The call for benefit cuts is getting boosted again. I can admit my own interest, since the wife and I live well enough on those benefits. The bogus story is that the Social Security Old Age and Survivors’ Trust Fund (the formal funding source for the benefits paid to retirees and their survivors) runs out of money in 2032, at which point by law there must be a benefit cut of 22 percent. That’s the “cliff.” Don’t believe it. The Medicare Hospital Insurance Fund that pays for Medicare Part A is similarly scheduled to go to a zero balance in 2033.

It is true that, given the ignorance of the subject in the U.S. Congress and in popular discourse, combined with elite opinion, benefits for anyone could be reduced through legislation at any moment. In 2032 they would be reduced for lack of legislation. That they must be cut due to a sudden shortfall of money is the falsehood that has been circulating for decades. Indeed, I’ve been declaiming against it for my entire career. If I make it to 2032, shit could get real for me personally.

Let’s run through a few numbers, all of which you can find in the Trustees’ annual reports. Who are the trustees? They include Trump Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., god help us. Sleepy Barack and Sleepy Joe failed to fill out the rest of the Trustee slots for public representatives with appointments they were empowered to make since 2015.

Consider Table 4 in this link. The cost of the Old Age and Survivors Insurance program in 2025 was $1,448 billion. That is mostly benefits, plus a tiny slice for administration of the program. The income to the Trust Fund, mostly from the payroll tax, was less, $1,248 billion. That means in accounting terms that general revenue supplemented income of the fund by $200 billion. The Fund income is mostly payroll tax revenue and interested credited to the Fund balance. The interest is purely an accounting entry. No actual money is deposited into the Fund, as it would be in your savings account at the bank. It’s really income taxes that finance the interest earnings of the Fund.

The difference between income and cost will grow as the Trust Fund balance diminishes and along with it, the interest it ‘earns.’ Until then, ye olde ‘general revenue’ (mostly the income tax) pays off the debt held by the Fund to the extent it supplements the Fund’s own income from the payroll tax receipts.

Between 2031 and 2033, years that bracket the year of projected Trust Fund exhaustion, there is no economic breakdown in Fund income. The general revenue used to make good on the debt held by the Fund, as well as the top-up to payroll tax revenue, can keep flowing. If you were cool in 2031, you are cool in 2033.

THE BREAK IS A LEGAL ONE — Congress must act to provide income tax revenue to supplement shortfalls between payroll tax fund income and program costs if the Trust Fund is empty and promised benefits are honored. There is no provision in law to provide the income tax revenue to prop up benefits and other costs. The failure of Congress to act would trigger the benefit cuts.

The villains in this piece include not a few economist friends from my former professional life, as well as financial industry predators circling the program like sharks, Washington Post editorialists (who predate Trump), corporate ‘Third Way’ Democrats, and other lifelong critics of the Welfare State.

It turns out that both sides in the debate have an interest in exaggerating or at least misstating the problem with the program.

The motives of those who want to wreck it are obvious enough. Their chief argument is that wealthy people receive high benefits, and the program’s resources would be better focused on the poor. Whenever they get the chance, these same swine tell us the poor should instead go back to work, rather than free-loading off the rest of us. Lately, a professor economics at Yale is getting pilloried for intimating that the aged of Japan should stop taking advaantage of old age benefits and commit seppuku (ritual suicide. Now he has apologized, saying it was an ‘abstract metaphor.’). I’m so old I remember when a Democratic governor from Colorado spoke in similar terms.

One rhetorical gambit of the attack squad is to claim that trimming the benefits will “modernize” or “save” the program. Naturally, Members of Congress who speak in these terms are never interested in modernizing their own generous pension benefits, nor in modernizing tax breaks available to the wealthy.

Then there are the antics of our friends, whose chief slogan is to “scrap the cap.” This is now an official bi-partisan legislative proposal from Senators Bernie Moreno (R-OH) and the saintly Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). They are referring to the payroll tax, presently capped at $184,500 in annual wages or salary. The cap is adjusted annually for inflation. An uncapped payroll tax would reduce the extent to which income taxes are needed to top up program revenues and pay promised benefits. Insofar as taxable payroll grows faster than inflation, a greater share of wages escapes exposure to the payroll tax every year.

Here I’m afraid I have to venture off the reservation.

Lemme tell you about “social insurance.” I may be the last social-democrat in the U.S. who appreciates the concept. The idea is that what you pay in has a lot to do with future benefits, as with a literal insurance policy. Since we are speaking of ‘social’ insurance, the equivalence is deliberately inexact. In fact, in Social Security the benefit-to-tax relationship is somewhat progressive; the higher-paid do not get as big a return on their tax payments as the lesser-paid.

My contention is that the social-insurance nature of the program has protected it from politicians, at least until now. Others liken Social Security to the celebrated so-called “Universal Basic Income” (UBI). But Social Security is not universal. Eligibility depends on a record of wage and salary tax payments. It is notorious that it was initially designed, in order to get legislative buy-in from racist Southern Democrats, to exclude disproportionately African-American domestics and sharecroppers. This is no longer an issue. Research has shown that Disability Insurance provides net gains to African-Americans.

Some cite the low life expectancy of minorities to criticize the program. Their numbers are usually off. The relevant life expectancy is of future workers; insofar as there is a racial difference in any life expectancy, that is not necessarily relevant to social-insurance. It is a scandal in other respects, but the correct age consideration is life expectancy conditional on reaching working age.

UBI enthusiasts claim that its universality (debatable, but that’s another post) would make it politically popular, “like Social Security.” I contend that Social Security is popular because of its social-insurance rubric. It’s a promised return of tax payments. A better analogy for UBI is Food Stamps (now renamed ‘Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program’), which has been popular because of its size, hence quasi-universality. Note that this has not insulated it completely from cuts.

The problem with scrapping the cap is that it diminishes the link between payroll tax payments and benefits, hence the social insurance character of the program. The right-wing Tax Foundation understands this. The Left view of benefits is more like Big Rock Candy Mountain. The Gov should just be giving everybody money. Scrapping the cap makes Social Security more like UBI and exposes it to further political sabotage, since the higher one’s income, the less one would favor the program.

Proposals for how to make good on the higher taxes vary. Some would cap benefits after uncapping the tax. Good luck with that. Others would dole some of the increased revenue to the lowest earners, better, but may not assuage the political agita of the better-off.

The simplest thing to do in 2032 is just do whatever you did with income tax revenue in 2031, plus a bit more. No bridges would collapse. Whatever the deficit was in 2031 would not be much higher in 2032. Nobody ever refers to or even notices the change in the overall deficit, which you might have noticed has gotten pretty big, due to changes in Social Security costs.

One virtue of ‘scrap the cap’ is it capitalizes on a few popular, if naive, nostrums about taxes (tax the rich) and neutralizes those motivated by deficit concerns. And it is true, the Gov needs more revenue, though there are better ways to get it. My hero Dean Baker has noted that small incremental increases in the payroll tax that would hardly be noticed could fund the program indefinitely.

For those among the aged, such as myself, I should soothe your possible apprehensions by noting that in the past, proposals to cut benefits have always excluded already-retired beneficiaries and those above some cut-off age like 55, on the grounds that it would be too late for them to adjust their finances to cope with lower benefits.

For the young, I would remind you of the late Senator Moynihan’s point, that persuading people that the program is doomed makes it easier to take it away. There is popular commentary about the burden of the aged on everyone else, usually penned by those who don’t depend on Old Age benefits for basic expenses. But generations, ‘Boomers’ no more than anyone else, don’t make policies. The One Percent holds the reins.

Stop saying it won’t be there. That would be literally impossible, since there will always be payroll taxes to finance benefits at some level. As long as GDP grows, labor compensation will grow, and as long as that grows, so will payroll taxes (even if capped). If GDP stops growing, our problems will be bigger than financing Social Security. We could turn into Argentina, which used to be among the world’s biggest economies. A few more presidents like Trump and we would be on our way.

In conventional terms, the deterioration in the Trust Funds’ conditions, according to the Trustees — Trump appointees — are due to three factors: reduced immigration, Trump’s tax cuts, and a lower birth rate. You can find a few more rocks to throw at the Administration in the Trustees’ summary, but I think this is all beside the point.

I might also note that by the same fallacious reasoning applied to retiree benefits, the Disability Trust Fund is good until 2099. Perhaps this distinction will protect disabled beneficiaries from cruel and stupid policies, but I wouldn’t count on it. In the same vein, the “Supplementary Medical Insurance Fund” (SMI), according to the Trustees, “is adequately financed into the indefinite future” because it is funded from ‘general revenue’ (everything besides the payroll tax).

The economic reality is that none of the programs are less secure than the SMI. All of them are currently financed by general revenue. That is how the debt held by the Funds is made good, and how benefits that are promised could be paid in full. All we need are politicians who are not shitheads.

The need for a distinction is more emotional than rational. Nobody wants to be associated with the ‘social democrat’ label. It reminds people of the old “Social-Democrats USA,” that anti-Communist Cold War relic, supporter of the Vietnam War, and auxiliary of the AFL-CIO in its worst years. But those dudes are all dead or gone, so ‘social-democrat’ should be inoffensive. The other emotional need is for a radical departure from old-time liberalism, but that liberalism has given us great things as well as awful ones: Social Security along with the Bay of Pigs.

