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Gov. Shapiro on Mamdani-backed wins in NYC: Candidates doing ‘performative politics’ must learn ‘how to deliver results’
Tone, Humor, and the Performative Aspect of Politics
Senators John Kennedy (R-LA) and Peter Welch (D-VT) joined C-SPAN "Ceasefire" host Dasha Burns to discuss the roles of tone and humor in politics.
‘Performative reductions’: Labor MPs and business groups urge Burke against sweeping immigration changes
MPs say they are anxious for the government to avoid cuts to family and humanitarian visa categories
POLITICO Correspondent reports the WH wants countries to ‘participate performatively’ in Strait of Hormuz
Editorial: Chicago needs a data center strategy, not another performative stunt
Data centers raise legitimate concerns, but a yearlong moratorium threatens to leave Chicago behind in the AI economy. The city needs smart regulation, not political theater.
Reclaiming the Politics of the Possible
Washington is stuck in a cycle of performative conflict. The incentives seem to reward outrage, not outcomes that last; purity tests, not problem‑solving. So it’s no surprise that after three shutdowns in less than a year, public approval of Congress collapsed to just 10 percent this spring. (Gallup...
The Ken-ification of Hungarian Politics
June 29, 2026 | What does Orbán’s defeat reveal about the limits of performative masculinity in populist politics?
Bari Weiss: Think For Yourself, Not By Yourself
When we launched The Free Press, the plan was simple: Tell the truth plainly, and let readers come to their own conclusions. I thought there would be a sizable enough group of people who would pay the cost of one coffee a month to read high-quality news and opinion journalism. But what happened next surprised even me. Yes, you came for the stories—for the investigations, essays, debates, interviews, podcasts, and arguments. But over the past few years, you also found one another. I’ve watched strangers become friends in the lobby before our debates. I’ve seen people trade numbers after live recordings of Honestly, launch businesses after Free Press dinners, fall in love after our meetups—even get married (!?), and say some version of the same sentence over and over again: I thought I was the only one. We live in the most connected age in history, and yet, millions of people feel isolated, alienated, politically homeless, and starved for real conversation. We have followers and no neighbors. Algorithms instead of interlocutors. Our social media feeds are like troughs, but what we really need is a table to gather around. The Free Press is a publication, yes, but it is also a gathering place for independent minds. So today, I’m thrilled to share our new investment in you. We are launching a new world of community experiences for our paid subscribers, designed to bring _Free Press_ers together online and in real life. Introducing Our Community Launch The Free Press Forum Our new digital home for paid subscribers, the Forum, is now live. This is where _Free Press_ers can meet, debate, recommend, organize, joke, argue, and converse like civilized people. Imagine that. This is not social media as you know it. No bots. No algorithmic rage bait. No performative nonsense. Just smart people talking to one another. Inside the Forum, you’ll find conversations on the things our readers already care about most: the issues of the day, recommendations (books, music, travel), work and networking, parenting, dating, and where to find your people—online and in real life. Jump in! Introduce yourself and join the first conversations in the Free Press Forum here. You’ll also find announcements from us (paid subscribers are first to hear!) and our writers, hosting regular Ask Me Anythings (AMAs)—live conversations where subscribers can ask questions, push back, and continue the discussion beyond the page. This Thursday, subscribers can chat with our brilliant reporter, culture vulture, and co-founder Suzy Weiss. Friday, I’ll be lending you Nellie Bowles, queen of TGIF, to answer subscriber questions live. Read more about The Forum directly from Nellie here. The Free Press Supper Club The best part of being a _Free Press_er is meeting other _Free Press_ers. So we’re inviting you all to dinner to do just that. It’s part salon, part blind date, part old-fashioned dinner party. Here’s how it works: You answer a short questionnaire. We match you with a small group of _Free Press_ers in your city. We send you to a great restaurant. You show up for supper. The rest is up to you. Your next best friend, co-founder, or future spouse may already be waiting at the table. Learn more and sign up here for our first Supper Club in 12 cities in three countries taking place on June 18. Don’t see your city? Raise your hand if you’d like a Free Press Supper Club near you. Yes, St. Louis—we hear you. The Free Press Retreats and Excursions We’re also building something new for 2027: immersive experiences for Free Press readers who want to continue the conversation trailside, poolside, or around a fire long after dessert. The Free Press Retreat will be an intimate long weekend built around big ideas, outdoor adventure, great meals, and the kinds of discussions that happen when curious people spend meaningful time together. Bring your spouse, your parents, your children—or come on your own. Free Press Excursions will take us farther afield: curated trips with Free Press writers and contributors exploring places that help explain the world we live in, from the battlefields of Gettysburg and Normandy to the Vatican in Rome. We’ll share more details this summer. If you’d like an early look when these experiences open for registration, show your interest here.**A Note to Our Subscribers** These new offerings exist because of our paying subscribers. If you’re already one: Thank you. You built this. And you keep us going. If you’ve been reading us for free and wondering whether to join, this is a very good time. For a short while only, we’re offering a rare 20 percent discount for you to join our community as a paid subscriber. You’ll unlock everything we publish, plus exclusive access to our members-only Forum, Supper Clubs, and more insider perks. Thinking for yourself shouldn’t mean thinking by yourself. See you there. —Bari
This is the most performative thing ever, New Jersey politician says
Assemblyman Paul Kanitra, R-N.J., says I.C.E. is being used as a scapegoat by Democratic politicians on ‘The Ingraham Angle.’
