The gang of 6 on the Supreme Court has revealed in its recent decisions its authoritarian pedigree – racist, misogynist, christian fundamentalist, labor hating, plutocratic, corporate, and more. It’s zealously giving legal cover to a wider and coordinated effort to undo the entire democratic and social scaffolding of rights and progress, achieved by dint of struggle across generations and time.

So much for “The Shining City on the Hill” and “The Last Best Hope for Mankind.” Both metaphors never really fit the reality, but after yesterday’s hearing, the overturning of Roe v. Wade last week, and the spike in mass gun violence – in Buffalo, Uvalde and elsewhere – the fit is all the more awkard and undeserved.

It is hard to believe that the editors of the PW would publish this article, written years ago by Betty Smith, commenorating the Soviet resistance to Hitler’s invasion of that country on June 22, 1941 without mention of the irony of it all. Everybody knows that the current Russian goverment led by Putin – authoritarian and imperialist, if not fascist – is reigning down, without a scintilla of justification, bombs, bullets, and mayhem on Ukraine, a sovereign country and government on its border.

Was this an oversight by the editors? Could be, but probably not. It strikes me as a continuation of its Janus faced coverage of this bloody invasion by Russia. One day it objects to it, the next day it blames Biden and NATO for it all, and the day after that it suggests, mimicking Putin, that Ukraine is nothing but a hothouse of Nazis.

I wonder what Susan Collins is thinking today???

I consider this essay, written by the editorial team at Convergence Magazine, a refreshing and necessary break – analytically and practically – from the conventional approach and wisdom of many on the left.

“Our task is to stitch together the left-progressive bloc, and fight to maximize its influence within the broader alliance needed to beat back the authoritarian Right. The Democratic Party is shifting, and while there are still forces in it that see the Left as the big enemy, those forces are weakening; the Democrats are closer to being allies than they have been in 40 years at least. Non-neoliberal policy is widely popular, including among Republicans, and could be a way to get some on the Right to shift to the Left (think of union members who voted for Sanders but not Clinton).There is an opportunity in this opening and in the uncertainty of the waning of neoliberalism to reassert a different, new common sense, something like a Third Reconstruction, a multi-racial social democracy.”