The conceptual distinction between social-democrat and democratic socialist is also murky. Fans of the latter like to speak of workers control, but models for such control vary. Some would have each plant or facility run by its employees. More onsite democracy could not be bad, but it pales besides our greater needs, and it begs the question of economic planning. It is not enough upon which to base an entire ideology. Most of the other objectives of ‘democratic socialists’ can be achieved alongside regulated privately-owned firms operating in markets under an expansive welfare state.

The old-timers mentioned above are the people who came out of the student movement of the 1960s and gathered towards democratic socialism at the end of the 1970s, many inspired by Michael Harrington, culminating in the formation of the organization in 1982. Though I’m now an old-timer, I was not one, coming from an immature Marxist-Leninist perspective. I actively disliked Harrington as a ‘State Department socialist.’ I still reject his thought, but now I think I have better reasons. I wouldn’t fault his intentions.

Back then, the label ‘democratic socialist’ sounded defensive, an effort to proclaim one was not one of those obnoxious communists. Now there are no obnoxious communists of any consequence from which to distinguish oneself, so there is nothing wrong with emphasizing the democratic aspect of socialism, and there is nothing wrong with the label of ‘democratic socialism.’

I’m provoked by a back and forth in The American Prospect by Harold Meyerson and David Duhalde. Meyerson is a tireless socialist journalist, Duhalde is an active leader in DSA. Both are acquaintances.

Meyerson asks why DSA only has 120,000 members, when in the U.S. it ought to have many more. He ascribes this to an insular ‘cocoon culture’ that pays inadequate attention to what non-members think. That to me is just the beginning of an explanation. A good question is why other groups without that burden are not properly enormous.’

What else is out there? There are basically a handful of outfits. One is “Our Revolution,” set up and since abandoned by Bernie Sanders. In my neck of the woods, it doesn’t do anything; once in a while there is a meeting. It has an allied Facebook group which is basically one lady. Then there is Justice Democrats, which has done a fabulous job helping to elect progressives, but it does not seem to be a membership organization that meets; it is mostly a donor list.

Finally there is the Working Families Party (WFP), which plays a big role in states, especially New York, where ‘fusion’ voting is legal. (Fusion means a party with sufficient support can run candidates from either of the two major parties on its own separate ballot line, effectively signalling the extent of support for its agenda.) Where fusion ballots are illegal, there is not much rationale for the WFP.

I’ve also investigated Progressive Democrats of America, started years ago by Dennis Kucinich and Howard Dean, but there isn’t much there. I should also mention Indivisible, very active in my county, but it is not built to run its own candidates.

None of these organizations stand explicitly for socialism. I think that’s important.

Duhalde offers a sociological explanation, suggests DSA is a little choosey about whom it welcomes as an official member, and claims its ideas are much more popular than indicated by its surging membership rolls. I would agree with the last bit.

“Cocoon culture” has pros and cons. The pro is that it offers a cozy place in which people can commune. The con is that its insularity simultaneously attracts and repels. The repel side is stronger and tends to be associated with a few of DSA’s outlandish positions.

I do not believe DSA’s off-kilter stances, such as abolishing prisons, are what limits its popularity. The MAGA movement is replete with absurd views yet it still commands the allegiance of at least 25 percent of the population. If the Left ever won those folks, many would still have batty ideas, if new and different ones. God help us.

In U.S. politics, cocooning on the left is faced with a vast and complex network of traditions with which to grapple. A compelling one is founded on what I would call basically fallacious logic:

1. Our problems are vast, horrible, and demand a radical response.

2. That radical response is respect for persons of all faiths, ethnicities, genders, gender-identities, and philosophies, plus immediate socialization of the economy.

The fallacy is that even if #1 is true (I would say it is), that does not mean #2 is possible in the foreseeable future. A favorite line from the distant past was the response to the urge to “make a revolution.” Nobody “makes” a revolution. It’s a rare event.

The proper ‘radical’ response begs the question of how to operate. In a democracy, there is still public opinion to consider on the respect point (I say ‘consider,’ not indulge, but here is me on the ‘woke’ thing), and on the latter there are practical considerations as well.

In left politics of any sort, there will always be people who gravitate to a stance they understand as Marxist-Leninist. Now Marx is a monumental figure in world intellectual history. Lenin was no slouch as a thinker, but his intellectual legacy has been squeezed into his leadership in a unique historical time and place, never to be duplicated since. Bolshevism and the Bolshevik revolution, whatever their unfortunate subsequent evolution, was a one-off and no guide to future politics anywhere.

Nevertheless, it is inevitable that some will seize upon Lenin’s legacy and blunder into trying to apply it to utterly different circumstances, such as the contemporary U.S. Groups will form on this basis, and when they see larger groups with less-rigid doctrines, they will naturally try to infiltrate and colonize them, with a view towards taking them over eventually. This is not a moral judgement. It’s what I would do! You could say it’s what I’m doing myself, in my own tiny way. The bigger the general trend to the left, the more of these sorts of developments will proceed. It’s as natural as April showers bringing May flowers.

The problem in DSA is that naive, aspiring Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries have wedged themselves into leadership positions. When the aspiring Leninists in DSA open their mouths, they certainly do no good. But from where I sit, it looks like they have decided to ride DSA’s growth and try to make their move for political dominance later. Milk the cow after it fattens up.

A big membership means lots more dues paid in and the chance to employ their own cronies. The pressure for a separate party I think is being held in check. How they think their ascendance inside the organization could happen is probably as incoherent as their basic political outlook.

So we have DSA proper, beset with a crew that is wired into the leadershp and has the power to broadcast silly thoughts, and a surge to the left in the U.S. by progressives more generally, punctuated by dramatic electoral victories, visible to anyone who hasn’t been living in a cave. The elections take actual U.S. socialism two steps forward, the pronunciamentos of certain DSA leaders take it back a half-step or two.

Whatever the inadequacies of the DSA platform, its ‘brand’ of “democratic socialism” is important because it upholds two key principles, one of which is exclusive to DSA. The one it shares with progressives more generally is advocacy of an ample, peaceable welfare state. DSA is more serious about this than most, whereas others are held back by spurious concerns about the public debt or, in foreign policy, the boogie-man of the month. The more novel one which is worth elevating, though of course the specifics matter, is for socialization of the economy, in old-time parlance “nationalization of the means of production.”

For me, the priority is not immediate, full-spectrum “nationalization,” but to attack specific sectors of the sacred market. I would start with health care. Contrary to naive revolutionism, if it happens at all it will come in pieces, not all at once. Some areas are not worth the trouble. I don’t want to see the U.S. Congress running Nvidia, but I would like to see ‘Meta’ (Facebook) cut down to size. (My friend Dean Baker thinks that technically, it could be done easily.)

I do not think the Right’s attempt to stop DSA with ‘red-baiting’ will work. It could even impress people that DSA is serious about Change, unlike the two major parties’ establishments. Whatever you think of “Medicare For All,” it signals more determination than efforts to tinker with ObamaCare. People may think Bernie is unrealistic, but they know he is for real. At some point, whatever the difficulties in implementation, “Medicare For All” could become a new litmus test. DSA electoral triumphs demonstrate the sort of language a socialist needs to use to advance in politics. Whether anybody is an actual member becomes a secondary consideration. Any candidate worth their salt accused of being subservient to DSA ideologues will be able to brush that off.

DSA imposes little in the way of discipline on its members. There is some bitching when an elected member is viewed by the less-grounded as failing to measure up. In my view, the most radical components, Marxist-Leninist or otherwise, are too smart to fall for that. They saw what happened with the Jamaal Bowman debacle.

A juicier question, in light of the large number of African-American socialists, is why don’t we see more of them in the membership and leadership of DSA? The door to them is wide open. Perhaps the electoral victories of progressive African-Americans, such as the incoming mayor of Washington, D.C., an actual DSA member, will bring real diversity to the organization.

A point made by the Combahee River Collective (which included Bill DiBlasio’s wife, LOL), decades ago, was that the most oppressed, how I would classify the African-American section of the working class, and especially its LGBTQI component, are logically the most fit to lead the Movement.

I might first note a personal stake. There is currently a furor in my little corner of the world over purported plans to locate a data center or power lines nearby. The likelihood of a data center seems low, a new power line less so. Neither would directly affect me, though they could reduce my home equity, which I treasure.

In general I welcome local economic development. (We really need a decent Chinese restaurant.) Most other homeowners do not, out of mistaken belief it will reduce their property value. I would argue the contrary. Development brings in more commerce and people, which means more amenities and higher property value. The history of the county’s breakneck growth over the past twenty years, including becoming a national center for data centers, attests to this.

Opposition to development often has a racist tinge. It’s selfish. People here (not me) have huge houses on huge lots, if not mini-mansions, while many, especially in the eastern part of the county, are afflicted by onerous obstacles to desirable housing. I could also note another class struggle dimension: the centers provide well-paying, union jobs. So does building power lines.

On Facebook, I fight with yokels who tell me to ‘do your research’ without citing any research. Their idea of ‘research’ is to Google until they find something that looks like what they already agree with, without reading it, naturally. One lady told me she didn’t care about research unless it would help her win a court case. Others told me maybe I should consider relocating, going back to Maryland. When I drop a post in a FB group that contradicts the majority opinion in a thread, it is removed. Chuck you, Farley. There’s a lot to be said for being a recluse.

I actually did a cupful of research on this, looking for sources that contradicted my priors. I found nothing. My wife sent me a couple of things, but they were weak and inconclusive.