The primary political reform and precondition for all others
In its current state, the American political system has no end of ailments. Far too many factors accelerate polarization and work against moderation and narrowing the differences. Media, and the way so many citizens limit themselves to agreeable, reinforcing sources, only dials up the division. Congress has become performative and is essentially crippled in carrying […]
You Uncool Performative Dorks Drove Up The Price Of Porsches And It's Ruining The Vibe
These are explicitly driver's cars, not collector pieces to shuttle to a cars and coffee once a month. Stop being a dork and be cool instead.
Tufts professor says students are ditching woke culture and find performative politics 'cringy'
Tufts professor says new college students are rejecting woke culture and demanding real debate. Campus politics shifting as generation embraces discourse.
The work you can't always see: Beer is political, part 2
Recently I published a piece about beer, politics, and the question of who speaks up and who doesn’t. I meant every word of it. I still do. And then my inbox opened up. Cleveland Prost is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe I’ve been writing about beer since 2014. For most of that time, I kept things deliberately light — taproom profiles, new releases, the people behind the pints. Gradually, over years of building this thing, you gave me something I didn’t expect: permission. Permission to go deeper. To say what I actually saw in this industry and what I actually believed about it. That trust isn’t something I take lightly. It’s why that piece existed at all, and it’s why this one does too. I’m not walking anything back. But I want to go further. In that piece, I wrote that beer has never existed outside the system. That immigration policy affects who staffs breweries and harvests ingredients. That labor policy affects taproom workers. That civil rights policy affects who feels safe walking into a taproom. That “beer does not exist in a vacuum. The idea that it does is comforting. It is also false.” I believe that as much now as I did when I wrote it. But one idea came back at me, in different forms, over and over (from reader emails, comments, and conversations): that beer itself isn’t political — that it only becomes political when someone decides to make it that way. That what we’re really seeing is a choice by individuals to inject division into something that doesn’t inherently require it. It’s a comforting idea. It’s also wrong — and I think it’s worth being precise about why. That framing assumes that breweries operate outside the conditions shaping everything else. That politics is something you choose to bring into a room that was, until then, clean and neutral. That if you stay quiet, you stay clear of it. But the room was never neutral. It was never clean. Politics is already in the room. It’s in who walks through the door comfortably and who hesitates. It’s in whether a space can be used for organizing without fear. It’s in whether helping someone quietly might carry consequences you have to think carefully about in advance. It’s in who staffed the brewery, who harvested the grain, who can afford to be a regular. The idea that you opt out of all that by staying quiet is an illusion. You only change how visible your response to it is. This is, I realize, a hard thing to hear if you came to a beer newsletter for something lighter. I wrote recently that “beer, for me, has always felt like a refuge — a third place in an increasingly fractured world.” I meant that. I still do. But a refuge is not an escape from reality. It’s a place to gather strength to face it. Here’s what I actually missed — and what I want to correct. Multiple people in the industry reached out to me. I’m not naming them and I’m not identifying their businesses, because that’s not my call. If and when they want to be loud about what they’re doing, that agency belongs to them. What I can share is the substance of what they said, because it complicated something I presented too cleanly. The overall message: *You don’t know what we all are doing.