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Picture of former President Bill Clinton looking downtrodden.

The Disastrous Legacy of the New Democrats

Clintonites taught their party how to talk about helping people without actually doing it.
"What difference would another world make?", Sam Pulitzer, 2021.

New Left Review

Who did neoliberalism?
Demonstrators holding signs during a student walkout over coronavirus pandemic safety measures at Chicago Public Schools.
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Students Are Protesting Covid Policies — And the Adults Who Won’t Listen to Them

For a century, student activists have demanded a say in their schools.
Picture of Joe Manchin

Joe Manchin’s Deep Corporate Ties

An underexamined aspect of Manchin’s pro-business positions in the Senate is his early membership in the American Legislative Exchange Council.
Exhibit

Social Safety Net

How Americans through the years have approached the thorny questions of identifying who the government is obliged to help and how such assistance should be funded and distributed.

Picture of a parent holding a child in a run-down room

The US Hasn't Changed How it Measures Who's Poor Since LBJ Began His War

Newer measures of poverty may do a better job of counting America's poor, which is necessary to helping them.
Immigrant mother and child embracing

As American as Family Separation

Though the cruelties of the Trump administration’s “Zero Tolerance” policy were unique, they were part of an American tradition of taking children from parents.
Undocumented students in support of DACA
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Biden Will Allow Undocumented Students To Access Pandemic Relief

For decades, policymakers have debated who may access public education and the social safety net.
Volunteer registered nurses from New Mexico give people coronavirus vaccines at a rural vaccination site in Columbus, N.M.
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Volunteering and Generosity Are No Substitutes for Government Programs

Conservatives have weaponized Americans’ desire to help to attack the social safety net.
A graphic that reads "taxpayer dollars."

"Taxpayer Dollars:" The Origins of Austerity’s Racist Catchphrase

How the myth of the overburdened white taxpayer was made.
Joe Biden.
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The History of Using Computers to Distribute Benefits Like Biden’s Relief Checks

Technology can break down, but just as often with government tech, glitches are rooted in policy failures.
A shack on Eastland's plantation, as it appeared in the 1964 film

He Risked His Life Filming A Mississippi Senator's Plantation In 1964

Fannie Lou Hamer is among the sharecroppers interviewed in this unauthorized documentary about the plantation of Dixiecrat James Eastland.
image of Milton Friedman reading a book

"Welfare Without The Welfare State": The Death of the Postwar Welfarist Consensus

Cash transfers are an efficient response to the Covid-19 crisis, but UBI is a radical transformation of how states conceptualise and provide for people’s needs.

On the Insidious ‘Laziness Lie’ at the Heart of the American Myth

Devon Price wonders why we equate sloth with evil.

Thirty Glorious Years

Postwar prosperity depended on a truce between capitalist growth and democratic fairness. Is it possible to get it back?
Daycare classroom
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Richard Nixon Bears Responsibility for the Pandemic’s Child-Care Crisis

The policy roots of today’s childcare crisis.

Stop Worrying About Protecting ‘Taxpayers.’ That Isn’t the Government’s Job.

Republicans are replacing the public good with a far narrower definition of it.

America’s Long War on Children and Families

Trump’s family separation policy belongs to a much longer history of U.S. government forces taking children from families that don't match the American ideal.
Prison security guard wearing a mask.
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The Policy Mistakes From the 1990s That Have Made Covid-19 Worse

Being tough on crime and cutting benefits from the poor left millions more susceptible to disease.
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The Sting of ‘Thank You for Your Service’

The benefits that come with serving the country have withered in recent decades.

Everything You Know About Mass Incarceration Is Wrong

The US carceral state is a monstrosity with few parallels in history. But most accounts fail to understand how it was created, and how we can dismantle it.

Not So Great

Reflections on the problems with progressives’ central principle that activist government is the only mechanism able to solve a modern society’s problems.

Impossible Contradictions

Even Donald Trump’s most draconian and violent immigration policies are still circumscribed by the interests of capital.

How Nativism Went Mainstream

Three decades ago, California was the launchpad for a virulent strain of anti-immigrant politics that soon spread nationwide.

The Forgotten Failures of the Great Society

A review of "Great Society: A New History," by Amity Shlaes.

Andrew Yang and the Failson Mystique

America has already witnessed the largest UBI experiment known to history — the postwar middle-class housewife. And she was utterly miserable.
Sketches of soldiers on the cover of "Bodies In Blue."

Civil War Disability in the Light and the Dark

Beyond the "casualty numbers and bloodshed," a new history takes into account the "social and structural issues" of disability among soldiers and veterans.

The Square Deal

Some people called it "Welfare Capitalism." George F. Johnson called it "The Square Deal."

The Dawn of Big Government and the Administrative State

A new book correctly diagnoses how non-elected agencies are running the country, but falls short on how it got this way.

The Bitter Origins of the Fight Over Big Government

What the battle between Herbert Hoover and FDR can teach us.

The Making of an Iconic Photograph: Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother

The complex backstory of one of the most famous images of the Great Depression.

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