A new Gallup poll conducted over the month of August puts socialism at its highest positive rating, 43 percent, since the polling firm started asking Americans in 2010. Socialism has hovered just under the 40 point mark every year since, until experiencing a pronounced uptick since last year.

Maybe more significant is the reason for this uptick, which according to Gallup isn’t to do with the attitudes of Democrats — their roughly two-thirds positive view has effectively stayed flat since last year — but thanks to independents, whose positive views of socialism have gone 8 points up to 45 percent.

To be clear, socialism still has a way to go. The same Gallup poll found that capitalism is viewed significantly more positively at 55 percent, effectively unchanged from last year, as is “free enterprise” at 77 percent — which, somewhat confusingly, fell 4 points since last year, part of a more gradual downward slide it’s experienced since 2019. On the other hand, “big business” is in the doldrums, hitting a new low of 35 percent this year.

And socialism’s appeal remains geographically specific. According to a recent New York Times/Siena University poll of likely voters nationwide, socialism’s favorability is underwater in all four regions polled but is strongest in the West (-8), and weakest in the South (-27). In a Times/Siena poll of Michigan specifically later this month, Detroit was the only region where it was close to breaking even (-1).

Nevertheless, though 43 percent isn’t a majority, recent history shows that may not matter. Less than a quarter (24 percent) of Americans viewed the MAGA movement positively in April 2023, a year and a half before Donald Trump and MAGA routed the Democrats and took total control of the federal government. The Gallup results here track with several other recent polls that show voters are significantly more open to voting for a socialist candidate than a MAGA politician.

The general narrative is that socialism is mostly popular with young, well-off, and highly educated white progressives. This recent wave of survey results does continue to show there’s a marked generational divide in socialist support. But other than that, this narrative about socialism being confined to a particular demographic slice isn’t really supported by the data.

In the Gallup poll, socialism has more support from people of color and those earning less than $100,000 than from white adults and those earning more than that figure. And its support is about the same whether someone went to college or not. In fact, other than adults aged thirty-four and younger, people of color are the only group that views socialism more positively than capitalism.

We saw a similar result in the Times/Siena nationwide poll, in which white voters had the least favorable view of socialism (-26), followed by the “other non-white” category (-18), while black and Latino voters viewed it most favorably (+4 for each).

Interestingly, that poll does show an educational divide, but one that breaks down along race: while white voters of any educational level hold a very dim view of socialism (a net negative in the double digits), non-white voters both with college degrees (-4) and without (0) hold much more positive views. Bear in mind that only 18 percent of the voters surveyed in that poll self-identified as democratic socialists, with the highest proportion of those that did (33 percent) being non-white, non-college-educated voters.

The data is particularly interesting when we move away from socialism writ large and look at specific socialists, especially two of the most high-profile socialist politicians: possible 2028 presidential contender Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Both are wildly popular with what have come to be termed “normie” Democrats. The Liberal Currents survey found that the pair, as well as fellow socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, officially an independent, are three of the most popular figures in the Democratic Party, behind names like Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, and Gavin Newsom. Meanwhile, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the organization that counts both Ocasio-Cortez and Mamdani as members and that has been involved in many of the left-insurgent victories this past year — holds a net +53 positive rating, with its strongest favorability (+45) coming from black voters.

But when it comes to views of Ocasio-Cortez and Mamdani, there seems to be a divide between Democratic and all other voters. Comparing the Liberal Currents and Times/Siena poll, we can summarize some of the takeaways as follows:

• Ocasio-Cortez is viewed slightly more favorably than Mamdani by Democratic voters, while Mamdani is viewed substantially more favorably than Ocasio-Cortez by all likely voters (Ocasio-Cortez has an overall -11 rating from the latter).

• In both cases, Ocasio-Cortez substantially lags Mamdani in terms of her support from younger voters, meaning those aged under forty-five.

