By Carl Davidson

Leftlinks Newsweekly, August 28, 2026.

President Donald Trump appears determined to take out two birds with one stone: to help ICE assemble lists of non-citizens for mass deportations, and to weaponize the U.S. Postal Service in a campaign to suppress voting by mail.

The result is not merely administrative chaos. It is a coordinated attempt to sow confusion at the polls in November and to bend federal institutions toward partisan ends.

The ICE raids alone collide with bedrock constitutional protections — the Fourth Amendment’s shield against unreasonable searches, the Fifth’s guarantee of counsel and due process, the Eighth’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, and the Fourteenth’s promise of equal protection. On mail ballots, Trump is demanding that USPS address lists be cross-checked against state voter rolls, both to purge registered voters and to identify unregistered names for an ICE dragnet.

In either case, the White House measures are an assault on democracy with a small “d,” a deliberate narrowing of the civic space in which ordinary people participate with their own voice and organized grassroots power.

To understand the stakes,let’s get into a detail MAGA would remove from our national story. Why are they furious at the post office? It helps to remember what the postal system has meant to this country. Long before the United States existed, Benjamin Franklin saw something that the British Crown — and later America’s own elites — instinctively feared: a communications network that treated ordinary people as political equals.

The importance of information

Franklin’s postal vision wasn’t just logistics. It was a democratic philosophy. In the mid-18th century, information moved only as fast as privilege allowed. The Royal Mail could seize your letters, censor them, overcharge you, or deny service entirely. Mail was not a right; it was a tool of gatekeeping. And gatekeepers always serve power.

Franklin, printer and scientist, understood that democracy — even in its infancy in the colonies — required the circulation of information. Ideas had to move cheaply, securely, and without partisan interference. Newspapers could not flourish if elites set postage rates high enough to starve dissent. So Franklin did something radical: he made the postal system a public utility rather than a political weapon.

He set uniform, low rates — one penny for the first hundred miles, one and a half pennies beyond — and insisted that every newspaper, regardless of ideology, had equal access. He guaranteed mail secrecy, ending the practice of local postmasters dumping letters they disliked. He expanded routes into rural areas that had never been connected to the political life of the colonies. And to make the system rational, he invented the odometer, measuring each mile so routes could be balanced and extended.

These were not small reforms. They democratized space and expanded civil society. They knit together distant towns into a shared political world. They enabled farmers, artisans, and small merchants to participate in debates previously reserved for the wealthy.

The postal system became the circulatory system of the American Revolution.

The British noticed. As colonists deserted the Royal Mail for Franklin’s service, the Crown lost both revenue and control. The secure transport of the Continental Congress’s paper money — now protected from British interception — helped stabilize the rebellion’s finances. Franklin’s postal network became an infrastructure of resistance, a quiet but essential engine of independence.

Enter public banking

That democratic impulse did not end with the Revolution. It resurfaced in the early 20th century with postal savings banks — one of the most quietly radical structural reforms in American history, apart from the abolition of slavery. The small postal saving accounts altered relations of power. Paying a modest 2% interest, these accounts offered working-class Americans protection from private bank failures and a nearly cost-free way to cash their paychecks. They were a lifeline for immigrants, farmers, and laborers that private banks routinely exploited.

Wall Street hated them. The battle between finance capital and public banking — between concentrated wealth and mass participation — was one of the fiercest ever fought in Congress. Public banking surged again during the Great Depression and declined only after the new FDIC insured the first $10,000 of deposits.

Even then, the postal service was one of the few institutions designed explicitly to expand democratic participation rather than restrict it. It subsidized newspapers so political information could reach low-income people. It connected frontier communities to the national conversation. It treated every citizen the same, whether they lived in Philadelphia or a remote Appalachian hollow.

That’s why, at the turn of the 21st century, Congress launched a new attack. A right-wing majority forced the USPS to pre-fund retiree health benefits seventy years into the future — a burden imposed on no other institution, public or private. It was a deliberate act of sabotage, designed to make the postal service appear financially unstable and to pave the way for privatization. The goal was simple: weaken a public institution that had long served ordinary people, and replace it with private profit centers without any mail ballots.

And yet, despite these assaults, the USPS has securely delivered ballots for decades. In several states, all voting is conducted by mail, with negligible problems. The system works. It is reliable. It is one of the last remaining public institutions that treats every citizen the same.

This is the tradition Trump is attacking — not just a mail carrier or a sorting machine, but even with the self-destructive cancer of chattel slavery, Franklin and his heirs built a 250-year-old democratic infrastructure deliberately designed to resist the very kind of political manipulation Trump is now attempting. His latest claims — that mail ballots are inherently fraudulent, that the postal system is riddled with danger — are snake-oil cures for ailments we do not have. They are meant to frighten, to confuse, and to justify interventions that would shrink the electorate.

The truth is simpler. The postal service has always been a democratizing force. It has always expanded the circle of mass participation. And every time elites have tried to choke it, ordinary Americans have fought back. We should do so again.

Don’t buy the snake oil. Don’t let manufactured chaos become an excuse to weaken the vote and the USPS. The institutions Franklin built were designed to serve the public, not to be bent into exclusive partisan weapons. They deserve our defense — and our vigilance.

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Illustration: One Room In The Vast Library of Alexandria

Our Weekly Editorial

By Carl Davidson

LeftLinks Newsweekly, August 21, 2026

This week we return to why AI and data centers matter. But to understand that best, we need to go backward - far backward - to the origins of human knowledge, human labor, and human power. The story begins long before silicon chips, long before electricity, even ong before capitalism. It begins with the first time human beings tried to store meaning outside their own bodies.