* And they’re right. I don’t. One example involved a collaboration brewed quietly to support another business facing serious challenges in a whole different region, with proceeds directed toward solidarity, community, and keeping operations afloat. No announcement. It could have been broadcast widely. The point was never publicity. Another example involved logistical support for community efforts: organizing safe transportation, providing space for meetings on otherwise closed days, facilitating gatherings under difficult conditions. All of it happening while balancing real financial pressure and genuine concern for personal safety. None of what they described is a brewer “deciding to make beer political.” It’s people responding to the conditions around them — conditions that are already shaping who feels safe, who has access, who can gather, who needs help, and who has the capacity to offer it. Politics, again, already in the room. Already shaping choices. Whether anyone announced it or not. I’ve spent decades in taprooms, at barrel releases, at festivals, in back offices and brewing floors, talking to the people who built this industry from nothing. I know how much happens that never makes it onto social media. I know the owner who quietly comp’d a tab for someone having a crisis. The brewer who drove an hour to pick up a stranger who needed a safe ride. The taproom that stayed dark on a Tuesday so a community group could use the space without it becoming A Whole Thing. None of that gets a post. Most of it never will. So when I wrote recently about silence — when I said that “silence right now doesn’t feel neutral, it feels like complicity” — I was writing about what I could see. And I was right about what I saw. The public silence of breweries that have the platform, the stability, and frankly the safety to say something and choose not to? That still troubles me. I’m not softening that. But some of what I read as silence is actually something else entirely. It’s people doing the work with their hands instead of their phones. It’s people who are genuinely afraid — not of being canceled, but of real consequences for their families, their employees, their ability to keep the doors open at all. That deserves more than a footnote. It deserves to be named clearly. Here’s the tension I want to sit with honestly: public statements matter. They matter because people can’t rally around something they can’t see. Visibility creates awareness and solidarity. It helps people find each other. It tells someone standing outside your taproom door, uncertain whether they’ll be welcomed inside, something they need to know — or whether it’s even safe for them to be in public at all. That’s not performative. I wrote recently that the craft beer movement “was built on collective defiance. It was built on rejecting consolidation. On pushing back against homogeneity.” I believe that too. And I’ll extend it: breweries should be at least as loud about their values as they are when they drop a new seasonal. Your hazy IPA gets a full rollout — the label art, the tap handle photo, the countdown post. Human dignity deserves the same energy. Be as loud about human rights as you are about your beer. There is no reason those two things should require different levels of courage from you. But visibility isn’t the only form of courage. And not everyone can be visible right now without real consequences — financial, personal, sometimes physical. There are people in this industry doing hard, unglamorous, sometimes risky work in the background, and announcing it would compromise it or paint a target on someone who’s already stretched thin. That’s not silence as complicity. That’s operational discipline under pressure. What I want to push back on — clearly, not gently — is the idea that behind-the-scenes action and public visibility are in competition with each other. The person organizing quietly in the back room and the person posting a statement of solidarity on a Tuesday morning are both doing something real. We need both. We need the quiet infrastructure and we need the visible signal. We need people to know that this industry — at its best, at its most independent, and human — gives a fuck. I closed that piece with a question: “Reactive and fearful? Or clear and values-driven?” That question still stands. But having heard from you, I’d add a corollary: the values-driven path isn’t always the loudest one. Sometimes it’s a phone call and a recipe. Sometimes it’s a room made available on a closed Tuesday. Sometimes it’s a drive across town for someone who needed a safe ride home. All of it is political. All of it was always political. You don’t get to opt out of that — you only get to decide what you do with it. I’ve spent more than a decade writing about this industry because I believe it can be exactly that. I’ve been lucky enough to build an audience that lets me say so plainly. That’s a privilege I intend to use. The work is happening. Some of it you’ll see. Some of it you won’t. Support it either way. Cleveland Prost is a reader-supported publication covering beer and brewing across New York state. To receive new posts and support this work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Cleveland Prost is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe
If Not AOC, Then Who?