• Mamdani has a stronger favorability with independents and nonvoters (+14 with each), raising the question of whether the New York mayor’s rise helps explain independents’ growing friendliness to socialism since last year.

• As with socialism more generally, when it comes to all likely voters, both get their strongest support from voters of color and especially black voters, college-educated and not. Ocasio-Cortez is significantly stronger with Latino voters, while Mamdani is stronger with the “other, non-white” category, maybe related to his campaign’s unprecedented mobilization of South Asian voters.

• These demographic coalitions look very different when it comes to just Democratic voters: there Ocasio-Cortez has her highest favorability with white voters and also beats Mamdani with black voters, but significantly lags him among Latino voters. (By contrast, Sanders registers a stronger rating than the pair among all three voter groups.)

Put aside these details, and the broader takeaway is that the country’s most well-known socialists derive their strongest support from non-white voters and have significant appeal to those among them without a college education. By contrast, DSA, the nation’s largest socialist organization, is according to its most recent internal polling 60 percent white — down from 85 percent five years ago — as well as 9 percent black and 14 percent Latino. In older surveys, a substantial share of its members had or worked in fields that required higher education degrees, though like the racial demographics, that has likely changed in the years since.

Still, these poll results suggest the organization’s struggle to diversify its membership is not due to some inherent aversion to socialism by non-white and non-college-educated Americans. It suggests these efforts may bear further fruit — but that it may also require changes within its own recruitment practices and internal culture.

We are a long way away from the pre-2016 era, when Democrats largely didn’t think about politics in ideological terms. These poll results show that not only have Sanders’s two presidential runs and the Democratic establishment’s series of failures transformed and radicalized the Democratic electorate, but that they’ve done so in a way that leaves a socialist candidate with the strongest pitch to make them.

The Liberal Currents survey confirms what countless polls have told us over the past nearly two years, namely that Democratic voters have had it with their own leadership. Senate leader Chuck Schumer has only a +3 net positive rating from Democrats, while possible future House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries is disliked by 22 percent of them. These voters agree with the statement that “criticizing the Democratic Party establishment makes you more likely to support a candidate” by a +19 margin.

On a policy level, the survey shows Democratic voters are strongly in favor of positions that socialist politicians have long taken: expanding the Supreme Court, abolishing the filibuster, zoning reform to build more housing (an issue socialists have long led on), holding the line on trans rights, and taxing billionaires out of existence, with Democratic voters believing billionaires shouldn’t exist by a 6 point margin.

Note that not all of this newly radicalized electorate’s views necessarily line up with what might be socialist priorities: these voters are overwhelmingly friendly toward the idea of a military coup against Trump and double the share of self-described liberal voters want Trump officials prosecuted by the next administration as socialist or progressive ones do.

In any case, whether or not she decides to run, Ocasio-Cortez is the socialist politician best positioned to capitalize on this transformation and not just because numerous polls show she’s now one of the party’s leading figures. Not only does the Liberal Currents survey show she has strong support from young voters when matched up head-to-head with the rest of the potential field, but crucially, she retains high favorables (+52) with voters over forty-five and white voters (+54) — a demographic that votes heavily in primaries, and whose skepticism of Sanders sunk both of his presidential campaigns. The next most progressive likely 2028 contender, California Democrat Ro Khanna, lags behind her with all these demographics and has far lower name recognition.

To deflect against the inevitable electability arguments, Ocasio-Cortez will be able to point out that her positions are broadly popular with the electorate. Voters nationwide, in Michigan, and in other battleground states all prefer candidates who oppose military aid to Israel. In Michigan, voters prefer a pro–Medicare for All candidate by 29 points. These voters also hate data centers and want them limited and heavily regulated. Other polls show even self-described moderate voters holding stridently anti-billionaire views, and swing voters being more likely to back a candidate who wants to tax the rich, pass Medicare for All, and raise the minimum wage.