Here we turn to Ella Al Shamahi, a prominent British paleoanthropologist of Yemeni and Syrian descent, who does an amazing job of bringing us to see things in new and revolutionary ways. Her 2025 PBS documentary on Curiosity Stream, Human, offers an instructive lens. She takes us to Göbekli Tepe, the 10,000-year-old stone temple in southeastern Turkey, built not by early farmers but by hunter-gatherers.

Dozens of small bands gathered there, perhaps to intermarry, perhaps to share rituals. When agriculture emerged soon afterward, some farmers settled in these Tepes, with their fields outside, or, in the case of animals, brought inside at times, in shared interconnected quarters. But this proximity to animals brought disease and violence; the settlements collapsed. Some groups returned to gathering; others rebuilt agricultural life along major rivers, allowing for cleaner, more stable living.

Here Al Shamahi shows us the first markings appear: etched price tags and tallies for grain. As goods multiplied, the tallies became painted glyphs, produced by a caste of painter-scribes. Over centuries, glyphs became hieroglyphics. Writing on this scales made the pyramids possible - not because writing is decorative, but because writing is organizational power. Someone had to keep track of stone deliveries, workers’ schedules, and all the rest. These collected writings were the first data center.

Then comes the turn that matters most for Marxists - and for us.

The Egyptian elite wanted more than pyramids. They wanted copper and turquoise. They sent their enslaved workers far into the Sinai desert to mine them. These mines were hellholes: blistering heat, toxic dust, brutal overseers. But those workers wanted something of the rulers’ power, which they saw in the ability to put their orders and instructions in hieroglyphs. They couldn’t read these, but they knew the aleph sign meant “ox,” but instead of drawing the ox, they recorded only the initial sound - ah. Then ba for beta, the glyph for house. On and on, until the symbols for their sounds could be put together as spoken words. Full sentences, then, could be turned into strings of symbols, written down and respoken. Al Shamahi shows us the ‘graffiti’ scratched on the walls in the mines.

The alphabet - the foundation of writing as we know it - was invented not by kings or priests, but by enslaved migrant laborers in a miserable desert mine.

This is the first great contradiction of human knowledge: the ruling class hoards power, but the enslaved working class invents the tools that make deeper civilization possible.

And here is where we introduce the Epstein class - not as a scandalous footnote, but as a structural category. The Epstein class is the modern incarnation of that ancient ruling stratum: a fusion of capital, political power, intelligence networks, and patriarchal impunity. It extracts labor, hoards knowledge, and uses secrecy as a weapon. It is the class that treats human beings, especially women, as commodities, whether in Bronze Age mines or on today’s private islands and ranches. It is the class that benefits from knowledge but rarely produces it.

The Sinai miners created the alphabet. The Epstein class uses the alphabet to produce contracts, shell companies, blackmail dossiers, and the architecture of elite impunity. The contradiction persists.

But writing does more than transmit messages. It can store them. Greek plays were not only performed; they were written down and collected in libraries like Alexandria. Anyone literate could learn from them, extend them, contradict and debate them. Knowledge thus became cumulative. The Library of Alexandria was the first class data center of the ancient world - and when it burned, humanity lost centuries of stored know-how.

Today, our libraries are often digital. Our Alexandria is the global network of data centers. And once again, the ruling class wants to control the storage.

But let’s look deeper. Paul Romer, a Nobel Prize economist, gives us a simple model of any economy: draw a circle, then divide it into three sectors: hardware, software, and wetware. Hardware is smokestack mills, machine tools, power grids, trucks. Software is apps, manuals, books, poetry, recorded music and film - all stored in libraries, hard drives, and data centers. Wetware is the “software” between your ears - the human capacity to generate new knowledge.

Wetware is the most important of all. It is what allowed enslaved miners to turn glyphs into letters, letters into words, words into knowledge. It is what allows workers today to build AI models, write code, design chips, and imagine new worlds.

Some on the left, in this context, argue for an ecological “degrowth” in our economies. With that view alone, they remain prisoners of an old idea: that an economy is primarily “white guys moving heavy stuff around,” movements that also require fossil fuels. Strategically, we may want to curb and restrict one or even two sectors of the economy.

But not the third. The knowledge between our ears must grow toward infinity. Only through its infinite growth do we gain the know-how needed to humanely curb the other two. And if you ignore or are blind to the third sector, your political economy is flawed.

Buckminster Fuller explained this in Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. He divided the universe into two: Matter in motion is finite. Energy obeys conservation laws. But know-how is unlimited. The more you use it, the more it grows. And once digitized - once stored, copied, transmitted - its growth approaches the speed of light.

Which brings us back to AI.

AI is simply the newest, fastest engine for generating know-how. And all that know-how must be stored somewhere - in data centers. The Epstein class wants to own the data centers, just as ancient elites wanted to own the mines. They want to own the storage of knowledge because storage is power. Then they want to rent it out to us in dribs and drabs. They are not wealth creators, but a new rentier class, landlords of access to information.

Our task is to break that monopoly grip and take popular control.

We do well to build data centers - but as Bucky would say, with “high design” - in ecological harmony with everything else. But we must also design them in political harmony with democracy, labor, and human dignity. Because the alternative is to let the Epstein class privatize the very infrastructure of human knowledge.

Welcome to the new world of AI - and to the ancient struggle over who controls the library, who controls the alphabet, and who controls the future.

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By Carl Davidson

LeftLinks Newsweekly, August 14, 2026

This week, let’s take a deeper look at what many people are arguing about: the possible impact of the price of gasoline on the outcome of our upcoming elections. Many of you may be surprised at what we find.

