From the Washington Post, John Bellamy Foster on socialism and the American Dream:

Socialism has always been part of American culture. It would no doubt disturb today’s Republican Party to learn that one of Lincoln’s favorite political writers was Karl Marx, European columnist for Horace Greeley’s paper, the New York Tribune.

In [Bernie] Sanders’s vision of democratic socialism, a society lacking basic equality and fairness for every individual cannot be considered a democratic society in any meaningful sense. Real, live democracy leads in the direction of socialism.

From the National Review, James Kirchik on so-called identitarians, a new generation of white-separatists, who are, you won't be surprised to learn, big supporters of Donald Trump:

[Richard] Spencer compares identitarians to visionaries of other, once-downtrodden social movements that claimed their stake upon a distinct identity. The gay rioters at Stonewall, the determined Zionist pioneers who made the desert bloom — these are the models for his burgeoning white-nationalist undertaking. It is a mark of their fine-honed appreciation for the zeitgeist that identitarians reference Jews and homosexuals — groups not typically looked favorably upon by white supremacists — as their inspiration.

From the New York Times, Dwight Garner and Margalit Fox on the novelist and poet Jim Harrison, who died on Saturday in Patagonia, Arizona, at the age 78. In her obituary, Fox writes:

Because of his books’ hypermasculine subject matter, their frequent setting amid the woods and trout streams of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and his own knockabout life, Mr. Harrison was chronically, and to his unrelieved disgust, compared to one man.

In fact, his prose is nothing like Hemingway’s: It is jazzier, more lyrical and more darkly comic. His characters, more marginal and far less self-assured — many abandon jobs and families to light out in search of meaning they never find — are handled with greater tenderness.[...]

At bottom, Mr. Harrison was not so much like Hemingway as he was like something out of Hemingway. Or, more accurately, something out of Rabelais — a mustachioed, barrel-chested bear of a man whose unapologetic immoderation encompassed a dazzling repertory...