Boston Review

When Bernie Sanders was asked in a 2016 Democratic presidential debate what “democratic socialism” meant to him, he responded that we should “look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway.” Hillary Clinton was unequivocal in her reply: “We are not Denmark.” Yet Sanders kept the line, and his odes to the shining example of Nordic social democracy remained an exhaustive refrain throughout his 2016 and 2020 campaigns. The theme was unsurprising: ever since 1936, when Franklin Roosevelt hailed Sweden’s “middle way” between capitalism and communism, Scandinavia has been a fixture in the American left-liberal imaginary.

In an influential essay on what he called “post-fascism,” the late Romanian-Hungarian philosopher G. M. Tamás took aim at a new phenomenon overtaking capitalist democracies. “Everywhere there is a post-totalitarian fascism that survives sans Führer, sans one-party rule, sans SA or SS,” he wrote. “From Lithuania to California, immigrant and even autochthonous minorities have become the enemy.”

In the wake of exploding pagers, universalism plunges into the abyss.

Our weekly Reading Lists compile editors’ selections from Boston Review’s decades-long archive that speak to current affairs and the pressing political, cultural, and intellectual debates of our time.

Activists, not elites, are leading the way forward in a world without Roe.

Seyla Benhabib’s 2024 Adorno Prize lecture.

A conversation with Wendy Brown on the U.S. presidential election, the exclusions liberal democracy is built on, and why we must aim at more than restoring its mythical former splendor.

Nihon Hidankyo, winner of the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize, makes us see what we cannot: the consequences of our actions.

Contrary to both far right and mainstream center-left, there’s no epidemic of chosen childlessness.

The tragic reascent of Trump is not an anomaly to democracy but its fatal flaw.