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The Left Needs to Resist Anti-Immigrant Initiatives From Within its Ranks

David Adler on politics, Pedro Noguera on the LA teachers’ strike, and Kate Aronoff on the battle of ideas.

Start Making Sense and Jon Wiener

January 17, 2019

Sahra Wagenknecht of Germany’s left-wing party Die Linke.(Reuters / Hannibal Hanschke)

A political movement combining a left-wing economic program with anti-immigrant initiatives: It’s developing right now in Germany and France—could it happen here? David Adler explains—he’s the policy coordinator for the European Spring, Europe’s first transnational party, led by Yanis Varoufakis. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, The Guardian, and Jacobin—and now he has the cover story in the new issue of The Nation.

Also: 31,000 teachers are on strike right now in Los Angeles—it’s the biggest strike in a long time in the second biggest school district in the country, with more than half a million students, mostly poor and Latino. And it’s not just about salaries and benefits; the teachers say they want smaller classes, which means more teachers. Pedro Noguera reports.

Plus: Like everybody else on the left, we’re excited about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her proposal for a Green New Deal, but “the left needs more than good ideas”—that’s what Kate Aronoff says. We need to change the economic and political consensus shaped by the right and build a political and intellectual infrastructure that can match theirs.

Start Making SenseTwitterStart Making Sense is The Nation’s podcast, hosted by Jon Wiener and coproduced by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes each Thursday.  


Jon WienerTwitterJon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and co-author (with Mike Davis) of Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.


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