MARCH 13, 2026

Americans aren’t facing a democratic collapse. We’re living in its aftermath

“For tens of millions of people, democratic life has been absent for decades as they endure precarious housing, inaccessible healthcare, unchecked policing powers, debt servitude, vanishing public goods, and near-total exclusion from meaningful formal political power. For others — the wealthy, the politically connected, the donors and oligarchs — the same system produces not insecurity, but insulation.” For the many afflicted, it’s the traumatic “return of the repressed,” the constant fear of losing what has actually already been lost. “Nations too generate defenses against reality: denial, idealization, displacement, projection, regression, collective forgetting. America’s fixation on democracy’s perpetual near-death is one such defense.” The Guardian, and brought our way via our Tip Line.

Billionaires Are Swaying Elections in All Corners of America

Billionaires made 19 percent of all reported federal campaign contributions in 2024, a Times analysis shows, and even more in some local elections. Wealthy donors are reaping the rewards. Before the 2010 Supreme Court decision that money was free speech subject to First Amendment protection, billionaire participation was close to zero. Now, [a former RNC chairman] said, the country is on the verge of becoming a place where wealthy people are able to spend millions of dollars to essentially direct how the government runs — without breaking any laws. NYT via Portside

The Left’s “Housing Civil War” May Be Ending

Over the past decade, two movements on the left have emerged to explain the housing crisis punishing America’s big cities. One has branded the real-estate business as a villain, blaming realtors, landlords, and developers for soaring costs that force people from their apartments. The other has pointed the finger at homeowners for blocking new construction in their neighborhoods, limiting supply and raising prices. With their dueling diagnoses and solutions — call them Socialism vs. Abundance — the factions have been at each other’s throats in online flame wars and combative public hearings. But now, a pair of ascendant politicians in the country’s largest metropolises are asking, “Why not both?” Politico via Portside

How Vietnam Inflamed the Civil Rights Movement — Wil Haygood’s “The War Within a War” is a rare, illuminating look at the way the war shaped the struggle for equality back home — starting with Black GIs’ awareness of inequality of wartime risks.

The reviewer, Brent Staples, is a former and longtime NYT editorial writer, so when he notes “the white press corps was uninterested in questions of how race and racism were shaping the Blackest war in our national history” and “it was some time before Black journalists … gained the clout to shape stories that passed through layers of white editors on the way into print” you can hear the personal experience showing. NYT review

International Women’s Day Observed — Too Briefly?

March 8 came and went with relatively few commemorations or rallies to mark International Women’s Day. In a lengthy article, March 8th Between the Legacy of Working Women’s Struggles and Socialist Feminism, Bayan Saleh — a Danish socialist-feminist of Iraqi origins — provides both an historical overview and theoretical analysis of the holiday’s roots and contemporary importance. znetwork.org  

Women and children are always the victims of war — as we see in the current lethal bombing of Iran. Azar Sepehr, spokesperson for the Democratic Organization of Iranian Women (founded in 1943) writes of the on-going struggle of Iranian women against US-Israeli attacks on their country, desire to control Iran’s oil, desire to dictate the forms of their society and the on-going struggle for democratic rights, women’s rights, and social justice within Iran by its people. See her article: March 8 Amid the US-Israeli Aggression on Iran in Morning Star

The Coalition of Labor Union Women’s president, Sylvia Ramos, has written two articles for CLUW’s Bulletin highlighting the legislative history behind Women’s History Month and current struggles for abortion rights, for peace, against US wars of aggression, and for union rights as essential to women’s rights. As an exemplar of that struggle she profiles Grace Lee Boggs, radical daughter of Chinese immigrants. Grace moved to Detroit in 1952, and along with her husband, James Boggs, a Black auto worker, she became intimately involved in Black Power, labor, environmental, and feminist struggles in the 1960s. In 1992, after Detroit’s deindustrialization, she created Detroit Summer as an intergenerational, multi-cultural movement to develop youth leadership to rebuild community in the struggle against poverty. In her last book, Grace wrote, “We can’t beg for jobs or hope for jobs. … We have to create forms of work that create community and expand humanity. … That’s why we have to talk about revolution these days.  We have to get rid of the old ideas of leadership and followership and use our imaginations to create the new.” CLUW Bulletin — and for more, see also this roundup in Portside.