I grew up always knowing the price at the pump. My Dad worked at his auto and truck repair shop for most of his life. It was also an ESSO station. He never liked pumping gas, since it was a distraction from the work he actually liked, repairing trucks and cars, which was also where he made the most money. His biggest client was the local Peoples Natural Gas truck depot, and he maintained all their vehicles, as well as the cars of everyone nearby.

So I learned to pump gas, check oil, and wipe windows at a very early age. The earliest price I can recall was 18 cents per gallon for regular gas. ‘Hi-Test’ was 21 cents. By the time I stopped working there and worked as a ‘grill boy’ at ‘Eat ‘N Park’ fast food for two years before going off to Penn State, regular gas was up to 30 cents a gallon. After Penn State and my following years in SDS and the Guardian, I was preparing to move to Chicago, and I visited ‘back home’ for a holiday. I noticed my Dad had new price signs at the garage, allowing for three digits, since gasoline had recently gone over $1.00 per gallon.

“Wow,” I said to him, “gas is really getting expensive.” “Not really,” he replied, “gas is as cheap as it’s ever been.” How did he figure? When it was 30 cents, he explained, the average hourly wage in the local mills was just under $2.00 an hour, so 30 cents was 15% of an hour’s work. When it went up to a dollar per gallon, the average wage was $6.75 per hour, so still at 15%. Today, at just over $4.00 per gallon and an average manufacturing wage of $30.35 per hour, it’s even down a bit to 14.5%. So prior to Trump’s war on Iran, we might argue the price of gasoline was unnaturally low, and now it’s back to “normal.”

All this leads to a more interesting question: what is ‘normal’ or, better, the true cost of gasoline today? “True cost” means we strip out all the various subsidies but add in additional costs, such as the impact on the environment and our health, plus the military costs of securing its safe delivery to our national refineries. In a rough calculation, if a gas station were legally forced to internalize every hidden tax, infrastructure subsidy, defense cost, and medical bill generated by their product, prices at the pump would hover around $6.50 per gallon.

We’re not going to suggest that progressive candidates hit the campaign trail this fall demanding an increase in the price of gasoline to that amount! In politics, subjective impressions matter at least as much as objective truths. But we shouldn’t ignore such truths either. Advocating for a system of governance allowing for public planning for the common good, our side of the political spectrum needs to think more deeply. Americans visiting Europe are often envious of their railroads and the delights of the 30-day Eurail Pass. You can even take the night train between cities, with very nice berths, and avoid hotel costs if you plan it right. And likewise, those Americans visiting China are simply stunned by China’s high-speed rail networks, as well as their airports and train terminals. Why can’t we have such nice things?

Think it over. Apart from adjusting gasoline prices, there are many alternative ways to get people from Point A to Point B and back again. During the golden age of trolleys (roughly 1900 to 1925), you could board a trolley car in Erie, Pennsylvania, get a transfer, and travel seamlessly across Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and into Wisconsin strictly on electric streetcars. Likewise, you could travel all the way from New York City to Boston (and up into Maine) entirely by transfer-hopping from one local streetcar system to another.

But the production of trucks and tanks for the First World War brought changes. Mainly, it saw government subsidies shift toward the gasoline engine, oil extraction, and hard-paved, long-distance highways. Combined with the low cost of the Ford Model T, Americans shifted toward private motor cars and trucks for personal daily needs. In the 1930s, rail travel declined, but surged again during the war years of the 1940s. After 1945, passenger train service again declined sharply, and even more so as the Eisenhower-Initiated Interstate Highway System was completed.

Another added factor is the relative cost of upgrading U.S. rail trackbeds. Many were older, constructed in the late 1800s. China, on the other hand, had nothing standing in the way of its putting down track for its new high-speed system. The U.S. would have to dig out and upgrade its old, outdated tracks to accommodate trains running at higher speeds. So our money went into air terminals instead.

Stretched over time, however, there are still good reasons for investing in new passenger trains. In addition to running on electricity rather than fossil fuels, they run from city center to city center, avoiding cabs and buses at airports that shuttle passengers to downtown areas. Passengers also enjoy the comfort of trains—the ability to walk around, visit the dining car, or chat with other travelers at the bar. Then, on overnight trips, it’s possible to rent a berth in a sleeping car.

A North American continent-wide future network of electric high-speed long-distance trains, combined with suburban subways and charging stations for individual electric vehicles, would still be a worthy investment. The ecosystem would thrive, as would air quality, thereby improving everyone’s health.

One drawback is the dominance of the military-oil complex. Another is that we are still a nation largely governed by lawyers. California, for example, recently hoped to have a single high-speed train connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles. Billions were allocated for it. But every few miles, dozens of local legal objections and suits forced the state to use eminent domain to acquire private land, parcel by parcel, resulting in hundreds of additional massive “change orders” (contract amendments) that triggered billions of dollars in litigation and construction overruns. The project seems stalled for the foreseeable future. Perhaps we have to empower the Communist Party of China to come here and show us how to get it done.

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By Carl Davidson

Leftlinks Newsweekly, August 7, 2026

A small and largely unheralded event took place last week in Washington. H.R. 9931 — the American Manufacturing Renaissance Act — was introduced into the House of Representatives. It arrived without fanfare, without a press conference, without the usual Beltway theatrics. Retiring Rep. Jan Schakowsky of Chicago and her staff finally got the text into the hopper after years of work.

Going forward, the primary sponsor will be Rep. Ro Khanna of California — known for forcing the bill requiring full release of the Epstein files to unanimous passage and widely assumed to be positioning himself for a 2028 presidential run. He has recently joined Justice Democrats and is strongly favored by Progressive Democrats of America,

On the surface, H.R. 9931 looks like a modest industrial policy bill. But beneath it lies something deeper — a quiet shift in the American political economy, and a rare moment when a progressive-informed deep structural reform has slipped into the bloodstream of Congress.

