man in a long time!” Meanwhile, economist put down the axe he is perpetually grinding against President Trump to wonder: “Why are Americans so down on an economy that, while not the greatest, isn’t terrible by the usual measures?” And veteran conservative firebrand sums up the concern troubling commentators on both sides of the aisle: How Can America Be So Miserable When It’s So Rich?

These accounts are part of a broader panglossian genre of writing that has sprouted up like spring weeds. The economic fundamentals are sound, pundits right, left, and center assure us. The bad feelings are all just vibes.

To most people, stories like these read like dispatches from outer space. The truth is that the economy really is broken and really is making us miserable.

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The following is the introduction to our sixth print issue on the theme of “Trains.” The issue will be mailing out very soon. Pre-order your copy here if you haven’t already!

Beyond the physical infrastructure of engines, carriages, and tracks, trains are one of the most famous and inspiring symbols of modernity. The modern age is of the machine, and there are few machines that have such a direct connection to the ideas of time and progress as the train. Trains represent directed movement, speed, and power. In the paintings of Turner and Manet, the steam produced by the trains of the nineteenth century billow out and cloak the train itself, adding even more majesty and mystery to the machine.

For Marxists such as Marshall Berman and David Harvey, modernity is understood as a particular experience of space and time. In Berman’s reading, modern subjects find themselves at home in an ever-changing maelstrom in which “all that is solid melts into air,” while the characteristic modern experience for Harvey is one in which technologies of mass communication and travel compress both time and space. Trains represent the possibility of mass access to the sort of speed that can shrink the nation and the world.

Over and above the moving of goods—initially around the rapidly industrializing north of England—trains have long represented the fast movement of people. Early train passengers felt the exhilaration of this speed while also worrying about asphyxiation due to the compressed air they would be forced to breathe. Medical experts expressed concern that train travel would lead to “cerebral lesions” and other naysayers likened railway travel not to transport but to the delivery of packages. If the motorcar came to stand in for individual freedom and movement around the expressway world, the train was a symbol of collective, industrialized power—a heavier, more brutal way for humans to conquer their geographical surroundings.

Alongside this new aspect of consumer travel experience, trains have long stood as a metaphor for the more abstract ideas of historical movement and progress itself. If for the optimistic liberals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, progress was a river flowing in one direction, it was also a train running along the tracks of history. Edmund Wilson’s influential 1940 account of revolutionary socialism, To The Finland Station, sets Lenin’s return by train to St. Petersburg’s Finland Station as the culmination of the tradition. Today the square in front of the station still contains a statue of Lenin that avoided being torn down after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Notwithstanding Lenin’s own ambivalence towards statues (“for pigeons to shit on”), it remains a powerful symbol, with Lenin in classic directing pose, making his 1917 speech atop a constructivist armored car. For Wilson, it was Finland Station that symbolized the terminus for revolutionary socialism and the location for the rendezvous with destiny for the Bolsheviks, and by extension the revolutionary hopes of the century.

For Marxists, trains have also been handy historical metaphors because they embody the idea that a locomotive force is needed—and is on hand—to drive history forward along the rails of progress. Marx saw revolutions, and Trotsky wars, as the “locomotives of history.” Ninety years after Marx, Walter Benjamin wrote that revolutions were not the locomotive of world history but rather “an attempt by the passengers on this train—namely, the human race—to activate the emergency brake.” Benjamin had previously written about a railway disaster in Scotland in December 1879 where a train travelling from Edinburgh to Dundee was crossing a bridge over the Tay estuary when it collapsed, leading to the deaths of all 75 passengers and crew. For a Marxist like Benjamin, historical progress and forward motion requires interruption, not acceleration. If humanity allows the train of history to follow the path already laid out by rails, then it will be a disastrous derailing and a crash into the water below. It is much less Marx’s vision than Benjamin’s that seems dominant now, as we look to interrupt the runaway train rather than putting our faith in a locomotive to drive history forward.

Today our experience of trains and time is unlikely to invoke any conceptions of historical time and far more liable to be connected to the anxieties of everyday clock time. The anxiety of missing a train or the reality of unreliable trains being late or cancelled have replaced any thoughts of historical progress when we arrive at a railway station today. E. P. Thompson’s famous 1967 essay on “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism” talks about the rise of a new conception of time mirroring industrial production replacing an older one grounded in agricultural labor; today trains, like all standardized and timetabled methods of transport, instead enforce a travel-discipline in the context of a mass-consumer capitalism. As social life continues to accelerate, this anxiety only intensifies.

But as the locomotive of history has accelerated out of control, actual locomotives have fallen into disrepair. In “The Railroading of a Steel Town,” Ryan Zickgraf tells the story of Steelton, PA, and with it the rise and fall of the steel and rail industries in the United States. In “Foaming for Breakdown,” Courtney Rawlings dives into the world of modern train enthusiasts (“foamers”) on Youtube, who promise scenic cross-country views but who deliver documentation of America’s decline—crumbling infrastructure, economic decay, institutional failures. And Aaron Wells tackles the re-nationalization of British railways in “Slumping Toward Nationalization,” an effort bearing none of the political promise of previous waves of nationalization and one forced by operational dysfunction rather than ideological commitment. Together these three articles all speak to the way in which trains have become a symbol of the broken promises of modernity.

Something similar holds for Alex Hochuli’s “Brazil Off the Rails,” but there he notes a general underdevelopment of rail that has Brazilians today in the grip of a curious “nostalgia for nostalgia.” Having never been an agent of national integration as it was elsewhere, rail improvements today can, for Hochuli, only be one component of a broader developmental vision. For many, the one country with such a vision is China, and our interview with Dan Wang on “China’s Rail Revolution” situates China’s high-speed rail build out and pursuit of other “gleaming infrastructure” within the country’s broader political project.

The Chinese example illustrates that massive rail improvements are still not only greatly desired but also of sufficient romance to capture the public imaginary. For many, trains connote a previous industrial era; they make us nostalgic for a form of progress that was and is no longer. But if it is nostalgia, it is one for industrial improvement of the built environment and for technologies that bind together a national community. In this sense, and again with the Chinese experience in mind, what we take to be “nostalgic” is only framed as such within the coordinates of our present decline and decay.

As Dustin Guastella contends in “Men at Work,” the demand for investment in industries that require muscle-power is no nostalgic fantasy but the key to finding a social cure for the present crisis of “male malaise.” In “Everybody’s Doin’ a Brand New Dance Now,” Amber A’Lee Frost similarly champions “People’s Dances” like Little Eva’s “Locomotion,” which have declined with the rise of a competitive and individualistic dance culture that spurns mass participation. And Nate Fisher holds up the train movie as a barometer of health for the film industry as a whole in “Not Another Train Movie,” lamenting the genre’s decline as representing that of Hollywood itself.

One prominent piece of “nostalgia” associated with trains is the intense class conflict that once manifested in the efforts of rail unionists, a history recounted in Paul Prescod’s “Struggle on the Iron Highway.” There are plenty of people, even on the putative “Left,” who think the era of labor upsurges is over. But if we are to make our way out of the present political and social crisis, we once again need a massive labor conflagration in the key industries of the day. There is no way around the central conflict at the heart of capitalist society.

Perhaps then it is best to think of the train as conjuring up a nostalgia for the “future of the past,” a past when the train was the symbol of forward-facing and ever accelerating modernity. In this reading, the train was the image of the future (unlike flying cars) that we actually had; it was designed to supersede itself by becoming ever more high-speed, ever more reliable, and ever more comfortable. Without a great deal of confidence that we can replace our antiquated rolling stock, decaying tracks, or take collective control of the transport infrastructure that ought to connect us, we have still not gotten past the train horizon and the future it used to represent.

A final note: this will be Damage’s last print issue for a while. We are not closing the door on print and will continue to pursue book projects like Rustin’s Challenge (out now, order your copy!). But the print issues will be on hiatus while we build some regularity into our publishing schedule and professionalize our operation a bit. We are tremendously thankful to everyone who’s supported the print operation and to everyone who continues to support the magazine. Print is dead; long live print!

George Hoare is Associate Director of the Palm Springs School for Social Research (psssr.org) and co-host of Bungacast.

Benjamin Y. Fong keeps a Substack on labor and logistics at ontheseams.substack.com.

The common view of Bayard Rustin on the Left is that he was a talented and marginalized organizer in the iconic period of the Civil Rights movement, that he pulled off one of the great American political events in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August 1963, and that from the mid-1960s on, he moved to the right, tragically compromised by, amongst other things, his support for Lyndon Johnson’s war effort. The idea that Rustin either supported or did not speak out against the Vietnam War is typically employed to dismiss much of what Rustin wrote and did from the mid-60s. Indeed, I would say that this has been the main impediment to engagement with the volume that Paul Prescod and I recently published with this outfit.

To cut to the chase, this idea—again, the thing that Rustin detractors point to in order to dismiss his post-1963 work and views—is demonstrably false. I am not simply attempting to “complicate” or “unsettle” some pre-existing narrative here; I mean that the notion that Rustin supported the war is a straightforward untruth, spread first by New Leftists but repeated ad nauseam today, deployed to dismiss someone who had more organizing skill and strategic prowess in his little finger than most compile in their entire lifetimes.

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About whether or not Bayard Rustin was too wedded to the political possibilities of the Johnson administration, a debate can be had. About whether or not he supported the war, it cannot. Whenever he was asked about the war, he repeated that “as a pacifist, I consider all wars evil.” In the spring of 1967, when King came out against the war, Rustin urged publicly that the conflict in Vietnam “be brought to a speedy end.”

Perhaps my favorite example of the wild disconnect between the reality of Rustin’s views and their caricature by New Leftists comes from June 1965, the month that Staughton Lynd published a scathing article on Rustin in the peace magazine Liberation, on whose editorial board Rustin sat. Lynd accused Rustin of being both a “labor lieutenant of capitalism” and also of advocating a “coalition with the marines” for his stance that leftists ought to attempt politically to seize the apparatus of the Democratic Party. It was the equivalent of declaring all-out war on Rustin as an enemy of the peace movement and of the Left more generally. As Rustin’s biographer John D’Emilio notes, Lynd’s article “displayed all the characteristics of a slash-and-burn, take-no-prisoners style of leftist debate”, which “anticipated a style of rhetorical excess soon to become commonplace among radicals.”