Especially significant is that more than 81 percent of Democratic voters believe a candidate’s foreign policy views are important. This doesn’t just mean the matter of Israel-Palestine, which socialists have led on. The same poll found these voters oppose a US war with China over Taiwan by a 16 point margin, part of a wider trend in US public opinion that views China less negatively and is less predisposed to conflict with the country.

Finally, there’s long been a lot of talk about how the pet obsessions of the press and social media commentators don’t really reflect what most average people are thinking about. This has always veered into overstatement — there is every sign that people are thinking and worrying about artificial intelligence to a similar degree as pundits and online chatterers, for instance. But it is definitely true when it comes to some of the leading controversies of this election season.

Take Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, who, despite holding no elected office or any formal power at all, has become a media fixation. One aggregator found that news outlets had published 327 stories about Piker over the last three months, or more than three stories per day, the vast majority of it in national coverage.

Yet polls show most voters still have no idea who he is. Fifty-one percent of Democratic voters have never heard of him, even though centrist Democrats have worked to put him at the center of both primary and now general election contests. More astoundingly, 54 percent of specifically Michigan voters haven’t heard of him, even though you would assume from media coverage he’s the most important issue in that race. For that matter, 69 percent of Democratic voters have never heard of DSA national Cochair Megan Romer, whose recent interview missteps were a big story among the commentariat last month but don’t appear to have resonated elsewhere.

It’s hard to know exactly what to make of this, but one explanation could be that it signals the waning power of traditional news. Cable news networks saw their ratings nosedive last year, and things haven’t been much better a year later, part of a longer-term decline that ticked up after Trump’s 2025 win. It goes beyond viewership: trust in traditional forms of media fell last year to an all-time low. Given the role corporate and legacy news outlets have played in tilting previous election results, including presidential ones, this could prove advantageous for left insurgents and other outsider candidates.

So, to recap: socialism and socialists are slowly but surely growing in mainstream approval, that approval is often strongest among people of color and isn’t limited to college graduates, and the Democratic and general voter electorate have been transformed in ways that have flung the doors open to socialist ideas and organizing wider than they’ve been in a very long time.

Oh, and constantly bringing up Hasan Piker does not seem to be the political silver bullet that Republicans and corporate Democrats want it to be.

There’s a long way to go before 2028, and all of this could look different in the wake of whatever happens in November, not to mention after whatever potential wild card a Trump who no longer cares about elections ends up playing. Still, it’s clear the past ten years of socialist organizing have slowly, unevenly reshaped the US political landscape — and that landscape in turn is changing the fortunes for socialist organizing.

The New Dark Ages starts by taking us back more than three thousand years to the first recorded instances of written language in ancient Mesopotamia. “Reading was by no means inevitable,” he observes. This is something of an understatement. Even today there remains no evidence to suggest that humans were ever cognitively programmed to understand the patterns of signs and symbols that we have come to call language. To develop these advanced linguistic abilities, we had to retrain our brains: an immensely difficult and time-consuming process that ensured that reading and writing remained the preserve of a specialized elite for over three millennia.

There is evidence to suggest that literacy rates increased during the more prosperous centuries of the Roman Empire. By some measures, approximately 10 to 15 percent of the population could read. However, these numbers would stagnate for much of the Middle Ages. In Europe, it was not until the invention of the modern movable-type printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1440 that mass literacy was even remotely conceivable, although even then its growth was gradual. In the words of the sixteenth-century essayist Francis Bacon, Gutenberg’s invention (alongside gunpowder and the compass) had “changed the appearance and state of the world” by disseminating print culture throughout Europe. No doubt this process was helped by the spread of Lutheran Protestant ideas that offered a cultural argument for literacy as a tool of social emancipation.