What do we do if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez decides not to run for president in 2028? It makes sense that many leftists are currently focused on calling on her to take the plunge. But the absence of a Plan B, or even much discussion about one, is worrisome. The US Left can’t afford to sit out the 2028 Democratic primary. Doing so in 2024 was a disaster: our abstention self-marginalized anti-billionaire politics from the national conversation and thereby gave space for Harris to pivot to the “center” (i.e. the policy preferences of corporate donors, establishment hacks, and AIPAC). Abstaining again in 2028 would be especially counterproductive since democratic socialists now have so much wind in our sails after our big electoral wins in NYC and across the country. It’s time to deepen our momentum, organization, and profile — not to retreat to the margins during America’s single most important political battle. Even more urgently, keeping Trump’s heir out of the White House may depend on whether leftists and the party’s unprecedentedly disenchanted base can force the Democrats in 2028 to take meaningful steps towards a very angry electorate and away from the corporate-consultant blob that has helped get us into this mess. If AOC (or Abdul El-Sayed) decides to run, we should enthusiastically go all in — DSA, fighting unions, progressive organizations, anybody who wants to see a better country and world. But, as far as I can tell from the outside, there’s a real chance that she doesn’t run. And we can’t just wait and see where she lands before discussing alternatives, since AOC’s decision might not come for quite a while, giving us little time to scramble at the last minute for an alternative. So we should start working now on getting a Plan B into motion, and recruiting a good candidate for the role. Here’s one idea. A Worker Candidate — Healthcare Not Warfare 2028 Run a union worker Leftists don’t need to always run experienced, well-known socialist politicians for high-profile contests. Lula, the current president of Brazil, began his political career as a metalworker militant who ran for governor of São Paulo in 1982. Especially in an era of institutional distrust, it’s possible to lean hard into making a virtue out of a working-class comrade’s distance from traditional politics. Experience abroad shows this clearly. Rachel Kéké — an immigrant hotel housekeeper — ran as the candidate of the leftist La France Insoumise for the National Assembly in 2022, defeating a former minister in the Macron government. The Belgian Workers’ Party in 2024 won its first Flemish seat in the European Parliament by running Rudi Kennes, a three-decade veteran of the Opel Antwerp auto factory. And the South Korean left in 2024 elected auto factory militant Yoon Jong-oh to the National Assembly. If a tiny French Trotskyist organization could make such a big splash in 2002 and 2007 by running a well-spoken postal worker cadre for office — the LCR’s Olivier Besancenot received about 1.5 million first-round votes — it’s not far-fetched to expect that a much larger organization like DSA, together with a broader coalition of the willing, could run this playbook to much greater effect. This is especially the case now that almost everything DSA does immediately becomes a national news story. We don’t need someone famous. We just need a charismatic, well-vetted comrade who works in a relatable working-class occupation — e.g. a nurse, or a worker in auto or construction, or at Amazon. Ideally, they have a compelling personal story or have been part of a significant strike or organizing campaign, but even those criteria don’t necessarily have to be deal-breakers. The main lesson of the Graham Platner fiasco isn’t that we should never run outsiders for office (the momentum he generated proves the exact opposite), but that they need proper vetting and roots in democratic membership organizations like DSA or a union. In any case, there are plenty of ways to signal working-class authenticity without resorting to Platner’s or Fetterman’s performative macho white dude affect. Better to have someone of any gender or race who is actually working class, with firm socialist politics, who can speak from experience about the day-to-day realities of trying to make it in America. There are surely at least a dozen such worker leaders in our movement nationwide; we just need to sit down and convince one that their personal sacrifice for the greater good (i.e. running for president) will be worth it. If we don’t have a frontrunner with a clear path to victory like AOC (or El-Sayed, were he to win Michigan), it’s better to embrace someone whose decision to run in itself tells an important story about US politics: workers have been iced out of our political system and are now fighting hard to break back in. The novelty factor, in itself, would generate press. And it would help democratic socialists signal to the American public that our movement’s defining characteristic is that we represent workers vs. bosses, not that we’re “the furthest left” force in American politics — a framework that suggests we’re extremists and that helps our opponents isolate us from non-college-educated voters by highlighting extremely minoritarian (and misguided) stances included in DSA’s platform like prison abolition. We don’t get many opportunities