The bill did not emerge from a K Street think tank or a corporate lobby. It was drafted by a small, diverse alliance called the Federation for a Manufacturing Renaissance. The founding core was Dan Swinney of the former Chicago-based Center for Labor and Community Research; myself, Carl Davidson, a founder of the Solidarity Economy Network; and Alan Minsky, a national leader of Progressive Democrats of America. We quickly pulled in allies from Quebec, Australia, and the Mondragon Cooperatives in Spain’s Basque Country — the latter being one of the most successful worker-controlled industrial ecosystems in the world. Other US organizations like the American Sustainable Business Network, the Century Foundation, the Urban Manufacturing Alliance (Mechanism) also became allies.

This is not the usual cast of characters shaping U.S. economic legislation. These are people who have spent decades wrestling with the real contradictions of American capitalism — not in theory, but in shuttered factories, union halls, and community meetings where workers fought to keep their livelihoods alive.

The Long Arc of Defeat and Persistence

Dan and I began this work during the plant-closing crisis that gutted Chicago’s industrial base in the late 1970s and 1980s. We saw tens of thousands of unionized manufacturing jobs evaporating as capital fled to low-wage regions or into pure speculation. We fought to save Stewart-Warner, a major Chicago-based auto-parts producer, through worker control. We were on the cusp of victory when a key ally — the United Electrical Workers — backed out, offering the excuse that “we’re not in the business of running capitalism better than the capitalists.” It was a tragic misreading of transformative political economy, and a missed opportunity. The UE has since reversed that stance, but the old idea still lingers on in parts of the left: that structural reform is merely a distraction from the “real” revolution, which is always imagined as somewhere in the distant future or on matters other than who controls the economy.

Too many self-described progressives and other leftists still have no practical understanding of how workers actually encroach on the means of production, and have every right to do so. They treat it as a romantic horizon rather than a concrete task. They forget that “the development of the productive forces” is a precondition for a democratic and progressive economy, not an afterthought.

After Stewart-Warner, Dan and I didn’t give up. We shifted into the emerging global social and solidarity economy movement — first rising in Brazil, then spreading across Latin America, Africa, and Europe before finally reaching the United States. We worked to popularize the Mondragon cooperatives as a key wing of it, not because co-ops are fashionable, but because Mondragon is a living example of workers controlling manufacturing, banking, education, and technological development at scale. Father Arizmendi, the priest who founded MCC, made ‘Labor is Sovereign’ as the first of ten values. It is a structural reform that alters power relations and creates new wealth — the very thing too many of the U.S. left have too often failed to grasp.

We worked on many related projects, including the ill-fated Austin Polytechnical Academy on Chicago’s West Side — an attempt to build a high-road manufacturing school rooted in community control. That is another story that deserves its own editorial.

A New Left Without Factories

A new young left emerged with Bernie Sanders and AOC. DSA now holds over 250 elected offices at the local and state levels. They all need an advanced manufacturing industrial policy to deploy in their district or metro areas. But they came of age in a country where 90% of workers had never been in a union, and where manufacturing had been hollowed out by neoliberalism. Most had never held a manufacturing job. Instead, they were radicalized by debt, precarious service work, and the climate crisis — not often by the shop floor.

The neoliberals in both parties had no plan to rebuild manufacturing. Trump’s right-wing bloc had empty slogans and false assertions, but no strategy. Meanwhile, the U.S. economy faced a deep structural crisis: deindustrialization, supply-chain fragility, declining productivity, and the erosion of skilled labor. Real wages had flatlined since 1980, and, despite a few upticks, both union density and manufacturing jobs fell.

If the new DSA and other progressive mayors, legislators, and organizers were going to contribute to solving these crises, they needed a crash course in political economy. The old Alinsky model — transferring wealth from top to bottom — was necessary but insufficient. It was redistribution without production, a band-aid on a hemorrhage. What was needed were Mondragon-style reforms that democratized production itself.

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Swinney’s Strategic Cuts in Capital

One of Dan Swinney’s most important contributions was reframing the terrain of struggle within capital itself. Instead of the old distinction between monopoly and anti-monopoly capital, he drew a sharper line: speculative capital versus productive capital.

Speculative capital — the Wall Street casino — makes money the same way my father did when he had a good day at the racetrack. It is the logic behind the business cliché: “I’m not in business to make steel; I’m here to make money.” Under this logic, you gut the mills and speculate in pork bellies, oil futures, or crypto. You destroy productive capacity to chase paper financial returns.

Productive capital — advanced manufacturing — actually creates new wealth. It requires skilled labor, stable communities, and long-term investment.

Dan then made a second cut: high-road versus low-road production. Low-road capital races to the bottom: anti-union, anti-environment, anti-community. High-road capital sees a benefit in investing in training, clean technology, and cooperative relationships with labor.

The implication was clear: the left could form tactical alliances with high-road productive capital to curb speculative finance and rebuild the industrial base. This was not class collaboration; it was a strategic struggle. Workers and their allies must fight for structural reforms that expand their power within production — not ‘Waiting for Lefty’ on a distant rupture that rarely arrives.

The Bill as Structural Reform

Which brings us back to the American Manufacturing Renaissance Act.

If passed, it will create the conditions for a new, ecological, high-wage, worker-centered industrial economy. It will support advanced manufacturing, workforce development, community-based industrial planning, including public bank funding of municipal and cooperative ownership models. It will give cities and states tools to rebuild supply chains, create green industrial districts, and anchor manufacturing in communities rather than in the whims of global finance.