So began an era of mass “democratization.” Marriott — a self-described “Enlightenment bro” — pays particularly close attention to the eighteenth century, an era in which the growth of literacy helped many to challenge existing forms of religious and political authority, remaking the world according to new modes of rationalism. Books, journals, newspapers, and pamphlets spread information that might previously have been accessible only by the elite but that could now be turned against them. Marriott has little patience for the strand of Enlightenment skepticism one finds among the likes of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. For those thinkers, the rationalistic quantification and measurement of social reality allowed humans to dominate one another in ways previously unimaginable. Marriott contents himself with cheering Voltaire — a man who “dared to know” — and the democratic energy, as opposed to economic and social forces, that led to the first French Revolution.

The cult of the written word continued to grow until the middle of the twentieth century, when television challenged the novel’s place as the main means of imagining a shared cultural community. In 1985, Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death sought to explain this drastic cultural shift. For him, TV’s tendency toward triviality, spectacle, and celebrity had hijacked the attention of its consumers and eroded the calmer and more rational forms of thought that reading promoted. Postman was particularly dismissive of the phrase “Now. . . .  this,” which in TV-speak tied one form of entertainment to another. This uniquely modern idiom, he remarked, served to highlight how disjointed and banal TV programming had become; the new medium encouraged viewers to passively absorb the diffuse fragments of information that were being beamed into their households.

Postman’s analysis of the “Now. . . .  this” paradigm seems particularly relevant today. If TV crowded out the time needed to pick up a book, the invention of the desktop computer and, later, the smartphone has dealt a near-fatal blow to the culture of reading. Suddenly the options for entertainment are infinite, and all accessible literally at our fingertips. On TikTok, users are able to skip through 260 videos in under thirty-five minutes. Meanwhile the latest developments in phone software encourage “dual screening” or “in-picture watching” — marketing jargon for being able to text, call, or browse while watching films on devices. Producers at Netflix have even encouraged their filmmakers to insert plot refreshers into dialogue throughout any production, better for those not paying attention to catch up easily.

The New Dark Ages is at its best when describing the dangerous effects that these new behaviors might have on our ability to think critically. When we read, Marriott observes, we can engage in a number of sophisticated cognitive processes: drawing inferences, assessing truth value, considering multiple perspectives, and integrating everything into a broader analysis that allows us to interpret meaning and make judgements of aesthetic quality. Unlike short-form videos, books exercise the human attention span. They challenge us to follow a line of thought to its logical conclusions, for instance. This makes writing a particularly subtle form of expression, capable of holding nuance and contradiction unlike more visual media.

As greater numbers of people turn to digital entertainment, however, these cognitive skills are under threat. Consider again the phenomenon of AI fruit videos. They pander to the shallowest human desires: providing an emotionally saturated spectacle, complete with bright colors, unexpected narrative twists, and thinly veiled forms of sexual taboo. A similar degeneration is evident in our politics. Data shows that political speeches given in parliaments across the West are getting shorter. However, they are also getting louder, using quasi-hysterical appeals to a public that is no longer able to process or participate in any other form of rational debate. As Marriott rightly observes, this highly affective politics is embodied by President Donald Trump who, by no coincidence, refuses to read memos or policy briefs on principle.

It is hard to disagree with Marriott, even if he at points seems to offer an unintended example of the declining literary culture he is mourning. His sentences are often clipped and written in simple journalistic prose, appropriate for a seven-hundred-word column but not a serious study of the decline in literacy. The New Dark Age is brisk, concise, and peppered with personal anecdotes — perfectly suited to our almost postliterate era. There is also a talking-you-off-the-cliff-edge reasonableness that pervades The New Dark Age. Constantly, we are told that its author has no desire to be “apocalyptic” or “virtuous”; every description of structural crises is followed by evenhanded qualification. “This is not to say” is a common refrain.