to speak to tens of millions of Americans; we need to use these opportunities to broaden our appeal beyond those already in our orbit. Run to polarize the 2028 primary and general election around “Medicare for All” and “End All Aid to Israel” Why should democratic socialists use our scarce time and volunteer energy to run in a race we’re unlikely to win? Running in the 2028 primary will not only recruit us scores of members (imagine having a DSA member intervening in eleven nationally televised primary debates!), but — more importantly — it has the potential to be a decisive leap forward towards an America that finally starts meeting the needs of working people instead of HMO and AIPAC billionaire donors. Polarizing litmus tests are good, actually — as long as they’re fought for around popular demands in a thoughtful and strategic way. Democratic socialists have an opportunity and responsibility to make the 2028 primary about two of the most widely and deeply felt issues of our moment: domestically, America’s unaffordable, family-breaking private healthcare system; internationally, America’s bankrolling of the genocidal Israeli government. A candidacy relentlessly demanding Medicare for All and No Aid to Israel would pose a sharp question to the American public, the Democratic Party, and other 2028 contenders: Why can’t working-class Americans afford their healthcare bills at the same time that our government is spending at least $3.8 billion yearly to fund an Israeli regime eager to keep dragging us and the world into more forever wars? Our candidate can agitate around a clear message: I’m running to give voice to all those working-class Americans who are struggling to get by. No matter what state you live in, who you voted for in 2024, or your background, it’s just plain common sense that we should make healthcare more affordable instead of spending billions to enable the Israeli government’s crimes against humanity. Every American who agrees with me when I say ‘Medicare for All — Not a Dime for Israel’ should make their voice heard through our campaign. Racking up a high number of votes for this agenda is a crucial way to show the Democratic Party and the country as a whole that we can’t keep supporting a life-destroying status quo in our healthcare system and in the Middle East. If we want to defeat Trump’s handpicked crony this coming November, we need to speak to ordinary people’s frustrations with the status quo — we can’t keep running the same tired establishment playbook and expecting a different result. For those highly engaged voters (or skeptical media pundits) who raise concerns about wasting votes, the candidate can take the time to explain why this isn’t the case: It's true I'm a long shot. But Zohran showed anything can happen — and voting for me is a pragmatic decision, not a wasted vote. In a heavily divided primary with a large number of candidates and a very discredited establishment, my campaign and the democratic socialist movement I’m part of are positioned to be the balance of power if we can get a large enough number of voters to loudly demand Healthcare Not Warfare. Since there’s a high chance no candidate will get to 50% in the 2028 primaries, the Democrats could very well be heading towards a brokered convention, where a disciplined, principled current committed to breaking from corporate donors can play an outsized role in making sure whoever ends up with the nomination raises the banner of single-payer healthcare and cutting aid to Israel. How exactly could running this sort of primary campaign be translated into actual leverage? The candidate replies: I’m aiming to win the nomination, but if I don’t achieve that goal, my delegates and I will pledge our support in the primary only for a candidate who agrees in the general election to call for ending US aid to Israel and establishing Medicare for All at home. These are both winning planks for November against the Republicans, and the only reason I can see that other candidates haven’t yet raised these is that they’re still more scared of the donor class than they are of the people. That needs to change. If Democratic leaders want young people, workers, and those sick of the status quo to show up in big numbers this November, they need to meet us halfway. In this way, whether or not we win the nomination, democratic socialists could still play a decisive role in 2028. The approach outlined here is similar to what radical left parties periodically do in parliamentary democracies like Denmark or Sweden when they find themselves as a junior partner electorally: they dictate to center-left allies what their terms would be for enabling, from the outside, the formation of a new government. Running a Healthcare Not Warfare candidate will make it significantly more likely that the 2028 Democratic candidate stands with ordinary people instead of donors on these two pivotal planks — a shift that will, in turn, make it easier to achieve the existentially important task of defeating MAGA’s heir in November. Look at how much popular traction the Uncommitted movement got with a similar strategy in 2024 with so little on-the-ground organization — surely we can go much further with a working-class candidate, a much bigger DSA, and a Democratic Party base that has turned against Israel, billionaires, and the hacks in the party who