It is not a revolutionary bill. But it is a bill that makes both progressive and revolutionary reforms possible.

It is a bill that treats manufacturing not as nostalgia but as a necessary foundation for democratic economic power.

It is a bill that recognizes that workers cannot seize the means of production if those means of production no longer exist.

The Left Must Catch Up

For this bill to succeed, the left must understand the deeper thinking behind it — not the caricature, but the real thing. They need to deal with factories, capital flows, productive forces, and the concrete organization of labor. They need to see structural reform as a battlefield, not a detour.

The false assumption that worker control is a matter for the distant future has crippled generations of organizers. The future is built in the present. The means of production are seized not in a single dramatic moment, but over decades of struggle, structural reform, experimentation, and institution-building.

The American Manufacturing Renaissance Act is one such moment. Quiet, modest, and easily overlooked — but carrying within it the seeds of a new political economy.

If the left takes it seriously, it could mark the beginning of a long-delayed industrial reconstruction — one rooted not in corporate power or nationalist nostalgia, but in democratic control, ecological responsibility, and the dignity of skilled labor. In short, the governing power of a Third Reconstruction needs a dynamic economic foundation, as envisioned in this bill.

If it is ignored, it will become another missed opportunity in a century already full of them. The choice, as always, belongs to those willing to do the work.

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By Carl Davidson

LeftLinks Newsweekly, July 31, 2026

Our understatement of the week is that President Donald Trump is intensifying the dangers of wider wars abroad and fascist measures at home.

Fortunately, resistance is already forming and growing—across institutions, courts, and civil society—but to grasp the full scope of the travails ahead, it’s worth stepping back and tracing the pattern emerging from his recent danger-laden actions.

Trump and his newly installed ‘War Secretary,’ Pete Hegseth, have embraced a politics of spectacle. Their preferred medium is violent broadcasts as entertainment. They reveled in circulating videos of U.S. aircraft blowing up fishing vessels allegedly carrying drugs.

In any prior administration—Republican or Democratic—the U.S. Coast Guard would intercept suspicious boats, search them, seize any contraband, and, if warranted, arrest suspects. That is what ‘law and order’ actually looks like. But Trump’s team is not interested in legal procedures or evidence. They want live-fire ‘snuff’ reels on our cable news, a steady drip of destruction to cultivate the image of ‘tough guys’ and ‘real men.’ In reality and a just world, these murderous theatrics expose the United States to potential war crimes allegations under international law.

The escalation didn’t stop there. Trump moved on to a super-spectacle: an aerial kidnapping of Venezuela’s president and first lady, killing dozens of Cuban security personnel in the process. He made no pretense of supporting democracy in that country. He left the Maduro regime intact as a subordinate client and immediately maneuvered to seize Venezuela’s oil. It was a gangster’s coup dressed up as foreign policy.

Trump has long admired the methods of the mafia, having been groomed early in life by Roy Cohn, lawyer to the mob. Former FBI Director James Comey explicitly noted that Trump’s private demands for absolute loyalty, or personal fealty to him, and not the Constitution, felt exactly like a Cosa Nostra induction ceremony.

But Trump’s inflated ego has now carried him into far more dangerous terrain. He appears to have believed Iran was simply Venezuela with turbans—a fragile state run by goofy mullahs easily decapitated by precision strikes. Remove two layers of leadership, he thought, and the regime would collapse into America’s lap.

This is what happens when a nation is led by a narcissist who refuses to read the daily CIA briefings placed on his desk. He insists he is a ‘stable genius’ who knows more than the country’s generals and spies. Fox News placed him in front of a camera, fed him a series of leading questions, and he obligingly blustered his way into a crisis, threatening Iran with genocide.

His core mental deficiency was simple: the ‘stable genius’ knew next to nothing about Iran. It is a large nation of roughly 96 million people, many of whom are highly educated and rooted in a civilization stretching back millennia. It has a diverse economy, significant industry, and substantial agricultural capacity. Yes, its major wealth comes from oil, but the Islamic theocratic regime currently in charge also possesses a capable military and intelligence apparatus. Despite internal democratic, Kurdish, and feminist opposition in its civil society, it is not a pushover. It is not Maduro’s Venezuela.

Bombings and sanctions have battered Iran’s economy. In Tehran and across the country, families are seeing meat and dairy vanish from diets, medical treatments postponed, school blown up, rents paid late, and salaries stretched to the breaking point. But hardship does not equal collapse. Trump ignored the first rule of war: the enemy gets a vote. The Islamic regime voted by striking back—at every U.S. base surrounding it, and with intensified missile and drone attacks on Israel. More importantly, the regime understood that time was its ally. If it endured long enough for the United States to exhaust itself, the Islamic Republic would win by default. Washington had no strategy. Tehran does.

Iran’s trump card was the Strait of Hormuz. Its ability to shut down the world’s most critical oil artery meant that even mere survival was a form of victory. Moreover, as Trump’s bombings brought great harm to the Iranian people, growing numbers sided with the regime in defense of their sovereignty and their ability to subsist.

So, where does this leave Trump and his tirades?

First, Trump could ramp up air and missile strikes. But the list of viable military targets is likely exhausted, along with U.S. air weapon supplies. Further escalation would mean hitting civilian infrastructure—energy facilities, power grids, bridges, roads, communications networks. The outcomes are uniformly grim.

