In an 1829 letter to President Martin Van Buren, the diplomat and former US Secretary of War Joel Poinsett wrote:

“It would lead you into error to compare [Mexicans] with the free and civilized nations of America and Europe in the Nineteenth century. They started from a period nearer to the age of Charles the fifth, and it is even a matter of some doubt whether this Nation had advanced one step in knowledge and civilization, from time of the conquest to the moment of declaring themselves Independent.”

The South Carolinian Poinsett had spent some years in Latin America, notably in Chile, prior to his arrival in 1825 as the first official US ambassador to Mexico. He headed there following his vote to execute the last “ringleader” of the 1822 Denmark Vesey–led slave rebellion in Charleston as part of a court commission. He was sent to Mexico by then-President James Monroe on a special mission to assess where the country merited US recognition of its independence. His ship briefly stopped in Puerto Rico, long enough for him to ponder the high probability of a slave insurrection due “to the vicinity of the Republic of Hayti.” Finally arriving in Veracruz in late 1822, during the tumultuous imperial rule of Agustín de Iturbide, the South Carolinian traveled through eastern and central Mexico. He fretted about Britain’s preponderant economic power in the country, scouted promising mining ventures for his personal portfolio, and (correctly) doubted that Iturbide’s unstable monarchy would last. Upon his return to the United States, Poinsett published his writings, reaching an international audience. As historian Lindsay Schakenbach Regele notes, these published “opinions formed the basis for Alexis de Tocqueville’s statements in Democracy in America about Mexico’s inability to sustain democracy.”

Poinsett was not the first choice for this new diplomatic posting. Future President Andrew Jackson had previously declined Monroe’s offer. When the South Carolinian returned to Mexico, he immediately began meddling in its internal affairs. By the time Jackson allowed him to resign in 1830, the ambassador had interfered in negotiations between Mexico and the last remaining Spanish military forces located near Veracruz; secretly organized political opposition via a Masonic Lodge to the ruling Centralist party “which he saw as antithetical to U.S. interests because of its close ties to British business”; and, in 1828, even supported a coup to further US political and economic interests in the country. He also used those “Masonic connections” to obtain “favorable plots of land for himself and his friends and establish an American-based mining company.” Poinsett later went on to serve as Jackson’s secretary of war and carry out the genocidal Indian Removal Act.

Now remembered more for the red cuetlaxochitl flower that he sent back to the United States than his diplomatic misadventures, Poinsett created the script for future ambassadors. From the beginning of the United States’ diplomatic relations with Mexico, its sovereignty was titular and negotiable. The United States’ neighbors were not equal nation-states. The question, past and present, is not whether the United States should infringe upon Mexican sovereignty, but how much, and how it should calibrate and determine the scale and form of said infringements.

The first ambassador’s actions highlight a broader, structural feature of US-Mexico relations. From the US perspective, Mexico merely serves as a strategically important territory, a launching pad for the regional and global projection of imperial power, and a key to ensuring its own domestic stability (particularly in the past decades through the control of migration and illicit drug trafficking). US national security is premised on viewing Mexico as a territory to control, exploit, and subordinate. In that regard, Poinsett set the rule for a type of meddling that combines state and private interests in aid of imperial policy. That rule led to the theft of more than half of Mexico’s national territory in the mid-nineteenth century and the coup plot that murdered the country’s first democratically elected president of the twentieth century.

The US architect of the coup that overthrew President Francisco Madero in 1913, Henry Lane Wilson, was a twentieth-century version of Poinsett. When Madero’s wife implored Wilson to save her husband, the ambassador retorted, “Your husband’s downfall was due to the fact that he never wanted to consult with me.”

Josephus Daniels represents the rare exception. A southerner like Poinsett, Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointed him ambassador in the days of the New Deal and Good Neighbor Policy. Daniels (like others in FDR’s “brain trust”) viewed Mexico as a revolutionary laboratory from which to learn and draw lessons. In his recent book, America, América, historian Greg Grandin narrates how Daniels — despite his white-supremacist past and ideas — pushed FDR to consider borrowing from the 1917 Mexican Constitution’s revolutionary advances on social rights. “Mexico,” he told the president in 1934, “is looking to do more for the forgotten man than you have been able to do.”

It was a brief moment when some progressive US politicians managed to recognize the limits of political liberalism and of US power itself by reading about and analyzing in good faith the social and economic radicalism unfolding south of the border. Mexico — and Latin America — had something to teach the so-called colossus of the north about social justice, noninterventionism, liberal multilateralism, and respect for national sovereignty, and as Grandin argues, an actual “rules-based international order.” There were surely contradictions, particularly for some Caribbean and Central American nations that chafed under the dictatorial rule of FDR’s (and the United Fruit Company’s) preferred “sons of bitches”: the likes of Fulgencio Batista (Cuba), Anastasio Somoza (Nicaragua), Rafael Trujillo (Dominican Republic), Maximiliano Hernández Martínez (El Salvador), and Jorge Ubico (Guatemala).

Yet this looks like a brighter moment when contextualized in a longer history of US-Latin American ties. Tragically for the region, the United States has been a terrible, unwilling student, unable to take responsibility for a violent imperial history, or even acknowledge it.

This same history continues to this day, as we have witnessed in Venezuela and Cuba. It is as if the region is there only for the United States to control and dominate it, making the imperialist aspirations of the Monroe Doctrine into reality — including in its southern neighbor.

The Donroe Doctrine, as cartoonishly brutish as its namesake, imagines two political options when dealing with Latin America today: work with obsequious, pliant authoritarian local proxies (Nayib Bukele, Daniel Noboa, Javier Milei) or hold a gun to the head of recalcitrant leaders through economic, legal, or military threats. Cynical recourse to “international niceties,” as Stephen Miller puts it, are out; strength, force, and power as the “iron laws of the world” are back in. There are efforts to legitimize this will to power by deploying framings that fuse security and anti-communist discourses, like “narcoterrorism.” But overall, sheer dominance without hegemony is the aspiration for the Americas, even as the United States rhetorically or militarily concedes the limits of its power elsewhere in the world.

But Mexico represents a different sort of challenge for this imperial arrangement. It always has.

Since winning independence in 1821, the first of Mexico’s three popular revolutions, outsiders have doubted Mexico’s capacity for republican democratic self-rule and, by extension, its ability to exercise sovereignty. Modern sovereignty, as political theorist Bikrum Gill reminds us, depends on “two relations of force”: internally as effective control over a geographically delimited territory,and a monopoly of force within it; and, externally as recognition accepted, granted, or forced from other sovereign powers.

The United States has long doubted the Mexican state’s ability to translate internal sovereign aspirations into reality. Such doubts have consistently connected Mexicans’ alleged incapacity for self-rule — expressed as perpetual political disorder and social violence — to the immediate safety of the US homeland. Mexico even presents the biggest threat. “And you thought World War III started in Eastern Europe,” a CIA contractor in Taylor Sheridan’s television show Lioness tells his teammates, “No, no, no everyone. It’s Mexico.”

In contemporary terms, we are talking here about “border security.” In the 1830s, a Mexican Texas dominated by indigenous polities like the Comanches capable of organizing large raids, made unstable by undocumented proslavery Anglo migrants, and open to European capital, potentially undermined US border regimes and capitalist frontier fantasies. Today, it is an amorphous mix of migrants, illicit drugs, and “narcoterrorists” that is allegedly threatening the evergreen American Maginot Line: The barbarians are at the gates, “The Hispanic Challenge,” as Samuel Huntington wrote in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, threatened to undermine “Anglo-Protestant culture” and US national identity. Whereas this illustrious Harvard professor and dedicated consultant to authoritarian regimes feared a country split in two, it’s not too difficult to see how some of his students moved on to think about racialized civilizational warfare and even great replacement theories.

To diagnose US imperial and domestic anxieties in any given era, look to the US-Mexico border, a space of exception where US empire justifies myriad forms of violence as acts of “preemptive self-defense.” US empire, following Nick Estes and Stefan Aune, is one long Indian War. Enemies are rendered “Indian,” subject to exceptional forms of justified violence beyond the law, beyond political rights, beyond so-called civilization, reserved for its “barbarous” opponents. This settler-colonial and imperialist logic — underscored by a notion of self-defense against “irrational” and “savage” enemies whose form of warfare is total “undistinguished destruction” — links Thomas Jefferson’s comments about “merciless Indian savages” in the Declaration of Independence to the genocidal wars waged by the United States against indigenous polities throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the ongoing extrajudicial executions of Caribbean “narcoterrorists” on boats who kill “millions” of Americans with illicit drugs. As the lawyer, Dylan Saba, argues, these frontier-border-Indian wars, saturated in racial colonial violence, formed the core of US legal understandings of (just) warfare — a core projected onto international law in the aftermath of World War II as the United States became the global hegemon.

In this imperial imaginary, Nicolás Maduro represents a current manifestation of Geronimo, or perhaps a hybrid version that includes Pancho Villa: revolutionaries who treated the US-Mexico border like a Möbius strip.

But when the empire is everywhere, the imperial borders/frontiers are global. Understanding the history of US empire as grounded in the logic of Indian War helps us understand why the global war on terror‘s legal justifications for torture invoked the Seminole Wars; or why Osama bin Laden was code-named Geronimo in the US operation that killed him in Pakistan.

As such, the US policing of imperial borders and the hapless but violent search for new “regenerating” frontiers — like Greenland today — depend on what is called the security of the southern border and the country below it. For two centuries, US tolerance for some degree of mediated Mexican sovereignty has hinged on the existence of political-social stability, economic opportunity for US capital, and “border security.” Viewing the interdiction of illicit drug trafficking as a tense and negotiated binational exercise since the early twentieth century helps us understand the US-Mexico relationship today and Mexican sovereignty more broadly. According to the Donroe Doctrine, as incoherent and contradictory as this “project” seems, the tripartite war on migrants, drugs, and the nebulous concept of “narcoterrorism” is at the core of, as Pete Hegseth said last year in Panama, the project “to put America first,” and, to accomplish this, “we will put the Americas first.”

In this paradigm, what connects Minneapolis, Caracas, and Cuba to the Caribbean, the eastern Pacific, and the US-Mexico borderlands is the US imperial power to decide who gets to live and who must die. It is the power to detain, imprison, and extrajudicially murder individuals and communities deemed existential threats to the United States. With impunity and no due process or regard to international law. With no distinction between the foreign and the domestic. And celebrated via snuff video clips or “banger memes” disseminated throughout social media platforms.