I can sympathize enough with those who sank their wealth into property in pristine areas, who do not look forward to their sight-lines being besmirched by power lines. If we ever moved, a key factor in my choice of locations is what I see if I look out the window.

I’m aware that power lines are suspected of being health risks, but I don’t believe that. To me it’s like chemtrails. In any case, the sponsors of any new structure or facility that detracts from somebody’s stake in real estate should be required, at minimum, to pay compensation.

I’ve also read that proximity to a data center that runs diesel generators 24-7 can render a home unlivable. I imagine that could be addressed by regulation, but it requires a state or local government to act effectively and pre-emptively. There is no guarantee of that.

Another concern is data center impacts on water supply and utility rates. There again there should be regulation and compensation, with the same reservations noted above. State and local governments have not proven themselves adept at utility regulation.

Data centers fuel the spread of Artificial Intelligence (AI), which could prove to be a financial windfall, like the Internet, or a huge, bursting, destructive financial bubble. In the immediate term, there is little doubt that AI dough corrupts our politics and promotes the fossil fuel industry, which certainly does not add to the appeal of data centers. So too the crypto con-men.

AI is part of the infernal holy quartet that is propping up Trump and contributing to the destruction of Humanity. That trinity consists of AI, Zionism, the crypto bros, and the Arab oil sheiks. Russia is not helping either.

At the end of the day, to get a fix on families’ financial conditions, the contribution of the data centers or power lines in property tax revenue should be compared to their impacts on utility and water rates. This the critics never do, which bugs me. The incoming tax revenue clearly makes possible better public services, and better-paid public employees.

At bottom, the anti-data center furor smacks of anti-tax sentiment, which is the bane of contemporary civilization. We have a skinny public sector, calling to mind John Kenneth Galbraith’s characterization of the U.S. as beset by “private affluence and public squalor.” Since he said that, in the 1950s, there has been a lot more affluence, but also a lot more squalor. These days folks are afraid to drink their own tap water, or surrender their kids to the public schools.

This is a hopelesss exercise in another sense. The Right will always find a way to caricature its targets. Lacking facts, it will just make them up. Even if you repudiate a previous, dubious statement, they will still associate it with you. The latest ignorant gambit is calling all Democratic candidates “vegan.” In other words, the men are pussies, the women are just weird. We’re all gay.

It still pays to minimize the supply of targets, as Woke of any vintage will never be able to do. There are a few markers that are easier to get a handle on, so I’ll pursue it by that route, going from simpler to less simple.

“Defund the Police” attracts the most brickbats. I understand the motivation, on both sides, but in ordinary retail politics, as everybody knows, it’s a deal-breaker. So if an axe murderer is charging up and down Main Street, chopping off heads, we don’t need armed police? Though I can’t help remembering an online video of an extraordinary scene in London. A clearly unhinged man is screaming and swinging a machete wildly in the street. He is surrounded by about thirty unarmed police, who just stand there calmly with arms crossed at a safe distance, until he finally tires out enough to be grabbed and restrained. Nobody gets shot, or even slapped. Imagine such a scene in the U.S.

Of course, what people mean is that in situations where mental health or domestic violence are involved, you don’t want to send armed police. You want to send somebody equipped to talk people down or restrain them with minimal resort to violence.

We could also talk about demilitarizing the police, training and managing them differently, diverting resources from bloated police budgets, putting their pay and benefits on a par with other public employees, etc. etc. etc. There is a lot to talk about, but it requires explanation and elaboration. What the advocates fail to grasp is the old saying that in politics, when you’re explaining, you’re losing. You have to be careful about the slogan on the bumper sticker.

Another political millstone is prison abolition. I would say a nation with an inordinate level of incarcerated population is not a successful or healthy place, but just as surely, there are some folks who are not fit for personal freedom. Getting to a better place would be a lengthy process. Abolition sounds immediate and precipitous. It is untenable in a political platform.

Both ‘Abolition’ and ‘Defund’ were understandable cries of frustration with execreble, racist police abuse. But politics requires persuasion, for which you have to keep your cool. Outrage needs to be calculated. ‘Defund’ is on much stronger ground regarding ICE, whose abuses are well-appreciated by the masses.

“Open Borders.” Clearly, xenophobia is a ready and effective tool of the Right throughout the world, but even in principle, ‘Open Borders’ is not smart. There are better stories to tell, as I have tried myself, but again, explanation takes time. Any nation worth its salt, as even Trump understands, will regulate entrance. It makes sense to defend immigrants who are already here, or who are presently massed at our points of entry, but that should be the limit, absent a more enlightened level of public opinion. Ideally we would provide transitional assistance for new arrivals, housing and employment.

I wrote that immigrants benefit the country of arrival. That implies they sap the vitality of the countries from which they departed. Of course, there is usually a lot wrong with those places, something with which U.S. immigration policy ought to reckon.

Banning or disrespecting Thanksgiving is said to have made a difference for Francesca Hong’s razor-thin margin of defeat in Wisconsin. To be sure, the folklore underlying Thanksgiving is repulsive, and turkey is not worth eating more than twice a year. Even here in Virginia, the fabled origin of “Thanksgiving,” we now have “Indigenous Peoples Day.” It transpires without clamor. Italians are not rising up. People celebrate the holiday as they prefer. I suspect most people, Woke or otherwise, think the original story is bullshit.

Two recent lefty takes on the Hong defeat oddly shy away from grappling with Woke. One is by Harold Myerson in The American Prospect, the other by Paul Heideman in Jacobin. I don’t disagree with any of what they say, but neither deal with the now common anti-Woke attack lines deployed by the Republicans and their sympathizers in the Democratic Party bureaucracy. They are both more at pains to point out that the meat-and-potatoes proposals of democratic socialists (e.g., Medicare For All, the Green New Deal) are popular. Sure, but so far, not enough to overwhelm MAGA.

We could think of a few other well-founded notions said to be Woke, or at least drastic, such as abolishing the U.S. Senate and/or the Electoral College and expanding the Supreme Court. These are fine ideas, but they too require explanation. On the surface, they look unfamiliar, drastic, and sudden. By contrast, some ideas sound simple but are anything but, such as “Medicare For All.” In politics, surface simplicity is what works.

In a recent conversation with other DSA members, we talked about data centers. My views on this are opposed by absolutely everybody. My point, however, is that my comrades’ views are not as inflexible as might be thought by other parties. It happens that the slogan of completely blocking new centers is popular, or at least not controversial. In this case, the inflexible interpretation happens to be what sells. In the worst cases of Woke, the converse applies.

I was pleased to see that my local Democratic Socialists of America (‘DSA’) in Virginia is getting behind three proposed amendments to the state constitution that are up for a referendum in November. They are: legalizing gay marriage, restoring voting rights to felons, and legalizing reproductive rights. These are simple enough. At last, something DSA is doing that I could get behind!

Then I found out that the amendments have strong Democratic Party support, including being approved by a vote of our state legislature. It is smart of the Party to elevate amendments that should increase Democratic turn-out and help the candidates in the general elections.

Nobody has a monopoly on popular causes, which to me means less reason for DSA committing resources, beyond verbal support, to the amendment vote. Activists can just blend into their own local Democratic efforts. At a certain point, back in the 1960s, Students for a Democratic Society got bored with anti-war organizing. Vietnam was still in full swing. Peace advocacy had become mainstream by a certain point, so there was not much point in SDS trying to continue to lead the parade. Its work had been done. Its early opposition, when it was unpopular and dangerous, helped to break the ice.

DSA can grow if it stakes out popular-trending positions of which it can take ownership. It cannot grow unless it supplies a reason for activists to operate outside of formal Democratic Party organizations. It needs to be ahead of the curve. It’s fine to prove we are better Democrats, where possible, but it is not as high a priority. Best is to stake out and own an unpopular position that will earn majority support in the future. Politics is a competition.

In Northern Virginia, I believe one such issue is Palestine. We have a large South and West Asian community much animated by this cause. Withdrawing support for Israel’s unconscionable rampages in Gaza and the West Bank, tied to Trump’s unpopular war with Iran, are easy things to explain. The compromised Democrats are on the back foot in this situation. It is ripe for DSA ownership.

Is there a new Woke 2.0? We certainly observe the advances of democratic socialists, and close facsimiles thereof, who provide ‘proof of concept’ by being smarter about politics. Invariably, they walk back from defunding and abolition. In a recent interview, even a DSA leader — one of the red-hot Marxist-Leninists — soft-peddled DSA’s own positions on abolition and defunding as ‘long-term objectives.’ That takes the edge off and it suggests DSA’s most radical leaders are intent on nailing themselves into the organization, taking advantage of its explosive growth and remarkable electoral victories through the promulgation of social-democratic — that is to say, reform — policies. So much the better.

I still have a few seasons of the old British cop show “Inspector George Gently” in reserve. The appeal there is one, that it takes place in Northumbria, so the unfamiliar accents are fun, and two, it is unsentimental.

Here are a few reactions to other things.

I enjoyed “The Count of Monte Cristo” on PBS. The main virtue is the intricacy of the stories behind the protagonist’s schemes for revenge. Also Jeremy Irons’s shot in one episode. I tried to read it but put it down. It was tedious. It’s very long, but I scored a free PDF. Less investment made it easier to put aside.

