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Articles by Carl Davidson
Alinsky Vs. Arizmendi
We are living in the period of late-stage capitalism—a stage where finance capital and large capitalists have violated the social contract of the New Deal era and embraced neoliberalism. They have abandoned their obligation to be the stewards of our productive capacity, cannibalizing it instead. The demands of Wall Street have been to make the highest possible return in the shortest amount of time no matter what the impact is on our communities, the environment, and the working class.
Opposing a Bad Idea: The Liberals Who Are Criticizing Trump’s Peace Deal From the Right
Opposing a Bad Idea: The Liberals Who Are Criticizing Trump’s Peace Deal From the Right Published June 24, 2026 Every morning, we’re in the habit of getting a cup of coffee at 6 am and returning to bed to watch ‘Morning Joe.’ We’ll confess to a clever trick: when they cut to streams of stupid ads, we hit two clicks and switch to Al-Jazeera for more realistic and rational coverage of the Middle East. Then we flip back to ‘Morning Joe’ when the ads are over.
Say ‘No’ To Trump Using the Insurrection Act In Upcoming Months To Block the Blue Wave in November
By Carl Davidson LeftLinks Newsweekly, April 24, 2026 Over the past week, President Donald Trump and his team have been trying to wriggle out of several concurrent hot spots, from trying to end an ill-considered and unjust war against Iran to bringing down the price of groceries. They are stuck in one muddy rut after another, but in another way, it serves as a distraction. But from what?
This October 18 and the Tasks of the Left
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Hit the Streets: We Need the First Amendment To Defeat ICE, Stop Gaza Genocide, and Fight for All the Rest
By Carl Davidson LeftLinks Weekly, Sept 19, 2025 If you favor free speech and the First Amendment, now is not a time to keep your mouth shut. Just the opposite, pick up a bullhorn if you can, and head for the streets now, not next week or next month. There’s a new round of ‘No Kings’ events coming soon. Join them. The hour has arrived. In the meantime, watch the messaging coming from the White House closely.
Oval Office Fascism Keeps Lashing Out, Learn How To Defeat It!
By Carl Davidson LeftLinks Newsweekly, Sept. 5, 2025 Our politics this past week were bizarre, full of chaos, turmoil, and outright lies. How can we sort it all out? Lenin is far from being everyone’s favorite astute political scientist. It’s a shame, really, because he was very good at it, whatever other flaws he may or may not have had. And you also don’t have to be a communist to appreciate many things about him. He was a very smart guy.
Chaos Builds a Path to Fascism.
By Carl Davidson LeftLinks Newsweekly, August 31 Carl’s LeftLinks Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Like all Americans, we are deeply disturbed by yet another mass murder by deranged individuals who conclude their moment of madness by suicide. We need to think about it more. In a way, this ultimate act of self-destruction is also a message warning us all: change or die.
New Danger Rising: ICE Growing Beyond Anything We Had In Mind
By Carl Davidson LeftLinks Weekly, July 11, 2025 The main features of our political landscape regarding policing are about to change dramatically in the coming year. We are all familiar with our local and state police and sheriff's departments. While not as familiar, we are also aware of the FBI and U.S. Marshals. But following the Oct. 11, 2001, attack on the Twin Towers, we have a new player on the field: ICE and its parent, the Dept of Homeland Security.
MAGA, Trump, and the question of fascism in the US : Indybay
MAGA, Trump, and the question of fascism in the US ================================================== The roots of the MAGA movement go back a long way-to the origins of the US as a slave-based settler colony. Parts of the US right now openly sympathize with a neo-apartheid regime.
The Fourth of July and the Left
I’ve always had mixed feelings about the Fourth of July. As a young child in the 1940s, I was terrified of the loud fireworks, despite the colorful beauty they brought to the dark skies. But to me in those years, the holiday was mainly about extended families. We would pick a park with decent swimming pools, and the clan would gather around picnic tables under trees. I had all varieties of potato and macaroni salads, hot dogs and burgers cooking on the grill, and a dozen varieties of desserts.
Fractures in Power Structures: Why Elite Infighting Matters and How We Can Make Use Them
By Carl Davidson LeftLinks Weekly, June 6, 2025 It's Not just the Sparks, Look for What’s on Fire: This week’s headline feud—President Donald Trump’s very public break with Elon Musk, his one-time megadonor—is best viewed as a symptom, not the disease. Similar quarrels are simmering among a dozen other power centers.