In addition to a shared border, a history of military interventions and territorial conquests has shaped US-Mexico relations and lasting Mexican definitions of nationalism and sovereignty. Changes in US government and geopolitics have at times provided Mexico more space to assert its sovereignty: President Lázaro Cárdenas’s nationalization of Mexican oil during the late 1930s is one important example. This story is not just one of unilateral, overwhelming US dominance over its southern neighbor. Mexican political officials have had to learn something about waging asymmetrical warfare, mostly in a metaphorical sense, to defend sovereignty from external pressures.

Mexican political leaders since the 1960s have also repurposed those external pressures to firm up domestic political and social stability and to extend state power into internal frontiers and rebellious zones like the states of Guerrero and Sinaloa. Since World War II and the Cold War, public and now-declassified transcripts have helped scholars understand the dynamics of US-Mexico relations. Publicly, US political leadership has generally tolerated even strong Mexican rhetorical and diplomatic assertions of sovereignty. For instance, during the 1960s, Mexico maintained diplomatic relations with revolutionary Cuba even as the United States cajoled the rest of the region into isolating the revolution. Yet as we now know thanks to historian Renata Keller, Mexican political and diplomatic officials secretly passed along intelligence about the Cubans to the US government. The Cubans reciprocated by not supporting revolutionary movements within Mexico. 1970s President Luis Echeverría was later revealed as a CIA asset, having secretly pushed US officials to elevate and tolerate Mexico’s international position as a progressive but anti-communist state within a rapidly decolonizing and nonaligned Global South. Three other Mexican presidents were also on the CIA payroll from 1958–82.

During the Cold War, Mexico thus remained “the last good neighbor” — albeit with some reservations. In a now-declassified military analysis from 1965, a Mexican intelligence officer considered the possible consequences of the US buildup in Vietnam. If the United States sought to more aggressively protect its “southern flank” as it (over)extended its military capacity in Asia, would it coerce Mexico into a more direct collaboration? And even violate “our sovereignty over land, sea, and air?” And if Mexico refused, considering the status of its military, designed for the police maintenance of internal security, not for resisting external aggression? Such refusal in the name of defending “territorial sovereignty,” the author hypothesized, could lead to direct US military intervention.

That threat remains today. Replace Vietnam with “the drug cartel” or “narcoterrorism” and you have the twenty-first century version.

As historian Christy Thornton shows, historical experiences of US intervention led Mexican intellectuals and diplomats to formulate important new multilateral approaches to international governance and global economic development in the decades after the 1910 Revolution. In meaningful ways, these Mexican contributions helped shape the so-called rules-based international order and offered more progressive alternatives throughout the twentieth century, such as the New International Economic Order. This is one legacy that President Sheinbaum could draw upon in this current precarious moment, faced with a serial killer US empire.

Mexico also has leverage. The current criminal war waged by the United States and Israel on Iran — and the economic fallout that promises to worsen, particularly for energy and food markets — only enhances the primary significance of the US-Mexico economic relationship. The shared border, too, gives Mexico power in this unequal arrangement.

Trying to satiate this erratic, warmongering US empire is a dangerous, self-defeating option. It will not stop at Venezuela, Haiti, or Cuba. The killing or capture of cartel kingpins like Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes “El Mencho” will not suffice; “narcoterrorism” is a convenient label that can be slapped on anyone deemed a threat to US regional interests. A day after journalists reported last January that President Sheinbaum had decided to end oil shipments to Cuba, the GOP-controlled Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives demanded more: “ending all support for this oppressive regime and its friends in Moscow and Beijing.” Threats of US military intervention have not stopped.

The challenge for the current Mexican government is to reject the role of colonial gendarme and look south to engage in the ever-seemingly impossible task of uniting “Nuestra América.” It must do so in the face of a bellicose northern colossus and its growing number of regional lackeys that comprise the so-called Shield of the Americas.

At the least, increased coordination with Brazil (the biggest country in the region, demographically, along with Mexico) to defend sovereignty as a foundational, nonnegotiable principle is a must. Sending oil to Cuba would help alleviate national electrical blackouts and a collapsing power grid. Not by coincidence, the global grassroots convoy that sailed to Cuba earlier this year to break the murderous blockade bears the name of José Martí’s idea of revolutionary, internationalist, and anti-imperialist solidarity put into practice.

Or, as the Argentine delegation to the 1889 Pan-American Conference put it, this means building an America not for the United States but an “America for humanity.”

One of the most frustrating aspects of climate politics today is that it is arguably the Right that mobilizes class politics most effectively on this issue. Right-wing politicians consistently argue climate action is a plot of the liberal elite to harm the lives of average working-class families with rising energy costs and lost jobs. On the other hand, liberal activists often make climate change about everything but class — “Believe Science” — and sometimes advocating policies like carbon taxes that would raise the price of energy (affirming precisely what the Right warns against).

The report throws this problem into sharp relief. A question asking about a carbon tax that would impose an additional $40/month on consumers obtains 69 percent support from elite liberals, while working-class support is a paltry 24 percent! Meanwhile, simply reframing the tax to focus on emitters with no increase in household costs increases working-class support to 65 percent (and support from liberal college grads to 90 percent).

While climate activism tends to single out the fossil fuel industry as the enemy, often targeting “Big Oil” in particular, one of the key findings is that this kind of politics falls flat with working people: “Climate action to rein in Big Oil produces the widest class gap, with support from 91% of liberal college grads versus just 50% working class support — a 41-point gap.” This might be because most working-class people understand they rely on fossil fuels for their basic everyday existence — to drive to work, to heat their homes, and more — and as we’ve seen with rising gas and electricity prices as of late, these costs impose significant burdens on already strained household budgets. A politics narrowly aimed against the fossil fuel industry will struggle to overcome the industry’s own highly misleading narrative that they are the key to delivering affordable energy to American families.

Another topic beloved by affluent liberals is the commitment to the Paris Agreement — a nonbinding climate agreement signed by 195 countries in 2015. Not only does the Right paint this as a globalist plan meant to impinge on US national interests, but the treaty itself also translates into an abstract politics of degree targets and emission-cut commitments. Unsurprisingly, there is a massive class gap over whether the US should stay in the treaty: liberal college grads oppose withdrawal at a level of 95 percent, but the working class only shows 39 percent opposition.

There are other topics climate activists should avoid entirely. For good or ill, the electric vehicle (EV) is cemented in the popular imagination as an overly expensive vehicle for the smug elite; thus working-class support for government incentives to purchase EVs (not even mandates) is abysmal at 37 percent (compared to 66 percent for liberal college grads).

But even left-wing climate advocates get squeamish around the idea of an EV-focused transition. One thing the report did not ask is whether there is a class gap on questions of public transit — which, in cities at least, is disproportionately relied on by the working class. Of course, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani made expanding free public transit a cornerstone of his campaign, a policy that would have a positive climate impact as well.

The report not only shows the extent of the class gap on a number of climate questions but also demonstrates how reframing the issues can dramatically increasing working-class support for pro-climate policy. If the message shifts focus from “Big Oil” to “corporate profiteers,” working-class support increases by 12 percentage points. This is no doubt due to the simmering popular anger toward the rich in general, rather than the fossil fuel industry in particular.

The most dramatic gains come, unsurprisingly, from a focus on what matters to working-class people every day: energy costs, well-paying jobs, and even pollution. A message emphasizing those issues resonated with an impressive 75 percent of working-class respondents while retaining 90 percent of affluent college-grad liberals.

This finding aligns with a core slogan of the Yellow Vests movement in France, when it complained that the political class only cares about the “end of the world” when workers are trying to make it to the “end of the month.” Indeed, while climate change itself can appear gradual and abstract, it has been the consistent failure of climate advocacy to reach people at this “end of the month” level.

The report also shows the working-class responds positively — increasing 17 points — to a “Build, Baby, Build” message that centers economic growth, job creation, and calls for reshoring manufacturing. It should be obvious why this framing resonates in communities destroyed by decades of free trade and deindustrialization.

But this message also stands in contrast to the last two decades of climate activism that has had a skewed focus on blocking destructive fossil fuel projects like pipelines or coal-fired power. While many of these struggles are inspiring — the fight over the Dakota Access Pipeline comes to mind — this style of politics inevitably antagonizes unions and workers in these industries who we need to build and replace all that fossil fuel infrastructure with clean energy alternatives. The report shows the wider working class is more aligned with these building trades unions.

One possible response is that the Democrats already tried a “Build, Baby, Build” strategy, linking climate to jobs with the Inflation Reduction Act, which led us right back to Donald Trump. But crucially, the report advises we “don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater” on that front. Not only had many IRA projects barely gotten off the ground before Trump was reelected, but studies have shown the tax-credit model of policymaking made it difficult for communities to link any economic benefits to a coherent political project of the Biden administration. (It didn’t help that Joe Biden himself was incapable of communicating those connections.)

While Marxists and others on the Left are correct to point out that many college-educated progressives are themselves part of the working class — even many lawyers and doctors must work for a paycheck to survive, after all — the key to socialist political strategy is uniting the whole working-class around a majoritarian agenda. For a civilizational challenge like shifting away from fossil fuels, only broad-based working-class power is capable of achieving what planetary systems require. To build that power, we need to understand why we are failing to win many workers to our politics, and how we can change that.

Whenever someone goes to the doctor, the bill they receive is paid either directly by them out of pocket, by their insurer, or through some combination of the two. The precise payment mix is determined by the cost-sharing rules contained in health insurance plans, which vary from policy to policy.

The Affordable Care Act established a list of ten essential health benefits (EHBs) that must be covered entirely by health insurers without any out-of-pocket cost-sharing for individuals. The Searchlight proposal would simply add primary care services as the eleventh EHB.

To evaluate the significance of this proposal, we need to know what percentage of current health spending goes to primary care services that are paid for out of pocket. The short Searchlight paper does not provide a definition of primary care services. So, for my analysis, I have adopted the definitions used in the Milbank Memorial Fund’s Primary Care Scorecard.

In the Milbank scorecard, author Yalda Jabbarpour provides both a narrow and a broad definition of primary care, which I replicate in the graph below.

Under the narrow definition — which includes general practice, family practice, internal medicine, pediatrics, and geriatrics — primary care makes up 4.5 percent of total health spending. Under the broader definition, the number goes up to 12 percent.

The vast majority of this spending (85 to 87 percent) is already paid for by insurers, not by individuals out of pocket.

When you add it all up, out-of-pocket primary care spending amounts to just 0.6 percent (narrow) to 1.8 percent (broad) of all health spending. This is a drop in the bucket, and if this proposal is implemented, households will end up paying higher premiums to make up for the increased insurer payouts, making it a wash overall with some winners and losers. This is not a bad thing to do, but it is fairly trivial in the grand scheme of things.