“Life, Larry, and the Pursuit of Unhappiness” was pretty good, albeit not including the unwatchable second episode. The bits stolen from “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” which I’ve watched all the way through, twice, did not sit well with me. I dislike and avoid knock-offs. The Obama role in the final installment is well-done. As David has said, Obama can be very funny.

“Sugar” with Colin Farrell is a pretty good private-eye yarn with a nutty alien visitor overlay. Who thought that was a good idea. Another sci-fi, “Silo,” is pretty good. I’m still missing “The Peripheral” and “The Expanse,” good sci-fi shows that were both cancelled. In the latter, I liked that the space ships are armed with rail guns, which are a real thing, not lasers or space torpedoes.

I’m a sucker for anything about New York City, hence “Westies,” happening in Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan. Problem is, the Irish gangsters and revolutionaries are all too dumb to believe. The Italians are smart enough. I would be surprised if Hells Kitchen still existed, in light of Manhattan gentrification.

Also taking place in NYC is “The Godfather of Harlem.” (Harlem is disappearing too.) This series absorbs me but also bugs the hell out of me, since it deprives black radicalism of its radical core and integrates it with drug gangsterism. The story entails completely improbable incidents of radical protest and cartoonish representations of an array of famous African-Americans. The black ‘radicals,’ including the Black Panthers, are no more than angry MLKs. The only convincing character is Giancarlo Esposito as Adam Clayton Powell, decidedly not a radical. The Malcolm X character isn’t bad. The nobility of the show’s good guys, like Malcolm, is a little overwhelming.

The saving grace is the fabulous cast, including Forest Whitaker, Vincent D’Onofrio, Esposito, Chazz Palminteri (briefly), and Michael Raymond-James, who plays Joe Columbo. Whoopi Goldberg is there too and does well enough.

The worst bit in the series, which should be a hanging offense, is a moment when the show restages the famous picture of an armed Malcolm X standing guard at his window with the gangster Bumpy Johnson standing next to him. Evidently they did know each other, but Johnson was not there.

In the telling of the story, Bumpy Johnson is alleged to have great plans for the benign uplift of Harlem. Utter fantasy. There are so many true, exciting stories of black radical upsurge. Why concoct one that relies on drug pushing murderers for protagonists, with a gangster-rap soundtrack.

The film-bio of Fred Hampton was not terrible. They tried for accuracy. But the best depictions of U.S. radicals ever are still in the movies of John Sayles: “Return of the Secaucus Seven” and of course “Matewan.” The best right-wing hate-fantasy portrayal of leftists was in the third Dirty Harry movie, “The Enforcer.”

I was glad to see the arrival of a new season of “Reacher.” Also unsentimental. The star is so ripped he looks photoshopped. I also confess to the guilty pleasures of watching “The Punisher” and “Daredevil.”

The other side always needs a boogieman, and if they lack one, they will just make him up. I note that Piker is said to have a net worth of $8 million. A similar question pertains to the Black Lives Matter celebrities said to be sitting on millions in real estate holdings. For a Lefty, is that too much? Yes! Kudos to Professor David Greenberg of NYU, who bequeathed $5 million to the Democratic Socialists of America. Better late than never. May he R.I.P.

I take for a point of reference my own family. We live quite well by my lights with annual incomes from pensions and Social Security combined well under $200K. Google says median household income in the U.S. is about $84K, so by that standard we are rich. (Trust me, we don’t feel rich.)

With pretty safe bonds, say 4 percent, you can make $40K a year on a million dollar balance. So by my standard, $5 million should be enough if you have no job. Gross it up a bit since I live in a low-cost area and we lucked into a low-rate mortgage, or cut it back if you can still work. He who does not work, who is able and below retirement age, fuck him.

There is an idea on the Left of a “maximum wage.” I used to think it was dumb, since it implies a marginal tax rate of 100 percent. The politics and administration of such a tax would be daunting, but I no longer think the underlying, motivating idea is so dumb.

This reminds me of The Rolling Stones’ emigration to the friendlier tax haven of France. In his very entertaining autobiography, guitar-god Keith Richards complains that U.K. taxes would take 90 percent of their earnings, so why do concerts? I was a bit sympathetic.

90 percent sounds high, though I suspect his resentment was motivated more by the need to establish the worth of his work rather than personal spending needs, even after taking the costs of his flagrant consumption of heroin and coke into account. I also suspect for Mick Jagger, thanks to his serial marriages, spending needs loomed larger. (Incidentally, there is a new tv documentary about Richards and the group that I liked.)

There are jobs or work I would do for free. The problem is that the sponsors or audience attaches the value of the product to whatever it cost, so I always insisted on getting paid, the more the better. It wasn’t because I needed the money.

The cost of living in places such as New York City or San Francisco can be astronomical (Obviously, I wish Mayor Mamdani the best of luck in changing this), but not everybody has to live there. So too the cost of child care and educating the kids, if you shun the public schools. It’s a huge waste of money that should be donated to Doctors Without Borders or people like Francesca Hong. Families whose primary residences have ballooned in value should be downsizing, moving to Akron, and disgorging their capital gains.

My electrician moved to West Virginia, where he says he is “redneck rich.” I think he must have come from my own county, one of the richest in the U.S. I live in Virginia, not among the highest tax states, but not the lowest either.

I once tried to become super-rich. I think I would have given most of it away, especially to lefty projects, but I never got the chance to demonstrate my altruistic inclinations. Riches were not forthcoming. More the reverse, actually. But I made sure I would end up safely solvent. I would like that for everybody. Under socialism, everybody is solvent because public benefits obviate the need for private sector insurance and great accumulations of wealth. Nobody has to die for lack of money or beg on Gofundme to pay for a life-saving operation.

I don’t begrudge anyone the need to make a living, even to finance a mid-to-upscale lifestyle or fancy hobbies. But there is a limit. Skydiving or golf, o.k. Collecting numerous classic cars or owning a Lear jet, too much.

Another factor is that, as for young athletes, levels of wealth that are volatile because the high incomes are transitory may need to last a long time. I still think a net worth of $4 million for almost anyone, not counting the house, is a solid amount. If you have more, you should be giving it away. There is a multitude of options. And I don’t mean me (though don’t hold back!). Billionaires? Forget it. Shoot them, or send them to a collective farm.

One has to wonder about the bona fides of self-proclaimed lefty leaders who accumulate like Ebenezer Scrooge. Michael Moore, whose films I thought were brilliant, was said to own a ridiculously huge estate, but he blamed that on his wife. I read online that in his divorce, he and his soon-to-be ex-wife divided nine properties between them. Too much!

As Andrew Carnegie in his “The Gospel of Wealth” said, “He who dies rich dies disgraced.”

The protagonist is one Rhaenyra Targaryen, aspiring queen, whom I find to be an annoying, whiny bitch, like most of the women in the show. Her BF Prince Daemon (right, above) is more interesting. I much prefer Daenerys Targaryen from the original Game of Thrones. Daenerys was played a little over the top, but not too much, even though she eventually incinerated half of her subjects. My other fave from the original was Cercei Lannister, similarly ruthless and homicidal. Give me women willing to kill thousands without mercy or regret.

I’ve always been struck by the ersatz names in these series, which remind me of streets in suburban developments. I’ve spent time poring over online maps of the GoT world, which are more interesting than any of the TV shows, once you get past Westeros and Essos, to the mysterious lands to the south and east.

On top of everything else, these series are little more than just yarns. I see no overriding themes of any consequence. A yarn can be well-told and interesting, others are not, but they are all similarly vapid, like soap operas.

Speaking of sword-and-sandal, there is a PBS production of “The Count of Monte Cristo” that I’ve begun, in about eight parts. The first episode is a little slow, but the second picks up with the entrance of Jeremy Irons as Abbé Faria. The politics — when Napoleon was the progressive ideal — are interesting. The plot becomes more interesting as we see the protagonist’s schemes for revenge taking shape.

Coincidentally I’ve been reading — fighting my way through would not be inaccurate — “The Four Heavens” by David Stuart. He’s one of the leading experts on the ancient Maya.

The Maya was a great civilization that flourished very roughly between a thousand years before the Common Era (birth of Christ) and the 800 after. Contrary to popular supposition, it had mostly collapsed well before the arrival of the rapacious Spanish conquistadors, perhaps for environmental reasons (the exhaustion of accessible fresh water).

Information on the ancient Maya has been very hard to come by. The historical record consists of hieroglyhic carvings found throughout Central America on stone blocks and pyramids — chiefly Belize, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatamala, and Southern Mexico. Deciphering these was a central task of archeology. The calenders were unbuttoned first. I look at the many reproductions of the symbols in the book and I can’t make head or tail out of them, even with Stuart’s description of what I am supposed to be looking at.

Many carvings have been destroyed, looted, or damaged. Basically the historical record is a vast field of rubble, a giant jigsaw puzzle. Despite that, it has become possible to read the inscriptions and construct a history. The hieroglyphics have been decoded, including by Stuart himself. It has not helped that the Spanish colonists made it their business to destroy what records existed, with religious justification for eradicating heathenism.

I don’t think I could get into archeology. There is too much guesswork and mystery involved. Stuart himself acknowledges not a few of the findings are “in the eye of the beholder.”

The relevance to the Game of Thrones universe is that the Maya was an aggregation of constantly shifting, rival, fragmented sub-empires perenially at war amongst themselves. Stuart at one point references the series. His book is hard to follow due to the proliferation of rival groups with unpronounceable names. I’m about halfway through and doubting I will finish it.