A New Order at the Vatican, An Old and Dying Order in D.C.
By Carl Davidson LeftLinks Weekly for May 9, 2025 I was surprised, like everyone, to learn that Robert Prevost, born in Chicago and mainly educated in the U.S., would become the first ‘American Pope,’ Leo the 14th. The Roman Catholic church of the 2020s is far different from that of the 1950s, in which I was raised. It’s worth noting that Leo is not American in any usual sense. First, he is a dual citizen of the U.S. and Peru.
Carl’s LeftLinks Newsletter
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The Risings Begin With 3 Million on the Streets, While Trump Wrecks The China Shop with Stupid Tariffs
By Carl Davidson LeftLinks Weekly for April 11, 2025 The weeks of April 2025—and those that follow—demand reckoning. Some 3 million strong, the militant minority of a progressive majority has awakened and seized the public square everywhere. They demanded ‘Hands Off'‘ their Medicare and Medicaid, their Social Security, the VA hospitals, and veterans ’ benefits. They insisted that diversity, equity, and inclusion remain as tools to see that those most in need were served in good time, if not first.
Carl’s LeftLinks Newsletter
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Trump Unmasked: Annexations and MAGA's Great Nation Chauvinism
By Carl Davidson LeftLinks Weekly, March 14, 2025 'Great nation chauvinism' is a term rarely used outside the left and a few academic classrooms on political philosophy. It's not too hard, however, to figure out what it means. Nor is it too hard to see why it might come into vogue again in much wider circles. Since taking office, Trump has made headlines by declaring he would take over Greenland, take back the Canal Zone in Panama, and force Canada into becoming a 51rst U.S. state.
Mahmoud Khalil’s Illegal Kidnapping is the Tip of a Fascist Spear
A Palestinian human rights advocate, Mahmoud Khalil, has been kidnapped from his Columbia University residence and illegally detained by ICE/DHS agents, first in New Jersey, and now in a private prison in Louisiana. Khalil is a legal resident of the U.S. with a Green Card. His wife is an American citizen, and eight months pregnant. He has broken no U.S. laws, or at least none his ICE captors will name, and he is entitled to all the protections of the U.S. Constitution.
Mahmoud Khalil’s Illegal Kidnapping is the Tip of a Fascist Spear
A Palestinian human rights advocate, Mahmoud Khalil, has been kidnapped from his Columbia University residence and illegally detained by ICE/DHS agents, first in New Jersey, and now in a private prison in Louisiana. Khalil is a legal resident of the U.S. with a Green Card. His wife is an American citizen, and eight months pregnant. He has broken no U.S. laws, or at least none his ICE captors will name, and he is entitled to all the protections of the U.S. Constitution.
Unmasking TrumpSpeak: Critical Theory and the News of the Week
By Carl Davidson LeftLinks Weekly, Feb. 28, 2025 This is one of the weeks when decades are happening. We even have to challenge what counts as real news.
The Risings Vs. Trump-Musk: Why They Keep Coming, and How They Might Fight Better
By Carl Davidson LeftLinks Weekly for Feb 21, 2025 It’s another week, and the prairie grass is still quite dry. We’re referring, of course, to our reference two weeks ago to ‘A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire,’ an old Maoist meme. We described how it applied to the first insurgent wave of ‘50501’ mass protests in every state against the Musk-Trump regime’s slashing attacks implementing the fascist 2025 platform.
Trump and His Muskrats Are Spurring Wide Opposition
By Carl Davidson LeftLinks Weekly, Feb.7, 2025 Carl’s LeftLinks Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. ‘A single spark can start a prairie fire!’ I recall first noticing this watchword of an inspirational slogan attributed to Mao Zedong when I was a young graduate instructor headed off to the University of Nebraska. In addition to teaching and my studies, I planned to organize SDS in the Great Plains.
New Politics Vol. XX No. 2, Whole Number 78
Winter 2025 (New Politics Vol. XX No. 2, Whole Number 78) FROM THE EDITORS A POLITICAL PARADOX: A PROGRESSIVE-LEANING PUBLIC ELECTS A FAR-RIGHT PRESIDENT, Howie Hawkins ASSESSING ONE OF AMERICA’S GREAT LABOR PROGRESSIVES, Jeff Stilley CHINA’S “NO HUMAN RIGHTS” COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGE VS.