But what was Rustin doing in the same month of the same year that Lynd was lighting up the pages of Liberation? Here are a few lines from a speech he delivered at an anti-Vietnam War rally at Madison Square Garden in June 1965:

Though Congress refuses to admit it, we are at war. It is a useless, destructive, disgusting war. We must end the war in Viet Nam. It harms people on both sides. It reveals the bankruptcy of America’s foreign policy. The bombings, the torture, the harassment and needless killings are abhorent to me, and to all civilized men. Therefore, I am for supporting any and every proposal that is humane and relevant, that will end the war in Viet Nam.

And after this address, Rustin led the crowd in attendance in a march from MSG to the UN, where he again spoke to denounce US foreign policy.

All of this should raise a pressing question for us. How, despite expressing his opposition to the Vietnam War in both word and deed, did Rustin come to be known as someone who did not speak out against the war, and even someone who supported it?

There are a whole host of particular infractions New Leftists have cited to impugn Rustin’s character, but when it comes to the war, two key concrete particulars stand out. The first is simply that he was critical of new tactics and gestures coming from the anti-war movement. He found the burning of American flags and draft cards, as well as openly hoping for a Viet Cong victory, to be strategically objectionable, and something long-term that would turn the American public away from the peace cause.

Peaceniks of course blamed Rustin’s new ties and commitments for his having abandoned the cause, but as D’Emilio rightly claims, “Neither Rustin’s financial dependence on organized labor nor his desire to work with the Democratic Party can explain his distance from the growing antiwar movement.” Just as he had no time for the “exaggerated masculinity” of Black Power, so too did he reject the dramatic actions of the young college activists who were now the peace movement’s vanguard. As with the Black Power advocates, Rustin believed that “those in the peace movement who reject America with hate, and support conservative putchism and elitism” were in “unconscious coalition with the worst and most reactionary elements in this country.” “As soon as the Vietnam War was over, and with it the threat of conscription,” Rustin predicted, “the students would go quietly back to their studies and from there to their comfortable middle class lives.”

One can disagree with this analysis, of course, but to say that his criticism of new developments in the anti-war movement amounted to support or acceptance of the war is absurd, especially since Rustin was critical of the strategies of the anti-war movement in the name of the peace cause. But that he offered criticism at all is today used to smear him as an imperialist. I don’t think I need to spell out how this “If you’re not in agreement with us, you’re in agreement with them” kneejerk attitude continues to exist on the Left today.

However, the more substantive reason that Rustin is said to have been silent on the war concerns the rollout of the Freedom Budget. The Freedom Budget was a proposal drafted by the A. Philip Randolph Institute in 1966 for the elimination of poverty in the United States, with massive federal investments in jobs programs, healthcare, housing, education, and other sectors. As one might expect, it bore a hefty price tag, and the question of how the government would pay for such an ambitious program during wartime was naturally raised. Rustin’s position was simply that war expenditure was no impediment to carrying out a massive domestic spending program, or, more specifically, that ending the war in Vietnam was not an economic precondition of creating a more egalitarian society at home.

For this, he was excoriated from many angles. Economist Seymour Melman concluded that the Freedom Budget was a “war budget.” Stokely Carmichael agreed: “To ask for part of the Freedom Budget is to ask for the continuance of the war in Vietnam.” SDS’s Michael Kazin said it was “welfarism at home and imperialism abroad.” Rustin had not supported the war, but he might as well have, according to the critics, given his capitulation to the notion that the country could have both guns and butter.

Again, there are legitimate questions here about the relation between domestic and foreign affairs. But Rustin’s economic assertion that the war expenditure did not financially preclude a robust domestic investment program is simply not tantamount to support for the war. Outside of the contentious political mood of the 1960s, I have real difficulty dismissing the essential truth of the assertion, and wonder if anyone today would say, for instance, that we cannot restore Medicaid funding without first ending the war in Iran.

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More importantly, however, Rustin thought that winning people over to a robust social-democratic program was itself a form of anti-war activism, and indeed, the form needed not just for moral condemnation of the war but for weakening its structural causes. There are two key components to this thought: first, Rustin had organized Freedom Budget chapters around the country and imagined them going door-to-door with petitions (something that never materialized in any substantial fashion, due, amongst other things, to the resistance of the New Left). His first strategic question here was: when you are knocking doors with Freedom Budget petitions, and you find someone who supports your aim of good jobs for all, do you first make sure they are against the war before you allow them to sign? If not, then why make ending the war in Vietnam a precondition of supporting the Freedom Budget?

But just as important to this strategy was the second component, which was that winning the public over to a transformative domestic program would undermine the structural drivers of the war in the long-term. To his New Left critics, he thus relentlessly emphasized the economic aspect of the problem of war: what black Americans needed, what the trade unions needed, indeed what the United States as a whole needed, was an economic replacement for the Vietnam war. It was easy to be against the war but much more difficult “to present a meaningful political alternative to expanded and increased defense spending.” To play with William James’s well-known call for a moral equivalent of war, one might say that the Freedom Budget was proposed as the economic equivalent of war: in Rustin’s words, “The most effective method of redirecting our economic energies away from the war in Viet Nam is to mobilize people around the needs of the poor and the priorities of the Freedom Budget.”

To the young “radicals,” Rustin’s message was clear: if you want the end of this war and to weaken the economic drivers that will lead to future wars, the Freedom Budget is the answer. “At some point, the Viet Nam war will be over, and unless the concepts expressed in the Freedom Budget are accepted, then the funds which will become available will be diverted to other objectives—such as sending rockets to Venus—rather than to alleviating the social conditions of the poor,” he warned. Unfortunately those rockets are still flying, and most have not left the atmosphere.

In sum, when critics bring up Rustin’s views on Vietnam, they do so to discredit him and in turn to dismiss the prophetic elements in his speeches and writings as too entangled in moral and political cowardice and confusion to take seriously. But what I think Rustin’s actual perspective on the war demonstrates is less something about Rustin himself than about a New Left eager to uphold its own moral coherence by engaging in character assassination and straightforward slander while simultaneously flouting a broad-based economic program for working-class progress. Which is to say, again, that Rustin’s work reflects back to us the continued degradation of left politics in the US, even in its very dismissal.

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Benjamin Y. Fong is the co-editor of Rustin’s Challenge and keeps a Substack on labor and logistics at ontheseams.substack.com.

Ana Maria Cisneros’s Damage article “The Need for a Socialist Morality” makes a welcome plea for socialists to rid themselves of the incoherent taboo on normative claims about the kinds of personal lives that are desirable. There are, for Cisneros, a pretty clear set of social goods that contribute to human flourishing on this earth, and socialists shouldn’t be shy about affirming them as the moral undergirding of their political vision.

I have no objections to Cisneros’s overall argument, but I do wonder about Cisneros’s assumption about the intuitive appeal of these goods to broad swathes of the population. In her view, only “the middle class and elites,” segments that tend to dominate the Brahmin Left, are thoroughly wedded to permissive individualism in morality because “their range of freedom as consumers makes it appear as if they are truly autonomous.” Meanwhile, “people who lived in pre-capitalist societies, and even many working-class people today, are not autonomous in most aspects of their lives. As a result, their approach to moral thinking does not rely on individualistic morality.” If this is true, then the vast majority of people incline towards external, collective standards of goodness, while only the rootless PMC insist on an incoherent individualism in ethical consideration. If this were the case, the socialist moralist’s job would be simple: clear away the bad thinking habits of this restricted group, whose form of life warps their moral sensibilities, and re-connect with the moral intuitions of the vast majority.

Sadly, the task is harder than Cisneros leads us to believe. If we recognize that a form of life can negatively shape moral outlook, then we must account for the positive conditions required to form the collectively oriented, externally anchored moral outlook that she recommends. And if the development of a pervasive non-individualistic moral outlook has necessary social conditions, then we might discover that we are sorely lacking the required social infrastructure and institutions.

Practical Identities and Morality

I want to consider the uncontroversial claim—one that I think Cisneros would agree with—that repeated, habitual daily practices powerfully shape our ability to recognize reasons for actions. Such practices allow us to fulfill social roles that place practical demands on us beyond our personal preferences, grounding deferential attachments to projects and to people and the capacity to recognize “external” goods or reasons for actions in the sense that Cisneros describes.

Philosophers have used different terminology to describe the connection, but the idea is straightforward. If I am involved in a practical role such as, say, a teacher or a doctor, there are standards to which I must adhere and ends I must desire in order to practice the role at all. To be a good teacher or a good doctor is to internalize standards of excellence that are not dependent on my “authentic self”, my feelings, or my desires. To truly be a teacher is to attempt to be a good teacher; I have no choice but to recognize a set of goods bound up in the occupation and to be motivated by them. My “individual,” original motivations for adopting the role (“I heard that I can have a secure retirement”, “people think doctors are hot”) become less relevant as I take on the practical identity and the motivations internal to the practice. A “practice” or a “practical identity” are a condition for having reasons at all for action beyond my own immediate desires.

Here is how philosopher Christine Korsgaard defines practical identities:

… a description under which you value yourself and your life worth living and your actions to be worth undertaking. Conceptions of practical identity include such things as roles and relationships, citizenship, membership in ethnic or religious groups, causes, vocations, professions, and offices.... Our conceptions of our practical identity govern our choice of actions, for to value yourself in a certain role or under a certain description is at the same time to find it worthwhile to do certain acts for the sake of certain ends, and impossible, even unthinkable to do others.

Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s account is not so different:

By a ‘practice’ I am going to mean any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended.

Note that practical identities don’t refer only to jobs, titles, or crafts. The same connection between the recognition of external goods and a practical identity holds for the kinds of everyday relational roles to which Cisneros alludes. To be an aunt or a co-worker entails at least some form of external standards of goodness and motivations to adhere to them.

Note also, however, that having a practical identity doesn’t just mean “having a job.” Under the two descriptions above, there’s quite a lot that doesn’t qualify. Packing Amazon boxes as directed by a management app and separated from other workers such that any communications or sense of collective project is impossible won’t do. Neither will the routines of white-collar “flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters”, high-paid or low-paid, college-educated or not. Neither will parasocial relationships on social media or internet-based social networks. There is a floor to practical identity, and quite a lot of what we—speaking broadly, “we” as Americans—do does not meet it. For this outlook to really hook in, it can’t be isolatable—you can’t just “clock out” and leave your practical identity at the door.