One popular point of reference is the Mel Gibson movie, “Apocalypto.” The movie provoked criticism that it inaccurately depicted Maya as bloodthirsty, prolific practitioners of human sacrifice. By Stuart, this criticism was prone to exaggeration. Though the Mexican civilization to the north, in the great city of Tio’tihuacan (next to modern-day Mexico City) were the most avid executioners, Stuart has said the Maya were also implicated, more than a little.

There is more accurate content in the Gibson film than somertimes appreciated. He may be a racist uber-reactionary fascist asshole, but he made a good movie and worked to infuse it with realism. Clearly artistic liberties were taken as well, but it’s still a hell of a film.

I have to mention one scene from the film which only lasts for a second but obsesses me. The hands of a Mayan ruler behind a curtain are shown holding a magnifying glass over a map. The hands are white. If you Google this, the AI tells you there is no such scene, but that is flat wrong. I’m dying to know what Gibson was thinking.

“Cool Machine” is part three of CW’s Harlem trilogy. I haven’t read the other two, but as a denizen of Manhattan between 1975 and 1985, “Cool Machine” triggers many memories of New York City. The main character is really the city itself. At the end of the trilogy, it evolves into something new, along with the protagonists.

I distinguished above between the writing and the story-telling. I thought to memorialize one of CW’s briliant sentences for this note, but I gave up. Which one? There are too many, on every page.

I lived in Manhattan, between 1975 and 1980, progressively extricating myself from some demented post-college radicalism. It’s still my favorite place in the world, another of our frequent destinations, usually the Lower East Side. I followed local politics religiously and used to prowl the East Village. Read the Village Voice devotedly, with Stan Mack’s “Real Life Funnies, “The Angriest Dog In the World,” and the pre-Simpson’s Matt Groening’s “Life In Hell.” Listened to WBAI’s Steve Post and Larry Josephson (R.I.P. to both). Lots of bits jived with my own memories. Ed Koch, Rudy Giuliani, etc. I heard Herman Badillo speak once; he was brilliant. He tried to be mayor; what a missed opportunity for the city.

A similar, appealing restrospective of Manhattan in that period that I happened to catch recently is the TV documentary “Bang My Box,” about the early wild west of local public access cable and its support for gay liberation. The proliferation of cable TV throughout the city happens to play a role in CW’s story, though its content is never an issue.

The other thing that sticks out for me in CW’s book is that the African-American protagonists are solvent, middle class, and successful entrepreneurs. The drama comes from their connections, some inherited, to the criminal world, which for CW is really NYC itself. But they are not of the criminal world.

Per Ishmael Reed’s attacks on “The Wire” TV series, there is no ghetto porn in CW’s stories. In one way it reminds me of the striking ending in the film version of “Devil In the Blue Dress,” a vision of a bright, viable, solvent African-American urban neighborhood, which ran counter to my intuition. (I’m also a fan of Walter Mosely’s books.)

NYC in CW’s novel is anything but bright. It’s a pit of corruption; everybody is on the take. But in it, CW’s characters carve out an island of dignity and honor, like Easy Rawlins in the Mosely novels.

This bit from Jacobin founder and all-around maven Bhaskar Sunkara is making the rounds. Associated speculation reflects assorted political misconceptions that I will now correct.

(One of my favorite memories is when my mother told me she had been advised by one of my teachers that I was “arrogant.” It was my kindergarten teacher. But I digress.)

We are in a democratic socialist moment, so of course AOC should run, but in the Democratic primaries in 2028, not the general. A primary is a free shot at spreading a message, as 2016 was for Bernie Sanders, and now is an obviously propitious time for the Democratic Socialists of America (‘DSA’), of which AOC is a member, to make a splash. However, there are two rules that must be observed.

These rules lack the force of law, but stand on the power of tradition and norms. One is that if you compete in the primaries, you have to commit to supporting the eventual winner. The other competitors must commit to reciprocate before the results are in. If they decline, you are released from any parallel obligations.

The second is that you get two shots. If you have lost twice, the press or what passes for it has leave to write you off. First time, for a dem-soc politician, would bring a raft of press coverage. It’s kind of a man-bites-dog story, amplified by the wave of recent dem-soc victories. Second time is when it gets real; then you only do it if you can win, but if you have a realistic chance to win, the press will smother you with coverage. I doubt AOC could win in 2028, but she could set the table for a subsequent, all-out effort.

I’m forced to refer to “dem-soc,” short for democratic socialist or social-democrat, because DSA itself is held back by ideologues on its '“National Political Committee” (“NPC”) who remain confused about the best path forward. An AOC campaign wouuld stir up huge turmoil inside DSA. There is talk of a national poll of the membership to select a nominee. Such a poll would expose how little support there is for the NPC, which is why they would oppose any such poll. I’ve said the problem in the NPC is that it is full of folks who are not democratic socialists.

Some have fantasies of collecting their support in a third party. Evidently they do not understand that under the rules of politics in the U.S., third parties are not permitted to function. Others denounce political campaigns as “electoralism” though they never, ever propose any alternative method of achieving political power. I imagine they harbor absurd hallucinations about mass strikes or even less plausible precursors leading to smashing the State.

Meanwhile, legions of genuine socialists in DSA chapters ignore the loons and get about electing literal DSA members and DSA-adjacent politicians to public office, who go on to perform useful tasks. It’s the comrades in the chapters who are the real movement. Regrettably, a few smaller chapters have been taken over by aspiring Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries. These comedians reject effective, successful progressive Democratic politicians in their own districts.

We dem-socs have two huge issues upon which we can capitalize. One is Medicare For All (‘MFA’). My local not-dem-soc Democratic Party County Committee recently endorsed it at their monthly meeting, unanimosly.

I’ve said MFA is an empty box. Actually existing Medicare, I’m on it, is not all that. We could aspire to greater goals than extending existing Medicare “for all.” But any huge reform will have a myriad of moving parts. Endorsement is mostly symbolic, though now it is something more. MFA is whatever Bernie says it is. When Bernie passes from the scene, it will be whatever AOC says it is. I’ve also suggested that, rather than wait for the entire country to embrace MFA (it failed to pass despite great efforts in our bluest states), progressives should get about expanding Medicaid where possible in the most likely states, or supplementing it with additional state government benefits. Red state governments come up big in surprising areas; one such is support for community colleges.

The other huge issue is the war. I’m half-persuaded by the wave of commentary that the U.S. is stuck in a no-win situation. ‘Stuck’ to me does not preclude a settlement that Trump will try to describe as a victory. Even so, the president’s volatile personal impulses make a definitive end to the war hard to see. As time goes on, failure to resolve the conflict puts more and more salt into the wound. And we have only begun to see reports of fatalities and other casualties among U.S. troops.

While dem-soc politics engulfs us, assorted Democratic establishment hacks demand that the tide recede. One twit said socialists should find another party and not seek party resources. In fact the party provides no such resources. Moreover, when it loses a primary it violates its own principles and sabotages properly elected Democratic primary winners on the left. India Walton in Buffalo, NY, is one case in point.

More radical denunciations have been forthcoming. Exhibit A is epic sell-out James Carville, who would like to purge the most dynamic, popular segment of the party, much like what happened with the Labout Party in the United Kingdom. How is that working out for them?

Bhaskar provokes me a tad with his jab at “producerism,” which we are told is an obsolete liberal political doctrine. The alternative is, like MFA, another vague construct known as the “Green New Deal.” It should be realized that any GND reform will sell behind its promise of jobs, jobs, jobs. That’s producerism, whether you like it or not. It sells.

Thus far the chief weapon deployed against the socialist revival is the cry of Communist infiltration. That tells you the other side is bereft of substantive arguments. The commie thing may have already lost steam as the charges of antisemitism and Islamicist infiltration are punctured daily by the political success of the graceful NYC mayor. Still, it would not pay to discount the political power of the accusation. In U.S. political culture, the word ‘socialism’ is still easily connected to the specter no longer haunting Europe, or anywhere else.

Lemme tell you about Communism. I was a communist, a serious one who canvassed working class neighborhoods with my awkward message. As you could guess, little came of it. Even then the label only applied to the Soviet Union, the Peoples Republic of China, and a couple of other places, none of which I supported. It was and is mostly associated with a maximalist notion of a sudden, complete social transformation that I eventually realized will never, ever, fucking happen. The only communists left are cranks. A 60-year-old communist is a sad thing.

Today the authoritarian practices of those nations are said to be the ambition of the dem-soc movement. More nonsense, especially as MAGA explicitly supports such practices that are happening on the ground, in real time, as we speak. Says MAGA, we hate you for what you might do, even as we celebrate the same shit when Trump does it.

The Democratic Party establishment is no great shakes in this field either. My favorite exhibit is the state of siege that descends upon any Democratic city where the national convention is being staged. Obama and his FBI were no big allies of Occupy Wall Street when it was raging.

My other favorite example is how fallen Democratic titan Governor Andrew Cuomo sabotaged his own party’s dominance of the New York State Legislature. Or we could talk about how the Nevada party regulars hijacked the state party out from under the socialists who had won control, fair and square. The suckitude is overwhelming. Still, when it comes to high offices, it’s a two-party system; we have to live in it, at least for the foreseeable future.