Searchlight’s second proposal is to create something called the American Health Gateway, which it calls a “nonprofit coverage option,” but which reads like what people normally call a “public option.” This public option would (1) compete in the ACA exchange market, (2) compete in the Medicare Advantage market, and (3) be available (for free?) to low-income individuals in states that have not expanded Medicaid.

Below I have plotted the current distribution of health insurance in the United States and shaded as teal the population where this public option would conceivably be available.

The potentially affected individuals make up around 13.2 percent of the overall population, with two-thirds of that coming from Medicare Advantage. Of course, not everyone in these groups will switch to the public option, so the percentage of people who would be directly served by it would be much smaller than that.

There are a couple of really strange things about this proposal.

First, if you are going to create a public option, why wouldn’t you make it available in the employer market, which is the largest market private insurers operate in? If you are going to make it available in the Medicare Advantage market, why wouldn’t you also make it available in the Medicaid Managed Care Organization (MCO) market, which is, for all relevant purposes, essentially the same thing?

Second, if you are going to create a public Medicare Advantage plan, why not just create that inside the Medicare program itself? The private insurers that operate in the Medicare Advantage market are basically criminals, but seniors nonetheless like the idea of an all-in-one insurance plan that incorporates Medicare Parts A, B, and D. The obvious solution to that would be to cut out the fraudsters and have the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) offer their own Medicare Advantage–type plan, not to create yet another health insurance entity.

There is something also quite comical about the Medicare Advantage aspect of the plan. When you run the clock back, what you see is Congress inviting private insurers to administer Medicare plans and then this whole thing turning into a vehicle for defrauding the government out of tremendous sums of money. Now our policy response to this is to see if the American Health Gateway can somehow convince the nation’s elderly to turn away from whatever Medicare Advantage plan Joe Montana is hocking on daytime TV in favor of the American Health Gateway, which sounds just as scammy if not more so. This is needlessly circuitous, at best.

Individuals who receive their insurance through an exchange receive an income-based subsidy. During the Biden administration, that subsidy was increased a bit. That increase lapsed in 2025, bringing the subsidy back down to pre–Joe Biden levels. As with most other organizations, Searchlight proposes returning to the Biden-era exchange plan subsidy levels. Unlike most other organizations, Searchlight proposes only doing so in states that have adopted Medicaid expansion.

In the graph above, we can already see what share of the population is on an exchange plan. It is 4.1 percent. This proposal targets them except that it excludes those who are in one of the ten states that have not expanded Medicaid. This exclusion knocks out 41.4 percent of exchange enrollees.

Once we remove these sacrificial pawns, we are left with only 2.4 percent of the population that is in an exchange plan in a covered state. Some fraction of those earn so much money that they would not receive subsidies even if we returned to the Biden-era subsidy levels.

This is an extremely bizarre proposal, especially when presented alongside the public option proposal above. Taken together, what we have is:

1. A (presumably free) public option for individuals caught in the Medicaid coverage gap due to their state not expanding Medicaid.

2. Expanded exchange subsidies for individuals except for those living in states that did not expand Medicaid.

The given rationale for the latter is that “America should not continue to subsidize states that fail to take responsibility for the health care needs of their people.” But then, the first proposal does exactly that.

Beyond the logical inconsistencies, on the merits, it is hard to understand how it makes sense to punish individual exchange plan enrollees for the sins of their state government. There also is no chance that any of these holdout states expands Medicaid in response to this incentive. If you really wanted to go down this route, how about increasing the top marginal tax rate to 90 percent in states that did not expand Medicaid? That might actually get state legislators moving and put the target on the rich, not on low- and middle-income exchange plan participants.

If you wanted to keep the punitive measure topically related to health care, why not also reduce or eliminate the federal subsidies for employer-sponsored insurance, Medicare, and military health care in nonexpansion states? Surely that makes more sense than a random potshot at people who don’t have access to an employer health plan.

The next Searchlight proposal is to remove the current related-family rules for who can be added to a health care plan in favor of allowing plan holders to add to their policy “a loved one who is not related but is still family in their hearts.” Unless we are going to be adjudicating whether someone really is or is not someone’s “family in their hearts,” this amounts to a rule that anybody can add anyone to their health care plan.

The number of “loved ones” you are allowed to add is capped at double the number of people the current version of the health plan allows, such that single plans could have the policyholder plus a “loved one” while individual-plus-spouse plans could have the policyholder, their spouse, and two “loved ones.” The proposal does not spell this out, but insofar as family plans theoretically permit an infinite number of children, it would seem individuals with those plans could add an infinite number of “loved ones.”

The proposal makes clear that insurers would be allowed to raise the premium to match the extra enrollees. So, ultimately, this just amounts to the ability of some people to add some other people to their own health plan at cost, which I guess is fine, even if small-bore.

Finally, the Searchlight document ends with what I would call the usual underexplained hand-waves. We get a broad commitment to cut red tape, to fight fraud and abuse, and to expand health care supply via telehealth, artificial intelligence, foreign doctors, and so on. Again, fine as far as it goes, but not all that significant in the grand scheme of America’s health care dysfunction.

Ultimately, the Searchlight proposal is far to the right of not just what Bernie Sanders ran on in 2020 but also what Pete Buttigieg ran on in 2020. It does not eliminate uninsurance and does little to nothing to cut down on excess administrative expenses and provider rents. It is clearly inferior to a Medicare for All–type system on all the relevant policy axes.

The point of this proposal seems to have been to generate a flashy headline about free primary care for all, which it did, but that headline policy amounts to almost nothing, and the overall grab bag of proposals is internally contradictory, cruel in places, and simply not up to the task at hand.

“It was a disaster,” says Francesca Fusaro of humanitarian NGO No Name Kitchen, whose six volunteers ran out of food and supplies almost immediately. They had already been responding to some three thousand crossing attempts throughout 2026. Now supermarket shelves were running empty, with no hope of adequate resupply for days.

Images of a small community being overwhelmed were beamed around the world and seized upon in order to argue for more extreme border enforcement. But the chaos in Ceuta was the result of enforcement, not its absence.

The Ceuta border was fenced off thirty years ago, as Europe shut down traditional circular migration patterns where North Africans regularly freely crossed back and forth. This immediately led to a spike in migration by those who feared permanently losing access to Europe.

In the post 9/11-wave of mass securitization, border surveillance and enforcement hardened more. The EU assumed new powers, with its new border agency Frontex deploying with Spanish forces off North Africa in 2006. Moroccan authorities’ violent clearance of migrant camps near the exclaves in 2015 did not prevent further crossings either; nor did the 2022 Melilla massacre in which dozens of people were killed by Spanish and Moroccan forces at the border.

Thirty years of criminalizing migration has produced an environment where refugees and migrants rely on smugglers and more occasional chaotic mass crossings.

In this case, despite talk of the EU being overwhelmed, Spanish forces in Ceuta oversaw large-scale returns the following day. But we should also ask: At what cost? How many people were unable to exercise their right to present an asylum claim before being forced back? How were suspected crossers identified, as Ceuta residents of Moroccan origin reported hiding in their homes, fearing racial profiling? Could more have been done to prevent deaths?

These are searching questions, but unfortunately, they are unlikely to be asked. Border deaths are now normalized, and when the issue registers in public discourse (with the notable exception of Pope Leo’s call for more humanity in the migration debate during a recent visit to Lampedusa) it’s usually to make things worse. Last month, the EU passed hard-line new deportation laws, inaugurated to cheers of “send them back” led by far-right legislators.

Ceuta is a test not just for Europe’s morals but for its organizing capacities. The harsh new Migration Pact, much criticized by human rights defenders, was supposed to forge European unity in such situations. Instead, the response to Ceuta has been messy, further discombobulating the bloc. Spain’s Pedro Sánchez has slammed some European leaders’ reaction as “selfish and unlawful.”

When we zoom out further from Ceuta, we can see a bigger story about migration control and its relationship to geopolitical chaos.

In Spain, many have accused Morocco of “weaponizing” migration; deliberately sponsoring the crossing as a part of a bigger power game, directed against Sánchez’s center-left government. Spanish security services claimed both in 2021 and now that Moroccan intelligence agents were embedded among those crossing.

Contrary to the belief that globalization would solve conflicts by binding rivals’ interests together, the weaponization of interdependence is now more common, with states exploiting their role in complex global networks to win conflicts (the closure of the Strait of Hormuz being the most obvious current example).

Around Europe, the accusation of “weaponized migration” is frequent. Turkey was accused of intentionally facilitating crossings to Greece in 2020, Morocco to Spain and Belarus to Poland in 2021, Russia to Finland in 2023, and Eastern Libya to Greece in 2025. There is evidence of such a strategy at play in all these cases; but it’s first worth asking what is being weaponized.

The accusation itself has major implications for people migrating. Seeing them as the mute tools of states or smugglers forestalls a reckoning with who they are and what has compelled them to move. Worse, treating them as mere pawns helps justify violence against them. Turkish, Greek, and Belarusian actions have been used to defend EU forces shooting at refugees, imprisoning them, refusing to aid them, and suspending international law, all in the name of responding to an attack by hostile states. It is a narrative instrument for dehumanization.

The height of irregular border crossings in 2015–16 only ever constituted less than 1 percentage point of the European population (the continent’s largest displaced population are Ukrainians, whose international protection was formalized and facilitated.) Europe is surrounded by much poorer nations who hold vastly higher numbers of refugees, insulating the EU from the pressures of global crises, including ones for which Europeans bear hefty responsibility, such as wars in West Asia and climate change.

The EU and European states in turn bribe or coerce neighboring countries to adopt harsher migration enforcement, exporting chains of abuse around the world. European financing and diplomatic cover supports illegal deportations in Turkey, violence by border forces from Croatia to Saudi Arabia, a regime of slavery and torture for migrants in Libya, and mass strandings in deserts in Morocco and Tunisia where mostly black people are rounded up and left for dead. EU public money now even pays for patrol boats that shoot at European rescue ships. The “norm” in Moroccan-Spanish border cooperation is violence, culminating in the aforementioned Melilla massacre of 2022.

European states have signaled to the world, first, that the EU’s internal political crises forestall any ability to behave rationally on migration issues and, second, that Europe depends on external states and entities, including authoritarian governments and militias, to do its dirty work. It is entirely unsurprising when states at the subordinate end of a grim transactional relationship do not always point the gun where they are told to.

None of this, of course, means ignoring how states do manipulate migration routes.

Spain’s position on Morocco’s occupation of Western Sahara appears to have motivated Morocco’s permission of the last mass Ceuta crossing in 2021 and also to be a factor in this one.

