By Will Marshall

The torrent of antisemitism let loose by student protests against the war in Gaza is a national embarrassment, but it reflects especially badly on leaders of America’s elite colleges and the intersectional left.

Two Ivy League presidents, University of Pennsylvania’s Liz Magill and Harvard’s Claudine Gay, resigned from their jobs after a December congressional hearing during which they couldn’t give a straight answer when asked whether advocating genocide of Jews violates their university’s code of conduct.

Alas, this salutary rebuke to moral cowardice looks more like the exception than the rule. The Anti-Defamation League reports an upsurge in campus assaults and harassment targeting Jews. A plurality of Jewish college students say they don’t feel physically safe on campus.

Students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard have filed legal complaints alleging that school leaders have failed to protect Jewish students, professors and centers from hostile anti-Israel protesters.

Keep reading in The Hill.

By Jeremiah Johnson

Complaints about “The Man” were a common theme in film and television through the 70s, 80s, and 90s. As with so many parts of pop culture, the phrase had roots in Black film and television before migrating to the mainstream—what used to be a mainstay of blaxploitation films parroted by white teenage stoners. Anybody who grew up in the 90s can perfectly recollect “It’s just like, Society, mannnnn. It’s like, The Man, screwing us over,” as spoken by an angsty teen.

This was seen as ridiculous. Not all complaints about society are ridiculous, of course. But this particular one always was. The person spouting it was always a disaffected loser. They were rarely making any sort of coherent point. Sometimes they were just listing random things they disliked about the world. And at the end of the complaint was the all-blame-taking Man, the omnipresent Society who was responsible for it all in some sinister way.

Jack Black’s speech here in School of Rock provides a trope-defining example. At this point in the film, Black is a deadbeat who’s failed at most everything in his life. He has vague complaints ranging from the ozone layer to Shamu the whale, and believes that one used to fight The Man with ‘Rock n Roll’ until The Man ruined that as well with MTV. Black takes himself seriously, but to the audience he’s inherently comedic, an object of derision.

Fortunately, this trope became so well-worn that today we’re largely spared rants about The Man. Social commentators are too savvy to appear that childish. Unfortunately, the exact same vague complaint has resurfaced in a more respectable form.

Keep reading in American Purpose.

By Tim Ryan

Okay, I’ll admit it: Joe Biden surprised me last night.

I didn’t expect it. These major-league speeches are judged on both style and substance, and the presumption, after months of incessant question-raising about his age, was that the President would present like the title character in Weekend at Bernie’s.

But a prizefighter emerged from the door in the House chamber and gave a more electrifying State of the Union than I’ve seen in years. And he delivered a message sure to play well among the working-class voters I long represented in Ohio.

The speech transparently served to kick off the president’s re-election campaign. And it should put to rest any questions over whether Biden is too old to run again.

Keep reading in Newsweek.

 

 

By Will Marshall

Donald Trump fires up his MAGA legions by telling them Democrats hate America. Like his stolen election lie, it’s a textbook example of projection — charging his opponents with what he’s guilty of.

If you don’t think Trump detests the nation he aspires to lead, you haven’t been listening. Speaking recently before a rapt gathering of far-right activists, he sketched a nightmarish portrait of a dystopic America overrun by “bloodshed, chaos and violent crime.”

The nation’s 45th president risibly miscast himself as a “political dissident” bravely standing against “thugs and tyrants and fascists, scoundrels and rogues” who are leading the United States into “servitude and ruin.”

Reacting earlier to the judicial murder of a true political dissident, Trump twisted Alexei Navalny’s death in an icy Siberian prison camp into a grotesque analogy to his own supposed persecution by the “deep state.”

Keep reading in The Hill.

By Claire Ainsley

Readers of The Liberal Patriot will be familiar with the argument that the Democratic Party needs to reverse its decline with working-class Americans if it is to create durable governing coalitions—or even win at all, judging by the current state of the polls.

This argument has also been playing out in British politics over the past few years. The Labour Party, historically the party of the working class, was comprehensively defeated by Boris Johnson’s Conservatives at the last UK General Election in 2019. Labour’s fourth successive electoral defeat was all the more painful for the loss of what became known as the “Red Wall”  seats, a phrase coined by Conservative pollster James Kanagasooriam to describe parliamentary constituencies who voted Conservative for the first time in their history.

But the reality is that Labour had been losing support amongst working-class voters for two decades, and until Keir Starmer became leader in 2020 it was insufficiently focused on winning over new and traditional working-class voters to the party. Starmer appears to be reversing that decline, according to research by the Progressive Policy Institute, which commissioned a comprehensive poll of working Americans and working-class Brits ahead of the double U.S. and UK elections in 2024. YouGov’s research for PPI shows that Starmer’s Labour are on course to win a majority of working-class voters once again—but Labour’s six point lead amongst this group is narrower than amongst the general population, with polls showing Labour at least 15 points ahead of the Conservatives amongst all voters.

Keep reading in The Liberal Patriot.

By Kirsty McNeill, PPC

The Labour Party has one job in 2024: delivering Keir Starmer a majority that is deep, durable, disciplined and democratic.

Deep because, to overcome our catastrophic 2019 result, we must bring over voters from every demographic and every corner of the country.

