From the Left
/Politics
Biden's Secret Border Agenda: Migrants Fill Our Baby Gap
I didn't question the incoming Biden administration when they rolled back the Trump era's stricter border control policies in 2021. There's nothing unusual about reversing a previous president's approach, especially when he belongs to the other party and the policy in question is roundly criticized.
You didn't have to be a proponent of open ...Read more
What's Left 9: Foreign Policy Under the Left
Every country needs a coherent foreign policy. And it's impossible to overstate the importance of the United States' military and diplomatic posture.
The U.S. has the world's second-largest and most sophisticated nuclear arsenal, exclusive, comprehensive command over the oceans, perfect strategic geography, nearly a thousand military bases ...Read more
What's Left 8: Health Care Is a Human Right
Learning is a societal and individual good. American businesses, however, have weaponized higher education into an overcredentialization racket that coerces millions of young people to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars in tuition, room and board, often to study subjects in which they have little interest, for the chance to be hired for a ...Read more
Israel, the Hermit Kingdom
"The world is kind of deserting Israel right now," Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) remarked after meeting with members of the pro-Israel lobby American Israel Public Affairs Committee. "So they're worried about that."
Their concern is warranted. Less than six months after Hamas attacked on Oct. 7, killing 1,200 people with brutality that sparked ...Read more
What's Left 7: Health Care Is a Human Right
Liberals believe a compromise that gets us closer to a goal is better than no progress at all. But compromise can lead to the dead end of dilution and a false sense of resolution.
The early 20th-century progressive and presidential candidate Robert "Fighting Bob" La Follette argued that politics played into different a psychological dynamic. "...Read more
What's Left 6: Abolish Homelessness Now
Homelessness is the single most powerful indictment of capitalism, the embodiment of human disposability, the ultimate expression of callous cruelty. In this nation where one out of 16 rental homes is vacant at any given time, one in 600 Americans (550,000) sleeps outside. An additional 3.7 million people, the so-called hidden homeless -- one ...Read more
What's Left 5: Let's Declare War On Economic Insecurity
Wages high enough to cover basic expenses are only the beginning of the Left's struggle to eliminate economic insecurity.
We must also fight for workers' rights on the job, as well as a robust and sturdy social safety net to protect people when they find themselves out of work. Americans suffer the worst worker benefits of major developed ...Read more
What's Left 4: We Need a Real Minimum Wage
When Gallup pollsters ask Americans what causes them the most stress and worry, personal economic concerns -- the cost of living, lack of money, the gap between rich and poor, difficulty finding a job or, if they're employed, low wages -- consistently come in first, so much so that they can't imagine saving for the future. General economic ...Read more
What's Left 3: What if We Had $4.5 Trillion a Year To Spend on Ordinary People?
The $1.6 trillion we waste each year on the Pentagon is an irresistible target for leftists looking for funds to appropriate to the human wants and needs that are currently going un- and under-addressed. Let's redirect those funds to something more worthwhile than slaughtering innocent people around the planet -- i.e., anything else. But why ...Read more
What's Left 2: We're a Rich Country. Let's Act Like It.
Lyndon Johnson, cautioned that his support of the Civil Rights Act was too bold and politically risky, famously responded: "What else is the presidency for?"
The United States of America is one of the richest, if not the richest, nation-states in the history of the world. It also is the most unequal. So its people live in misery and ...Read more
What's Left
We Americans are repeatedly told that the United States is a conservative country in which the 50-yard line of ideology is situated significantly to the right of the Western European representative democracies from which our political culture derives and to which we are most often compared. But there is a gaping chasm between the policy ...Read more
Official Lies Aren't What They Used to Be
The government's services keep getting worse. Even their lies.
The Bushies told us we had to invade Afghanistan to catch Osama bin Laden and then to go into Iraq because Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. As the Pentagon knew, bin Laden was already in Pakistan; as Hans Blix and Scott Ritter told us, there was no evidence Saddam had...Read more
Death to the Credentialocracy
The summer after junior year, my college expelled me. Six years later, I returned and graduated with honors. During the interregnum, I worked. But finding a decent job was tough.
No matter how easy or rote the gig, every prospective employer listed a bachelor's degree as a prerequisite to apply. I drifted from temp work to short-term project,...Read more