Morocco not only criminalizes dissent at home but is a key border control, surveillance tech, and military partner for European and NATO forces, as well as a potential key supplier of critical raw materials. Its ties to Israel and the United States — including apparently recently naming a highway after Donald Trump — have prompted some Spanish commentators to see US and/or Israeli involvement in the Ceuta incident.

The evidence presented is, thus far, circumstantial at best. Undoubtedly, a US-Israel axis has exploited the incident to relentlessly troll Spain in response for its defiance; with Israel’s United Nations rep accusing Spain of settler colonialism, others demanding it cede Ceuta and Melilla to Morocco, and the White House reasserting support for the illegal Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara.

The US-Israel axis is also deeply involved in the political economy of EU migration violence. A US military surveillance firm that flies spying missions over Gaza also flies for Frontex, supporting Libyan forces to intercept people fleeing. (Frontex also fields Israeli-made Heron surveillance drones.) The United States is seeking deportation deals with Libya and a brace of the same countries in which Europe also aims to set up an archipelago of gray-zone offshore detention camps.

Because of its moderately heterodox foreign policy, Spain has now become a major thorn in the side of US attempts at extending its hegemony in Europe — blocking its tech companies, refusing to allow its air bases to be used to extend the US war on Iran, and being vocal in its opposition to genocide in Palestine. Its stance may also have emboldened others, such as France. A general election is upcoming in Spain, and the far right will attempt to use polarization over migration to destabilize the government.

Spanish Premier Sánchez has been on a long journey since his government’s 2022 intervention at NATO, which caused the bloc to list irregular migration as a threat for the first time. The military and Guardia Civil in Ceuta may have upheld Fortress Europe by force, but a wider story is the recent large-scale regularization of Spain’s undocumented population, allowing them access to work, rights, and pathways to citizenship. The policy is a rare exception to harsher migration controls springing up across the West and has also prompted pushback.

The Spanish right, backed by US conservatives’ influencer-industrial complex, argues that Sánchez’s policy encouraged the Ceuta crossing. Misleading information does seem to have played a role; people crossing were told that they could not be deported or that the border was open. However, if there was really a strong link between crossings and government migration stances, Giorgia Meloni’s Italy would not remain a leading destination for those crossing the Central Mediterranean.

In Ceuta, many locals have been welcoming and done their best to help; a demonstration in support of refugees drew hundreds. But a minority have, according to some reports, attempted to form mobs to prevent people crossing.

In the exclaves where Francisco Franco’s forces once gathered and prepared to storm the Spanish Republic, their mainland descendants are now encouraging activists to “defend the border.” This incident cannot be separated from a coordinated push on multiple fronts — principally a barrage of artificial-intelligence-generated slop about Muslim invasions of Spain — to destabilize the last middleweight European power with a social democratic government.

Five years ago, I wrote about a past Ceuta crossing, arguing that a rapid increase in border militarization would become states’ maladaptive “solution” to a climate-stricken world.

In Morocco, years of crippling droughts have combined with state mismanagement and the long-run effects of a debt crisis and structural adjustment imposed by international financial institutions to produce a youth unemployment crisis severe enough to make tens of thousands risk a dangerous sprint into the unknown.

Spain is now installing a giant floating barrier on the Ceuta coast; similar barriers built by the Trump administration in Mexico and installed earlier this year have been ripped off their moorings by floodwaters and sent slaloming down the Rio Grande Valley, forcing arterial roads to shut.

Today around Ceuta, wildfires rage across North Africa. On the European side, Spanish and French cities are thick with smoke, and even temperate corners of Britain are burning. Some 270,000 Europeans have been forced from their homes — a salutary reminder that displacement is a growing feature in everyone’s lives, not only of those in lower-income countries.

As real crises accelerate, with wars, environmental breakdown, political polarization, economic stagnation, and inequality, and the explosion of dangerous technologies in the hands of a few, establishment discourse continues to obsess about migration while we burn. This scapegoating strategy is only deepening.

Ceuta has also sharply revealed how disarticulated the politics of such issues can be. Watching right-wingers attack Spain as a colonial force in North Africa while some on the Left call for harsher border controls has been deeply odd. Yet these contradictions aren’t about to disappear.

There will be more Ceutas: more people seeking safety and escape from multiplying crises, more border regimes that make their journeys more dangerous, and more actors seeking to instrumentalize humanitarian emergencies for various political ends. A socialist politics that can digest and respond to these complexities both operationally and politically is urgent.

Migration is many things: a humanitarian emergency, a social and economic opportunity, a reflection of local and global inequality and strife, and a vector for large-scale exploitation. Most governments responsible for violence at borders do not really want to stop it so much as ensure it takes place in conditions that keep migrants vulnerable and exploitable — also making racialized injustice more certain.

Engaging with these multiple realities is a prerequisite for addressing them. A focus on borders, whether on opening them or closing them, is no substitute for a broader transformative politics. This involves safe and planned migration routes. But it also involves breaking out of an interminable “migration debate” about costs and benefits and into a domestic call for labor protections and high-quality public services for all, and an international call to end inequality, extractive economies, wars, and environmental breakdown.

Incidents like those at Ceuta require a politics that can process both the rival moves of states and empires, and the movement of a teenage boy, arms thrashing in the warm water on a scorching-hot day, seeking a better shore.

Beyond their points of unity, there are important differences in how the Blue Collar Brigade candidates speak and where they stand on social issues.

The first difference is one of register: how effectively each candidate connects to working-class values and how well they avoid activist and technocratic language that can alienate working-class voters. Brooks and Poindexter are the strongest in this regard, using plainspoken language that reads as unmistakably working class. By contrast, while Kaela Berg’s personal story is as compelling as anyone’s, her campaign statements read at a college level, and her packaged messaging sometimes drifts into the language of a policy memo rather than everyday speech.

There are also clear differences around how the candidates navigate social issues. Brooks presents himself as the most culturally moderate, a gun owner who supports universal background checks and pairs border security with a path to earned citizenship. Poindexter says almost nothing about culture at all and keeps his campaign focused relentlessly on class.

By contrast, though generally disciplined in how they discuss social issues to ensure the economic-populist core of their message remains front and center, Forstag and Villegas nonetheless come across as more culturally progressive than Brooks or Poindexter. Forstag was a paid lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood who describes that record as a fight to “keep government out of your business.” Villegas takes a different approach than Brooks and Poindexter on immigration, centering that discussion on the human cost of ICE raids in his heavily Latino Central Valley district. Berg, the only Brigade member who still needs to clear the primary stage, is the only one of the five candidates who openly holds full-throated left-wing positions on immigration, transgender issues, and Israel-Palestine.

Whether any of these differences will prove electorally meaningful is an open question, since Democratic candidates in swing districts blending working-class biography and economic-populist messaging is so rare that we have little precedent to judge by. But it is worth noting that Villegas’s positions on immigration are unlikely to be out of step with his overwhelmingly working-class Latino constituents, whose communities were among the first in the country to endure large-scale immigration raids in 2025. Likewise, Berg is running in a more Democratic-leaning district with a smaller share of working-class voters than any of the others, in Minnesota, a state that bore the brunt of some of ICE’s worst excesses earlier this year.

While the Brigade has banded together under the same umbrella, they’re not the only candidates running the playbook. There’s Rebecca Cooke, a dairy farmer’s daughter who can be found waiting tables when not on the campaign trail. And Nate Powell, a Spokane firefighter and marine running as an independent in eastern Washington. There are also Senate hopefuls with similarly powerful working-class, economic-populist credentials, such as independent Dan Osborn in Nebraska and Democrat Troy Jackson in Maine.

And though they are imperfect parallels, since the Brigade generally brings more firsthand working-class experience and runs on bolder progressive economic platforms, a handful of sitting Democrats in tough districts offer important precedents. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (WA-3), who owns a rural auto repair shop and campaigns in a mechanic’s jumpsuit, has twice held a Donald Trump–won district in southwest Washington, running on a small-business-focused version of economic populism. Marcy Kaptur has held her Toledo-anchored, Trump-won district (OH-9) for decades, and Sherrod Brown — a fiery opponent of deindustrialization and bad trade deals — won statewide in an increasingly Republican Ohio until his narrow 2024 loss.

Brown is now running for Ohio’s other Senate seat against incumbent Republican Jon Husted, and the race is a toss-up. And Gabe Vasquez (NM-2) — who comes, like Villegas, from a working-class immigrant family with deep roots in his district but who also built a professional career before running for office, has won repeatedly in a majority Latino, Trump-trending swing district in southern New Mexico by keeping his message plainspoken and focused squarely on kitchen-table economics.

For all their differences, the Blue Collar Brigade candidates share far more than divides them. Even one or two wins in November would set a significant precedent, proving that the Bernie Sanders coalition of 2016 can travel into the swing districts any lasting working-class realignment of American politics will require.

The present confrontation started on June 5 and represents the third major phase of an Intifada-like uprising that has unfolded since 2023. Two previous uprisings won huge victories against the implementation of neoliberal measures: for instance, subsidies were revived while unbearably inflated utility bills were slashed.

The recent killings are not an exceptional breakdown of state authority but express the logic of a political order whose survival depends upon denying the people in PaJK any meaningful control over the conditions of their own existence. The PaJK, unlike Indian-administered Jammu Kashmir (IaJK), is not integrated into the Pakistani state and enjoys formal (though highly symbolic) autonomy. Its population of 4.3 million people is approximately one-third that of the Indian-ruled territories, and it covers less than one-quarter of their land area.

In practice, the ongoing dispute involves election manipulation, especially through so-called reserve seats. Islamabad rigs and manipulates elections to install a puppet government in PaJK.

The present uprising cannot be understood through the language of economic crisis alone. Rising electricity tariffs, soaring fuel prices, inflation, and declining living standards supplied the immediate grievances around which the movement crystallized. But these conditions were themselves products of a deeper political relationship. They reflected the organization of power in PaJK where the population bears the consequences of economic decisions over which it exercises no effective control.

The territory’s constitutional framework has long separated political responsibility from political power. While elections produce governments and assemblies, decisive authority over fiscal policy, energy, natural resources, and major administrative questions remains concentrated in Islamabad. The institutions that appear to constitute self-government therefore perform a contradictory function. They are expected to absorb public anger while lacking the capacity to resolve the conditions that generate it.

The result is a colonial-style political economy in which democratic forms coexist with the systematic denial of popular sovereignty. The state appears local but governs through institutions whose ultimate authority lies elsewhere. Economic exploitation and political subordination, therefore, reinforce one another. The extraction of resources, the imposition of austerity, and the transfer of decision-making power to Islamabad are not separate processes but different expressions of the same structure of domination.

Economic hardship alone, however, does not produce mass mobilization. Similar conditions have existed elsewhere without generating a movement of comparable scale. The decisive question is how social grievances acquire organization. That process had been unfolding for years before the present uprising.

