Americans often divide life into two settings: home and work. But life frequently involves the third-place informal gathering spots such as diners and coffee shops, bowling alleys and barbershops, church basements and library meeting rooms.

These third places, a term popularized by sociologist Ray Oldenburg in his 1989 book The Great Good Place, are crucibles of friendship, apprenticeships in citizenship, and the everyday practice of pluralism. It’s in keeping with the long American tradition of volunteer associations, acknowledged by observers from Alexis de Tocqueville to Robert Putnam (of Bowling Alone fame). Sadly, we use them less; now, we need them most. Our New Year’s resolution for 2026 should include a simple but demanding commitment: to reinvigorate third places in our communities—and their presence in our own lives.

Read more in Washington Monthly. 

Ukrainians are freezing and dying in the dark this winter as Russian missiles and drones relentlessly pound their power plants and other civilian targets. You’d expect Americans, who fought for eight long years to win their independence from another colonial power, would side instinctively with Ukraine.

And they do. Most — now including a majority of Republicans — favor sending more U.S. military assistance to Kyiv. Yet President Trump seems less moved than peeved by Ukraine’s stubborn resistance to Russia’s savage war of conquest and refuses its defenders weapons they desperately need to even the odds.

It seems the president values his unrequited man-crush on Russian dictator Vladimir Putin more than the trivial matter of Ukrainians’ freedom. This week, Trump made a mockery of his own “Board of Peace” for Gaza by inviting the Kremlin warlord to join.

Perhaps to impress his bellicose pal, Trump has turned to war. He’s attacked Venezuela. He threatened to bomb Iran again if it doesn’t stop killing protesters. And in a fit of pique over not winning a Nobel Peace Prize, he vowed to seize Greenland by force before backing off in a bizarre speech to world leaders Wednesday in Davos.

Read more in The Hill.

The 250th anniversary of America’s founding provides an opportunity to reflect on—and fight over—the country’s extraordinary story. Unfortunately, many of the serious scholars who study America—its history, literature and culture—fail to provide a balanced and nuanced account of the country’s complex tale.

On the one hand, America’s is a story of greatness: The U.S. is the wealthiest and most powerful nation on the planet. Its founders created what is now the world’s longest-lasting liberal democratic constitution. The Declaration of Independence put forth revolutionary ideas about human freedom and equality that ushered in a new era for the world. At the same time, the American experience is complicated. Our history includes the mistreatment of Native Americans, slavery and Jim Crow, and high levels of economic inequality that persist to this day.

No issue seems to befuddle Republicans more than health care. Last week, they failed for the umpteenth time to produce a convincing plan to make health coverage more affordable for working Americans.

The Republican-controlled Senate blocked a Democratic bill to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies for health insurance beefed up during the pandemic to help working families pay their premiums. The Republican alternative also failed to get enough votes to avoid a filibuster.

House Republicans this week likewise rejected bipartisan proposals to scale back and better target the premium subsidies. Instead, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) cobbled together a modest grab bag of proposals that bore scant resemblance to Senate Republicans’ bill.

Keep reading in The Hill.

Less than a decade ago, young U.S. progressives started agitating for a Green New Deal to combat climate change and usher in a planned economy more planet-friendly than capitalism.

It was a bold, if implausible, demand for a crash program to rid America of fossil fuels. Animating it were decades of increasingly dire prophesies about how global warming is irreversibly impairing life on Earth.

Lecturing world leaders at a 2019 United Nations climate conference, Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg won rapturous applause when she informed her audience, “You have stolen my childhood.”

In the U.S., environmental groups pressured politicians to keep fossil fuels “in the ground” even as advances in fracking technology were unlocking a bonanza of shale oil and gas.

In 2020, first-term Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) stoked a social media frenzy by joining Green New Deal activists in a ‘60s-style sit-in in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) office.

President Joe Biden got with the program, portentously calling climate change “an existential crisis” rising above such humdrum public concerns as spiking inflation and uncontrolled immigration.

Today, however, the Green New Deal seems to have fallen to earth, borne down by the inexorable gravity of economic and political reality. Therein lies a cautionary tale for Democrats about the gulf that separates elite and popular opinion on climate change.