“Abolition Democracy” and a Third Reconstruction - New Politics
In this exploration, we want to advocate a new strategic narrative about our future. All futures, especially one tangled in the complexities of fascism and socialism, are best rooted in a deep exploration of our past. And since all narratives require a good use of metaphors and analogies, as well as uncovering new facts, we want to start with an unusual but powerful one.
Carl Davidson Archives - New Politics
Carl Davidson is a theorist and writer beginning with his work in the New Left of the 1960s. In 2012, he founded the Online University of the Left, and today resides in Aliquippa, PA, near Pittsburgh, where he was born and raised. A Path for Defeating Fascism and Moving Toward Socialism Carl Davidson and Bill Fletcher Jr. call for the Third Reconstruction – a deep, systemic emancipatory transformation in the United States.
Dept. of Stupidity 2025: Trump as Top Bully of the World
Our cartoon this week was, in its day, a critique of President William McKinley, who Trump is now proclaiming as his inspiration. It shows Uncle Sam as a teacher, standing behind a desk in front of his new students who are labeled “Cuba, Porto Rico, Hawaii, [and] Philippines”; they do not look happy to be there. At the rear of the classroom are students holding books labeled “California, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, [and] Alaska”.
The Turning Point: Getting Ready To Fight Under New Conditions
By Carl Davidson LeftLinks Weekly for Jan 17, 2025 We are plagued with riches for editorial topics today. As Lenin once noted, “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.” So let’s just run through a handful of hot points featuring China. It’s an emerging power of some significance simply because of its size, if nothing else. One out of five of the world’s people live there. Our 346 million is a mere 4.2 percent.
Please wait while the queue evolves
How companies manage queues has barely moved on since the 1950s. Disney is best at handling physical waiting lines, but too often IT is in charge of phone systems or online chatbots. Insights experts Carl Davidson and Duncan Stuart report. You probably spend far more time waiting in queues than you think. Research by Microsoft in the UK shows that Brits spend about a fortnight each year in queues. This is split about 50:50 between physical queues and online ones.
Seeing Through The Fog: Trump's Fascism Creeps Ahead
By Carl Davidson LeftLinks Weekly, Nov 29, 2024 By Carl Sandburg The fog comes on little cat feet. It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on. Carl Sandburg’s ‘Fog,’ for a very short poem, received a good deal of commentary in it’s day. It ranged from high praise as ‘the American haiku’ to rowdy ridicule by standup comics wondering ‘where’s the rest of it’ and supplying bawdy answers. No matter.
New to this community
I am Carl Davidson, I live in Seattle, Washington and we just ordered our 7th Volvo. A XC-60 hybrid. There is an option that is available called "Neck Pillow" in American dollars it is worth $130.00. My dealer says he can't find the OPTION code to put on my order. Does Volvo have a listing of option codes available to look at. For example, Heated front seats on the XC-60 the option code is 000752. Thank you for the help, Carld
Trump's Starting His Game Early. Don't Give The Chump An Inch Without a Fight
By Carl Davidson LeftLinks Weekly for Nov. 22, 2024 “As President I will immediately end the migrant invasion of America. We will stop all migrant flights, end all illegal entries, terminate the Kamala phone app for smuggling illegals (CBP One App), revoke deportation immunity, suspend refugee resettlement, and return Kamala’s illegal migrants to their home countries (also known as remigration).
The LEADER Never Apologizes, Even to God
The LEADER Never Apologizes, Even to God Published November 18, 2024 Führerprinzip is an odd and relatively unknown word to most Americans. Perhaps a few have heard of it in passing as devotees of old anti-Nazi popular front movies and newsreels of the 1940s. A smaller number would be those in the academy who specialize in German or Italian history. They undoubtedly know exactly what it means.
