Dissent Magazine
@dissentmag.bsky.social
Democratic socialist since 1954. dissentmagazine.org
In Minnesota, one need not look far to see the contributions of Somalis, who generate about $500 million in household income, pay an additional $67 million in state and local taxes, and contribute $8 billion to the state’s economy.
Ten Weeks Under Occupation - Dissent Magazine
Operation Metro Surge was the culmination of a decades-long campaign in which conspiratorial crusaders have painted Somalis as a drain on social programs, criminals, and extremists.
dissentmagazine.org
The fight over who gets to tell the national narrative revives a much older one over the American past, with enormous stakes for American democracy. Ultimately, it is a fight over whether American history belongs to the many or to the few.
Who Owns American History? - Dissent Magazine
Under the second Trump administration, the fight over history has become a fight over democracy. Who deserves to be trusted with the country’s memory?
dissentmagazine.org
Presidential campaigns are the moments when coalitions can redefine the terms of debate. Whoever wears the progressive mantle in 2028 will need to treat foreign policy as an extension of democratic struggle at home.
Building a Post-Trump Foreign Policy - Dissent Magazine
Progressives need to ground international commitments to democratic accountability at home and engage with social movements abroad. Few political figures have articulated this as clearly as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
dissentmagazine.org
Every nation tells itself a story about where it came from. The question is who gets to tell it. For the past year and a half, Donald Trump’s second administration has been answering that question with unusual bluntness: The president does.
Who Owns American History? - Dissent Magazine
Under the second Trump administration, the fight over history has become a fight over democracy. Who deserves to be trusted with the country’s memory?
dissentmagazine.org
In the aftermath of the Eaton and Palisades fires, housing could have been stabilized and tenants could have been protected. But the private market won.
Fire Sale - Dissent Magazine
In the aftermath of the Eaton and Palisades fires, housing could have been stabilized and tenants could have been protected. But the private market won.
dissentmagazine.org
Under the second Trump administration, the fight over history has become a fight over democracy. Who deserves to be trusted with the country’s memory?
Who Owns American History? - Dissent Magazine
Under the second Trump administration, the fight over history has become a fight over democracy. Who deserves to be trusted with the country’s memory?
dissentmagazine.org
“I myself know compulsive bettors who’ve amassed sizable credit card debt on everything from American football to English soccer to—I kid you not—Czech table tennis. At least one of these people ended up in rehab.”
Doubling Down - Dissent Magazine
Online sports gambling has been normalized at a breakneck pace. Is there any way to push back against a predatory culture of promo codes and prop bets?
dissentmagazine.org
Our choice is between a future in which we own and control the datafied infrastructures that shape our lives, or one in which capital continues to steal from us.
AI Is Theft - Dissent Magazine
If capital is rewriting the rules of work with AI, then workers must rewrite the terms of resistance.
dissentmagazine.org
As climate risk intensifies, so does a struggle among insurers, homeowners, renters, and governments over which lives and homes deserve protection—and who pays.
The Bronx Still Burns - Dissent Magazine
The arson wave in the Bronx in the 1970s was caused by the financial forces and political priorities that still govern New York City.
dissentmagazine.org
To expand child care, New York City needs more space, more caregivers, more government workers overseeing licensing matters, and a robust information campaign to make parents aware of their options.
The Child-Care Challenge - Dissent Magazine
To expand child care, New York needs more space, more caregivers, and more government workers. It can only happen if the city works closely with existing (and aspiring) providers.
dissentmagazine.org
The scale and depth of the attack on our institutions means that there is no simple way for a pro-democracy coalition to flip the lights back on after Trump. We need transformative thinking.
The Case for a Third Reconstruction - Dissent Magazine
The scale and depth of the attack on our institutions means that there is no simple way for a pro-democracy coalition to flip the lights back on after Trump. We need transformative thinking.
dissentmagazine.org
Rolling back MAGA will require speaking to popular needs and aspirations and delivering on them. It will also require developing our capacities to work together in a spirit of democratic cooperation. https://dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/partyism-zohran-mamdani/
The challenge for Zohran going forward, no less important than delivering on campaign promises, will be sustaining public faith in the promise that the city is ours to make.
Zohran's Promise - Dissent Magazine
The Mamdani campaign extended the arena of political participation to ordinary and unseen people of every place and pursuit. The challenge going forward will be sustaining faith in the idea that the city is ours to make.
dissentmagazine.org
We’re 250 years into the American democratic experiment, with all of its limitations and contradictions. How healthy is our democracy in 2026?
Rot and Reform - Dissent Magazine
An interview with David Bateman and Julie C. Suk on the state of American democracy in 2026.
dissentmagazine.org
Despite all of the talk of winning, Trump is losing. Chances are good that the midterm elections will be a smashing victory for the anti-Trump coalition, likely delivering the House and possibly even the Senate to the Democrats.
Call It the End - Dissent Magazine
Introducing our Summer 2026 issue on America at 250.
dissentmagazine.org
Legalized sports gambling—not even a decade old—has quickly become a treasured American pastime; a multifaceted ideological campaign has normalized the phone as a harmless, pocket-sized casino.