Trump would face accusations of war crimes. Iranian public opinion would harden even more against the United States. The regime’s ability to retaliate would remain intact, and it could strike Gulf desalination plants and energy infrastructure, triggering a humanitarian disaster. No contingency plans exist for such a scenario. Oil prices could spike to $150 or even $200 a barrel, plunging the global economy into crisis.

Second, a ‘boots on the ground’ invasion is even more unrealistic. Current U.S. forces in the region are too small to achieve meaningful objectives. A Marine Expeditionary Unit numbers about 2,500 personnel, of whom only 800 are infantry capable of limited operations. Airborne units deploy with only a few days’ worth of supplies—bullets, beans, and batteries. They require constant resupply.

Retired Army General Barry McCaffrey has noted that even 150,000 troops might not be enough to secure the Strait of Hormuz along Iran’s coastline. Attacking Kharg Island would require a long, vulnerable transit through the western Strait, exposing U.S. forces to heavy casualties.

The third and most catastrophic option is the use of a nuclear weapon, even as a “demonstration shot.” This would open a Pandora’s box of severe and unknown consequences. Trump has long mused about the tactical use of nukes. But he would be declared a war criminal or worse. Whether detonated in the air or on the surface, the weapon would cause mass destruction, political isolation, and global panic. It would shatter the nuclear taboo that has held since 1945. Only Trump can deliver an order to use a nuke, but it must pass through a string of generals likely to view it as illegal and refuse it. A ‘No Kings’ insurgency would go global and dwarf those we have already deployed.

So we turn to the domestic front. While escalating abroad, Trump is also tightening his grip at home. He has attempted to use the proposed SAVE Act to regulate—or effectively take over—local elections, despite clear constitutional limits. A federal court in Massachusetts recently struck down key components of an executive order that sought to restrict mail voting through federal oversight of the Postal Service. Judge Indira Talwani ruled the order “unlawful, null, and void,” emphasizing that the Constitution grants election authority to states and Congress, not the president.

“The Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections,” she wrote, underlining the phrase for emphasis.

More than twenty Democratic state attorneys general brought the challenge, underscoring the breadth of institutional resistance forming against Trump’s attempts to centralize electoral control.

The Pattern Is Clear. Taken together, Trump’s actions form a coherent pattern: escalating violence abroad, eroding democratic norms at home, and relying on spectacle to mask strategic incoherence. His foreign policy is driven by impulse, grievance, and the pursuit of dominance rather than any rational assessment of national interest. His domestic policy is shaped by the same instincts—control, intimidation, and the dismantling of constraints.

The dangers are real. But so is the resistance. Courts are pushing back. States are asserting their constitutional authority. Civil society is mobilizing. Even within the national security establishment, alarm is rising.

The challenge now is endurance. Iran understood that time was its ally. Americans must understand the same. Trump thrives on chaos, but chaos is not a strategy. His bluster cannot substitute for planning. His spectacles cannot erase the consequences of his decisions.

For our part, we are defeatists in this unjust and irrational war. We demand that all U.S. military forces withdraw from their encirclements and restrictions of Iran. Desired changes in Iran, which we support, will come from within its civil society.

The United States is entering a period of profound risk—military, constitutional, and moral. But the country has weathered several storms before. Today, contradictions are sharpening within the MAGA bloc, making wider tactical alliances more likely. Our task, as a socialist left, is not simply to block Trump’s actions, but to both broaden the common front and build our own ranks by articulating and defending a vision of democratic governance that cannot be bent to the will of any single man, no matter how loud his threats or how grand his delusions. We reject fealty. We are not medieval serfs or mafia underlings. We are progressive democrats and socialists, and we see a new order rising on the horizon.

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LeftLinks Newweekly, July 24, 2026

Our Weekly Editorial

There are days in American politics when the country seems to wake up inside a fevered dream, and lately the voices of President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have taken on a nightmarish quality.

They are insisting, with the confidence of men who have never doubted their own hallucinations, that “Communists” have seized the Democratic Party. The universities fell first, according to them, then the unions and civil rights groups, and now the final rampart—the federal government itself—is about to be stormed and seized by insurgent communist-led voters and protestors with red banners flying come this November.

I listen to these inane claims with the weary amusement of someone who has lived long enough to know the difference between a ghostly shadow and a human being. If I were a twenty-first-century Rip Van Winkle, just roused from decades of slumber, perhaps I would blink and rub my eyes, then joyfully gasp at the news and imagine that the old dreams had finally come true in 2026! Seize the Congress and White House! All power to the workers’ councils!

But I have not been asleep. I have been here the whole time. I have called myself a communist and a socialist since 1968, joined the various groups, attended the required meetings, and watched several tides rise and fall. I know the strengths and weaknesses of every faction, and I know where the bodies are buried—partly because I helped dig a few of the holes myself, or tried to stop others from doing so.

If there were a communist takeover underway this year, I would be the first to know. And if it were true, I would be the first to celebrate. But it is not true. It is not even close.

We’re being presented with another ‘Big Lie.’ To understand the scale of this perverse fiction, it helps to begin with the simple arithmetic of American governance. In our country, there are nearly 20,000 elected officials at the federal and state levels. Add in the city councils, county boards, school districts, and the small bureaucracies that keep the lights on in every town from Bangor to Bakersfield, and the number swells to roughly half a million. This is the vast machinery rolling along quietly from sea to shining sea, grinding out the daily management of a capitalist empire.

Of these half-million potential seats, the Democratic Socialists of America have recently won about 250 of them, including a dozen in Congress. It is a dramatic increase from the handful they held 20 years ago, but it remains only a fraction of 1% of the nation’s overall apparatus of elected officials.