Practical identities are the social nucleus out of which we are educated into a moral outlook that integrates external standards of goods and sensitivity to the collective (what Cisneros calls the “not me, us”) aspects of those goods. They are where our deferential attachments to external projects and people are nourished. From this nucleus, we can see how a broader moral outlook might develop that carries the structure of good-oriented desires and reasoning over into the broader, overarching practical identities of our lives. We can even see, as MacIntyre argues, that there are certain goods of character and virtues that are required to perform a practical identity well: honesty, courage, and so on. We can see that ultimately this training in making our desires conform to real goods in order to legitimate them would have positive consequences for social behavior and coordination, and commitment to common goods that require political coordination to provide.

Practical identities are a premise for developing any philosophical reflection on morality. Aristotle takes it as a given that you must internalize these patterns of practical thinking in order for moral philosophy to be anything more than mouthing words. Korsgaard and MacIntyre hold radically different views in moral philosophy, but they all hold more or less to the same view about the habituated practical social nucleus of morality. If our society cannot provide most people the opportunities for robust, overlapping networks of practical identities—the prerequisites for moral reflections—then, debates about what kind of morality socialists ought to embrace put the cart before the horse.

Social Atomization’s Moral Aspect

If such nexuses of practical identities are in most cases conditions for developing the moral outlook that undergirds Cisneros’s socialist morality, then far more of us are deficient than just the “middle class and elites” with untethered consumer power—the widespread withering of practical identities has a far more significant impact on moral reasoning. As Americans, we’re all falling short on the necessary conditions and institutions to develop practical identities and the corresponding commitment to external goods beyond personal preference.

Those on the Left are familiar with the facts on US social atomization. Employment trends in the US continue to suffer deepening rounds of de-skilling. Employment growth is concentrated in low-wage, low-skill industries designed for high turnover. Civic mediating organizations are little more than a memory. Neighborhood and local-level organization is a farcical front for the NGO-industrial complex. Unions are bleeding out. The number of Americans who live in the same neighborhood throughout their lives (let alone through multiple generations) is dwindling. Church-going and participation in religious life continues to decline. Policy wonks describe a “friendship recession”, and the Surgeon General reports there is an “epidemic of loneliness”. Even NPR is now reporting on dwindling births and family life. The litany goes on.

Social atomization is much discussed, including in these pages. The relevance here is that this atomization destroys the requisite conditions for practical identities and the “external” moral outlook Cisneros is after. It is never fully destroyed, of course—nobody can really live without at least some practical identity—but the prospects for richly inhabiting a set of practical identities that force us to orient ourselves to reasons beyond our personal preferences are poor.

Short of a practical context that creates social roles that facilitate a nexus of practical identities en masse, projects for reviving a socialist morality will remain intellectual and rhetorical as similar calls to re-moralize politics are on the Right. We can exhort people to reject an atomized vision of personal autonomy, embrace the search for common goods, debate on the order of goods in common life, and promote both the personal virtues and institutional measures that facilitate these goods. But without mass remedial re-socialization, this all remains something between a philosophical exercise (we can construct arguments about the common good, about the incoherence of liberal morality, and so on), or political rhetoric to be judged on the merits of circumstantial effectiveness. Is the Left in New York City more likely to garner support for the new mayor’s ambitious childcare initiative if we frame it around freeing up autonomy for parents to continue living their lives and careers and making their own choices, or as a normative policy that encourages young people to have children and take root in the city in such a way that motivates a commitment to the common-good institutions of civil society?

The scale of the problem is enormous and so ought to be the scale of a solution. As firms like Amazon transform our labor regimes in much the same way that Ford did a century ago, and new technology threatens further social dislocation, all sorts of discussion of how to reverse-engineer civil society are back on the table for the Left and Right and whatever the hell you want to call what is going on in Silicon Valley. My point is that these programmatic discussions will be improved by recognizing that practical identities are the psychological and ethical core of a strong civil society and the moral authority of external reasons that Cisneros wants. New Deal Programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps facilitated the mass production of practical identities by institutionalizing collective living and experience in common projects, socialization across class, racial, and geographic divisions, rigorous physical training combined with training in skills in engineering, construction, and technology essential to the competitive advance of industry.

Today’s candidates for programmatic fixes—comprehensive industrial policies, jobs guarantees, educational reforms, national mandatory service programs, etc.—can use the same tactics to facilitate practical identities to an atomized populace, while at the same time supplying the labor force and the skills that are needed for overhauling the US’s crumbling transit, energy, and communications infrastructures (to name just a few). There is a gnawing chicken and egg problem here—is it possible to win socializing programs without the pre-existing sociality that makes them appealing?—but at least we’re beyond mere appeal to moral intuition. Though it would never cut it as a political slogan, “Practical Identities For All” is the prelude to getting beyond the pervasive normative authority of personal preference and authenticity.

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Scott Jenkins is a labor educator and an advisory board member at ASU’s Center for Work and Democracy.

A quick internet query or flip through the dictionary will tell you that the difference between a missile and a rocket is that one is guided and the other not.

Otherwise, they are really just the same thing. Everyone is familiar with the story of Werner von Braun, the Nazi scientist who designed the German war machine’s V2 rocket (confusingly also described as the world’s first ballistic missile), and how he is also the aerospace engineer who oversaw the program that launched America’s first satellites and the Saturn V rocket that sent Apollo astronauts to the moon more than a half century ago.

There exist critics of space exploration who draw attention to this identity of the rockets of science and missiles of war, who do not tire of reminding us of the dark, militarist origin story of the American space program. They argue that this link never truly went away, noting that the companies who built rockets for the Apollo missions also manufactured weapons to bomb Vietnam. You cannot have rockets without missiles, they say. The Guardian tells us that the Artemis program, returning humanity to the moon after more than five decades away, is a “dangerous distraction” from the Earth’s myriad environmental crises, and that most of the discoveries from space-faring “seem to involve finding better ways to kill each other.” Plus, “there is nothing to see” anyway, the paper’s columnist-curmudgeon Zoe Williams concludes. “Let’s stop going to space.”

Beyond the straightforward rebuttal that space science is earth science; beyond the fact that the development of our understanding of climate change depended in no small part upon our scientific investigations of Venus; beyond how we are able to track forest loss and glacier melt and the scale of so many other environmental challenges thanks largely to the decades-old Landsat satellite program, this technological determinism gets things thoroughly backwards. The science and engineering of rockets do not necessarily produce missiles. Instead, it is the pathologies of our political economy that necessarily produces far more spending on one rather than the other. Space doesn’t come cheap, but still, recent budget proposals for the 2026 US military budget hit $1.5 trillion; meanwhile the Artemis II launch cost an estimated $4 billion, or a quarter of one percent of the former.

Imagine what we could do as a species, not just here on Earth, but in space as well, with those military trillions spent differently, if only we could liberate ourselves from these pathologies!

Since its launch on March 27th and return to Earth on April 10th, millions of people around the world found themselves profoundly moved by the Artemis II mission, not merely entertained. Atop this, there has been an uncanny synchronicity between this humanist “moon joy” people have described as having experienced and the rich, warm, humanist feeling audiences experienced watching the Hollywood space drama Project Hail Mary. These two mass events seem to have resonated deeply with our being.

But why? What happened here that so affected so many? I think perhaps, contra Williams’s assertion, there has been in fact everything to see.

What We Are For

With the Artemis crew, we saw humans operating at the very limit of our capability—of courage, endurance, intellect, athleticism, curiosity, cooperation, and even love. A crew of staggering competence and accomplishment, trained for years, held up by some one thousand support staff, from engineers and mission controllers to janitors, drivers and secretaries.

Mission specialist, electrical engineer and astrophysicist Christina Koch, for example, has been a firefighter and glacier search-and-rescue operator in Antarctica, a field researcher in northern Alaska and Greenland, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric station chief on American Samoa, and spent 328 days without interruption on the International Space Station—the longest single spaceflight by a woman. A rock climber and triathlete on her days off, Koch also managed to find time to learn Russian just for her ISS mission.

So many of us here on Earth were deeply inspired at such practical achievement because we recognized instinctively, viscerally, that this is the fullest expression of what humans can be. Put another way, we were watching human nature thoroughly realized. This is what we are for.

This mission back to the moon, mounted by NASA, a public-sector agency, is a robust confirmation of Neil Armstrong’s humanist warning against the privatization of space research. A private company can only ever do what is profitable. Returning to the moon may one day result in profitable activities downstream, but the mission itself could only ever be undertaken by the public sector because it is not possible for the mission to be profitable. Elon Musk’s SpaceX can radically reduce the cost of escaping the Earth’s gravity well, but the company can only ever be a contractor to a public-sector mission (as it will be on future steps in the Artemis program).

Armstrong, the first man on the moon, was a Democratic Party moderate and no socialist, but in his critique of the commercialization of space, he intuited the core critique that socialism mounts regarding human unfreedom under capitalism. A crude but common reading of this argument is that socialists see feudalism’s authoritarian rule by kings and lords and bishops as being replaced by authoritarian rule by bosses and shareholders. But in truth, the argument drives deeper than that: under capitalism, humanity is not ruled by bosses but instead by an unconscious, amoral abstraction, one that is—to steal a term from artificial intelligence discourse—unaligned with human values: the profit motive. In this way, even the bosses are beholden to what the market demands of them. Humans thus do not truly govern ourselves; we remain instruments of some other design.

However, when we do decide for ourselves what to do, which can only be done through democratic government—and it must be fully democratic for this to be the case—we achieve self-mastery. Anything SpaceX does can only be done using humans as instruments in the service of profit. Public-sector space exploration, meanwhile, is the expression of humans acting as genuine ends, not means; we do this not because it is profitable, but because it is worth doing.

And all this human excellence has occurred at the very moment, back on the ground, that we are witnessing an expression of humanity’s most malign capacities: what seemed dangerously close to the opening guns of a new World War, with all three sides murderous, religiously dogmatist, authoritarian regimes that gleefully massacre civilians, that target elementary schools, hospitals, the water supply and power grids. Surely few can escape the contrast. On Earth, it is not as it is in the heavens. Perhaps most diabolical of all, in the middle of this glorious human Aretê high above us, President Donald Trump warned, perhaps hinting of a nuclear strike on Tehran: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to ​be brought back ​again.”

“Mom, take a picture of me!”

