The Vast Majority Micah Uetricht

The Democratic Socialists of America's biennial convention is in Atlanta this weekend. The rise of the DSA is one of the most promising developments in American politics in at least half a century. I talked to Andrew Sernatinger, a member of Madison DSA, an elected delegate to the convention, and a rank-and-file member of Teamsters 695, about what's at stake at the convention.

You can read Andrew's pieces about the convention and the state of DSA in New Politics: https://newpol.org/dsa-2019-convention-breakdown/ https://newpol.org/dsas-growing-pains/

Also, if you're going to be in Atlanta, come to the Jacobin "Our Socialism Is International" event, featuring leftist guests from Peru, Sudan, Brazil, Japan, Germany, the Philippines, and Yemen. https://www.facebook.com/events/489420788296872/

It's gotten heated this last week between Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the squad, on the one hand, and Nancy Pelosi, centrist Democrats, and the House Democratic Party leadership on the other. But this conflict isn't empty intra-party bickering. It's an actual political and moral battle, with one side, AOC's, on the right side of history and one, Pelosi's, not.

Miles Kampf-Lassin wrote about the battle and what it means, in an article called "They're Not Just Mad at AOC — They're Scared of Her." https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/07/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-aoc-nancy-pelosi-democratic-party





We also mentioned a recent Washington Post profile of AOC's chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, that's worth a read: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/magazine/wp/2019/07/10/feature/how-saikat-chakrabarti-became-aocs-chief-of-change/

The New York Times recently attacked Bernie Sanders’s record on solidarity with Nicaragua in the 1980s. It probably won’t be the last time we see redbaiting attacks against Sanders in the election season, so it’s important to establish what exactly happened in Central America in the 1980s, how brutal US intervention in the region was, what the Central American solidarity movement of that era looked like, and what side of history was the right one to be on.

Hilary Goodfriend discusses all of this in her recent article ”Why Bernie Sanders Was Right to Oppose US Intervention in Central America.”

Hilary is a doctoral student in Latin American Studies at the Universidad Autonoma de Mexico in Mexico City. You can read her article here:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/07/bernie-sanders-central-america-sandinista

Elizabeth Warren is, by American political standards, a very strong  presidential candidate. She has taken up a robust domestic social-democratic agenda — one that, while not as strong as Bernie Sanders’s, is pretty damn good.

Foreign policy, however, is a different story. Here, Elizabeth Warren is far from the most hawkish in her party. But she still leaves much to be desired, as Sarah Lazare recently wrote in a piece titled “Elizabeth Warren Can and Should Do Better on Foreign Policy.”

Sarah Lazare is a web editor at In These Times. You can read her piece on Elizabeth Warren’s foreign policy here (https://jacobinmag.com/2019/05/elizabeth-warren-foreign-policy).

Bernie Sanders has been talking a lot about the New Deal lately, mentioning it in his recent speech on democratic socialism. Ironically, the response from many liberals has been to argue that the New Deal wasn’t really socialism. Jacobin’s Seth Ackerman has a few quibbles.

Plus, we talk about why the idea that the New Deal was racist doesn’t fully capture its relationship to white supremacy.

Read Seth’s article on Bernie’s New Deal rhetoric here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/06/new-deal-socialism-bernie-sanders-democratic-primary

Read an interview with New Deal historian Richard Walker, who discusses the charge that the New Deal was racist, plus many other aspects of the New Deal’s wide-ranging policies, here:
https://jacobinmag.com/2019/03/green-new-deal-roosevelt-public-works