DSA now has about 120,000 members. But seen another way, less than 500 of them comprise the paid staff of their electeds, and less than 50 staffers work for DSA proper. The Democrats, with 45 million registered members, have far more paid personnel than the DSA has members, and the Dems unique members who make contributions each year are around 15 million.

As for the Communist Party USA, it has no more than 5000 active members, and holds exactly three elected seats, all in small, nonpartisan local districts—the city council in Bangor, Maine, a school committee seat in Cambridge, Mass, and a Cornell student on the Ithaca, NY, common council. Still, we wish them well, going forward.

Seek truth from facts. To consider this a pending takeover is to look at a glass of water and declare that the tide has swallowed the continent from coast to coast.

A deeper truth is more mundane and more human. Our species, in all their variety, are creatures of bread, even if they don’t live by bread alone. As Marx reminds us, when the bread grows scarce, we begin to question the system that promised bread to us. The 2008 financial crisis and a series of unjust wars, moreover, shattered the old faith in markets and ‘common sense’ moralisms. Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns widened the fissure. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory made it impossible to pretend the shift was a passing fad. Socialism, once a forbidden word, became a new, small but now viable option on the American political terrain.

But viability is not a strategic victory. And DSA, praising their energy as a new critical force, the supposed vanguard of this red revolution, is less a party leading a united front and more an overcrowded parliament. Its National Political Committee is divided into eight or so internal caucuses, each fighting a mostly quiet and ongoing war for the organization’s soul. Four or five of these factions practice what might be generously called “politics as self-expression.” For them, the movement is a stage for moral performance, a place to issue maximalist declarations that satisfy the conscience, to make challenge and and refine ends, but accomplish little else, at least in this moment. (There are other moments where they can be vital.) They hold a precarious NPC majority when drafting national statements—statements that the rank-and-file organizers will often readily ignore, even as the right-wing press seizes upon them with glee.

The remaining two or three larger caucuses practice what we can call “politics as strategy.” They count votes, knock on doors, get subscribers, recruit new members, and most of all, they build coalitions with people who think differently on many points. They are the ones who elect real legislators and mayors like Zohran Mamdani in New York and other pragmatic socialists across the country. While the loudest voices on the DSA’s NPC write press releases that vanish into the aether, save for the New York Post’s right-wing tabloid headlines, the strategic militant minority does the face-to-face, slow, unglamorous but productive work of building local power clusters that can turn out voters.

So why the panic on top? Why does the specter of Karl Marx haunt Mar-a-Lago and the corridors of Congress and the State Department? Because reality is always changing, and something has shifted in the nation’s soil. Recent polling shows that roughly 30% of young Americans view socialism or communism favorably. Among registered Democrats, about two-thirds express a positive view of socialism, while less than half say the same of capitalism. The youth look out at a world of high rents, endless wars, and corporate consolidation, and they no longer believe the old hymns of the free market and ‘leaders of the free world.’

Even more unsettling for the Democratic establishment is the shift in attitudes toward Israel and Palestine. The younger generation sees the violence on their screens and refuses to accept the cold calculus of geopolitical pragmatism. This moral friction—this crack in the imperial consensus—frightens the managers of the status quo far more than any card-carrying communist today.

To counter this shift, our political class is now manufacturing foreign enemies as bogeymen. JD Vance warns of European socialist influence, as though Denmark were plotting to overthrow Ohio. Marco Rubio speaks of Cuba as if the small, blockaded island were the command center of a deep-rooted clandestine communist network operating within the United States. He describes it as an existential threat to faith and freedom, as though Havana possessed the power to subvert the largest military empire in human history through sheer ideological will.

The irony is almost too rich. These same men insist that communism and socialism have never worked anywhere. Yet Trump blames China for America’s economic anxieties, even though China’s system is working rather well these days. One cannot claim an economic model is a failure while simultaneously warning that its success threatens to eclipse your own.

We could quarrel about definitions. I am orthodox on this point. In the Marxist tradition, communism is a classless, stateless society that emerges only after a long transition through a cybernated socialism. It is a North Star for guidance, not a location on any modern map. It has never existed anywhere on earth, save for the primitive variety in the prehistories of our species.

What we do have are varieties of socialism. Some projects collapsed under Cold War pressures, as well as their own deep mistakes and bureaucratic weight, like the Soviet Union. Others—Vietnam and China—are currently thriving in several ways and adapting to global markets. And then there are the social-democratic countries with labor or socialist parties in power, such as Denmark and Norway, which are reformist in nature. Russia today is neither socialist nor communist; it is an anti-Leninist, imperialist, nuclear-armed, and increasingly fascist power, though lacking the economic clout of its neighbor in Beijing.

In this sense, communism hardly exists in the United States, at least not for a good while. It’s used as a scarecrow stuffed with straw, waved about by politicians seeking an easy diversionary enemy. The social democrats—Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and their allies—are a growing minority within the Democratic Party, but a minority nonetheless. They are not preparing a revolution. For 2026 and 2028, they have already pledged their votes to center- or center-right candidates, as needed, to block the MAGA movement’s advance. They have chosen compromise over the purity of the wilderness in the face of a clear and present danger.

There are two bottom lines to MAGA’s Red Scare 3.0 performances, the first two being the Palmer raids of the 1920s and the McCarthy hearings and jailings of the late 1940s and early 1950s.

First, Trump and his allies use red-baiting because they fear a potential Blue Wave in November. When a political faction is bankrupt on material and moral issues—healthcare, wages, ongoing unjust wars, the decay of industrial towns—it must stoke fear. It must tell the better-off worker, the shopkeeper, and the suburban voter that the barbarians are at the gate, and that those barbarians wear red stars. It is an old trick, performed by actors who know the lines but lack the conviction of the original cast.