There are two images from the last few weeks that I cannot get out of my head.

These are not the images of the far side of the moon taken by the joint American-Canadian crew of the Orion (dependent on a service module designed by the European Space Agency), as staggering as these are.

No, the first image that sticks in my mind instead is that of eleven-year-old Hilt Boling waiting for the Artemis II lift-off in Florida, his shoulders strapped into a red backpack surely filled with all the essential provisions of a trip to a space launch (candy, chips, and books about space, obviously), and his still plump adolescent-baby cheeks framed by a black NASA ballcap with a GoPro camera clamped to the brim. When CNN asked this little space dork why he was excited about the launch, he replied bluntly: “Because we’re going back to the fucking moon!” The Kennedy Space Center then took understandable public-relations advantage of the virality of Hilt’s cute-vulgar outburst to offer his family a special tour, which then produced yet more images, this time of Hilt’s gob-smacked wonder at the center’s historic space-faring artifacts.

Boling’s adventure reminded me of when I was six years old, and my family emigrated from the UK to Canada. On the way to our new home in the Toronto suburbs, my parents stopped off in Florida to take my little brother and me on a side-trip to Walt Disney World and that same Kennedy Space Center as something of a bribe or recompense for uprooting us. I was a baby-faced little space dork once too, obsessed with space Lego and, very Britishly, Doctor Who. I wasn’t too different from Hilt, a child besotted with the mysteries of the universe and the technological triumphs of humanity. And as an adult, there is something beyond mere nostalgia when beholding a child’s awe in the face of these splendors. With the experience of age and an education of the past, we are able to recognize their experience of joyful amazement as a continuation of the grand chain of exploration and understanding unique to our species. As the astronomer Carl Sagan put it, we are the universe becoming aware of itself, and through our works, we come to know the universe ever better.

The second image—of the last few weeks of rockets and missiles, of space and of Earth, of the better world we could have and the injustices of the actual world that we are burdened with—that I have been unable to shake from my consciousness is a photograph of an Iranian child not much younger than Hilt Boling.

No less viral than the footage and photos of Hilt’s charming impudence, this image is of third grader Mikaeil Mirdoraghi in Minab, Iran, similarly baby-faced, equally backpacked, and from his comportment—I am almost certain—comparably nerdy, waving to his mother as he heads down the steps of his apartment building and off to school. “Mom, take a picture of me,” he said, according to his mother, who never saw him again. Shortly after, Mikaeil was killed either by a rocket or a missile, that was either American or Israeli, that landed on, perhaps targeted with the help of artificial intelligence, his elementary school, like so many other schools and hospitals.

Why does one child win the thrill of a lifetime watching a rocket take off, while the other loses his life when a rocket lands on his school? Hilt did not do anything to deserve his day of awe and wonder, and Mikaeil did not deserve his death. There is no way to rationalize this: instead, the vagaries of fate with regard to both boys simply call upon us to strive toward a better world where all children are free of war, free to dream of being astronauts (or whatever else they want to be).

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Greater Love Hath No Man Than This

Audiences’ response to Project Hail Mary, a Hollywood blockbuster, may seem—and indeed is—of far less moment than the majesty of a real-world mission to the moon. But the stories we tell ourselves and, crucially, about ourselves are nevertheless extremely important. And here, once again, we encounter the uniqueness of the human: we are, after all, the only species that tells stories.

The author of the book upon which Project Hail Mary is based, Andy Weir, has complained that science fiction has been taken over by a bleak dystopian misery. In place of this, Weir says, “I write stories of hope where human nature is positive and uplifting. At least, that’s what I’m shooting for.”

Project Hail Mary’s main character, middle-school teacher and failed microbiologist Ryland Grace, finds himself alone aboard a starship struggling with amnesia. Over time, he begins to remember how he got there: he was sent by an international consortium of governments (another respite from the real world’s international antagonism and war) and scientists that built and sent his ship on a one-way journey—unable to return, and thus a suicide mission—to a distant star system to try to learn about a space-faring microbe. The life-cycle of these bacteria, which they name astrophage, causes a rapid dimming of the light from our sun and that from other stars. Within a few decades, Earth will be reduced to a sort of permanent nuclear winter, and most of the planet’s food web, including us humans who depend upon it, will go extinct. But in one system many light years away, the astrophage exist but mysteriously do not dim its star. Grace and his crew, of which it turns out he is now the last surviving member, had been dispatched to find out why, in the hope that what they learn will be sufficient to figure out how to save everyone back home.

At his destination, Grace encounters an alien spacecraft from a planet in yet another star system, 40 Eridani A, that also suffers from the astrophage star-disease. The craft, similar to his own ship, is home to just one surviving Eridian astronaut, after the rest of the crew were killed by radiation poisoning. The alien is a rock-encrusted, five-legged creature with no face or eyes that Grace befriends and names Rocky. They devise a way to communicate despite radically different evolutionary histories, and together, using the formidable powers of science and engineering and friendship, they ultimately succeed in learning enough about the astrophage—including discovering its natural predator, an amoeba-like organism that Grace names Taumoeba—to save both Earth and Erid.

At one point in the gravitationally fraught, high-risk process of these two buddies’ “science-ing”, Rocky almost dies trying to save Grace’s life. Moreover, as Grace’s amnesia slowly wears off, he realizes that he did not in fact volunteer for the mission as he had been too scared of dying. He only ended up on the ship because the mission’s director drugged him and placed him aboard against his will, knowing he was the only human with the knowledge and experience sufficient to pull it off. Grace had been a coward, perhaps the worst coward in all history, for he was frightened to join a one-way trip to save all mankind. At the story’s climax, in return, Grace risks his own life for his Eridean friend. The film is not a religious work, but one of its elements that touched so many viewers was surely this echo of Jesus’s maxim of John 15:13, one that no atheist could gainsay: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

Grace comes to realize this imperative thanks to Rocky’s own act of sacrifice. He has undergone a grand moral progression—an arc common to so many of our best stories (the infamous “hero’s journey”), but Weir has infused this time-honored storytelling structure with an urgently necessary celebration of humanity.

Trees Make No Progress in Wisdom

Project Hail Mary recognizes that to be a person is no mere phylogenetic category; it does not require belonging to the species Homo sapiens. To be a person is instead to have the full set of attributes that have supreme moral value: things like consciousness, reason, self-awareness, to seek purpose and meaning-making, and above all, the ability to make moral choices, to be capable of virtue, and therefore the capacity to undergo moral progress. Rocky is certainly no member of our species, and it’s not even close! Earth bacteria would be more closely related to us than his species. But Rocky is absolutely a person, for he has all these qualities. He is closely related to us in moral value, not in genes. Grace instinctively recognizes this within minutes of meeting him, and vice versa.

Compare this to how the microbial lifeforms of the astrophage bacteria and Taumoeba are treated in the story: to save humanity back on Earth and Rocky’s species on Erid, the two main characters’ goal is to deliberately drive astrophage to extinction on their worlds. And the way they do this is by genetically engineering a version of the Taumoeba to be a radically different, far more hardy species. In other words, extinguishing one species and transforming the “way of being” of another have no negative moral consequence.

Audiences might respond: “But of course microbes are less important than humans or Eridians; they’re just microbes! We don’t need to be told this!” And this is indeed an unassailable position. What is noteworthy is how this instinctive response rubs up against critiques of anthropocentrism—the belief that some species have greater moral value than others, and that humans enjoy the greatest moral worth—popular in some corners of academia and the animal rights and environmental movements. But the Hollywood audience instinct, in this case, is the correct one. It is the fashionable rejection of human exceptionalism that is incoherent.

The North African philosopher and theologian Saint Augustine is perhaps most well known for wrestling with the crooked nature of Man, illustrated most famously by his one-liner of a youthful prayer, “Lord, make me chaste—but not yet!” But his less well-known arguments on the nature of human exceptionalism are worth revisiting in an age of commonplace human self-loathing. Core to what he regarded as the attributes that suggest our superior worth is our ability to morally reason—even as our powers of reason are fragile. This capacity for morality enables us to recognize a kinship with any other rational beings and form a community of rights and law. Other organisms cannot do this, as they are governed by instinct rather than reason: “The wolf will as long as it lives be a wolf, and will not listen to any preachers and give up killing sheep.”

Cruelty to animals must still be prevented, but we remain at the apex of this chain of being above all, Augustine argued, because we are the only creature capable of moral progress. And there would be no need for moral progress if there were no moral frailty. “Trees make no progress in wisdom,” he writes.

But Ryland Grace can make progress, moving from cowardice to self-sacrifice, just as American society can move from acceptance of slavery to its abolition. Women can keep being denied the vote until they win it. And one very fine day indeed, the whole world will move from war to peace.

Radically Different

Project Hail Mary is not the first time that Weir has put on his hard-sci-fi humanist show. In his breakthrough hit, The Martian, the main character Mark Watney, a botanist and engineer who finds himself stranded on Mars, must use his scientific wits to find a way to survive long enough until a new mission can be mounted to return to the red planet and rescue him many months later. The book and subsequent film version from director Ridley Scott show just how well Weir’s shot has hit that humanist mark. The entire enterprise of the rescue mission, posing not inconsiderable danger to the many lives of the rescuers and costing presumptive billions in treasure, plows, well, a rocket straight through the idea that humans can be used as an instrument in other designs.

Beyond the fact that Weir’s stories are unputdownable, ripping yarns, it’s his recognition of how special humans are that resonates with what most readers and movie-goers already feel deeply. I say “most” because we live at a time of widespread and growing misanthropy. Many of the environmentally minded declared during the Covid-19 pandemic that “We are the virus.” Anti-humanist philosophers argue in the pages of the New York Times that the world would be better without us. The billionaires of the Tech Right lend even greater power to such ideas: Peter Thiel struggles to say whether he wants the human race to endure, while Elon Musk reckons the most important thing is the spread of intelligence throughout the universe, regardless of whether that intelligence is human—though it would be nice if AI superintelligences let us humans come “along for the ride.” There is even a growing fringe of Silicon Valley thought leaders who argue that we should strive for AI superintelligences to replace us, for they would be a “worthy successor” superior to us in all capabilities.

What is remarkable about the synchronicity of Weir’s celebration of humans alongside audiences’ instinctive embrace of this celebration, and the humanist “moon joy” experienced by so many watching the Artemis II mission, is how robustly these two mass events counter an otherwise widespread ambient misanthropy from the green Left and the tech Right. They have performed important work reminding humans of how precious we are, reviving—at least in an emotional register—recognition of how radically different we are compared to the rest of nature.