Doubling Down - Dissent Magazine
Online sports gambling has been normalized at a breakneck pace. Is there any way to push back against a predatory culture of promo codes and prop bets?
dissentmagazine.org
In New York City in particular, child care is less a system than a patchwork of very expensive solutions glued together with Band-Aids, popsicle sticks, and prayers.
The Child-Care Challenge - Dissent Magazine
To expand child care, New York needs more space, more caregivers, and more government workers. It can only happen if the city works closely with existing (and aspiring) providers.
dissentmagazine.org
Last year, billionaires made 19 percent of reported federal campaign contributions. Epstein is gone, but we’re stuck with a class of people with effectively infinite resources that they can devote to whatever they want.
The Epstein Class - Dissent Magazine
The real scandal of the Epstein saga is not that a billionaire cabal runs the world. It’s that there is a billionaire class.
dissentmagazine.org
Politicians like Roosevelt and La Guardia harbored principled commitments, but social achievements came not from the visions of politicians, but because the people of the city were sufficiently well-organized to compel them to act.
Capital of the American Century - Dissent Magazine
Mike Wallace’s Gotham at War offers a guidebook to a half-vanished city, bringing to life the immense human drama that unfolded in New York during the Second World War.
dissentmagazine.org
As the decay of public institutions and the rule of social media algorithms deepen our collective alienation, the country’s political divides are often on display in the most vexed region of American life: the suburbs.
Subdivided - Dissent Magazine
HBO's Neighbors attempts to capture our mutual loathing and derangement at the neighborhood level. What hope is there for the paranoid suburbs?
dissentmagazine.org
John Fetterman’s lack of serious attention to political solutions is enabled by a Democratic Party geared toward fundraising and poll-tested, sterile platforms.
Mavericks Without a Cause - Dissent Magazine
The memoirs of John Fetterman and Joe Manchin offer revealing insights into two figures granted outsized importance by our broken political system.
dissentmagazine.org
Like with previous generations of skilled craft workers, intellectual and creative skill is being expropriated unpaid, injected into systems that obscure the origins of their own acumen. AI is just another opportunity for capitalist theft.
AI Is Theft - Dissent Magazine
If capital is rewriting the rules of work with AI, then workers must rewrite the terms of resistance.
dissentmagazine.org
There is no sign that any of the destruction has brought Iran’s regime near collapse. Indeed, it appears stronger than before—a predictable outcome, given its history and war strategy.
Trump's False Promise of Liberation - Dissent Magazine
The war with Iran will not produce a freer or more democratic country.
dissentmagazine.org
The right is hell-bent on diverting tax dollars into school vouchers, to the benefit of private schools and religious schools. In the meantime, many liberals continue to flirt with charter schools under the assumption that they can outcompete public schools and better serve poorer students.
Public Education and the Long Tax Revolt - Dissent Magazine
Public schools are in need of major funding reforms, but any egalitarian vision for the American education system will need to overcome a right-wing crusade to dismantle it altogether.
dissentmagazine.org
At a time when a rhetoric of American greatness was being deployed to break strikes, disrupt public demonstrations, and prosecute dissenters, Eugene V. Debs refused to cede liberty to his reactionary opponents.
What to Eugene Debs Was the Fourth of July? - Dissent Magazine
Few figures on the left have been as committed to realizing the democratic promise of American politics as Eugene Debs.
dissentmagazine.org
Putting socialist ideas in dialogue with other traditions that share an interest in human emancipation is always worth doing, but especially when everything that progressive people hold dear is under existential threat. We hang together, or we hang separately.
Coalition Socialism - Dissent Magazine
The intertwined relationship between liberalism and socialism offers important lessons for today’s fractious intra-left fights.
dissentmagazine.org
The scientific arguments that pepper lawmakers’ justifications for banning gender-affirming care draw on a previous generation of clinical research that reflects its anachronistic beliefs, biases, and often faulty methodologies.
The Bad Science Behind Trans Medicine Bans - Dissent Magazine
The conservative movement has built its case against gender-affirming care on the authority of anachronistic, faulty clinical research.
dissentmagazine.org
One reason why public schools remain highly segregated, seventy years after Brown v. Board of Education, is that wealthier neighborhoods have carved out separate school districts to keep their property tax dollars at home.
Public Education and the Long Tax Revolt - Dissent Magazine
Public schools are in need of major funding reforms, but any egalitarian vision for the American education system will need to overcome a right-wing crusade to dismantle it altogether.
dissentmagazine.org
The Mamdani campaign extended the arena of political participation to ordinary and unseen people of every place and pursuit. The challenge going forward will be sustaining faith in the idea that the city is ours to make.
Zohran's Promise - Dissent Magazine
The Mamdani campaign extended the arena of political participation to ordinary and unseen people of every place and pursuit. The challenge going forward will be sustaining faith in the idea that the city is ours to make.
dissentmagazine.org
The conservative movement has built its case against gender-affirming care on the authority of anachronistic, faulty clinical research.
The Bad Science Behind Trans Medicine Bans - Dissent Magazine
The conservative movement has built its case against gender-affirming care on the authority of anachronistic, faulty clinical research.
dissentmagazine.org