The revocation of Article 370, which granted IaJK limited autonomy, by the Indian state in August 2019 transformed political debate across the divided state of Jammu Kashmir. Although the constitutional changes were implemented in IaJK, their significance extended far beyond the Line of Control (the de facto line dividing PaJK from IaJK). They exposed the extent to which competing states claimed the authority to determine the future of Jammu Kashmir while excluding its people from that process. Questions of sovereignty, democratic power, and political representation acquired a renewed urgency throughout the territory.

The developments of 2019 also exposed the exhaustion of the dominant political parties in PaJK. For decades, they had alternated between the roles of government and opposition while operating within institutions whose purpose was not to transfer sovereignty to the people but to administer a subordinate territory.

The contradiction became increasingly difficult to sustain. The left-wing organizations, nationalist currents, student movements, and democratic activists sought to construct broader political alliances capable of challenging the existing order. Consequently, the People’s National Alliance (PNA) was founded in 2019 and generated considerable enthusiasm and revealed the existence of a substantial constituency seeking political change. Yet they struggled to establish durable organizational roots because they were unable to fuse the constitutional question with the increasingly urgent material concerns of workers, students, and the urban poor.

By the early 2020s, those contradictions had begun to converge. An economic discontent merged with a growing recognition that these conditions could not be separated from the political structure through which the territory was governed. It was from this convergence of class grievances and democratic aspirations that the present movement emerged.

The earliest campaigns focused on electricity tariffs, wheat prices, and the increasing cost of living. Demonstrations against inflation, symbolic burning of electricity bills, nonpayment campaigns, sit-ins, and shutter-down strikes spread through towns and villages during 2022 and 2023. What initially appeared as scattered local disputes gradually revealed a common political reality. Regardless of locality, protesters confronted the same institutions, the same administrative indifference, and ultimately the same state power standing behind every decision that shaped their lives.

This convergence was not simply geographical but reflected the gradual formation of a common political consciousness among social groups that had previously entered struggle through different experiences. Workers faced declining wages, there were shrinking opportunities for students along with phenomenal fee hikes, and small traders were struggling with falling purchasing power as well as rising operating costs. These experiences did not erase the differences between classes and social layers, but they increasingly pointed toward a common source of authority lying beyond the institutions of local government.

The city of Rawalakot, which has long served as a center of radical left politics and secular democratic activism, became one of the earliest centers of sustained mobilization. Demonstrations over wheat prices evolved into prolonged occupations that repeatedly frustrated attempts by the authorities to disperse them. The city acquired political significance because it demonstrated that disciplined mass mobilization could withstand routine police repression and maintain control of public space for extended periods. Each successful mobilization encouraged similar initiatives elsewhere, enabling participants in local struggles to recognize themselves as forming part of a wider territorial movement rather than isolated episodes of protest.

As mobilization expanded, it became increasingly clear that fragmented campaigns could not exert sufficient pressure upon a state capable of containing localized dissent. Activists, therefore, sought an organizational form capable of coordinating action across the territory while preserving the broad social coalition emerging through struggle. This process culminated in the formation of the Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC), which united local action committees into a territory-wide coordinating body in September 2023.

One of the most important developments within the uprising has been the scale and visibility of women’s participation. PaJK remains deeply shaped by patriarchal social relations that have historically confined women to the private sphere while restricting their presence in political life. Public leadership has largely remained the preserve of men, and women’s political activity has frequently been treated as secondary to struggles defined and directed through male-dominated institutions.

The present movement has disrupted that order in significant ways. Women have organized demonstrations, addressed public meetings, participated in sit-ins, and marched alongside men despite the certainty of police violence and arrest. They have not appeared merely as supporters of a movement led by others but as political actors whose participation has altered the movement’s social composition and expanded its democratic horizons.

This transformation carries implications extending beyond questions of representation. Patriarchal authority and colonial rule are historically distinct forms of domination, yet they reinforce one another by restricting who may legitimately exercise political agency. A population is more easily governed when political participation is confined within established hierarchies, whether those hierarchies are maintained by the state or by conservative social relations.

Women’s emergence as organizers, therefore, challenges both simultaneously. Every woman who occupies political space denied to her weakens structures of authority that depend upon exclusion as a condition of their reproduction.

These developments have unfolded unevenly. Conservative tendencies within the movement have at times sought to marginalize women’s leadership or limit their role in decision-making. Such contradictions reflect the movement’s broad social composition rather than an external pressure imposed upon it. Yet these tensions cannot obscure the transformation already underway.

Women have stood on the front lines of demonstrations, endured arrests, faced live ammunition, and mourned those martyred in the struggle. Their participation has become part of the political memory of the uprising and whatever course the movement ultimately takes, it has already altered the social landscape from which future struggles will emerge.

For decades, the Pakistani state has sought to legitimize its authority through constitutional arrangements that preserve the appearance of self-government while concentrating decisive power elsewhere. This contradiction has become increasingly obvious and difficult to manage.

As living standards declined and democratic institutions repeatedly proved incapable of responding to popular demands, broader sections of society began to recognize that meaningful economic reform could not be secured without challenging the political framework that produced those conditions. The struggle has, therefore, moved beyond a contest over policy. It has become a confrontation over sovereignty itself.

This explains the ferocity of the state’s response. The Pakistani ruling class is not merely defending a particular government or protecting a single administrative institution. It is defending an entire structure of domination whose stability depends upon preventing the people of Jammu Kashmir from exercising effective control over their political and economic future.

Every successful mobilization threatens to weaken that structure by demonstrating that collective organization can impose limits upon state power. Every concession won through struggle encourages new demands, broader participation, and greater confidence among those who have long been excluded from political decision-making.

The significance of the uprising, therefore, extends beyond the boundaries of PaJK. Across South Asia, declining living standards, deepening inequality, and increasingly authoritarian forms of rule have generated recurring waves of popular resistance. Governments have responded with familiar methods: criminalizing dissent, militarizing civilian life, restricting democratic freedoms, and presenting repression as the defense of public order. The confrontation unfolding in Rawalakot belongs to this wider historical moment, in which ruling classes increasingly rely upon coercion to preserve political arrangements that command diminishing social legitimacy.

Whatever immediate outcome emerges from the present confrontation, the uprising has transformed the relationship between the people of Jammu Kashmir and the state. A generation that has experienced its own collective strength is unlikely to return quietly to the political passivity upon which colonial-style rule depends. The question now is not whether the old order has entered into crisis. It is whether the forces that have brought it to that crisis can develop the organization, political clarity, and solidarity necessary to carry the struggle beyond resistance and toward genuine popular sovereignty.

Our empirical verdict is clear: participatory budgeting and related institutions demonstrably improve local democratic life even when they face severe structural headwinds. Peru’s participatory institutions increased civic engagement, improved government responsiveness, and measurably improved citizen well-being. These aren’t trivial accomplishments.

Legal mandates matter a great deal. When participatory processes are properly resourced, sustained, and embedded into annual budget cycles, citizens engage more often and governments respond more meaningfully to citizen input, leading to both better lives and stronger democracy.

This speaks directly to a challenge every progressive mayor faces. The famous Porto Alegre participatory budgeting process — for decades considered the global gold standard for successful municipal participatory democracy — was eventually dismantled when a hostile mayor came to power and simply ended it. This is a central vulnerability of participatory governance: its strength depends on a committed executive, but when that leadership disappears, even the most committed activism to defend participatory democracy may not be enough to save it. Peru’s answer was to embed participation in national law, giving it both reach and longevity, if also limiting the program’s vigor and dynamism.

We also document a dynamic that should encourage progressive mayors: participation begets more participation. Citizens who engage in participatory budgeting become more civically active overall, and civil society organizations grow denser and more capable where participatory institutions are stronger. Engagement in one arena spills over into others, building the kind of organized citizenry that makes a progressive administration more powerful over time.

We are equally unflinching about the failures of participatory democracy. Peru’s participatory institutions have been deeply uneven in their quality, and our research catalogs their common pathologies: burdensome registration requirements that exclude poor and underrepresented communities; limited outreach that lets the same organized groups control the process; poorly facilitated meetings where a small handful of speakers crowd everyone else out of the discussion; and a disconnect between what citizens prioritize through the process and local governments’ ultimate spending decisions.

These failures have direct implications for cities in the United States run by even the most well-meaning progressives. People are tired and skeptical of endless “listening sessions.” Participation without binding consequences, without transparency, and without deliberate efforts to bring in a wide range of voices that are generally left out of the conversation serves more to demoralize than to mobilize.

Our findings on representation are particularly sobering. Without explicit rules prioritizing groups traditionally shut out of political decision-making, participatory institutions tend to reproduce existing inequalities. Opening the door to participation is not enough; governments must invest serious resources in bringing more people through it.

The most important design lesson is about integration. Gianpaolo Baiocchi, who studies participatory democracy across Latin America and Europe, and served on Mamdani’s transition committee, has argued that participatory processes deliver only when connected to real institutional decisions, and when assemblies hold genuine power over budgets and services rather than running alongside government as symbolic consultation.

Our work on Peru’s participatory budgeting confirms Baiocchi’s insights. Peru’s participatory processes were never meaningfully integrated into broader, long-term municipal planning, nor scaled up to link local participation with regional and national decision-making, as a range of experiments under Brazil’s Workers’ Party showed was possible. And mobilization efforts fell woefully short: limited outreach let the same organized groups dominate; low awareness kept most citizens in the dark about the process; and the deliberative process reproduced the inequalities it was meant to overcome.

A central argument in our book concerns what we call Peru’s democratic paradox. Despite two decades of locally impactful participatory institutions, Peru remains one of Latin America’s most unstable democracies, with nine presidents in a decade — four of them since late 2025 alone — a newly inaugurated right-wing president whose father ruled the country as a dictator and died a convicted human rights criminal, and alarmingly low public support for democracy as a political system. Local participatory democracy has produced genuine improvements even as democracy at the national level is fraying.

Our conclusion is clear: participatory institutions can strengthen local democracy, but they cannot substitute for healthy national political institutions or reverse democratic backsliding driven by corruption and concentrated elite power.

Local democratic innovation must be pursued simultaneously with, not instead of, the harder work of building durable political organizations and winning power at higher levels. Mamdani’s New York is a powerful example, but its success will depend not just on how well his administration governs the city, but on whether the movement that brought him to power continues to grow. Local participatory democracy can be a training ground and power base for that larger project, but it can’t replace it.