But it is not enough to leave this question of human exceptionalism and moral hierarchy in nature at the level of instinct and emotion. We need to formally clarify what these attributes of moral value are, or put another way, rigorously define what it means to be a human as distinct from other species, and in so doing, ask what humans are for.

There are two causes for urgency in this endeavor. First, amidst the current and all too real ecological crisis of a warming Earth system, a misanthropic approach to climate change, biodiversity loss, and other challenges misunderstands what the project is about: the conservation of optimal ecological conditions for humans, rather than “saving the planet.” The misunderstanding often produces counterproductive policies based on restoring some unscientific balance of nature. Organic agriculture, for example, founded on the belief that “natural” fertilizer and pesticides are good for the planet and synthetic ones harmful, represents not merely an unscientific fear of chemicals, but can also exacerbate biodiversity loss as organic food’s land footprint is often greater than that of conventional agriculture.

The second cause of urgency arises from the explosion of investment into artificial intelligence. Some potential applications of AI go beyond enhancing productivity and reducing drudgery and would eliminate human-meaning making itself. It is one thing for robots to replace humans down mines, but what will it still mean to be human if all our art, science, and math are performed by an algorithm?

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In Defense of Planetary Defense

Our return to the Moon offers at least the start of this new but also ancient task of defining the human, of asking what humans are for. Contra the Guardian’s Zoe Williams’s assertion that there is nothing to see up there, one of Artemis’s primary scientific objectives acts in service of the most important undertaking ever mounted.

Our current best theory of how the Moon formed suggests that some 4.5 billion years ago, a gargantuan rock the size of Mars—which scientists call “Theia”, after the Greek Titan and daughter of Uranus and Gaia—smashed into the early Earth. Its impact ejected a tremendous volume of debris into orbit, which in perhaps as little as a few years coalesced to form the Moon.

Were a Theia-sized body to hit Earth today, the likely result would be a complete sterilization of the planet. Even extremophile microbes living deep in the Earth’s crust would perish, as the shockwaves and heat conduction raised the temperature of the entire planetary interior far beyond the limits of protein stability. Thankfully, NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office reckons it has identified almost all of what it calls “planet-killer” asteroids, and has cheerfully reported that nothing larger than 140 meters is likely to hit the Earth in the next 100 years.

Our evidence for the lunar “Giant Impact Hypothesis” comes from Moon rocks gathered by Apollo astronauts in the 1960s and ‘70s, which showed a composition almost identical to the Earth’s mantle, suggesting in turn a deeply linked origin story.

Those manned Apollo missions were essential to our coming to this understanding. Comparisons of manned and unmanned space missions have demonstrated how much more scientific discovery results from the former. An astronaut trained in geology can accomplish in one week what it would take a robotic rover a year to perform. Current AI capabilities cannot (yet) match humans’ superb capacity for situational awareness. And we can walk freely through loose sand or scattered rocks that are pure grief for wheeled rovers, and perform complex drilling tasks that (again, current) robotic hands cannot manage. Robots and other machines are fantastic, and we can send them to many places humans cannot go—such as the visit to the surface of Venus by the USSR’s unmanned Venera program. But most capable of all is a combination of human and robotic capabilities, each helping out with what the other cannot do.

The fact that the US and its allies are in a new space race against China does not undo the need for such science. The first space race between America and the USSR did not undermine the value of the research delivered from those Venera missions. One can only strive to build a democratic world where all nations cooperate to better and more rapidly achieve such goals.

One of the primary objectives of the Artemis program as a whole is to better understand the origin of the Earth-Moon system. Artemis II astronauts undertook extensive geological training across lunar analogs in Labrador and Iceland. But future missions aim for even more hands-on geological research from a surface landing and ultimately a lunar base in the 2030s. Such studies would offer a unique field laboratory where we can better understand the physics of such catastrophic collisions, which in turn is essential for defending the Earth against any potential future strikes.

It is possible over the next few decades, or even just the next few years, that we are able to detect the chemical signatures of life in the atmospheres of exoplanets, or perhaps Mars missions will discover bacterial life on that world. The discovery of life elsewhere does not diminish our need to maintain the flame of life and consciousness alive on Earth, not least by avoiding nuclear war that an increasing volume of scientific evidence suggests humanity could not survive. But it is also possible that in our search of the heavens, we continue to find nothing. If life does not exist anywhere else, or even if it is incredibly rare, this increases the burden on humanity’s shoulders to be a good shepherd to this world.

Capybaras cannot build asteroid deflector technology. Whales and octopuses and redwoods, and other species that we love, cannot staff a planetary defense office. And an AI aligned to human values can certainly offer great help in this task, but why would an unaligned AI even be interested in it?

Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman said upon his return, “It’s a special thing to be a human, and it’s a special thing to be on planet Earth.”

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Leigh Phillips is a science writer and geologist. He is the coauthor of The People’s Republic of Walmart.

Earlier this week, left-wing Twitch celebrity Hasan Piker and New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino appeared on a New York Times video podcast to discuss “microlooting,” a new term for shoplifting concocted by the New York Times seemingly for the sole purpose of the podcast. Both Piker and Tolentino endorsed the practice on the grounds that rich corporations steal from ordinary people all the time. Why shouldn’t us poor schmucks steal back?

Of course, despite the guests’ airy defenses of petty theft, the conversation was also full of plenty of hedging. After arguing that there was nothing wrong with stealing a car and insisting that he would do it himself if he could get away with it, Piker admitted that he has yet to steal so much as a candy bar. Tolentino, who copped to boosting four lemons from Whole Foods, was quick to explain that this had been undertaken solely for the benefit of a needy neighbor, through a mutual aid group she’s been part of “since 2021.”

You can log these among the infinite number of times the well-educated and well-heeled have failed to preach what they personally practice. But the excitement over the prospect of low-level social disorder that was on display in the discussion provides a glimpse into what has become a widespread attitude among upscale progressives: that we ought to excuse or overlook bad behavior by the everyman because bad behavior by the uber-rich is so much worse; that all antisocial behavior is downstream from larger antisocial structures; and that it’s ultimately the “global design of capital” that incentivizes that behavior. Politically, the conclusion is that social disorder is not an issue that progressives need to confront, at least not directly.

Tolentino and Piker are correct that the social contract has collapsed in our new Gilded Age. Many feel that working hard and playing by the rules amounts to holding up one end of a bargain that no longer exists. On top of that, extreme wealth and income inequality has bred widespread social resentment. If Bezos, Musk, Thiel, Zuckerberg, Trump, Epstein, and the like are all above the law, why shouldn’t the rest of us sink below it when it’s convenient?

But while this impulse may be understandable, a tit-for-tat moral code is a recipe for political disaster. Yes, the fish rots from the head down, but that doesn’t mean it smells any better at the tail. The truth is that rising disorder makes achieving the kind of social reform that could reverse today’s obscene inequality much harder. And left-wing ambivalence about antisocial behavior only worsens the problem.

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Since 2020 or so, the main progressive response to the creeping, noticeable rise in antisocial behavior has been an injunction to ignore it. That’s partly because today’s progressives are horrified by the notion of involving the police, partly because many are incapable of saying no to anybody at any time, and partly out of a morally admirable urge to protect the down-and-out from further scapegoating. Disorder is only a symptom of a larger disease, they say, so we need to address the root causes, not the downstream effects. The theory is simple enough: if people had decent and dignified lives to begin with, they wouldn’t steal, litter, or vandalize.

The trouble, however, is that the very presence of public disorder makes resolving the upstream causes of it much harder, if not impossible. A rise in antisocial behavior fractures public trust and social cohesion. The inability to maintain basic order in turn draws more people toward civic nihilism and begets a self-perpetuating cycle.

Step on a subway car in Philadelphia today and you’ll immediately notice that it’s clogged with smoke, public drug use, half-eaten, half-rotten food waste, and mystery fluids greasing the floors (not to mention assorted smells of human origin that the smoke actually helps to mask). A decade ago there was nothing near this level of wanton disregard. Some progressives may shrug: who cares? But allowing public transit to exist in a perpetual state of shambolic disorder keeps riders away, wears on taxpayers’ nerves, and continually demoralizes the workers charged with cleaning up the mess day in and day out. Patience runs even thinner when riders see people hop turnstiles to join them on a journey they dutifully paid for. Good luck asking for more transit funding when the crummy subways we already have seem wildly overpriced.

Or consider America’s infamous lack of public restrooms. It costs a fortune to install these things, partly because, as travelogue writer Chris Arnade has colorfully pointed out, they have to be made “asshole proof” as a condition of their existence. Keeping public restrooms tidy and functioning requires nonstop vigilance against the assholes, figuratively and literally. And even then, the assholes always find a way. As a result, public restrooms hardly exist in this country, and in their absence, public life is worse.

To convince the public to invest in public life—in social goods and services—you must first convince them that you care about maintaining a state of relative order. If it isn’t pleasant to play in public parks, ride public transit, attend public school, or simply be out and about in the city because everyone is constantly breaking the rules, all at once, all the time, you will never find the political will to make those public goods any better. After all, any renewed social compact will necessarily be built on a renewed sense of social trust. And trust is in short supply in a society pock-marked by evidence of chronic theft and vandalism.

Yes, rising social disorder is a symptom of a larger antisocial disease. But very often it’s the symptom and not the underlying disease that kills the patient. And for progressives, disorder is a politically lethal symptom. For one thing, progressive promises for more public investment will fall on deaf ears when basic commitments to order are routinely overlooked. Worse, when affluent progressives, from Brownstone Brooklyn to the Hollywood Hills, casually laugh off the very things that make working people’s day-to-day lives more difficult or unpleasant, they will only succeed in inspiring a different kind of class contempt.

Already right-wing rags are having a field day painting Piker and Tolentino as the poster children for an out-of-touch liberalism. The political implications should be clear. Social disorder is notoriously the cheapest, most reliable fuel for right-wing growth. A society in disarray, reactionaries insist, requires an old-fashioned Strong Man to clean up the mess. Of course, conservative solutions will only make the upstream causes of disorder worse. But if the Left continues to hand-wave away—or worse, celebrate—antisocial behavior, reactionaries will fill the void. And their appeals will have an audience.

