Source: In These Times

To overcome the insistent messaging of the corporate media and Democratic establishment, we need grassroots people power.

Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign with impossible promises, from erecting a massive, Mexican-funded border wall to revitalizing dying industries. Instead of being dismissed as a huckster, he raised Republican voters’ expectations of the possible and normalized the party’s shift to its extreme. Trump’s victory seemed to turn on its head the conventional wisdom that only centrists win general elections. read more

Four years after he became a slavish enforcer of EU dogmas, Greek leader Alexis Tsipras is finally set to lose office. But for former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, next month’s snap elections are a chance to take the fight against austerity back into parliament.

Is socialism making a comeback? If so, what exactly is socialism, why did it lose steam toward the latter part of the 20th century, and how do we distinguish democratic socialism, currently in an upward trend in the U.S., from social democracy, which has all but collapsed? Vijay Prashad, executive director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and a leading scholar in socialist studies and the politics of the global South, offers answers to these questions.