Our two decades of research on participatory democracy in Peru have produced a detailed account of what works, what fails, and why. Participatory institutions can improve the quality of democracy, improve people’s lives, and build the organized citizenry that sustains a progressive administration through hostile conditions, but only when they are well designed, adequately resourced, and genuinely integrated into government decision-making. The hard lessons learned in Peru are ones progressive mayors elsewhere would do well to learn before they repeat them.

After mentioning a tiny number of female billionaires, while not pointing out how rare they are, the familiar trope of name-checking a few of the world’s richest male footballers is wheeled out, as if Elon Musk’s ability to accumulate astronomical wealth were somehow comparable to the ability to kick a ball. However, there is a connection that the expert analysts don’t mention.

The “compensation” of contemporary international footballers has relatively little to do with their talent alone. They happen to be playing at a moment when football has become more monetized than at any point in its history. Had they been equally brilliant a century ago, they would have received peanuts. It is the TV deals, the size of the world’s audience, and the accountants that make a few footballers so very rich today.

The idea that extraordinary talent deserves extraordinary compensation is our modern-day justification for an increasingly threadbare myth about inequality. What appears to have spurred the Economist to action is the growing opposition to that myth. The article notes that fundraising emails from Democratic Party politicians in the United States were, by 2026, three times more likely to castigate billionaires than they were as recently as 2024. Something is rapidly changing.

The Economist’s writers devised their own categorization of roughly 7,000 billionaires profiled since 2001 to make the claim that “for the first time, half the wealth of the world’s billionaires is reasonably fairly earned.” The adverb “reasonably” is doing heavy lifting here. Apparently, securing a billion is “reasonable” so long as it does not come from gambling, construction, defense, or mining. The magazine’s rationale is that these industries often require “political access,” implying corruption has played a role. In the “expert analysts’” own words: “It is hard to open a mine or a casino, for instance, without friends in the government.”

Almost all billionaires have never gotten their hands dirty. Few could program even the most basic software used by their companies or bolt together and wire even a small part of a machine themselves. Their talents tend to lie elsewhere: bean-counting, dealmaking, self-promotion, and ruthlessness. Even those who self-describe as “self-made” frequently benefit from forms of substantial inherited wealth, elite educational credentials, the security to take risks, and exclusive social connections unobtainable to regular people.

Praising billionaires is a little like praising kings and queens of old or the high priests, pharaohs, and emperors that preceded them. These figures were once worshipped, and elaborate narratives were constructed around them, elevating their greatness no matter how mad, bad, or incapable they might have been — or still are.

Societies create positions that must be occupied by figureheads, and someone will invariably fill them. What is interesting is when the stories propping up those figures begin to lose their shine. That is often when change is coming and society is evolving into something new.

The Economist examines the changing makeup of the billionaire class in order to suggest the system is becoming more meritocratic and robust. By its measure, roughly half of all billionaire wealth came directly from inheritance in the early 2000s; more recently, that proportion has fallen to a quarter. But this decline appears to reflect the falling concentration of billionaires in the United States and Europe — as enormous fortunes grow elsewhere around the globe — alongside corporate growth and rising asset values.

The very rich become much richer when the rest of us are less well organized. As the US and Europe shrink in economic importance and Asia rises, the composition and geography of billionaire wealth is transforming. In trying to explain the apparent rise in “deserved” wealth, the magazine notes that companies around the world have made annual average returns of 13 percent for shareholders. As the Economist acknowledges, a great deal of the rise in billionaire wealth has come from holdings in companies other than those that individual billionaires are associated with.

The magazine sees no connection at all between this increase in profit-making and the global cost-of-living crisis confronting a great majority of people. instead, it terms this “the affordability crisis” and reduces it to “a few years of high inflation hitting living standards.”

At one point, the article concedes that democracy might function better with less billionaire influence. However, if democracy did function better, we would have no billionaires. No compelling case can be made for allowing anyone to accumulate so much wealth and therefore so much power over the lives of others. But there is little praise for democracy in this article. Instead, the acclaim is reserved for the money hoarders who, we are told, keep the modern world turning.

Interestingly, the place that has seen one of the greatest increases in billionaires in recent years is China. It is also one of the few countries in the world where the government has taken an active role in curtailing the growth of billionaire wealth. The Economist mentions Beijing’s crackdown on gambling in Macao, which hurt some casino billionaires, and the fall in wealth of one Chinese property developer from $21 billion in 2017 to around $4 billion today. It also notes that many Chinese billionaires have only recently tipped into the billionaire wealth bracket.

The Chinese government is unlikely to celebrate the concentration of wealth in its still-growing economy. Nor is it likely to accept the Economist’s conclusion that “a greater share of today’s billionaires spurs employment growth and productivity gains” and that this concentration of wealth “raises the economic cost of losing them” if they “decide to move away, or work less hard, to avoid taxation.”

The idea that a tiny number of extraordinarily rich people are the reason why there are more jobs in some places, or that workers become more productive because billionaires exist, would be laughable were it not peddled so earnestly and desperately today. The implication seems to be that democratic societies cannot tamp down on billionaire power. China’s example does not prove the opposite, as the number of new billionaires has grown so rapidly, but it does at least show that how many billions each might eventually accrue is a political choice, not an inevitability.

The Economist is owned by rich families, most of whom have family wealth measured in billions. Its largest shareholders include the Agnelli family (worth more than $20 billion) and the Smith family, through the Smith Financial Corporation (worth around £7 billion). Other very rich families, including the Cadburys and Schröders, also hold significant stakes.

Why would very rich families sponsor and shape the direction of a magazine called the Economist? One answer may be found in articles such as “The rise of the deserving rich.” At a moment when the very rich are under increased public scrutiny, the magazine has elected to produce a tract in defense of billionaires.

The article begins with the observation that “billionaires have never exactly been popular, but today they are loathed,” adding that it is now common to hear that “Every billionaire is a policy failure.” The Economist was founded 180 years ago by a banker and businessman. It has always championed a particular economic worldview aimed at particular people. Today, as economic liberalism faces renewed and energetic criticism, the magazine has responded with a defense of the rich. The very need to mount that defense is telling.

The title, “The Deserving Rich” is itself a revealing inversion of the old distinction between “the deserving poor” and the “undeserving poor.” The deserving poor were deemed well-behaved and adequately industrious to merit some pennies to live on; the undeserving poor were placed in the workhouse.

To those with riches, arguments for greater economic equality can feel like oppression. The rich worry that they are increasingly deemed undeserving and that one day they might be put in the equivalent of a workhouse. The article suggests that they are, in fact, worthy of sympathy and protection. Through publications they own or influence, the rich ask not just for our sympathy and pity but for our gratitude, understanding, and, ultimately, our continued subservience. Their shrill special pleading reveals how weak their arguments are.

The backdrop is ongoing existential threats to the US Postal Service (USPS). Since Trump returned to office, the postal doomsday clock has been minutes from midnight.

Though Trump hasn’t acted on his threat to move the Postal Service under the Department of Commerce, his new batch of nominees for the Board of Governors aren’t even from private sector logistics but from finance — so maybe less interested in rationalizing the service than in selling it for parts.

Postmaster General David Steiner, who somehow makes his predecessor Louis DeJoy look good, is going along with Trump’s extreme attacks on vote by mail. He says USPS won’t deliver ballots in states that won’t hand over voter lists to the government.

Steiner has also been claiming USPS could run out of money within the year, and threatening to close post offices and cut delivery days if its finances aren’t fixed.

The next-biggest union, the American Postal Workers Union (APWU), organized rallies July 28 for three reforms that would help in the short term — raise the debt limit, modify the investment strategy for retiree benefit funds (they’re all in Treasury bonds), and change how the retirement obligation is calculated.

Longer term, USPS needs to adapt to fewer letters and more packages. Management’s approach has been to cut costs by degrading service. The unions argue it should instead expand revenue by adding services like banking, internet access, hunting licenses, electric vehicle charging, and checking in on seniors.

In addition, retired letter carrier and longtime activist Jamie Partridge argues, the government should subsidize rural delivery, as many other countries do.

A vote-no movement on the 2024 contract was organized by a coalition of forces including Caref, the CLC, the Build a Fighting NALC (BFN) caucus, and influential podcaster Corey Walton, number two on the CLC ticket.

Podcasts are big with letter carriers — you can listen while you slog through the workday. One called Next Generation Carriers has interviewed activists from all the vying groups and even Renfroe himself (Labor Notes staffers have also been guests). Cohost Margo O’Neill, a steward of Branch 352 in Des Moines, is also the treasurer for BFN. Her main goals at the convention, she said, are to grow the reach of the reform movement and to build unity across the various existing groups.

The Next Gen hosts have been agitating for a contract demand of “30 for 30”: a starting wage of $30 and no more than one manager per thirty carriers, to save money and alleviate micromanagement. New carriers start at about $21, in an entry-level job called “city carrier assistant” where they’re often made to work Sundays delivering Amazon packages. It can take two years to convert to a career position, and even then, everyone hired since 2013 is on second-tier Table 2 pay.

In the Massachusetts chapter of BFN, “we’ve been really pushing to get people more active, talking to CCAs about their rights on the job,” said Chris Persampieri, legislative and political director of Branch 18:

A lot of people had no idea that if it’s your day off, you’re not on call. You don’t have to pick up the phone. There’s no union steward on Amazon Sundays, so they’re on their own. We show up with flyers about their rights and a box of joe from Dunkin’ Donuts, because it’s Massachusetts, and that’s what we do here.

Some reform activists are backing the CLC; some are backing Caref; some like certain members of the Davidson slate. The election may yield a mixed executive council of people who ran on opposing tickets, and the new president will have to “mold that into a solid team,” said Branch 3 President David Grosskopf of Buffalo, who’s running for trustee with the CLC.

What’s difficult to find is anyone with a good word to say about Renfroe. Last convention, he was already in hot water, facing internal charges of dereliction of duty and impaired driving of a union vehicle.

Delegates voted to let him off the hook. But they also voted for more member involvement and substantive bargaining updates; Renfroe had been bargaining for nearly two years in near-complete secrecy.

Soon afterward, he came out with a tentative agreement featuring a measly 1.3 percent annual raise. Members voted it down.

As the union returned to the table in early 2025, Renfroe announced nationwide “Fight Like Hell” rallies — then reversed course over fears of Trump and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and rushed into binding arbitration. The arbitrator imposed a contract nearly identical to the one members had voted down, sparking more outrage.

And the bad deal had taken so long to negotiate that it was more than half over, expiring in May 2026, so NALC was soon back at the table.

The union has made incremental improvements in its approach this time. There was a member survey, a national day of rallies, some video updates, and a collective bargaining conference for branch and state leaders.