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Dustin Guastella is Director of Operations for Teamsters Local 623 in Philadelphia and a Board Member of the Center for Working-Class Politics.

Karl Marx did not care to speculate in much detail about what comes after capitalism. That stray remark in The German Ideology, about how in the future it would be possible “to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind,” has excited a thousand fancies, but it has invited as much scorn from critics who take the passage as a telling example of utopian naivete. Marxism, they say, fails to take human nature seriously. It is supposed to enable production without alienation; without having to incentivize (or force) workers to do what they do not necessarily “have a mind” to do. But this is impossible: workers will not produce unless they are incentivized, because no one “has a mind” to work. They must be given a mind to do what is necessary. Every actual communist regime has discovered this truth, to the dismay of citizens who soon find that they will hunt or fish or rear cattle as the state requires, and will certainly not do any criticizing after dinner, assuming they get any. Better the capitalist way, in which the directives are issued by the free market, and are therefore no directives at all, since the market makes us free.

So say the critics. It’s interesting to observe that under the actual capitalist regimes of the present day we are taught to envision the future of work as an expanded and upgraded gig economy of endlessly varied options, in which everybody will be freed from alienating work by platforms and AI agents to change careers as whim and chance provide, and granted our independence from the stifling corporate and factory environments of yesteryear, with all their nasty pensions and benefits. In the hands of a skilled propagandist, or an undergraduate marketing major, it can almost sound like we are all going to start hunting in the morning and criticizing after dinner and fishing and cattle-rearing throughout the day. Although hunting is problematic, as is rearing cattle, since their meat makes us fat and their farts cause global warming. I don’t know about fishing. Maybe we should make it the subject of our next after-dinner struggle session.

Interesting, yes, but only one among many examples of capitalism’s admirable talent for marketing itself as the end of capitalism, of a piece with Lululemon selling resistance in the form of luxury yoga pants. Nothing new to see here. But there may be something new to see, or at least a fresh way to see something old, if we reflect on Marx’s idyll more obliquely, from the perspective of a resident of the twenty-first century whose most conscious experience of alienation may not come primarily from the way she is “minded” (by other people) to labor, but from what she is minded by others to do when she is supposedly not laboring.

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In Marx’s image, hunting and fishing and farming and criticizing are all forms of labor that have been transformed into forms of leisure because they have finally been disalienated. They are not weekend entertainments; they are creative and indeed productive activities, even if the kind of life marked by these activities is made possible only because the problem of the “general production” and distribution of necessities has been solved. A just political economy for Marx is not one in which you don’t work; it is one in which work is self-consciously “chosen” and the artificial distinction between work and leisure is relaxed. That distinction is convenient for capitalists who need carrots and sticks to keep people in line (you work for money that pays for your entertainments; you work for the weekends; you work so you don’t have to work), and who have by means of that system smashed the feudal order and vastly increased our capacity for production. But it is not convenient for human beings, who naturally want to work, and are therefore equally unhappy when they have no work to do and when the work they have to do is unleisured because it is not done for its own sake, as we “have a mind” to do it. Marx looks forward, not merely to a world without bad work, but to a world with good work in abundance. Which is to say: he looks forward to a world of leisure properly understood.

How disappointing then to consider that our understanding of leisure has only deteriorated as some of our least immiserated workers have labored hard to ensure the nearly universal distribution of quasi-magical technologies that are supposed to reduce drudgery and increase productivity and generally accelerate the arrival of a work-free utopia. Let us forget, for a moment, the obvious facts that drudgery has increased in what seems like direct proportion to the number of tasks our devices enable us to perform simultaneously, and that productivity seems to have decreased in similarly direct proportion to the number of people who have been convinced that multi-tasking is a thing. Even if so-called artificial “intelligence” really does deliver a world without alienated labor, by delivering a world without any labor at all, it is already adding here and now another layer to the same world of frantic boredom built on the back of the smartphone and the social media platform. And to the extent that we actually do have less bad work to do (which for some people in some ways is true), we all are spending more and more of our “free” time working (scrolling, swiping, producing this eerie new commodity called “attention”) onscreen, entertaining ourselves by making other people richer and ourselves less free. Perhaps one reason it is easier than ever to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism is that the most valuable corporations in history have managed to supplement and maybe even replace the false distinction between work and leisure with a new form of “leisure” which is actually a new kind of alienated work, and is therefore what we might call “alienated leisure.”

Alienated leisure is as good a term as any for the peculiar experience of living in the “attention economy.” Indeed, it is a better term than most, because it is not swaddled in the kind of therapeutic claptrap that invariably, in the service of mental health, leads to calls for more mental health care, as if the problem were in your head (sorry, in your brain: it’s certainly never your fault!) and not in the heads of the mercenary psychologists who deliberately addicted you to short-form videos. Nor is the term saddled by moralistic concerns about distraction and dissipation, as if it really were just your fault, when of course it is not, even if you can and should avoid succumbing to distraction and dissipation. “Alienated leisure” puts the focus where it belongs: on a material system that has spiritual effects, one of which is a diminishing capacity to be sufficiently offended by what is happening to our ability to choose what we do with the “eight hours for what we will” sought by the old labor movements, before the colonization of those hours by the builders of some particularly shiny new “labor-saving devices” that have saved very few laborers from their traditional fate.

Consider what alienated labor is, for Marx: it is labor marked by a series of forced separations. First, the laborer is separated from the product of her work, both in the simple sense that she does not own it, and in the more profound sense that it owns her, because others own it, and use it to dominate her life. Second, the laborer is separated from the activity of working, by being confined to the performance of one task in a series over which she has no creative control (as on an assembly line), a confinement that damages her physically or mentally or both, depending on the work in question. Third, the laborer is separated from other laborers, who are turned from companions into competitors and reduced to obstacles or tools in the service of her own private ends. Finally, the laborer is separated from her human nature, which—it must be emphasized—wants to labor, and for that reason hates to be alienated from her labor by those who profit by doing so.

The parallel to leisure in the attention economy is easy to see. The product of our most determinedly “unproductive” hours (for Gen Z, over 6 hours of captured attention per day) is used to generate massive profits that we do not share, and to enable pervasive surveillance. The activity of scrolling (or clicking, or whatever) is intensely piecemeal, by design: we are algorithmically sorted with godlike efficiency into various silos and echo chambers that cut us off from any context that might salvage our act of attention from the constant fragmentation (cat video follows live beheading follows stock tips) that has been quite helpfully characterized as a form of “human fracking.” It goes without saying that we are unprecedentedly isolated from all the other people with whom we are supposedly more “connected” than ever before in human history. And, most importantly, we are increasingly cut off from our natural desire to spend our “free” time doing something that is free—something that is active and creative, something that strives for coherence and depth, something that involves not “connection” (that is what machines do) but honest-to-god relationships.

Unlike most on the “Left” today, Marx certainly thinks there is such a thing as human nature (what else would our material circumstances be alienating us from?). Marx’s conviction that humans naturally want to work, and that when their work is self-directed it is less distinguishable from leisure (and conversely that true leisure takes work; Homer Simpson drooling at the TV is most certainly not at leisure) will only become more important and more subversive if capitalism in the twenty-first century keeps its promises to automate vast swaths of alienated labor while opening up vast new territories of alienated leisure to those lacking the special “reality privileges” apparently enjoyed by Marc Andreessen. False consciousness is a thing, but in some ways it is easier to become and remain aware of your alienation when what is alienating is a job you feel forced by necessity to take (especially if it is a poorly-paid shit job, or even a highly paid bullshit job, in David Graeber’s sense). It is harder to stay alert to the fact that you actually hate your phone, since after all you keep scrolling on it, and nobody is “incentivizing” you to do it by paying you for your time. How can it be alienating if it’s freely chosen? Is not that the definition of leisure itself: free time spent on “what we will”?

So we have been made to think. Only by redefining leisure as no more than the absence of alienated labor has it been possible to so alienate us from our leisure that even our free time now becomes one more form of alienation, refined within an inch of its life, sliced and diced and parceled out into profit-generating chunks of captured attention. And now, it is with some horror that we realize—if we can—that even if we are quick to nod our heads in agreement, we are less and less capable of viscerally feeling the attraction of Marx’s quaint vision of leisure as hunting and fishing and cattle-rearing and criticizing, not only because all of those activities strike us as far too much work, but because all of them require the sort of slow and luxurious attention that is itself no longer for us a simple pleasure but an offputting slog. The insidious triumph of digital capitalism is to have turned attention into something we literally pay to others. And what they give us in exchange is nothing less than a steadily diminishing capacity to enjoy ourselves without making them rich.

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Adam Smith is a Professor of Political Philosophy and Director of the Honors Program at the University of Dubuque.

On November 13, 2025, Blue Origin, the space company owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, not only successfully launched its New Glenn rocket from Cape Canaveral, but recovered its first stage rocket 375 miles downrange from the launch site. This had been the norm at SpaceX, which had achieved reusability almost a decade ago. The US government had awaited a launch competitor for SpaceX to emerge, and with Blue Origin having achieved reusability, a contender appeared to be on the horizon.

More recently, on April 1, 2026 NASA launched Artemis II, a ten-day crewed trip that looped around the moon. NASA administrator Jarred Isaacman proclaimed, “Artemis II will be a momentous step forward for human spaceflight.” Artemis II broke the distance record formerly held by the infamous Apollo 13, at one point reaching a recorded distance of 252,756 miles from Earth, besting Apollo 13 by 4111 miles.

With all of this good news, things appear to be on the upside for US space prospects. Yet nothing happens in a vacuum. Back in the fall, then NASA administrator Sean Duffy spent a good amount of his time giving speeches with a singular message: “We are going to beat the Chinese to the moon.” The urgency of that sentiment may be unclear—after all, NASA first landed astronauts on the Moon back in 1969 and five more times after that (Gene Cernan was the last person to step off the lunar surface on December 14, 1972). That race ended long ago. Politics and budget cuts scrapped the remaining planned Apollo missions.

The difference between now and then is that the race is now about more than geopolitical prestige. The plan is now to get to the moon and stay there. If the Apollo landings targeted the region around the Moon’s equator, the current target is the Moon’s southern pole where there is an abundance of frozen water, along with some amount of rare isotopes such as Helium-3 (on most of the Moon the brutal heat of a lunar day doesn’t give ice much of a chance; hence the focus on the permanently sheltered poles). The idea is that water can be used for hydration and be split into oxygen for breathing and hydrogen for fuel for further missions. Helium-3 is currently used for medical imaging, but one day it could possibly be the fuel of fusion reactors. It remains to be seen how any of these resources will be exploited. Doing things in space is quite difficult, but the China hawks want to get a head start.