So Go AOC Go. I’ve heard comrades say that DSA should not angle for control of the Democratic Party, in keeping with those who imagine a new third party. In other words, since the corporate enemy controls the party, true, we should abandon the struggle to uproot them. But if we’re not about doing that, I have no idea what we are doing.

A common objection to a dem-soc candidacy is that it opens the way for the other side. That is possible, but the problem with the argument is that it glosses over how extreme the other side is. You can’t lose the middle of the political spectrum, also known as the ‘median voter,’ if the opposition is certifiable. Former Bush campaign bigshot Stuart Stevens says the Republican Party is now an “extremist party.” People shy away from that. It’s the super-power of a dem-soc politician, along with the array of meat-and-potatoes programs and the special anti-war message. The domestic proposals are well-attuned to the MAGA working class constituencies, for which the anti-war position is also important. It’s a good set-up for the Left.

The extremism of the G.O.P. under MAGA and Trump opens a lot of space to their left, providing ordinary centrist Democrats plenty of room to flaunt their anti-fascist bona fides. With respect to the latter, however, it does take away their principal ‘spoiler’ argument thrown at those to their left. And when they do try the spoiler thing, it opens them up to charges that they are not so different from MAGA as they would like to make out.

And they aren’t. They roll over on anti-tax propaganda, as Obama and Biden did. They “ended Welfare as we know it.” They are poised to help the Rs screw up Social Security, which they’ve been threateing to do for decades. Their defense of immigrants and their critique of mass incarceration are weak. Their anti-war arguments accept Trump’s basic premise for his attacks — that Iran must must not have nukes of any type. Etc. That dem-soc has a future should not be surprising.

Naturally, the MAGAs will cherry-pick what they take to be the most offensive pieces of the platform, in some cases resulting in comical denunciations of things that are actually very popular.

Now the same crew that formulated this document is opposing calls for a national poll of DSA members for 2028 presidential endorsements, one which AOC would probably win. The worthies on the NPC don’t want that. Some democracy. If the Rs had a clue, they would try to make some hay out of that, though that would be hampered by their own alienation from democratic practice.

Right off the bat, the preamble implies an equivalence between Republicans and Democrats, even though there is much railing against the atrocities of Trump’s party. There is an aspiration for an independent ‘workers’ party’ that fails to reckon with the rules of our system, that render such a strategy dubious.

There is nothing wrong in general with the meat-and-potatoes sections for a Green New Deal and so forth. The big thing missing is a political strategy to make any of it happen, though in actuality the DSA chapters that are doing useful work, electing socialists and progressives to public office, are making real progress in those areas.

I’ve been saying there is a basic contradiction between the constructive, reformist dare I say ‘social-democratic’ grassroots work, typified by the Mamdani triumph, and the noodle-brained proclamations from assorted ultra-lefts on the NPC. I do not advocate any expulsions or splits. I merely point out that this tension cannot be sustained, that a break of some kind is inevitable, and I wish some people would just go away. I only hope the ultra-lefts do not bring the ship down with them.

The groups in question are called the ‘Marxist Unity Group’ (‘MUG’) and ‘Red Star.’ They bloth like to flog the hammer and sickle, but evidently the MUG is not quite as out-there as Red Star. Neither could survive a genuine national poll of the burgeoning membership, now said to exceed 120,000. They do, however, exercise overweening influence on the NPC.

There is no point in trying to dissect their internals. Simply put, they are not democratic socialists, and they have no future in politics. All they can do is drag down the rest of us. I’ve heard that one or the other sect has been able to take over some of the smaller chapters, which underlines the most important thing about DSA: its diversity. Reject all generalizations about its politics and its objectives. It is not one thing.

The one big thing that DSA mostly is can be seen in the politics of successful socialist politicians, starting with Bernie and AOC, and now with the potential blossoming of ‘The Squad’ in the U.S. House of Representatives and elsewhere.

We also see the advance of “municipal socialism,” a.k.a. “sewer socialism,” in New York City, Seattle, Minneapolis, Boston, the District of Columbia, and Los Angeles. Cities are disadvantaged by the provisions of state constitutions, but in terms of economics and population, they are the power-houses of states. So the prospects for dissemination of progressive politics beyond urban boundaries looks promising. NY state has already bent the knee to Mamdani.

The programmatic aspects of the DSA platform are constructive and politically viable, in general. Match that with the progressive politics happening on the ground and we have the makings of relief from this MAGA nightmare.

I read the original Politico article that blew up the Platner campaign and a couple of other bits, nothing comprehensive or deeply researched. A few rumors have filtered out that vilify the woman. I will ignore them.

Basically we don’t know what happened, and neither do you, though something clearly did. Does it rise to an importance that justifies the termination of his campaign? It depends on exactly what happened. If a crime was committed, Platner should be prosecuted, which would make him unable to campaign.

There is a spectrum of possibilities between bad breakup and outright, violent sexual assault. If a crime was committed, that would justify timely prosecution and punishment. In any case, the threshold for political collapse of a non-incumbent is far short of criminal procedure, and that’s where we are.

For the record, my view of the entirety of previous anti-Platner commentary, before the coup de grace, tattoo included, is that it was one enormous, stinking pile of bullshit.

The most dubious principle bandied around, prevalent in popular delusions common to all points on the political spectrum, is that it matters whether or not an individual is qualified or virtuous. It really doesn’t matter. We could wish in our politics it was otherwise, but it is not. Particularly in a legislature, an individual’s qualifications mean little. There are rare persons whose own unique qualities lead them to great achievements, both good and bad. Such persons are few. Lyndon Johnson was one, Bernie Sanders is another, but so is Trump. Qualifications do matter for leadership positions, where an individual’s authority dominates that of his political cronies.

People like to say, “I vote for the individual, not the party.” Ha-ha. No you don’t! First of all, you never know the individual. Secondly, their impact owing to their individuality in a huge, complex political system is marginal. There are exceptions, but they are rare.

For most, the only important datum is party identification, not personal qualifications. Any public official has staff and/or family that compensate for his or her deficiencies. Whether you like what Ronald Reagan was up to or not, he was rumored to remain in office at the end of his second term beset with Alzheimers. The nation did not fall apart. Another of the walking wounded was Senator Diane Feinstein of California. Now Mitch McConnell’s health is in question, not to mention the president’s.

Even with Platner’s downfall, we may not have lost an extra D vote in the Senate. It ain’t over yet. As elections roll around, I keep thinking that the state of the nation is so awful people will have to come around and give us a blue wave. Or maybe the state of the People is so awful we are doomed. I’m uncertain. It is not even obvious that we will have an honest election.

The question of “Why now?” — why the victim here waited so long to speak out, just a week before an important political deadline — has a plausible answer. I’m not saying I believe it, but it is not incredible. The explanation is she was interviewed for the New York Times article a few months ago, along with a few other women. The Times focused on the most dubious witness against Platner — a full-fledged Republican Party operative and co-founder of “Women for Kavanaugh" — and neglected the others, one of whom provided the killer testimony two weeks ago. She says she was distressed to be left out of the Times article and was faithful to the qualifications dodge I noted above, as are many. Not a crime. A huge boo-boo, if you believe her professed political beliefs.

A better question is why wait for four or five years to report a crime. Obviously it was the success of Platner’s campaign. For his victim, apparently it was fine for Platner to keep walking around, by her lights a continued threat to women of his acquaintance, but not if he was a senator. This could be argued either way. As a senator under close scrutiny, he could have been more risk averse. On the other hand, the power in his position would have made him less vulnerable. I’d say the latter is more likely. We seldom see senators taken down by sex scandals. It happens, but not I would guess as often as it might under a different justice system.

Apparently the victim was shepherded into her bombshell by a shaky so-called “influencer” by the name of Cheyenne Hunt, a self-described progressive and presumably a woman not for Kavanaugh, who has made a cottage industry of sinking Democratic politicians. Her other big scalp was the obviously slimy Rep. Eric Swalwell. Evidently there is little misogyny to expose on the Republican side. Hunt’s professed goal is for Democrats to attain the moral high ground. In other words, to lose endlessly.

The moral high ground can be a foggy place. It helped to replace Al Franken, a pretty good senator, with someone nobody can name. The Franken indictment was rubbish. Why does our side think we can keep spotting points to the Republicans?

It’s amusing, to me at least, that the moral high ground is also a common objective among ultra-lefts in Democratic Socialists of America. For them, moral purity is found in condemnation of any politics short of defund the police and other fanciful pursuits. There is virtue in simplicity, but some comrades abuse the privilege.

As for “Women for Kavanaugh," come on!

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2026/07/11/democratic-socialist-versus-communists-trump/90839578007/

I keep coming back to the central problem in this commentary: how is investment determined? We could expand this to the question of how labor needs are determined as well. It’s too easy to say that labor-managed firms under MS will sell what consumers want, at prices that are determined in a market. Or that all firms would do so. I say the market efficiency pretensions are misleading.

The availability of consumer or intermediate investment goods depends on how production is organized, sometimes described as ‘upstream.’ Consumer demand to be realized has to feed into the organization of production in supplier firms that sit behind retail vendors. Even if all goods are sold in markets, how are the initial enterprises’ labor forces and capital stocks determined? Under MS, these further decisions are made by boards or public banks. Planning prevails. Moreover, such planning is supposed to be democratic, which makes it more difficult.