Still, as the sixty-day mediation period expired in July, meaning the union could be moving to arbitration, members had little information. “We have no idea what economic package our union is asking for,” Grosskopf said. “We don’t know if we’re asking for $30 an hour, or $50.”

Renfroe has kept even fellow officers at arm’s length from bargaining. The last straw for Mack Julion, assistant secretary-treasurer, was when the president proposed a four-day workweek of ten-hour days, meaning carriers would no longer get overtime pay after eight hours.

“Ours is a physically demanding job,” Julion said. “I’m kinda known for my fancy cowboy boots; I wear those because I have a bad case of plantar fasciitis. I’ve known many letter carriers who had hip replacements and knee surgeries.

“I had suggested hazard pay,” he said. “If you think a four-by-ten schedule is a higher priority than hazard pay when we’re just a couple years removed from COVID and we have letter carriers literally dying in the heat . . . We are human, and we break down.”

Rather than run again with Renfroe, Julion planned to run independently for reelection. He ended up joining the Davidson slate.

The convention has strongly democratic features. There are no major hurdles to getting nominated. Delegates vote on every constitutional amendment or resolution submitted by any branch or state association — this year there are many.

Persampieri authored an amendment for ranked-choice voting (where voters can indicate their second- and third-choice candidates and the resulting votes are tabulated in “instant runoffs”) to remove the fear of voting for a spoiler. Branch 3 proposed that the national bargaining team include five officers, not just the president.

Delegates may hear internal charges brought against the officers by a San Diego carrier, Michael Rivera, over the imposition of the rejected contract last year. The officers declined to investigate the charges against themselves, but Rivera is appealing to the convention body.

They will also elect delegates to the 2030 AFL-CIO convention. A “Stand-Up Slate” of younger carriers is running on themes like universal health care and the abolition of billionaires.

Some resolutions were submitted calling on the union to live stream the convention, which officers decided to do.

Minneapolis Branch 9 has sent resolutions on political themes, like ending the war in Iran and funding public services. BFN activist Tyler Vasseur warned first-time delegates not to be too disappointed if they don’t pass.

“The idea is to force a debate on the issue,” he said. “If we get 20 to 30 percent of the vote, we can identify people who want to fight and get organized on these issues going forward.”

Getting members into motion is the name of the game. “If we’re ever going to get the participation up in the union, people have to feel there’s a fight going on, and we have to get some wins,” Caref said. “We’ve been taking a lot of losses, and it’s really demoralizing for the carriers.

“You’ve got to start with a clear vision for where you want to be, and a strategy for how you’re gonna get there. You get some little wins, you get more people involved, and you start moving in the right direction.

“That’s why I always tell people, I only want to be president if you guys want me to be president,” he said, “because I’m going to give you stuff to do right away.”

Israel provides a useful case study on how this sort of strategic moderation can go wrong. After the October 7 attacks, US support for the Israeli military became a hot-button issue that divided the Left from the center-left in the Democratic Party. In the early period of that dispute, public polling was generally pro-Israel. But this completely reversed over the next couple of years (Gallup, Pew). This whipsawing of public opinion resulted in strategic moderates like Yglesias recommending taking positions that quickly became toxic, creating a “defund the police”–type problem for all of the politicians and political actors who followed Yglesias’s advice.

To see just how bad this advice really was, I used a coding agent to download every Matt Yglesias tweet from October 7, 2023, to present that mentioned “Israel,” “Palestine,” or “Gaza.” I was hoping I could plot some kind of change over time with that data, but Yglesias appears to have deleted all of his tweets from August 2024 through May 2026. This was presumably done through a tweet deletion service that said it would delete all of his tweets but actually only deleted his last 3,200.

So I shifted to a second idea, which was to have Claude analyze all 492 Israel-related tweets Yglesias made between October 7 and August 2024 (i.e., before the mass deletion) and to identify the ones in which Yglesias was arguing, directly or implicitly, that it was smart politics to be pro-Israel. You can browse the complete results of this here. Below are a few of them:

The last screenshot is the one that piqued my interest in all of this because it stuck in my head from when I first saw it nearly three years ago. Narrowly, on the merits, everything about it is backward. All else equal, sending money to Israel is not good for the American poor, and, as a matter of political rhetoric, it is pretty easy to say we should be spending that money on services at home. In the years since, that particular rhetorical line seems to have become fairly common and effective.

But Yglesias was not making a point about the policy merits. He was saying that Ritchie Torres was, whether sincerely or not, being a smart political moderate because he was doing good position-taking. Just two years later, three members of Congress in Torres-adjacent NYC districts were primaried by people who were, to a large extent, running against the pro-Israel positions of the incumbents. Torres did not face a similar sort of challenge this go-around. He may have won even if he did. But it’s hard to believe today that his past pro-Israel position-taking is a political asset that is helping his impoverished constituents.

The same is true for other politicians, not just Torres, who shrewdly followed the polls in 2023 and now have a record on Israel that puts them at odds with the majority of Americans and the vast majority of Democrats.

The problems with this sort of strategic moderation are not just that you can get burned by a rapid change of public opinion. There is also something more conceptually troubling about it, which is that it is, in a Kantian sense, not universalizable. If everyone were to try to deduce what the median is and then adopt that view, then there would be no median. To have a median, you need people to earnestly engage in political opinion formation and political advocacy that generates a distribution of political views. Yet this sort of earnest political engagement, which is what makes strategic moderation possible at all, is regarded as naive and reckless by strategic moderates.

These days, Yglesias has, in the spirit of strategic moderation, said that Democrats should actually bash Israel. That is, after all, what the current median requires. But if everyone took his advice in 2023, then the median would have never moved to the current anti-Israel position.

To the extent that Yglesias tries to deal with these paradoxes, it’s by imagining that it’s possible to simultaneously be moving public opinion in your direction without that bleeding over at all into the electoral process. But these two things are obviously intertwined. There is no secret place where you can spread your ideas away from the ears of voters, and winning politicians’ support is part of the process of moving public opinion.

Yglesias’s favored example on this point actually proves the opposite. On Twitter and elsewhere, Yglesias likes to point out that gay marriage advocates did not press Barack Obama to run as a gay marriage proponent because they knew it was not yet popular enough at the time, and Obama had given reassurances that he was actually lying about his views on gay marriage. Yet these same gay marriage advocates had, in the 1990s and 2000s, pursued state-level lawsuits aimed at legalizing gay marriage as part of a long-haul strategy of changing public opinion. Some of these suits succeeded, but they also generated public backlash in the form of state-level constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage. It was in this back-and-forth that a durable public consensus in favor of gay marriage was forged.

Free riding off of earnest politics by having others do it and then, as if floating above it all, putting your finger on the median and going “there” can be very psychologically satisfying. It makes you feel like you are one of the only serious people in politics. But what it really does is turn yourself into a non-factor, someone whose political views twist in the wind based on how persuasive other political actors — the ones who don’t engage in strategic moderation — end up being.

In the days before the United States and Iran agreed to a nemorandum of understanding that has now disintegrated, the UAE joined Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other Gulf states in appealing to Donald Trump to end the war. But Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) monarchs are unlikely to forget that the UAE was the only regional state that had earlier encouraged Israel and the US to pursue attacks on Iran and even actively participated in them while others were struggling to end the conflict.

As the GCC rulers had long predicted, their territories were the main targets of Iranian attacks. In coming years, joint action and cooperation between Saudi Arabia and the UAE will continue when circumstances demand it, but their rivalry is now a fundamental feature of regional politics and will worsen, regardless of a meaningless exchange of friendly messages between two officials on July 21.

Decades of pretense that the GCC states are a cohesive group of like-minded autocracies are misleading. Going back to the nineteenth century, rival families ruling little more than villages were riven by intrafamily disputes, with their leaders killing each other to control the then-scarce resources of the region. This sequence was interrupted when Great Britain fossilized the relationships between them as imperial overlord.

Saudi Arabia was, of course, the exception, but it is barely a century since the Al Saud finally took over Hejaz and established the country along its current borders. Had it not been for British domination of the coastal statelets, there is little doubt that, with the exception of Oman and Yemen, the entire peninsula would now be part of Saudi Arabia.

Relations between Saudi Arabia and the UAE have been tense more often than not. The long-lasting conflict over the Buraimi Oasis was only solved in 1974 when the kingdom recognized the UAE diplomatically. Particularly since the beginning of the twenty-first century, under the leadership of Mohammed bin Zayed (MBZ), the country has used its massive hydrocarbon export income to increase its power and challenge Saudi dominance of the GCC states and beyond.

As early as 2009, the Emirati leadership considered Saudi Arabia a serious security threat, as revealed in a US Wikileaks cable from that year:

While the UAE pays lip service to the idea of GCC unity, the reality is that Abu Dhabi is deeply skeptical of multilateral approaches particularly on military matter [sic]. And while publicly expressing close ties with Riyadh, the UAE privately regards the Kingdom as its second greatest security threat after Iran (Israel is not on the list).

After King Salman’s advent to the Saudi throne in 2015, his son Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) soon ascended to very senior positions. To become crown prince, he needed support from Washington, which favored the then-incumbent, his cousin Mohammed bin Naif, who had been a close collaborator of US intelligence agencies for decades. The UAE’s influential ambassador Yousef al Otaiba made the change possible by persuading the US authorities to support MBS. For a couple of years, observers generally described the relationship between MBZ and MBS as one of mentor and mentee.

The high point of their cooperation, which was also to be the root of their future divergence, was the blockade of Qatar between 2017 and 2021. Initiated by the Emiratis, it was at first supported by MBS. However, the Saudi-initiated reconciliation with Qatar was imposed on a reluctant UAE by 2021.

By now, the relationship had already significantly deteriorated as a result of this and other issues. Yemen was the first space where their rivalry was visible as early as the summer of 2017, when UAE officials did not hesitate, in private at least, to insult the Saudi leadership.

Both Saudi Arabia and the UAE aspire to middle-ranking world power status with international influence. To achieve its targets, Saudi Arabia must develop many sectors in which the UAE is decades ahead, including tourism, entertainment, sports, hospitality, and luxury infrastructure.

The development strategies of the two states are similar if not identical, based on the export of hydrocarbons, a close alliance with the United States and other Global North states, and neoliberal economic policies. Both are designing their economies for a post-oil future on the basis of advanced technologies, tourism, and grandiose projects. Politically, they are both absolute monarchies unwilling to accept any form of challenge, or even any hint of alternative political views, repressing the mildest forms of dissent.

In the long run, the size and financial clout of the Saudi regime are advantages it possesses. The population balance favors the kingdom, three times that of the UAE. Moreover, if we only include nationals of the two countries, disregarding migrant workers, the UAE has barely 10 percent of Saudi Arabia’s population.

