Kim Phillips-Fein teaches American history at Columbia University. Her most recent book is Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics.
The detention and threatened deportation of Mahmoud Khalil stands in a long tradition of the US government using border policy as a tool for political control, stretching back to First and Second Red Scare efforts to crack down on left-wing dissent.
The theatrics of this year’s New York City budget brought to mind the fiscal and political conflicts of the 1970s — and the need to find a new vision for New York beyond austerity.
During the New Deal, right-wing businesspeople were furious that their authority was being challenged in the workplace and in society. So they started organizing. And that’s the origin story of the modern conservative movement.
It’s easy to chalk up the Watergate scandal to Richard Nixon’s singular paranoia. But his criminal actions are better understood as a reaction to the social upheavals of the day and a feverish attempt to destroy the Left.
Today, on Inauguration Day, we shouldn’t forget that the business class has long stoked fears of democracy — and bankrolled the conservative movement that gave us the events of January 6.
Crises like the one we’re in upend the social order, reveal long-festering conflicts, and throw open the doors to futures both bleak and transformative. We can emerge from this crisis a more just society.
Robert Caro has penned more magisterial works of history than nearly anyone else. But without accounting for the often-invisible work of others in his research, his new memoir Working is not so much inspiration as an exercise in self-celebration.
A Jacobin roundtable on Trump’s first year in office.