Put simply, green activists have failed to convert America’s non-college majority to their cause. Working class voters recognize the problem but it takes a back seat to their everyday economic and social concerns.

Read more in The Hill

Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral victory in New York City, while historic, is not the story Democrats should focus on as they look to regain majorities in 2026 and win the presidency in 2028.

Why? Because Mamdani won just 50% of the vote in a reliably blue city — one that has voted Democratic for generations and likely will for generations to come. The real lessons for Democrats can be found in New Jersey and Virginia, where Govs.-elect Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger showed us how Democrats can win, and win big, by reconnecting with voters who have largely felt left behind by the Democratic Party.

At the Progressive Policy Institute, we have been speaking with these same kinds of voters. In a report authored by Claire Ainsley and Deborah Mattinson, PPI found plenty of evidence that the Democratic Party has moved further from the mainstream values of most Americans.

Keep reading in The Well News.

The media is puzzling over voters choosing centrist Democrats in Virginia and New Jersey and democratic socialists in New York City and Seattle.

Take a step back, though, and this election looks a lot like President Trump’s sweep last year: An unsettled electorate still in revolt against the status quo and punishing whoever’s in power.

The voters’ message was less about ideology than institutions. Americans believe their political and governing institutions are broken and want someone who can fix them. They are frustrated with leaders who inflame tribal partisanship rather than forging consensus around tackling pressing national problems. And they think the government has grown too big, costly and stuck in a “can’t do” mentality that puts process over results.

Such attitudes are particularly a problem for Democrats, who present as defenders rather than reformers of failing public institutions. The problem isn’t lack of resources. Former President Joe Biden’s prodigious spending didn’t lower living costs or improve economic prospects for the non-college majority. Voters’ shifts towards Democrats this month, however, indicated that Trump’s tariffs and power grabs aren’t doing the job, either.

When things aren’t working, radical change becomes the pragmatic course for political leaders. But radical change in which direction?

Keep reading in The Hill.

Demeaned and taunted by President Trump for nine dispiriting months, Democrats finally had a chance on Tuesday to respond with something more than theatrical gestures of resistance. Tapping a rich vein of anti-Trump sentiment, a party famished for wins racked up one after another in America’s odd-year elections.

Suddenly, Democrats seem politically relevant again. The victories, coming in mainly blue states and cities, don’t necessarily presage big gains in next year’s national midterm elections. For that, they’ll need to win on more competitive terrain. Nonetheless, Tuesday’s outcomes confirmed growing public dismay with Trump’s imperious rule, as well as Democrats’ ability to start reclaiming ground he seized in last year’s presidential contest.

This is good news for Labour activists in the UK and around the world, as it shows the fractures in the administration are beginning to take political effect.

Most consequential were the big Democratic victories in Virginia and New Jersey. Abigail Spanberger won the Virginia’s governor’s race by 15 points, leading a sweep of top state offices that flipped the state back into the blue column. Democrats also added seats in the state legislature, amassing their biggest majority since 1989.

Continue reading in LabourList.

Why is President Trump so intent on inflicting his unpopular tariffs on the U.S. economy? How did America, always a trading nation bordering two oceans, suddenly become the free world’s glowering bastion of protectionism?

The president’s logic is often fuzzy, but for once he and his economic team have a clear answer: They’re on a mission to reindustrialize America. They call it “economic nationalism,” but it’s really just central planning, MAGA-style.

Trump believes free trade agreements and globalization eviscerated U.S. manufacturing, studding the landscape with shuttered factories — “tombstones” as he put it in his bleak 2017 inaugural address.

In fact, U.S. manufacturing output has grown substantially since 1980. What has declined is factory employment and manufacturing’s share of GDP. That tracks the trend of deindustrialization and rising demand for services in all advanced countries, regardless of trade policies.

Nonetheless, the president is ripping up trade agreements and taxing imports from friends and foes alike, in hopes of generating lots more factory jobs. But building walls around our economy won’t change the fact that automation has severed the old relationship between increased industrial production and blue-collar job growth.

Keep reading in The Hill.