And many of them are getting quite nervous about this. China is targeting 2030 for a moon landing. Former NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe was quoted regarding China: “There is no question that the technology they have is verging very close to being in competition with us. Two years ago, I would not have said that, but they are really improving to the point [the 2030] objective is conceivable.” Last September, another former NASA administrator, Jim Bridenstein, was more blunt: “Unless something changes, it is highly unlikely the United States will beat China’s projected timeline to the Moon’s surface.” More recently, Issacman put it this way: “They may be early. And recent history suggests we might be late.”

In May 2024, then NASA chief Bill Nelson stated that the US and China were “in effect, in a race” to return to moon. In an interview with NPR, Nelson stated:

I don’t want them to get to the South Pole, which is a limited area we think the water is. It’s pockmarked with Craters. And there are limited areas that you can land on the South Pole. I don’t want them to get there and say “this is ours. You stay out.”

Taking this line further, testifying before the House Natural Resources Committee in December 2023, Dr. Greg Autry (coauthor of Red Moon Rising: How America Will Beat China on the Final Frontier) and Professor Michelle Hanlon, executive director of the Center for Air and Space Law at Ole Miss, were asked by Congressman Mike Collins: “What is the worst-case scenario if China wins the race for space mining, and how will that impact the United States?” Their answers?

Dr. Autry: I don’t want to be hyperbolic, but if China wins the race in space, we’ve ceded the entire strategic high ground militarily and ceded the entire economic future, and the United States will be relegated to the backwater position for the rest of human history.

Prof. Hanlon: I agree with Dr. Autry. The Chinese will have the opportunity to block our access not just to the moon but to all of space, and humanity’s future lies in space.

China became the third country capable of human spaceflight in October 2003 and wouldn’t take its first steps into deep space until 2007. In June 2024, China, with its Chang’e 6 probe, became the first nation to land and bring back samples from the far side of the Moon. This past December, Landspace, a leading Chinese private space-launch company, became the first non-American company to attempt to return a rocket stage to Earth for reuse with its Zhuque-3 rocket. The test ended in a grand explosion, but it won’t be too long before reusability is achieved in China. Established commercial Chinese firms, including Space Pioneer, iSpace, Galactic Energy, CAS Space, and Deep Blue Aerospace, are close to getting their own reusable rockets to the pad.

Meanwhile, the US space program post-Apollo is a story of indecision and bloat. The shuttle era ended on February 1, 2003, after the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated as it reentered the atmosphere. With the eventual retirement of the Space Shuttle, NASA became entirely dependent on paying for rides on Russian Soyuz rockets to the International Space Station. Each incoming president has had a different and often contradictory vision for NASA, preventing the formulation of a coherent space policy.

The roots of the current Artemis program go back to the Obama administration. The Constellation program, tasked with redeveloping moon-landing technology, was a mess from day one, and Obama sought to scrap it. But Congress, under the lobbying from legacy contractors such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman, wasn’t having it. In 2011, Congress preserved part of Constellation, which became the Space Launch System (SLS). The problem: a 2023 report by NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) revealed that SLS totaled $23.8 billion in expenses since 2012, resulting in a dizzying $4.4 billion cost per launch!

By the 2020s, when SLS finally launched Artemis I, Space X had emerged to reestablish launch capability from the US. Space X was chosen as a contractor, but the key to its plan to get back to the Moon relies on an orbital refueling technology that has never before been successfully deployed. As Bridenstine put it in his testimony to Congress: “By the way, that whole in space refueling thing has never been tested either. We are talking about cryogenic liquid oxygen and cryogenic liquid methane being transferred in space, never been done before, and we’re going to do it dozens of times, and then we’re going to have a human rated Starship that is refueled that goes all the way to the Moon.” Artemis III was originally scheduled to be the first to land astronauts on the lunar surface. This has now been pushed back to Artemis IV, with the plan to eventually send two missions a year. In late March, NASA announced plans to spend $20 billion for a moon base to be built over the next seven years.

Whereas the first space race was carried out by states to the end of national prestige, the current race back to the Moon is a much more literal extension of this-worldly battle for economic and geopolitical hegemony, but it is today being carried out by private entities more concerned with their stock price than the feasibility of the technology being deployed. In the mid-1960s, NASA consumed 4.41 percent of the US federal budget. Now, with all these visions for space flying around, NASA gets 0.5 percent.

Still, with all of these private entities pushing their extra-planetary endeavors, and China hawks dominating both sides of the aisle, it’s not hard to see the seeds of conflict blossoming in the barren soil of space. In 2019, NATO added “space” to land, sea, air, and cyberspace as an operational domain, and in 2021 established a space center at its Air Command in Ramstein, Germany. 2019 was also the year the US officially established its Space Force. In November 2021, Russia launched a missile from Earth’s surface that destroyed a defunct Soviet-era satellite (the satellite had been in orbit since 1982), creating 1500 pieces of orbital debris. Both China, in 2007 using a kinetic kill weapon, and the US, with a missile against a malfunctioning spy satellite at a lower orbit, have also destroyed satellites. India too conducted a kinetic anti-satellite test in 2019. In the gameified and human-less reaches of space, it is not difficult to imagine what could happen when all these countries meet each other on the lunar surface.

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Joseph Grosso is a writer and librarian in New York City and the author of Emerald City: How Capital Transformed New York (ZER0 Books). His writings have appeared in various publications including Quillette, Compact, Free Inquiry, The Humanist, Science for the People, and Counterpunch and he can be found on Substack.

Review: Gabriel Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? (Monthly Review Press, 2025)

The history of Marxist theory is replete with figures who lament the sectarianism of everyone except themselves. In his new book, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?, Gabriel Rockhill stands in this august tradition, hurling out accusations of bourgeois treachery while painting his “own theoretical practice” as above the degradations of his Western Marxist teachers.

Sometimes Pipers is an almost spiritual autobiography of the author’s life as a left-winger, with Rockhill as our postmodern Augustine. We learn how he studied at “premier institutions in Paris” and attended “all of the lectures and seminars by the thinkers who were the most renowned in the United States, as well as those who had potential to become so…. I also shunned those doing work that sounded old school or unsophisticated.” When none of these philosophies proved edifying, Rockhill then found a sterner creed. His discovery of the one true faith is also chronicled in Pipers. Rockhill presents theoretical apologias for a very orthodox version of dialectical and historical materialism. He claims that Soviet-style materialism is a “science” which operates at a higher level than “bourgeois social sciences, including their disciplinary divisions” which are “a direct outgrowth of the material social relations of modern capitalism.”

But the core of Rockhill’s book is in his claim that most Western Marxists functioned to combat the “real existing socialism” of the Soviet Union and its allies throughout the Cold War. After 9/11, he writes, he began to develop a “materialist analysis of the system of knowledge production, circulation, and consumption within which I had been trained.” One of the “ultimate objectives” of this materialist analysis was to sharpen “an objective ideological critique of the material system of ideas that produced an ideological subject like me and, much more importantly, legions of others indoctrinated into the same brand of imperial ignorance.” The practical upshot is to show how Western Marxists directly or indirectly abetted imperialism. This remains true, in Rockhill’s telling, to this day. It’s even true, he argues, where radical intellectuals and academics fancy themselves to be opponents of the system:

One of the most intriguing and strategically significant tactics that is encouraged, which is essential to understand for a complete picture of the history of Western Marxism, consists in a subtle, soft-sell campaign against communism…. By putting Marxism itself in the service of doctrinal warfare, intellectuals convinced by Marxist theory were thereby encouraged to hold on to a purportedly authentic version of Marxism while using it to vilify Marxism in practice and—at a minimum—accommodate capitalism.

Rockhill’s materialist analysis and critiques has what he calls “objective” and “subjective” dimensions. Objectively, his book paints a vast web of associations, conspiracies, pressure campaigns, funding schemes, etc. by American power to combat communism. Rockhill claims this includes using American money and soft power to prop up Western Marxism for its perceived value in undermining the legitimacy of Soviet and Chinese style communism on the Left. Subjectively, he tries to show how Western Marxists propagated arguments and analyses detrimental to really existing socialism, and consequently provided ideological cover for imperialism, capitalism and even fascism. The latter accusation might seem extraordinary, but Rockhill insists that even if critical theorists “subjectively considered themselves to be antifascists and, more important, worked to uproot fascism through bourgeois democratic means (which, again, is a laudable tactic), they remained accommodationist toward the capitalist system, the seedbed of fascism, while fighting the truly antifascist communists.”

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St. Gabriel the Red

One of the first major problems is that Rockhill uses the term “Western Marxism” in a very sweeping and transparently skewed way. His targets have very different motivations, political opinions, and philosophical orientations. Foucault, Habermas, Marcuse, Zizek, Derrida, Arendt and others all come in for a ribbing, and all, despite their own criticisms of Marx, somehow participate in the tradition of “Western Marxism.” According to Rockhill, what “they all share in common, and what becomes visible via a materialist analysis of the social totality, is their opposition to actually existing socialism, with only the rarest—and absolutely explainable—exceptions.” This is a bad criteria with which to lump very ideologically different figures together, bordering on crude “friend/enemy”-level Schmittianism rather than dialectical nuance. As a point of comparison, no leftist would accept a Heideggerian quoting Introduction to Metaphysics and claiming liberalism, socialism, and all other modernist philosophies were “metaphysically the same” simply because of their opposition to fascism.

In fairness, some of the material dealing with how ideological figures were funded offers a clear indication of how the United States worked to manufacture consent on a global scale. The expansive map of CIA agencies, covert ops, shell foundations, academic liaisons, and connections he draws showcases both the extent and sophistication of American Cold War imperialism, which had a canny awareness of the popularity of left-wing causes and realized more nuanced weapons were needed in the fight against communism. Moreover, Rockhill and Domenico Losurdo (a significant influence on Pipers) are undoubtedly right to chastise Western intellectuals of a previous era for their willingness to call out racist imperialism and genocide in Europe, while adopting a far more tepid and even critical attitude towards colonial aspirations for independence. When Rockhill goes after Max Horkheimer for defending the Vietnam war, or Arendt for her racism and excessive hagiography of the American founders, it’s easy to cheer. In these circumstances the accusations of gross hypocrisy and descriptions of how selectivity in the application of bourgeois principles reinforces capitalist imperialism have real bite.