prop them up. Objections and Responses There are quite a few objections to this proposal, many of which are very reasonable. Let me briefly address each here. Socialists shouldn’t waste their scarce time and resources on a candidate unlikely to win. This is a good rule in general, but there are important exceptions, and presidential elections are the main one. There’s no other political contest that gets anything like this level of attention and engagement in the US, so if you want to be a serious force in nationwide politics, you basically can’t afford not to have a candidate. Far from being an overall drain on our resources, running a dynamic 2028 campaign would likely result in a major net increase in members and capacity. In that spirit, the very pragmatic Milwaukee sewer socialists — who mostly ran to win at home in Wisconsin — supported Eugene Debs’s propagandistic presidential campaigns, which they correctly saw as a crucial means of recruiting to the Socialist Party. And now that the (post-1972) Democratic Party gives more weight to voters than party operatives in determining its presidential nomination, it’s become feasible to run as a socialist in primaries without risking a split in the vote against the Republicans in November. We should just support Ro Khanna, who also supports M4A and ending aid to Israel. I like Ro Khanna and would enthusiastically vote and canvass for him for president were he to get the nomination. But there’s a real chance that Khanna’s bid for office doesn’t catch on; he lacks the grassroots organizational apparatus of DSA, and, because he’s not really of the Left or labor (despite his current very good positions), he’s unlikely to generate the type of buy-in and enthusiasm that a DSA candidate would. Moreover, Khanna would be running as an individual, not as someone emerging from and building an organized movement — his campaign would not likely focus on building sustained power from below, nor would it likely polarize the 2028 primary around M4A and Israel aid. Also, and not inconsequentially, the poor electoral results for Tom Steyer and Saikat Chakrabarti this spring suggest that there’s perhaps not much of a popular appetite in the Democrats’ base to support multi-millionaire class traitors. Much better, then, to run a democratic socialist worker. If by Super Tuesday it’s clear that our campaign has captured the main left lane in the primary, Khanna should drop out and endorse us; conversely, if he’s managed to capture this lane, DSA could at that point transform its Healthcare Not Warfare campaign into an independent campaign to elect Ro Khanna focused on winning (and holding him accountable to) those two critical planks. An openness to consolidating an anti-corporate candidate by Super Tuesday is a necessary component of the strategy I’m proposing, because otherwise we risk splitting the primary votes (per DNC rules, you need at least 15% to get any delegates to convention). We should convince Shawn Fain or Sara Nelson to run for president instead. I agree it’d be great if either ran for president, but my impression is that there’s basically no chance that will happen in 2028, because both are firmly focused on their union leadership duties (and, in the case of Fain, beating back a federal witch-hunt). This plan could have DSA end up endorsing a non-socialist, non-DSAer for president. That’s against our principles. It’s a myth, and bad politics, that socialists can’t ever support candidates who aren’t members of their organization and/or who don’t call themselves socialists. Bernie, after all, was not a DSAer. And socialists abroad regularly make tactical decisions about if and when supporting a non-socialist candidate makes sense from the standpoint of promoting working-class interests, defending democracy, and building a socialist current in the process. If your “principles” prevent you and DSA from helping achieve the momentous stride forward of having a Democratic candidate in 2028 run on Medicare for All and ending aid to Israel, those “principles” are not very good. In fact, they actively undermine the causes they’re aiming to support. We shouldn’t confuse principles (working-class independence) with tactics (the best way to advance this in a given context). In my recent article in Catalyst on Milwaukee sewer socialism (I’ve uploaded the full text here), I have a section showing how similarly rigid rules about endorsements had to be eventually discarded in the old Socialist Party nationwide after WWI because they tended to lead socialists towards a sectarian abstention from broader anti-corporate electoral insurgencies beyond their party’s control. For what it’s worth, Lenin’s current under Tsarism frequently backed bourgeois candidates in the second round of elections and Lenin himself advocated that British Communists support Labour Party candidates; for his part, Kautsky in 1912 defended the German Social Democracy’s electoral pact with the Progressives in the runoffs. If our predecessors could be that tactically flexible in an era before the limits of their underlying strategic assumptions about intransigent class politics in capitalist democracies were made clear, then there’s no need to insist on being more tactically rigid today, after a century’s worth of accumulated experience. As long as you maintain your own political profile and organization