A note about meetings. I’ve been in a lot of them, so I’m a cynic about “democratic planning,” about which I claim no expertise. In meetings, no small amount of oxygen is used up by people who either don’t know much and/or who just want to hear themselves talk.

More broadly, really-existing, undemocratic planning bodies have been vulnerable to bad actors who were a combination of incompetent and corrupt. This is also the case in existing corporations and government departments. Even with the best of intentions all around, planning is burdened by massive information requirements, the classic objection raised by economists like Friedrich Hayek. Nevertheless, planning goes forward, including in large public agencies and in nations with social-democratic systems, not to mention in the Peoples Republic of China (PRC). My friend Bill Niskanen used to say the second largest planned economy in the world was the U.S. Department of Defense.

A subset of democratic planning is planning by selected officials supplemented by public participation, which means meetings where outsiders are able to speak their piece. I used to call this “death by outreach.” More cynicism on my part. A dirty secret about such proceedings: the bodies running them are not looking for substantive, technical advice; they are taking a political temperature. Open participation also opens the door to narrow interests who can deploy professional advocates.

Under certain versions of MS, the workers in enterprises reap the entire profits made by their firm, after a deduction for maintenance of capital. In some versions, there is a rental charge for capital, the entirety of which is owned by the state. One problem I have mentioned myself is that workers, especially younger workers, could prefer higher compensation to viable longer-term investment.

One possible question I’ve been avoiding is how the workers could seize ownership of firms and their capital? Technically this could also be a simple matter. The state could incrementally accumulate ownership stakes through taxation. Governments already own significant shares of private corporations. The difficulty is not the means, it’s the politics.

Norway’s government owns $2 trillion of private sector assets through its Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF), fed, by the way, from the profits of offshore oil extraction in the North Sea, which comes out to $340,000 per citizen. The state of Alaska’s Permanent Fund is around $89 billion, also founded on oil revenues.

I did a piece on this subject, pointing out that in taxaphobic U.S., the problem for an SWF is how the money to buy assets would be raised. It is all well and good to propose a universal basic income financed by an SWF. But who paid for the SWF?

Why not build up a fund for the U.S., incrementally transferring ownership of the means of production to the state? The increments could be large, politics permitting. Leave firms under current management, but incentivize worker participation in management, as in certain European countries?

Democratic socialism has given us, piece by piece, the welfare state, with all its deficiencies, and likewise, trade unionism. Leninism in its usual conception (contradicted by Lenin himself, prior to 1917, not to mention Marx and Engels) had one dramatic, short-lived success and provided no lessons for subsequent political practice. It was a one-off. There were no repeats, not even close.

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is progressing along democratic socialist lines. New York City Mayor Mamdani did not propose to nationalize the means of production, merely to provide some public grocery stores in areas of NYC known as “food deserts” (places where residents lack convenient access to supermarkets). He didn’t even suggest the city monopolize area grocery sales, which would have been bone-headed but consistent with some folks’ understanding of socialism.

As DSA progresses, now with 120,000 members, the nitwits on its National Political Committee debate how to hold it back, either by insisting on moralistic, impractical political stances or by demanding that use of a Democratic Party electoral line, that control of one of our two major parties, be foregone. A kiss of death, in other words.

Jacobin wunderkind ex-editor Bhasker Sunkara writes that he fears success will coopt the movement. It is certainly possible that progress could be slowed to a crawl. What people miss is that how to proceed by increments, small or not-so-small, is precisely the political problem. It is not solved by simply upholding the morally-satisfying maximum program. That is in fact an evasion, much like misguided urges for a third party or a ‘workers party.’

I’ve argued that democratic socialism is like a vector. It has a launching point (the current situation) and a direction. A vector has a length, or distance, and an end-point, but we only need the end-point to establish the direction. How fast and far we go is a tactical question. I’ve tried to explain how the logic of socialism differs from liberalism. We do not need to map out the ultimate objective in any detail. As we move forward, we will know what we are gaining and what we still need.

Another common misconception is to distinguish socialism from ‘social-democracy’ or liberalism by some kind of democratization of the economy. “People before profits.” Some stress public ownership of the “means of production,” an idea so vague as to be meaningless. Others speak of “workers control” (of what, exactly?). I honestly doubt many have a clue as to what any of that means.

Understanding public ownership as a principle is uninformed. Some things are better public than private, and vice-versa. There is no good reason for everything to be public. I’ve suggested the biggest priorities for public ownership.

I recently published a column explaining democratic socialism in one of our local newspapers. The objections are instructive.

One was to just yell socialism is not what you say, it’s communism and it’s bad bad bad. One alluded to my appearance as proof of his argument. It’s difficult to formulate an argument in a short comment, but none of them tried. It was all argument by assertion or bogus MAGA claims. This suggests the Mamdani approach can work, since the other side has no good response.

This is Virginia, so the message is a little watered-down. But not too much.

I know everyone has two questions. The first is, what the hell is gabagool? It’s a cold cut, properly known as capicola. Apparently gabagool is New Jersey/Italian slang. I don’t think I’ve ever had any. My Italian cold cut of choice is prosciutto.

The other burning question is what is sfogliatelle? It looks pretty good, though my dieting precludes pastry in morning.

Both of these things hold their own, but they don’t beat pastrami or a good cheese danish.

The familiarity of the show for me is in the geography. I’m from North Jersey and people say we have an accent. (Actually it’s everybody else who talks funny.) I spent years driving around the area in a different life, especially the highway to NYC on the Pulaski Skyway. I used to call it the Pulaski Smellway. For a while I lived in Newark and then Belleville (one of its suburbs) in the Anthony Imperiale years. On the other hand, even though I grew up in northern New Jersey with Italians, I never knew anybody like the characters in the show.

These characters are mostly despicable people. What is their attraction? Perhaps because the acting and writing are so good, the characters strike a convincing blend of good and evil. A few of the women are not so bad, especially the psychiatrist, Tony’s wife, and his daughter. The others all lie to each other and steal from each other. Almost nobody who comes into contact with the ‘Family’ escapes unscathed. If they smell money on you, you’re screwed.

The Russian gangsters and molls in the show have the virtue of honesty. So too the Jewish gangsters. You always know where you stand with them. I keep thinking of the plot hole about the Russian marked for execution who escapes from Paulie and Christopher in the snows of the Pine Barrens in South Jersey. He and his mates should have been itching for revenge, but they disappear from the story. I raised this question in a Facebook group devoted to the show and got driven out like a heretic.

The quote in the title of this post recurs throughout the series, the first time from Tony’s spooky, conniving mother Livia, played by Nancy Marchand in an epic performance. It really embodies the core of the series, a self-pitying contempt for the cares of others on the part of assorted characters.

I don’t get Tony’s appeal to women. Christopher makes more sense. Tony seems to be able to seduce just about any women he fancies. Why? He reminds me of me, before I lost 50 pounds. Also, I still have hair.

My favorite word from the show is “googootz,” which Tony applies to his good-for-nothing idiot son. It’s more Italian slang, this one for zucchini.

My other recent TV diversion via Amazon was a documentary about the Soviet resistance to the German invasion in World War II. Two seasons, about twenty episodes. A fair amount of obvious reenactment and animated sequences, but also plenty of newsreel/documentary footage too. The story is amazing and fascinating, the narration not much polluted by Russian propaganda.

My abiding impression: the U.S. and FDR, through some combination of lassitude, political constraints, and poor preparation, sat back while for three years (1941-1944) the Nazis kicked hell out of Russia and murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews, Poles, Gypsies, etc. The motivation of the U.S., to favor Germany and the USSR debilitating each other while Jews were massacred, has been well-documented.

D-Day wasn’t until 1944 in June, by which time the Soviets had turned the tide and threatened to engulf Europe. Greatest generation, my ass. It doesn’t justify what Putin has been up to in Ukraine, but it does explain it to some extent.

I hadn’t realize how weaselly the “neutral” Swedes were, shipping iron ore to Hitler and harrassing the Russian navy. Finland was even worse. I suppose there wasn’t much else they could have done. They could have fought more like Norway and gotten pummeled for their trouble. Finland had been attacked by the Soviets.

Dad brought home a Russian hat with a red star on it and an automatic pistol with a working firing pin but no magazine. The hat has long since been lost. I held onto the pistol but eventually threw it away, out of fear of being caught with it during my lawless years.

In the close-in D.C. suburbs in Virginia where most ‘Northern’ Virginia DSA action has transpired, it’s mostly younger, well-to-do professionals and Hispanics. The former has been the usual source of DSA membership. The older retired folks like me move further out, where housing is bigger and cheaper.

At any rate, I wanted to be sure not to miss the meet. I played my SDS card and the young fellow running the meeting asked, “What’s SDS?” Ha ha.

Its big issue is going to be the data centers, all the rage here among liberals, about which I have mixed feelings. I did a substack post on the subject, but now I think I may have overstated. My misgivings about the opposition is its dominance by bourgeois environmentalist types who represent well-off homeowners opposed to economic development in general. The hardest part of that is opposition to new housing construction. Less well-off folks here are hurting over the costs of housing, while many suburban liberals have huge houses on huge lots in areas where zoning blocks multi-family housing. Service workers -- electricians, retail clerks, etc. -- can’t afford to live here, where their jobs are. My electrician moved out to West Virginia, where he says he is “redneck rich,” no doubt due to cheaper housing costs. The suburbanites don’t want more people nearby. I think that’s bad. The anti-data center campaigns strike me as bad politics.