Trump's Lessons In Fascism: Irrationalism is A Feature, Not A Bug
By Carl Davidson LeftLinks Weekly fot Nov 15, 2024 Führerprinzip is an odd and relatively unknown word to most Americans. Perhaps a few have heard of it in passing as devotees of old anti-Nazi popular front movies and newsreels of the 1940s. A smaller number would be those in the academy who specialize in German or Italian history. They undoubted know exactly what it means. But this week a good majority of Americans are getting a crash course on the Führerprinzip in real time and in real life.
No Surrender: Build Anti-Fascist Organization From the Ground Up and the Center Out
By Carl Davidson LeftLinks Weekly for Nov 8, 2024 We’ll start by making two key points. 1. Trump’s next years will not be a kinder, softer form of fascism. So resist it, relentlessly, every way you can. 2: The best of white workers, youth, and all the oppressed saw through Trump and stuck with Kamala. For the most part, she did a good job. Don’t blame her. We all knew that our prospects for defeating Trump in this election were far from certain.
The End Is Near: Keep Working For The Best, But Prepare For The Worst
By Carl Davidson LeftLinks Weekly for Nov. 1, 2024 We are just days away from the critical turning point in the election. What do we face? What can we do? It is often said that a given pending election is the most important in our lives, one way or another, and such claims can be partly true or largely exaggerated.
It's Finals Week: Time For A Crash Course in Philosophy
By Carl Davidson Leftlinks Weekly for Oct 25, 2024 Once again we face a remarkable week full of tense complexities. At the top of the list is the studied assertion that the two presidential campaigns are tied regarding the Electoral College vote, a dead heat well within 'the margins of error.' Or so we are told. And it might even turn out to be a true forecast of the outcome. Biden's defeat of Trump in 2020 was on similar narrow grounds.
Time Is Accelerating And Overdetermined, Keep Your Eyes On The Prize
By Carl Davidson LeftLinks Weekly, Oct 18, 2024 Our review of the week has an amazing array of tragedies, farces, and other dramatic events. As Election Day approaches, time accelerates. To borrow from Lenin, “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” Start with Israel’s confirmation of its having killed Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader, in Gaza.
Mr Bates vs The Marketers?
The British Post Office scandal ruined lives, but an unhealthy corporate culture that protected ‘the brand’ at the expense of people allowed it to happen, say insights experts Carl Davidson and Duncan Stuart. If you saw the TV show Mr Bates vs The Post Office, you will know about the British Post Office scandal. The inquiry into this debacle shone a revealing light on the IT failures that led to more than 900 Post Office branch managers being bankrupted and wrongly prosecuted for fraud.
Liz, Bruce and the Common Anti-MAGA Front
By Carl Davidson LeftLinks Weekly for Oct 4, 2024 For those with an interest in the topic, this week's events have provided a fascinating array of present-day lessons in the strategic and tactical theory of the united front. [An Immediate note to some purists: Yes, we know we're discussing the cross-class popular front, not the diverse but workers-only united front set out in the 5th Comintern. We're with many other later practitioners of the theory who used 'united front' to cover both.
Immigrants Eating Your Pets: The Dark Irrationalism of Team Trump Sinks to New Depths
By Carl Davidson LeftLinks Weekly Sept 13, 2024. In his debate with Kamala Harris this week, Donald Trump spouted out an utterly bizarre racist rant against Haitian immigrants in Ohio, claiming they were scouring the city of Springfield to gather up and eat pet dogs and cats. The claim could be dismissed outright as deranged racist fantasy. But it's better, we think, to present its deconstruction here, which is even worse than deranged fantasy.. So let us begin.
Trump and the 'Russia Hoax'? J Edgar Hoover Thought the Mafia was a Hoax, too. But Follow the Money
By Carl Davidson LeftLinks Weekly, Sept 6, 2024 We were not surprised this week when Attorney General Merrick Garland announced indictments of several Russians and some of their American instruments. The charges? 1. Failure to register as foreign agents and 2. money laundering. What were they up to? Russian interference in the 2024 elections with widespread disinformation to back Trump and to end U.S. support for Ukraine. We’ve seen this movie before. The sequel shows they’re still at it.
Texas Attorney General Offers an Example of MAGA at Work
By Carl Davidson By Carl Davidson LeftLinks Weekly, Aug 30, 2024 This week we’re going to zero in on one story that tells you all you need to know about the nasty stakes in the 2024 election. In the full scope of things, one might argue that we need more than one event. Perhaps. But hear us out anyway. The story starts with a 6 a.m. hard knock at the door in Texas. The residence is that of an 87-year-old grandmother, Lydia Martinez. She happened to be up, still in her nightgown, watering her plants.