Durable because Labour has to govern with a relentless focus on deserving a second term so that we can win era-defining change, not just history-defying swings.

Disciplined because the country needs a united team that is prepared to take a long-term view.

And, most of all, democratic because we obsess about securing both ongoing enthusiasm for – and participation in – our ambitious missions.

We visited the US to understand voters’ lack of enthusiasm for Biden

It was with this in mind that a delegation, hosted by the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) and Progressive Britain, travelled to the United States last week.

We were in Washington DC and Virginia to learn from the Democrats and try to understand why voters weren’t more enthusiastic about a presidency of such extraordinary consequence.

Keep reading in LabourList.

 

By Will Marshall

This essay is the first part of an exchange with historian Nelson Lichtenstein. Read responses 2, 3, and 4.

Is it really necessary to debate progressives again over Bill Clinton’s legacy? With a vengeful Donald Trump thrashing about our political waters like a blood-frenzied shark, it seems like a distraction.

What’s more, the left’s revisionist history of the Clinton years strikes me as a facile exercise in presentism—reinterpreting the past to score present-day ideological points. Nonetheless, the “neoliberal” legend seems to be gaining currency outside the activist and academic circles from which it sprang.

In a widely noted speech last April, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan took errant potshots at Clinton’s trade policies by way of touting the Biden Administration’s turn to industrial policy as a bold new departure in economic philosophy. Rolling out Bidenomics in July, President Biden confusingly described it as a rejection of the “trickle-down economics” that has supposedly held sway for the last 40 years—a period that includes the eight years of the Obama-Biden Administration.

Read more in Democracy Journal.

By Will Marshall

Campaign 2024 is just getting underway, but President Biden already has framed it as a fight to save American democracy. That’s true no matter who wins the Republican presidential nomination.

If it’s Donald Trump, the threat to democracy is obvious. Having already instigated one failed coup attempt, he won’t hesitate to reject the voters’ verdict if he’s defeated again in November.

And if he wins, Trump has vowed to sic the Justice Department on his political enemies and pardon the Jan. 6 rioters, defining treason down for future insurrectionists.

Even a Biden victory, though, would only be a reprieve from our deeper dilemma: Public confidence in democracy is cratering.

Read more in The Hill.

By Will Marshall

It’s been a dreary political winter for President Joe Biden. He’s buried under an avalanche of adverse polls showing perilously low public approval ratings as well as scant enthusiasm even among loyal Democratic voters.

The blizzard of bad news, however, doesn’t mean Biden will lose his job next November. That’s especially true if his opponent is the rabidly divisive Donald Trump, who is kryptonite to American democracy.

But the president’s consistently poor job performance numbers and the fact that he’s trailing Trump in many polls reflects a general Democratic failure to consolidate and expand the anti-Trump majority Biden assembled in 2020.

Over the past three years, Democrats have made little headway on their top strategic imperative: winning back working Americans. On the contrary, Trump has expanded his already enormous margins among white working-class voters even as Democratic support among Black and Hispanic non-college voters continues to erode.

Keep reading in The Hill.

By Claire Ainsley

As the Labour party looks increasingly likely to form the next UK government, it would do well to heed the warnings as well as the successes of the Biden administration’s investment programme unfolding in America.

Undoubtedly ambitious, the programme can reasonably claim to have contributed to the relatively strong growth and jobs rate in the US — hence Labour leader Keir Starmer’s desire to set out an economic plan that follows in its wake. Wages are up in America and inflation is coming down. With less than a year until the election, the US administration should have cause for optimism.

But the polling for President Joe Biden is dire, with the latest surveys placing him behind former president Donald Trump in key swing states that will determine the outcome of the overall contest. There are loud murmurings about a Democrat challenger to be the “next generation” figure. The party’s problems don’t start and end with a judgment on Biden, however. Their economic policies — much heralded by the centre-left worldwide, not just in the UK — are just not landing with the voters the Democrats need. Not yet, anyway.

Read more in The Financial Times.

By Claire Ainsley

The furore over Keir Starmer citing Margaret Thatcher as one of the defining prime ministers of the 20th century has somewhat obscured the question of the “meaningful change” a Labour government would deliver. The purpose of referencing prime ministers who delivered transformative change – whether we agree or disagree with their means and ends – is surely to position the next Labour government in the tradition of great reforming administrations. Ultimately, history will be the judge, but as we look towards a possible Labour government for the first time in 14 years, what meaningful change is the party arguing for?

The scale of the challenge facing Labour is daunting. Only this week, the Resolution Foundation’s Economy 2030 inquiry powerfully demonstrated that the British economy faces continued relative decline unless we urgently correct our course. Some of our malaise dates from the post-financial crisis era and the political and policy choices made in its aftermath, most notably austerity and a botched Brexit. But, depressingly, much of it is attributable to long-running structural weaknesses in the UK economy which predate the 2008 financial crisis, such as the lowest investment in the G7 over the past 40 years and high inequality between people and places.

The consequence of all this is that our middle and lower earners are far worse off than their counterparts in similar-sized economies. As the Resolution Foundation charted, typical households in Britain are 9 per cent poorer than their French equivalents, while low-income families are 27 per cent poorer.

Read more in The New Statesman.