For all his insistence on materialist analysis, Rockhill frequently indulges in psychological speculation to prop up ad hominem attacks. He describes most contemporary Western Marxists and critical theorists as being “petty bourgeoise.” They find themselves “sandwiched between the bourgeois politics of capitalism and the proletarian politics of socialism, often dreaming of an enchanting but nonexistent third way beyond this pitched class struggle. Fearful of proletarianization, but attracted to a bourgeois lifestyle, the petty bourgeoisie is sometimes resentful of its corporate overlords and capable of celebrating jacqueries, while nonetheless lacking a concrete, long-term collective political project of its own.” Lest one think the scarlet letter ought to be pinned exclusively on posh Western leftists, Rockhill makes it clear his criticisms also apply to “imperially trained” intellectuals from developing countries that were victimized by imperialism and who have since “generally seen their working-class movements crushed and leftist culture decimated.” These intellectuals too he sees as nothing but “snake oil salespeople” brandishing “prestigious credentials” in order to sell “poison.”

Anyone who has spent any time on the academic Left has met the kinds of people Rockhill is talking about: self-described Marxist radicals who wear BLM t-shirts to class before rejecting a job applicant because she completed her undergrad in the global South. An essential problem with Rockhill’s book is that he takes the annoying experience of an encounter with this kind of person and universalizes it. One can admit that the Western (and non-Western but anti-communist for that matter) intellectual Left can be and often is hypocritical. But is this the entirety of it? Rockhill’s methodology textual misinterpretations leave one unconvinced.

Lyndon Larouche Redux

Pipers’ empirical and textual claims are deliberately vague and frequently misleading, if not outright false. Along the “objective” dimension, much of the evidence Rockhill presents is circumstantial (so and so met so and so and took money from this foundation with ties to this person) or ideological (X wrote an anti-Soviet book to cheers from some liberal academics, so for all intents and purposes X must have been anti-socialist). In a pinch Rockhill will insinuate wildly, conclude nothing, but accuse doubters of lacking faith to see and being shills for the status quo.

He implies, for instance, that Frankfurt School theorist Herbert Marcuse might have been a stooge of the CIA and various other organs of American repression and imperialism. As discussed in A.J.A. Woods’s recent, The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy, this accusation has a long history going back to Lyndon Larouche. Larouche was a radical leftist turned right-wing conspiracy theorist who accused Marcuse and other Frankfurt School theorists of being shills for the American state. One might have hoped this bleak example would be the end of it. But, first as tragedy…

Rockhill’s main rhetorical strategy is casting a sinister aura onto Marcuse’s well-documented time working for the OSS (Office of Strategic Services)—a predecessor to the CIA—and the State Department. In his recent guide Marcuse, Jacob McNulty describes this as part of Marcuse’s wartime effort to support the Allies against Nazism. Marcuse later participated in the State Department’s denazification and anti-Soviet efforts. McNulty acknowledges and lightly defends Marcuse’s never hidden anti-Soviet animus; for instance, in books like Soviet Marxism, which grew out of his time working in OSS. But he stresses that “Marcuse was no cold warrior, and it is clear that he viewed liberal capitalism as sharing the totalitarian tendencies of the Eastern bloc.”

Rockhill isn’t satisfied with this well-documented history. He reheats L.L Mathias’s charge that Marcuse was actually a CIA agent who worked with the “notorious Nazi general Reinhart Gehlen” as part of an anti-communist intelligence agency. Asking whether it is “possible, then, that Marcuse was a CIA agent,” Rockhill admits he was “never overtly employed by the CIA.” But Rockhill muses that since Marcuse spoke German and worked on anti-communist agitation for the State Department, it “seems unlikely that their [Marcuse and Gehlen’s] paths would not have crossed, either in person or via intermediaries and overlapping projects.” Moreover, isn’t it suspicious that in 1951, “...Gehlen was given a VIP tour of the United States to meet the leaders of the U.S. national security state and develop their plans for a common war on communism, which was one of Marcuse’s fundamental tasks.” Or that Gehlen “met William Donovan, the chief of the OSS and Marcuse’s boss during the war, as well as three major figures in the CIA, two of whom had served in the OSS, whom Marcuse almost certainly knew in some capacity: Walter Bedell Smith, Allen Dulles, and Frank Wisne.”

If all this seems circumstantial, wildly speculative and conspiratorial, Rockhill has a rebuttal. You’re probably one of the many “Western academics” and intellectuals who “ignored or rejected out of hand all of the allegations mentioned above” because you have a “direct stake in the Critical Theory franchise.” This slippery rhetorical process is tirelessly and tiresomely repeated throughout Pipers: strongly imply nefarious connections and convey conspiratorial associations, never get pinned down by claiming you’ve decisively proven anything, repeatedly suggest you’re just asking questions others don’t have the balls to consider, and when someone doesn’t reach the party line conclusions by filling in the blanks, accuse them of elitism and shilling for the capitalist class.

The same oily rhetorical strategies are applied when discussing Marcuse’s late career. Speculating on how Marcuse became a cultural icon, and referencing his connections to elite academia and culture, Rockhill suggests it’s “highly unlikely that the mainstream press was simply acting on its own in contributing to Marcuse’s renown,” implying that media coordination with nebulous state and private entities was responsible for Marcuse’s popularity. Lacking direct evidence for his extraordinary claim, Rockhill insists we can still infer the truth that the American government must have signed off on Marcuse’s work. How else could he have become popular if he was a true radical?

Things get darker still when Rockhill tirelessly tries to snare second-generation Frankfurt School philosopher Jürgen Habermas into a sufficiently tangled web of fascist associations while hoping readers will extrapolate the worst. Early in Pipers, Rockhill describes Heidegger as an “unrepentant Nazi after the war, as his former students Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas helped demonstrate….” Later he claims that Habermas “had himself been a member of the Hitler Youth and studied for four years under the ‘Nazi philosopher’ (his description of Heidegger).” Elsewhere, discussing Ludwig Friedeburg’s arrival at the Frankfurt School, Rockhill reminds us how Habermas “had, like Friedeburg, served in the Hitler Youth.” He elaborates in a footnote, saying: “Habermas himself, we should recall, was a member of the Hitler Youth and would later support the Persian Gulf War and NATO’s intervention in Yugoslavia.”

As with his treatment of Marcuse, Rockhill motte-and-baileys mightily to insinuate a connection between Habermas and Nazism without unambiguously asserting it. The effort is tortured. Habermas was indeed a member of the Hitler Youth, but Rockhill fails to mention that this was mandatory for all German boys over the age of ten after 1939. Moreover, Habermas never studied under Heidegger in any formal capacity. In fact one of Habermas’s early public interventions was a 1953 op-ed condemning the latter’s unrepentant Nazism; the first of several major critiques of Heidegger. This might be the reason, as Rockhill is grudgingly forced to acknowledge, that Habermas has always foregrounded Heidegger’s Nazism. Habermas’ political limitations are obvious enough without having to fantasize about fake ones.

Criticizing the Critical Critics

On the subjective side of things, Rockhill reads texts in lopsided ways to make the case that Western Marxists supported or abetted anti-socialism and anti-Marxism. Oftentimes, all that’s needed to see the problem is to check the original text.

The most egregious example is Rockhill’s treatment of Adorno. He suggests there was a “palpable shift in the Frankfurt School’s political orientation” in 1940 when the Institute “turned its back on class analysis in favor of privileging race, culture and identity.” He points to a letter Adorno wrote to Horkheimer in 1940 where the former claimed that “everything that we used to see from the point of view of the proletariat has been concentrated today with frightful force upon the Jews.” Rockhill uses this to blame Adorno for setting the “stage for a more general shift away from historical materialist analysis grounded in political economy toward culturalism and identity politics.” The reason two left-wing Jews exiled from Germany might be concerned with reactionary anti-semitism circa 1940 is something Rockhill largely passes over in silence, while he tries hard to project contemporary animosity over liberal identity politics into the past.

More embarrassing still is Rockhill’s discussion of a short Adorno essay, “The Meaning of Working Through the Past,” which was noticeable enough to generate an internet micro-scandal. Rockhill claims that Adorno suggested “that the Nazi assault on the Soviet Union could be retrospectively justified due to the fact that the Bolsheviks were—like Hitler himself had said—a menace to Western civilization. ‘The threat that the East will engulf the foothills of Western Europe is obvious,’ the famed philosopher proclaimed, ‘and whoever fails to resist it is literally guilty of repeating Chamberlain’s appeasement.”

What Rockhill deliberately doesn’t acknowledge is that in this passage Adorno was clearly satirizing and criticizing Cold Warriors who make just these kinds of equivocating claims. He even claims that by doing so Cold Warriors retroactively legitimate fascist arguments for attacking the Soviet Union. Here is the quote from the essay in full:

It is a quick jump from the statement ‘Hitler always said so’ to the extrapolation he was also right about other things. Only edifying armchair warriors could quickly ease themselves over the historical fatality that in a certain sense the same conception that motivated the Chamberlains and their followers to tolerate Hitler as a watchdog against the East have survived Hitler’s downfall. Truly a fatality. For the threat of the East will engulf the foothills of Western Europe is obvious, and whoever fails to resist it is literally guilty of repeating Chamberlain’s appeasement. What is forgot is merely—merely!—the fact that precisely this threat was first produced by Hitler’s campaign, who brought upon Europe exactly what his war was meant to prevent, or so thought the appeasers.

There’s an essential irony to Rockhill’s project. He is right that Western Marxism emerged in part as a response to the perversions of Stalinism and Maoism. A motivation for Western Marxism was a desire to speak truthfully about the world without having one’s work reprimanded for not toeing the orthodox party line. Or worse, having your writing manipulated and censured to demonize its author. By engaging in these kinds of tactics throughout Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?, Rockhill has done more than most to reinvigorate worries about these longstanding tendencies amongst Soviet apologists while staving off an honest assessment of the academic critical theory industry. This means that Rockhill has also done more than most to vindicate Western Marxism.

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Matt McManus is an Assistant Professor at Spelman College and author of The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism and The Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism amongst other books.