AUGUST 14, 2026

Can Tenant Organizing Build Political Power? The DSA Experience
For Shelterforce, Steve Dubb tracks how DSA chapters are using tenant organizing to build political power, featuring MDC DSA’s Stomp Out Slumlords tenant organizing project: “A motivating factor for DSA members is the opportunity to use organizing to make a material difference in people’s lives. This effort to connect with people’s material conditions has deep roots in socialist organizing. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was not uncommon for democratic socialist activists to join labor unions as a way to build stronger bonds with the working class. As a Jacobin article notes, these efforts echo today in institutions such as the union democracy group Teamsters for a Democratic Union and the publication Labor Notes. DSA similarly supports union organizing through its support for such institutions as the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee. Tenant organizing has now become an important vector of DSA activity alongside labor.” Shelterforce

Actually, Michael Harrington Would Probably Love Today’s DSA – and Hate It Too
The “big tent” of the Democratic Socialists of America has its drawbacks too, says a longtime DSA member and former Massachusetts legislator who nevertheless argues that claims the DSOC/DSA founder would be aghast at the current edition of DSA are only half right. “From my vantage point, while I understand [Kirkpatrick] Sale’s real – and Harrington’s imagined – distress at some of what he sees in today’s DSA, not only does he ignore developments that would have made Harrington proud, but I also think his take on Harrington’s politics is not quite right. [W]here I really think Sale is just wrong is in essentially arguing that Harrington was not actually a socialist. Yes, Harrington did talk of being ‘the left wing of the possible,’ and that ‘generally meant working within the Democratic Party’ — as do most current DSAers running campaigns to do something for the American working class in the here-and-now. And while Sale is accurate in saying that the DSA of Harrington’s day ‘put forth a vision of a democratically elected government that would be like those of the Scandinavian countries, providing state services in health, education, housing and the like,’ his contention that back then there was ‘Nowhere stuff about ending capitalism’ makes it sound like Sale missed a lot of meetings.” Common Dreams

From Nagasaki to Gaza: How We Learned to Stop Feeling
Psychic numbing, organized forgetting and authoritarian culture are teaching Americans to witness mass suffering without demanding justice. Every day we scroll past photographs of burned children, bombed-out neighborhoods, families clawing through rubble with their bare hands, and parents carrying the bodies of sons and daughters killed beneath collapsing concrete. Such images seldom unsettle our conscience, provoke outrage, and awaken a demand for justice. Increasingly, they do none of these things. They register briefly before dissolving into another statistic, another headline, another passing image in the endless digital stream. Violence has become familiar, suffering routine, and genocide itself is in danger of becoming just another image consumed and forgotten. This is not merely a political development; it is one of the great moral and cultural disasters of our age. The LA Progressive

What Happened to Liberal Democracy? by Daron Acemoglu review – how to fix the system
The Nobel-winning economist takes aim at elites for no longer meeting the needs of the masses; now, he argues, liberal democracy is in a crisis, largely owing to the abandonment of the working class by liberalism’s “progressive” wing. In post-industrial Europe and the US, the left ceased to speak of economic class and spoke instead of identity. It is a similar diagnosis to that offered by Bernie Sanders, who has spoken of “a Democratic party which has abandoned working-class people”, but Acemoglu is happier to wield culture-war rhetoric even as he deplores the culture wars. His solution is a new contract of “working-class liberal democracy”, which concentrates on improving the standard of living of the least educated or skilled. This is to be done by focusing on economic growth, encouraging more community decision-making, and making social media companies responsible, as publishers, for the messages they promote to users. He suggests legislating in favour of “worker AI”, by which employees could use expert systems based on machine-learning to help them be more productive.” The Guardian

America’s most divisive historian gets a new biography
There are good reasons why Howard Zinn’s A People’s History has sold more than four million copies since it was first published in 1980. It introduced readers to figures like the socialist activist and presidential candidate Eugene Debs, the labor organizer Big Bill Haywood, the anarchist Emma Goldman, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, and the slave revolt leader Nat Turner who were mentioned only briefly or not at all in the ponderously upbeat textbooks of half a century ago. The immense popularity of A People’s History revealed an embarrassing vacuum in the way American history has long been taught — something that will still be worth pondering and repairing long after the fractious commemoration of our 250th birthday is behind us. NYT via Portside

Francesca Hong’s Campaign – let’s not forget what she accomplished
There has been a lot of talk, wringing of hands, and Wednesday morning quarterbacking about Francesa Hong’s narrow defeat in the Wisconsin gubernatorial primary (as well as glee and condescension from corporate Dems and mainstream media). The following articles from Wisconsin present a different picture:

• What does Wisconsin’s chaotic Democratic primary for governor mean for progressive politics?: Ruth Coniff, former editor of the Progressive, writes in the non-profit Wisconsin Examiner about the real achievements of Hong’s campaign, the determination of her supporters to now fight to defeat MAGA in November, and the future of the agenda she advocated. 
• Crowley wins upset, Hong concedes in Democratic primary for Wisconsin governor: Olivia Hong in The Cap Times, Madison’s independent newspaper, writes about the campaign and gives voice to Hong and her supporters and their continued optimism facing the future.
• Francesca Hong: “Our Movement Is Strong, and the Work Isn’t Done”: John Nichols in The Nation writes about the historic importance of Hong’s campaign. And, to those who try to make Hong’s razor-thin defeat a comment on the limits of the left, he replies: “A little-known legislator with a scant campaign treasury, whose candidacy was actively opposed by the sitting governor and faced a hair-on-fire national media onslaught, finished in a virtual tie for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in the ultimate swing state. And we’re supposed to believe that the result has defined the limits of the left.”