New Future

In the last 20 years, Democrats have worked diligently to bring their electoral strategy into line with their Clinton-era neoliberal economic program. Class dealignment was therefore no accident — it was the foreseeable (and foreseen) consequence of changes made by Democrats in their economic and electoral strategy.

Latino voters’ decisive contribution to Donald Trump’s return to power has puzzled progressive analysts. An analysis of Latinos’ material insecurity and labor market vulnerability shows that rejecting the Democrats and exploring entry into the MAGA coalition, while alarming, was predictable. Like blue-collar white voters in 2016, working-class Latinos did not embrace Trump because they are sexist xenophobes but rather because they lack alternatives for effectively defending their interests.

This issue of Catalyst focuses on the current political moment in the United States. There is every reason to believe that the second Donald Trump presidency is not going to be anything like the first. Not only is Trump himself better prepared; he has substantially added to his electoral base.

Hyperpolitics seeks to politicize every space without prioritizing any particular one. While apparently left-wing, hyperpolitics is in fact a bourgeois radicalization with a distinctive social base and political culture. Progressives are wrong to think that it offers a pathway to social justice. It is in fact a symptom of middle-class hegemony in social movements, from which the Left must break out.

Donald Trump’s decisive victory in the 2024 presidential election has had at least one interesting consequence: an acknowledgment that voters responded forcefully to an anxiety about their economic well-being. A version of November’s lessons might be applied to the socialist left as well — we overlook people’s material interests at our own peril.

For over a decade, Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution offered leftists hope that another world was possible. This hope was based on real successes but rested on unsustainable foundations. As Nicolás Maduro tries to shore up his embattled government, it is time to take stock of Chavismo’s impressive achievements and its profound shortcomings.

During the first half of the twentieth century, millions of American workers and farmers wanted to socialize banking. In a nation where socialist principles supposedly lacked appeal, grassroots support for public banks revealed the prevalence and popularity of economic ideas that intersected and overlapped with socialism. Banking politics also presents a potential source of working-class political mobilization today.

George Orwell’s ethics of equality deserve careful consideration from general readers and academic moral philosophers alike. A new book offers a spirited defense of Orwell as a philosophical outsider but fails to historicize his socialist egalitarianism.

Is the success of the electoral left in contemporary Mexico linked to the emergence of a new social pact? This article outlines the trajectory of the electoral left, parsing out its understanding of neoliberalism as a political economy of corruption and the budding features of actually existing post-neoliberalism in the country.

Embracing national belonging strategically and redefining it with inclusive, progressive values can boost consensus and counter the Right’s dominance. However, this approach is neither straightforward nor without risks, which must be carefully considered.

The recent elections in Mexico are a tremendous development in continental politics. The election of Claudia Sheinbaum as president represents not just a continuation of Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s progressive agenda but the potential for lasting change in the country’s political economy.

The Gulf states are transit states because migrants constitute a majority of their populations. The politics of labor control is central to the organization of these states and to the predominance of their political and capitalist classes. The contradiction of Gulf labor politics lies in the autocratic nature of rule based on nonmarket forms of labor control and the continuous demand of the market for a willing labor force.

The US-Israeli genocide of Palestinians continues to roil global affairs. But since the publication of our previous issue, one of the most significant developments has been the eruption of a massive wave of protest on university and college campuses across the United States.

This essay reexamines the common scholarly and political refrain that the New Deal was fundamentally racist. In a close examination of the most influential arguments from this view, I show that they fail to make the case that racial animus was the main driver behind the legislation’s shortcomings and present little guidance for moving forward.