You may not have heard of the magazine Jacobin. It’s an intellectual magazine of the democratic socialist left — not the liberal left, but the democratic socialist left. It was founded in 2010 by Bhaskar Sunkara, a radical college student born and raised in suburban New York. From a 2016 Vox profile of him:
Jacobin has in the past five years become the leading intellectual voice of the American left, the most vibrant and relevant socialist publication in a very long time. And in 2016 it’s bigger than ever, thanks to Bernie Sanders, who’s making his millions of supporters curious about what democratic socialism actually means. That’s an opportunity that Jacobin is seizing to great effect, even if Sanders isn’t far enough left for their taste.
The Sanders campaign “could begin to legitimate the word ‘socialist,’ and spark a conversation around it, even if Sanders’s welfare-state socialism doesn’t go far enough,” Sunkara wrote earlier this year.
More:
Jacobin, which turned 5 this year, is perhaps the most relevant and important publication of the American political left today. Unlike more academic journals, it is always timely, globally oriented, and topically eclectic.
Eclectic:
More eclecticism here:
I wonder if Sunkara watches The Lives of Others, roots for the Stasi, and (spoiler alert), thinks the ending in which the Berlin Wall falls was a serious bummer? But as the Biden Riots remind us, Sunkara isn’t the only American leftist with a mindset towards revolution these day. Zack Ford is the press secretary at Alliance for Justice, which as Discover the Networks notes, “Systematically opposes Republican judicial nominees as ‘right-wing extremists,’ ‘ultraconservatives,’ or racists and sexists,” and “helped derail President Reagan’s nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the U.S. Supreme Court. Immediately after Bork’s nomination, AFJ sent messages to the editorial offices of every newspaper in the United States, urging the Senate to reject:”
As Caroline Glick writes in “Democrats and the Politics of Projection,” “if you want to understand who the Democrats are and what they are doing, all you need to do is look at what they are accusing Trump and his colleagues of being and of doing.”