As I wrote previously, the data centers make for good jobs and pay a lot of tax revenue that supports better-paid public employees, especially teachers. Our county’s schools are pretty well-regarded and have held up under the MAGA assaults over ‘Critical Race Theory’ and transgender matters. The data center boom in the county is like an oil gusher, but like most economic development, it comes with costs, possibly higher utility rates, as well as public revenue. It’s the net impact that matters, but that net is difficult to calculate. In our U.S. anti-tax environement, the public sector can ill-afford to forego any tax sources.

Last week I took in a webinar run by Indivisible, the most active lefty force in my area, which went on about the environmental costs of data centers, which I do not doubt at all, but not one word about the tax revenue they provide, nor how the curtailment of any such revenue would be coped with.

On the other side of the argument, a progressive, albeit vague attack on data centers could result in stiffer regulation. Even my DSA comrades admit the most relevant, short-term objective is regulation, not outright abolition. Regulation would put more focus on the evil Dominion Power, one of the biggest sources of political donations in our completely unregulated, corrupt state campaign finance system.

Besides data centers, the other imminent local action is to defend tenants (mostly Hispanic) from rapacious landlords.

I’ve long thought that Leesburg, VA, is ripe for a DSA branch but there do not appear to be many openings for a progressive candidacy in the county. The Democratic office-holders are all Mom and apple pie types. Our new Congressman, Suhas Subramanyam, is pretty weak tea. He may be the best we can do, but I suspect not. The liberals here are mostly animated by concern about homophobia and transphobia; it’s their kids and their kids’ friends. They don’t want more housing either.

So it goes in my corner. In general VA is trending blue. The new governor on balance is doing good things -- more good than not so good, pushed by our blue state legislature. Democratic voters tend to be geographicaly concentrated in higher-income and minority areas, but their numbers are growing.

One important opportunity here is the anti-Zionist sentiment regarding Gaza in our burgeoning South Asian population. There aren’t too many Jews here. There is one liberal-ish congregation, the other two not so much.

On top of that, the local Indian population, otherwise inclined to the revolting Modi, is itself victimized by racism. The South Asians in general are very good at politics. Many local office holders hail from that constituency. Even the local MAGAs have figured out they need to front some of them to succeed in elections.

The crypto swine have unlimited funds to intervene in our elections, the better to recruit toadies who will oppose prudent regulation of their industry, a constant threat to world financial stability. Zionist operatives supply the libelous accusations of antisemitism, as they did against Jeremy Corbyn in the U.K. The American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee runs dark money from assorted billionaires and front groups. AIPAC has become so tainted by Israel’s genocidal policies that it is obliged to conceal its aid under cover of anodyne labels and campaigns that ignore Israel entirely.

The Zionists and the Arab participants in Trump’s “Gaza peace plan” (sic), today endorsed by no less than Hillary Clinton, if that isn’t the Kiss of Death I don’t know what is, still beat the drums for further war with Iran. Assorted opportunists among Democrats are on this bandwagon by condemning Trump, in effect, for breaking off hostilities.

Take the “surrender” idea. The word imparts militant legitimacy to Trump’s cockamamie justifications, by lamenting they were not fulfilled. If I brutalize somebody and then stop, is that a “surrender”?

It is true that Trump has walked back from all his idiotic excuses for the war. JD Vance has caved even more forthrightly. Democrats who attack them for that should be boiled in oil.

One such excuse was that Iran could not have nukes. Of course, they don’t have them and weren’t about to get them, Netanyahu’s lies notwithstanding. They have reiterated what they already said when the deal with Obama was made (a deal neglected by Sleepy Joe and Mrs. Clinton). Pakistan and North Korea, regimes no less sketchy than Iran, have had nukes for years. What’s the big deal?

Two was the uranium, in Trump’s words the “nuclear dust.” There was talk of a special ops raid to recover the material. Now DT says that stuff is worthless and doesn’t matter.

Three was their missiles. Now DT says other countries have them, why not Iran. Fuckin’ A!

Four was the liberation of the Iranian people from their tyrannical government. The only one who believed that was the Shah’s idiot son. There is no plausible scenario wherein bombing a nation empowers its people to overthrow their government.

Five was the money. Remember when the Rs were screaming about Obama giving Iran money? Of course it was their money, previously frozen. Now Trump admits it is their money. Moreover, there is the talk about over $300 billion in funding for reconstruction. We should wonder who else will get a taste of that.

Like the blind warthog who finds an acorn, the intrinsic infeasibility of the U.S./Israeli attack, combined with approaching midterms in the U.S., has pushed the Mango Mussolini towards the light. Anyone who obstructs this progress is unworthy of respect, not to mention political support.

For example, the bright Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, one of the Democrats’ foreign policy mavens, has the clever stance of simultaneously pointing out that the war was a bad idea (true), and it accomplished nothing, as if more ought to have been accomplished.

We are not quite out of the woods on all this. Israel isn’t quitting Lebanon, so the fat man isn’t singing.

I did say “almost.” The simple problem with BDS is that it is tainted by chauvinism regarding Israel’s right to self-determination. Israel’s chauvinism explains BDS chauvism, a.k.a. “nationalism,” but it does not justify it. As from Kindergarten, two wrongs do not make a right. Socialism beats nationalism, democracy is foundational to socialism, and self-determination is necessary for democracy. BDS’s obsession with the “normalization” of Israel is a denial of its right to self-determination. It dovetails with the periodic antisemitic lapses observed in BDS-adjacent agitation.

Self-determination means respect for national sovereignty, regardlesss of what you think of a nation’s conduct. Socialists should like self-determination because it is conducive to countries not brutalizing weaker countries. It’s good for World Peace. We like Peace. War is usually waged for the benefit of corrupt, self-interested elites. Them we don’t like. Kindergarten stuff again.

Leo goes on about BDS’s habitually over-the-top conflation of all Zionists and Jews with the worst of Israel’s actions. I’ve made this point myself. The enemy is not individuals, however Zionist their sympathies, but Israeli policy and its fundamental supporting ideology, which was chauvinist, nationalist, and imperialist from its very start in the 19th Century.

What about self-determination for Palestine? Of course, that merits support as well. In fact, as I’ve previously asserted, Israel’s denial of Palestinian self-determination is nearly disabling with respect to its own right to self-determination. That’s another reason why BDS should be indulged, if not embraced whole-heartedly.

BDS used to be toxic politics. The faults Leo recounts are not helpful. There could not have been more than a handful of Congressional districts where a pro-BDS stance would be tolerated. That has been changing. Thanks to Israel’s horrific acts, American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee donations have become a stain on centrist candidacies all over the U.S. Michigan might elect an anti-Zionist senator.

But the carnage in Gaza, the West Bank, and elsewhere is ongoing. The shift in public opinion is not happening fast enough, which is why for practical purposes we still need to find common cause with liberal Zionists like J Street. BDS, for its part, can’t even see any value in explicit proclamations in support for Palestinian self-determination, because they come from Jews with incorrect thoughts.

Even the mad MAGAs are starting to turn against Israel, and given what passes for their intellectual faculties, Jews in general. I’ve always thought Trump, an obvious antisemite, would sell out Israel at the drop of a hat. That he has done so in a good cause by pausing the hostilities with Iran confuses people, but it does not erase the underlying prejudices boiling in the U.S. We are still in the woods.

First of all, four or even five percent isn’t so much. With a Democratic administration, there would be — or should be — few complaints from our side. That’s a tip-off to the inanity of the inflation babble. It’s also a set-up to get bitten in the ass if power shifted to the Democrats and inflation persisted. You can use conservative propaganda against Republicans, but that makes it easier for them to use it against you later.

Second of all, inflation or “affordability” glosses over the underlying, overriding issues: labor compensation and public benefits. If incomes are adequate, prices become intrinsically less important. Incomes goes to the state of political power — the power of employers to cram down wages and salaries, and the power of the Right to constrain public benefits. Related, I’ve been promoting Arin Dube’s substack on the benign effects of a higher minimum wage. Here is a Twitter version. My former employer The Economic Policy Institute has been on this forever.

Third, “inflation” obscures what I would classify as the three most important components of the elevated price level (not the periodic increase, which is the definition of inflation), important because of their magnitude and because of the availability of remedies in public policy. These three are health care, housing, and higher education.

We hear the most about gas prices, which first of all is determined by a global cartel and is not much susceptibile to government action. I realize I live a sheltered life, but I suspect most people can bite the bullet and pay $4 a gallon for gasoline. Yes I know there are exceptions. You can’t make a sound case on exceptions. Meanwhile, the biggest political targets get off scot-free.

First off, on health care, there is the shortfall in public insurance, including ‘ObamaCare’ subsidies and Medicaid cuts (the latter can be addressed by state government), as well as the inflated cost of prescription drugs due to monopolies in patents, as my friend Dean Baker tirelessly reminds us, and vertical integration in the private health insurance industry.

Second, housing. For policy this is a touch nut to crack but few things are more important for most families. We’ve had a shortfall in construction after the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, including the lame response from Democrats and the Obama Administration. There are fixes.

Third, higher education. The simplest to fix, starting with the recovery of state government aid to public colleges and universities. Relief from this source should put downward pressure on the costs of all post-secondary education. Don’t assume it has only happened in blue states.

When we talk in general terms about “inflation,” we either over-emphasize gas prices or we gloss over the more relevant, substantive policy issues.