while engaging in broader coalitional efforts, there’s zero inherent contradiction with the principle of political independence. More specifically: DSA and allied organizations should enthusiastically back Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed if AOC declines to run and he throws his hat in the presidential ring. (I have no idea whether he’s even considering this path, but there’ll surely be chatter about it if he wins his Senate race this November.) Though he doesn’t call himself a socialist, El-Sayed is a principled Berniecrat, a consistent fighter for Palestine, and would have a clear path to victory. Using the “s” word is far less important than whether a campaign fights for the interests of working people at home and abroad — and whether actively participating in it can grow the organized working class and the Left. And the same holds true if a less anti-corporate candidate were, under pressure, to adopt our two Healthcare Not Warfare planks. Why focus only on M4A and ending US aid to Israel? There are so many other important issues to fight for! Obviously there are many pivotal issues beyond healthcare and Israel, and our candidate — and especially our organizations involved in the campaign — should be prepared to speak on all of these. But one of the crucial lessons of the Zohran campaign is that you have to relentlessly stay on message if you want to cut through the noise. CNN and Fox News will want to talk about DSA’s views on Venezuela and abolishing the police; we need to polarize the debate on the widely and deeply felt issues that are most favorable for growing the Left, isolating our opponents, and winning urgently needed changes. One recent poll found 63% of Americans support M4A, even after respondents were told it would raise taxes and eliminate most private insurance. Another found that 74% of Democrats opposed “providing additional economic and military support to Israel.” And focusing on two demands sets the campaign up to be able to leverage its mandate to make clear demands upon other candidates (which we can’t do if we run with a laundry list of demands). Talking about a Plan B is a distraction from the more urgent work of building a groundswell of calls on AOC to run. It’s good for DSAers, fightback unionists, and progressive organizations to try to convince AOC to run. This proposal is meant as an addendum to pushes to get AOC to run and to line DSA up for that eventuality, not as a substitute for those efforts. But I’m worried that, like in 2024, we might eventually find ourselves with no time to find a viable alternative unless we start now. DSA, with its abundant deliberative processes, moves slowly. The approach you’re suggesting seems risky. If a DSA candidate runs but doesn’t receive a lot of votes, it’ll undercut our current national momentum. This is a reasonable worry. All big initiatives always carry risks, and the path I’m advocating is certainly not free of these. That said, if a Healthcare Not Warfare campaign doesn’t catch on like we envisioned, it’s a pretty simple pivot in March 2028 to explain that in the future we really need our standard-bearers like AOC, or our growing bench of national electeds, to step up in presidential primaries. Moreover, it’s worth noting that the risk of my Plan B proposal is on the whole significantly less than the risk entailed by an AOC run. We should all back her if she runs, since she’d fire up the base, provide huge openings for organizing, have a real shot at defeating a Republican (especially given MAGA’s unpopularity), be a great standard-bearer for our issues, particularly M4A and ending aid to Israel, and be less willing than mainstream candidates to capitulate to any anti-democratic machinations from Trump and co. But it’s also true that AOC could lose, which would be a devastating setback to the country and the Left. Or she could win and find herself unable to pass much, if any, of her (and our) program, a demoralizing prospect. So if we’re willing to take these risks with AOC (and we should), it follows that we should be able to take lower-level risks if she doesn’t throw her hat in the ring. What’s Your Plan B? The US Left is facing its biggest opening for growth and influence since the 1930s. Initiatives that would have been impossible a few months ago are now potentially feasible. A President AOC is now easier to imagine, but if she ultimately assesses that the risks aren’t worth the potential reward in 2028, we can’t be left flat-footed. So even if you’re not convinced by the specifics of my Plan B, I hope you can at least agree that it’d be a disaster for us not to have one — and not to start getting a Plan B into motion. Hopefully other organizers and political currents will put forward their responses and alternative ideas ASAP. The stakes are too high to just wait and see. More As always, please share this article widely. This newsletter depends on all you lovely people to get the word out. Thank you! I uploaded the full text of my Catalyst article on Milwaukee sewer socialism here (it’s updated and 3x as long as the version published earlier on this substack). If you haven’t yet, please make sure to subscribe to Catalyst here; I read every issue front to back, highly recommend. 🌹🎵 Ivan Lins (arranged by Arthur Verocai) — “General da Banda” 🌹🎵
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