The UAE has a much higher per capita income for its nationals and is way ahead of the kingdom in its development model: for example, the Saudis only introduced tourism visas in 2019. The UAE’s strategic geographic position, about halfway between East Asia and Europe, is a major asset for trade and manufacturing.

Disagreements and forms of competition are growing. Taking early advantage of the GCC Free Trade Agreement, the UAE established numerous productive and other enterprises in a series of “free zones,” mostly in Dubai. In July 2021, the Saudi regime ended free trade for outputs from free zones and imposed import tariffs on these products, targeting the UAE, which is most affected.

The same year, it decreed that all major international companies operating in the kingdom must have their HQ there. This prompted more than 660 companies to move to Riyadh, although its living conditions are not yet quite as relaxed as those in Dubai. Various incentives have been provided to support this move.

Although the UAE has a long head start, the Saudis are catching up, largely thanks to two factors: improved standards of entertainment and comfort in the kingdom, alongside the size and scope of potential profits for the companies concerned, which far outstrip anything the UAE can offer. This month, the Financial Times reported systematic delays in financial transfers between the two countries.

Another difference is the UAE’s focus on military interventionism. Since 1990, its forces have been involved in US-led operations in Afghanistan, Somalia, Kosovo, Libya, and Iraq and received the moniker of “little Sparta” from senior US military staff. By contrast, the Saudi military are widely reputed to be little more than a “parade” army. This has been one reason that few Saudi ground troops have been active in the fighting in Yemen, though the UAE suffered significant losses there.

Saudi and Emirati policies toward Russia and China are similar, ignoring the US-led sanctions and embargoes in favor of deepening economic relations. The Saudis pioneered a prisoner exchange between Ukraine and Russia in 2022. They also hosted an international Ukraine conference in August 2023 as well as meetings involving Ukraine, Russia, and the United States in March 2025. However, the UAE has mediated more prisoner exchanges, and the US-sponsored Ukraine-Russia negotiations in late 2025 took place in Abu Dhabi, suggesting that on this front, it is unclear who has Washington’s favor.

In Yemen, the two states were pursuing incompatible policies as early as 2017, and the gap steadily widened until the open breach six months ago. The UAE supports Southern separatists, while the Saudis are in favor of retaining a unified state. A major point of divergence emerged in Sudan when war broke out in 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces under Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) led by Hemedti (officially Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo), which have been responsible for horrific massacres.

Saudi Arabia supports the “official” armed forces, while the Emiratis continue actively arming and financing the RSF despite worldwide outrage at their atrocities in Darfur. In 2025, the UAE supported the formation of a RSF parallel government, while the Saudis established a coordinating council with the Burhan government. Following the eruption of the rivalry in Yemen in December 2025, disagreements on Sudan flared up publicly once again.

Tensions are also noticeable around the Red Sea. Saudi Arabia has facilities in Djibouti, whose government expelled the UAE in 2017. The Emiratis then set up a new base in Berbera in the unrecognized state of Somaliland, with additional facilities in Eritrea. Following Israel’s recognition of Somaliland, the UAE is now building military facilities inland to facilitate Israeli and US activities in the area.

Meanwhile, the Saudis are deepening their relations with Somalia. They have kept the UAE out of the Red Sea Council, a regional body created in 2020, although it must be said that this remains little more than a paper organization at time of writing.

Differences over oil exports and production first became prominent in 2021, when the Saudis compromised with the Emirati position. However, the UAE went on to leave OPEC on May 1 this year, a move that will deeply affect finances in Saudi Arabia. When the long-term impact of constraints on the Strait of Hormuz are solved, oil prices will drop thanks to a glut and the increase in renewable alternatives.

This context explains why rivalry, even explicit hostility, dominates the relationship between the Saudi Kingdom and the UAE, with their two leaders hardly on speaking terms. As early as late 2022, MBS was said to have told reporters that the UAE “stabbed us in the back,” for which he threatened to retaliate.

Although it is highly unlikely that this situation will lead to lasting armed confrontation between the two states, there is little doubt that the rivalry will intensify and manifest in other situations. There is now a deep split between the UAE and Israel on the one hand and a larger number of states that include Saudi Arabia, other GCC members, and Egypt, alongside Turkey and Pakistan. This is likely to be a feature of regional politics for years to come.

Yemen may remain the most visible litmus test of their relationship, though the Red Sea and surrounding states are also likely to become prominent. As the RSF prepares more atrocities in Sudan, now in Kordofan, the UAE shows no sign of reducing its support. Conflict continues in Yemen, with the Emirati leadership undermining efforts to solve the crisis. The main victims of this rivalry are the people of these countries.

Zumthor and museum management defend the price tag by pointing to the fact that the building is intended to last forever. Zumthor took his cue from the “primordial quality of the tar pits” adjacent to the site. The concrete structure “should look old, excavated rather than superimposed — something that ‘feels like it was there forever and should be there forever.’”

As Zumthor sees it, the problem with most architecture is its “slickness” — his catchall term for the consumerist worldview he despises — and he fashions himself by contrast as a simple artisan. As a critique of capitalism, “slick” is empty; it is about as sophisticated as thinking the problem with rich people is their McMansions. Zumthor sees the building as a challenge to the slickness that Los Angeles embodies. He is on record describing the city with a world-class cliché: “green lawns and bushes in the front yards of the houses look as if they were made of plastic.”

Rather than a manufacturer of glossy cubes, Zumthor offers himself as a simple laborer, a common man of the people. “The German word Baumeister,” he says, “is a beautiful word. When you call me a Baumeister, it will make me happy.” He is a simple craftsman “without a diploma.” He “trusts non-architects more than he trusts architects.”

Yet it is hard to imagine a more abstracted fantasy of labor than Zumthor’s. He speaks of the objects in the museum as displaced peoples, as objects that “speak,” if only we had ears to listen. Zumthor shows remarkable contempt for educators. Our ears are blocked up with the voices of “schoolteachers pinning everything down.” He hopes “there won’t be any tags” placed on the works by these repressive schoolteachers. So far, he has succeeded: his walls are stripped clean of nearly all information.

His antidote to the schoolteachers and the slicksters is an army of (partially undocumented) laborers, whom he fantasizes as simple artisans plying their trade. From the beginning, he “imagined Mexican workers doing the ground” of the museum (a concrete artwork entitled Feathered Ground), “something done by hand. Indigenous knowledge, people who have been there for a long time.”

Obviously Zumthor does not mean these workers have lived for a “long time” in the area but rather that they carry in their blood an attachment to ancient soil — that their indigenous experience can give the “homeless” objects their voices back. The objects in LACMA’s collection were deracinated, Zumthor explains, cut loose from their contexts and histories. “I think this could be my task, to create a new home, a temporary home for these homeless pieces,” he concludes.

Needless to say, his concern is not about such crass material things as wages, labor practices, or worker protections but rather with “how labor is hidden.” How these indigenous workers can show Americans “respect for tools, for work.” His aesthetic attraction to cracks — evident throughout the museum — is an expression of his desire to express labor rather than “conceal it.” Zumthor imagines that “revealing” labor rather than “concealing” it serves some unspecified political purpose.

Zumthor belongs to a long tradition that treats architecture as a critique of hierarchy and an embrace of the spiritual ideal of the laborer. Walter Gropius, in his famous 1919 Bauhaus Program, announced his desire to “create a new guild of craftsmen without the class distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist!”

For the Bauhaus generation, breaking down the walls between classes was the highest form of political achievement. Its architects were inspired by the infamous utopian writer and romantic antiauthoritarian Paul Scheerbart, who fantasized a world where “kings walk with beggarmen, artisans walk with men of learning.” For Scheerbart, the craftsman had no interest in the debased socialist ideal of improved conditions. “New social welfare organizations, hospitals, inventions, or technical innovations and improvements,” Scheerbart proclaimed, will not “bring new culture” — only a new architecture could. Neither Scheerbart nor Gropius had any interest in ridding the world of either beggars or kings, only in fostering mutual respect between them and, by the same stroke, naturalizing their class positions.

Scheerbart’s anti-hierarchical program shaped a range of influential practices including Bruno Taut’s The City Crown of 1920. Taut’s “non-political socialism” sought to “bridge every gap between fighting classes.” Taut sought “a better future, in which man will stand with mankind . . . without the barriers of the classes.” Like Zumthor, Taut regarded “comfort” (his version of “slickness”) as capitalism’s overarching vice. “Good Living, Education — knife and fork, railways and bathrooms, what do those bring us?” he wondered. Nothing but “guns, bombs, instruments for killing!”

The problem was not that the world was full of rich and poor, capitalists and laborers, but how these groups saw each other. His aim was to preserve those differences while ridding the world of the “arrogant” boundaries between them.

Erich Baron, another “socialist” writing in The City Crown, saw all the people of earth united in their “suffering,” including “emperor, king, gentleman, peasant, burgher, and beggar.” It went without saying that “cultural progress” could not “be measured by how the poor climb into higher classes.” Here the architects were in harmony with contemporary fascist economists, who, alongside Baron, insisted that “the notable increase of wages was not accompanied by greater civilization.”

The Bauhaus vision of anti-hierarchy is alive and well in Zumthor’s design and in the visual display. Contemporary museum directors, curators, and architects hold hands in their united vision of a world without barriers and in their celebration of craft labor — just so long as you don’t have to pay those craftsmen a living wage. According to the Los Angeles Times, more than 25 percent of full-time LACMA workers do not make a living wage, a figure that spikes to 69 percent for entry-level employees.

In December 2025, over three hundred LACMA workers formed a union, LACMA United (affiliated with the American Federation of State, Municipal and County Employees District Council 36), seeking better pay, expanded benefits, and more transparency. Workers pushed for unionization to address what they described as widespread burnout, high turnover, and inadequate compensation as they faced pressure to complete the David Geffen Galleries.

In October 2025, Govan and museum leadership roundly declined to voluntarily recognize the union (putting them at odds with other recent unionization efforts at LA cultural institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Academy Museum). Museum management instead insisted on a formal election before recognizing the union. Following a secret-ballot election, an overwhelming 96 percent of participating LACMA employees voted in favor of unionizing.

In a letter to management, LACMA United spelled out what they saw as the basic contradiction between the cultural critique of hierarchy and the capitalist reinforcement of class barriers:

We celebrate LACMA’s reimagining of the encyclopedic museum, presenting a more interconnected and inclusive narrative of artistic expression. As the museum evolves, we believe that this vision should extend beyond rethinking hierarchies of display to include prioritizing the people who bring its mission to life.

LACMA exemplifies a larger trend in museum design in which rethinking hierarchies of display serves as a smokescreen for exploiting the people who bring the mission to life.