Second, the corporate Democrats are equally afraid. They fear that their internal power will erode under pressure from groups like the Justice Democrats. To protect their donors and their grip on the party apparatus, they will join in the red-baiting. They will condemn the left to prove their loyalty to the markets and war makers, sacrificing their own youth base to maintain the favor of corporate boardrooms.

The system’s engines are chugging along at the moment. The offices are filled with men and women in suits. The communists have taken over nothing important. To say otherwise is to lie, and to lie poorly. But when a third of the country fears its own shadow, a poor lie can cause the machinery to sputter. Stand up to it all. Don’t concede a bit. Better, throw a monkey wrench into the works.

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By Carl Davidson

LeftLinks Newsweekly, July 17, 2026

President Donald Trump’s July 16 speech attacking the U.S. electoral system was at once ridiculous and dangerous—an eruption of undue ‘white’ grievance delivered without evidence, coherence, or restraint.

Most networks declined to air it in full; others interrupted his rambling with real-time fact-checki…

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By Carl Davidson

LeftLinks Newsweekly, July 10, 2026

We faced yet another week of demented ramblings from President Donald Trump, highlighted by a string of shiny objects meant to distract us from more urgent matters.

We’ll start with a Florida airport story on TV. The woman in Palm Beach spoke quietly, almost to herself. “It’s just disgusting,” she murmur…

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By Carl Davidson

LeftLinks Newsweekly, July 3, 2026

I was once asked if I would be flying the Stars and Stripes on the Fourth of July. “No need to,” I replied. “My Dad flies enough for the whole family.”

And anyone who ever visited him on his porch knew this was true. At one point, I counted at least a dozen flags on display there—a few large enough to fla…

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By Carl Davidson

LeftLinks Newsweekly June 26, 2026

We have a nutjob in the White House.

Not that the occupant of the Oval Office isn’t the usual right-wing populist and fascist mafia henchman insisting on feudal fealty over the Constitution we’ve known for two decades. All that still stands.

But today the air feels stale and heavy, as if the country itself…

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By Carl Davidson

LeftLinks Newsweekly, June 19, 2026

Every morning, we’re in the habit of getting a cup of coffee at 6 am and returning to bed to watch ‘Morning Joe.’ We’ll confess to a clever trick: when they cut to streams of stupid ads, we hit two clicks and switch to Al-Jazeera for more realistic and rational coverage of the Middle East. Then we flip …

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I’ve just returned from a small conference at Oberlin of veterans of the 1960s civil rights battles. They asked me to speak on this topic, which is the core of this week’s editorial. But I’ve also added a few things I learned from others at the meeting, especially the liberation theologians who responded to my talk.

By Carl Davidson

Leftlinks Newsweekly, …

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By Carl Davidson

LeftLinks Weekly, June 5, 2026

We suffered this week with a deluge of spectacles engineered by the White House of President Donald J. Trump—His ridiculous ‘Trumphal’ Arch, his ‘Ball Room’ on the former East Wing, decorated with his garish nouveau riche gold glitter, his turning the Reflecting Pond bottom from a somber grey to out-of-place…

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By Carl Davidson

LeftLinks Newsweekly, May 29, 2026

Our past week has witnessed President Donald Trump inflicting one absurdity after another upon us and the rest of the world.

On the home front, it wasn’t enough for him to tear down the West Wing of the White House for a garish ballroom trimmed with nouveau-riche gold clutter. He’s now constructing a gro…

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Go here to purchase a copy: https://tinyurl.com/NSL-May-2026

Go here for the table of contents:

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/18fU1Hm1sY/

Here’s the editorial board: Erica Carter, Carl Davidson, Bill Fletcher, Jr., Jerry Harris, Jay Jurie, Paul Krehbiel, Ellen Schwartz, Harry Targ, Janet Tucker, and Meta Van Sickle.

This is NSL’s fourth issue. Our aim i…

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By Carl Davidson

LeftLinks Newsweekly, May 22, 2026

The current wave of videos and articles about data centers, as well as my critical response here, all reside somewhere.

To be precise, they reside in a data center. So do all the movies you pick from Netflix to watch in the evening, and much more.

Nearly everything digital that is not on your own CDs, hard…

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By Carl Davidson

LeftLinks Newsweekly, May 16, 2026

The news is dominated this week by President Donald Trump’s visit to China, President Xi Jinping’s treatment of him, and what it all might mean for us and the world.

It’s no secret to LeftLinks’s readers that I’m among those who see ourselves as ‘friends of China’ and also relentless adversaries of Trump …

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Our Weekly Editorial

By Carl Davidson

LeftLinks Newsweekly, May 8, 2026

Here are eight of today’s news headlines. Taken as a whole or in batches, they spotlight the troubles we face:

--ICE Arrests Violated Order Requiring Warrants in D.C., Judge Rules.

--Iran War Live Updates: U.S. and Iran Exchange Fire Amid a Declared Truce.

--Anti-Choice States Target Orga…

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By Carl Davidson

LeftLinks Newsweekly, May 1, 2026

Our Weekly Editorial

The events of this week--the ongoing war in Iran, the irony of King Charles reminding Congress of its duty to counter and restrain executive power, and continuing illegal raids by ICE--all served to highlight our grim political terrain. But one event stood out: the six-to-three Supreme…

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By Carl Davidson

LeftLinks Newsweekly, April 24, 2026

Over the past week, President Donald Trump and his team have been trying to wriggle out of several concurrent hot spots, from trying to end an ill-considered and unjust war against Iran to bringing down the price of groceries. They are stuck in one muddy rut after another, but in another way, it serves…

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