The Shift in the Zeitgeist Vs. Trump's Politics of Fear
By Carl Davidson Carl’s LeftLinks Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. LeftLinks Weekly, Aug 16, 2024 If you’ve noticed the ‘shift in the Zeitgeist’ with Team Harris-Walz on the campaign trail, you are not alone. Zeitgeist is a fancy word, widely used, to mean ‘the spirit of the times’—‘Zeit’ equals ‘time' in German, and ‘Geist’ translates as ‘ghost’ but better as ‘spirit.
Trump's Hannibal Lecter and Vance's Childless Cat Ladies. What's the Next MAGA Gift to Kamala?
By Carl Davidson LeftLinks Weekly, July 26, 2024 What a difference a week makes. The July 19 LeftLinks anticipated the changes with its commentary about political 'wild cards' in the current battlegrounds, but not nearly as rapidly or strongly as the impact of their playing out. Kamala Harris is now the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party. President Biden is being wisely praised for reading the writing on the wall and 'passing the torch' to a new generation.
New Zealand Marketing Magazine
Maybe the triumph of your last campaign was less about your prowess than you’d like to think; maybe its failure wasn’t your fault. Insights experts Carl Davidson and Duncan Stuart weigh in on how much of marketing can be a roll of the dice. John Wanamaker (1838-1922) is regarded as a marketing pioneer.
The Deeper Story Behind Justice Alito And His Flags
By Carl Davidson LeftLinks Weekly, May 24, 2024 When Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito first flew an upside-down American flag on his home's flagpole, it just seemed a bit odd. Was there just as a widely-known symbol of distress? But once Alito added the 'Appeal to Heaven' flag, with the pine tree symbol, at his summer home, a deeper story begins to unfold. Both flags were among those carried by the Jan 6, 2021, Trump insurrectionists as they stormed the Congress in an attempted coup.
Generational Pixie Dust?
Our insights gurus take a look at the problem of trying to fit humanity in all its colourful, erratic glory, into boxes that make sense. Marketers love market segments. The more we can wrap a bow around a group of consumers and stick a label on them, the easier our jobs seem to be. But every approach to segmentation raises the possibility of two fundamental errors. The first is that we start to believe the segments have a life beyond our models.
Guest Article: KOS on Trump's Effort To Do Better Than Lincoln at Gettysburg by Praising Robert E. Lee--and Worse
By Mark Sumner for Daily Kos Daily Kos Staff April 15, 2024 - On Saturday, Donald Trump held a rally in Schnecksville, Pennsylvania. This was his last big media event before appearing in a New York courtroom on Monday at the start of his first criminal trial for falsifying business records related to hush money payments to a porn star. So it’s only appropriate that Trump was determined to make his speech especially historic. And he succeeded.
Time To Get Serious. Our Fascist Adversaries Are Deadly So
By Carl Davidson LeftLinks Newsweekly, April 12, 2024 It's one thing to seize upon outrageous snippets from Trump's stump speeches and media postings: getting rid of vermin who penetrated our borders, protecting our bloodline from criminal animals from shithole countries, calling for violence against his opposition, denying the legitimacy of votes in Black communities, and many more.
Trump's Twisted & Warped Law and Order
By Carl Davidson LeftLinks Weekly, March 29, 2024 Trump as the candidate of 'law and order? ‘Lawless and Disorder’ would be more like it. Listening to 'The Predecessor' attending a policeman's funeral in New York City this week and making this proclamation brings out a combination of laughter and disgust. We know many politicians are prone to hyperbole and elastic notions of fact. But this bit of Orwellian Newspeak should make even all of them blush.
Trump vs Biden vs the UN on Gaza
By Carl Davidson LeftLinks Weekly, March 22, 2024 How will Israel's war on Gaza affect our future? It's widely acknowledged that President Biden's embrace of Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu following the Hamas attack on Oct. 7 and Israel's massive and unrestricted war against Gaza has driven a wedge in the democratic coalition needed for the defeat of Trump. Biden, a Catholic, has called himself a Zionist of long standing. Trump has done likewise, only more so.
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