The this-but-also-that quality of The New Dark Age is attributable to the author’s political outlook. Marriott is a journalist at the right-wing Times newspaper, incapable of thinking seriously about class. One searches the book in vain for any discussion of the relationship between inequality and the crisis of literacy. Studies conducted by Ofcom, a UK media regulator, have shown that low-income families watch twice as much TV and spend significantly longer on social media each day than their wealthier counterparts. Why is this? As many parents have pointed out in response to social media bans in both the UK and Australia, screen time is a begrudged substitute for twenty-four-hour childcare. The growth of the screen-free childhood movement, adopted disproportionately by wealthier parents, has only worsened the disparities between children from different class backgrounds. Childhood is increasingly two-tiered. Some kids spend hours on social media every day, while others have parents who are happy to read them the classics, in some cases even while they are still in the womb.

Unsurprisingly, Marriott pulls his punches when it comes to apportioning responsibility for the current crisis in literacy. It is now widely understood that capturing users’ attention — and refusing to let go — is part of the business model of tech billionaires. The longer we spend looking at our phones, the more ads we are exposed to and the more metadata we hand over to internet companies. This means that there is a clear financial incentive to use the algorithm to keep us looking, liking, tapping, and scrolling. As the Google whistleblower Tristan Harris has ominously observed, “you can try having self-control, but there are a thousand engineers on the other side of the screen working against you.” Declining rates of literacy ultimately help Big Tech companies to continue exploiting their consumers without requiring their consent.

Instead of identifying and criticizing these trends, Marriott is keener to extol the virtues of Western literature. “We face the serious possibility that writers like Shakespeare, John Milton, and Jane Austen. . . .  are not going to reach the next generation of readers,” he writes with glib sanctimony. This seems unlikely. The elite culture that Marriott feels so protective of is not going anywhere; we will always live in a world in which there are places to read the classics — at least for some. What is at stake is the existence of the mass culture, a unique historical development that came into existence only within the last hundred years, when working class people, women, and non-Westerners shaped global politics collectively for the first time. From the Nobel Prize–winning poetry of Rabindranath Tagore to the revolutions that humiliated European imperialism in nations as distinct as Algeria and China, the culture to which mass literacy gave rise was always a by-product of the struggle for, and achievements of, mass democracy. It was and remains the only successful challenge to Western chauvinism and the navel-gazing court culture that has flourished everywhere in the absence of inspiration from the popular classes. Without a renewal of the fight for democracy, we are unlikely to see a return to the culture of informed engagement with the world. If this happens, the end of literacy may be the least of our worries.

Golden Dawn always cast its leaders as political prisoners, and portrayed the trial as a politically motivated witch hunt. Nikos Michaloliakos, Golden Dawn’s founder, was allowed to leave prison for house arrest on health grounds in September last year, less than five years after his jailing following the verdict. Last Tuesday, Kasidiaris walked free too, less than six years after receiving a thirteen-and-a-half-year sentence for directing a criminal organization.

In the past six years, Kasidiaris has been very busy. After his own party “Hellenes” was barred from the 2023 election, he backed the previously unknown Spartans, propelling them instantly into parliament with just one viral tweet. In 2025, Greece’s Special Highest Court ruled that he had effectively acted as the party’s concealed leader. But when he was considered for release, this political activity apparently did not count as a disciplinary violation, raising serious questions about how such conduct was treated by judicial authorities.

The differences between Golden Dawn and Kasidiaris’s later political vehicles are deliberate. He has largely abandoned overt Nazi symbolism, despite his documented neo-Nazi past and swastika tattoo, instead repackaging his politics in the language of ultranationalism. Hellenes, for example, called themselves defenders of Greek national sovereignty, while the Spartans avoided explicit identification with Golden Dawn — although several of their 2023 candidates and MPs had previous ties to that party.

Last Tuesday, Kasidiaris walked out of Domokos Prison to cheers from dozens of male supporters, posing for photographs and selfies before announcing his return to the “front line” of Greek politics. Wearing a black Fred Perry shirt — a brand whose black-and-yellow polo was notoriously appropriated by the Proud Boys — he promised the emergence of a new “powerful national party.”

That return may already command considerably more support than the published polling suggests. I have confidentially reviewed the raw datasets of two separate polls privately conducted by major Greek polling companies over the past month, both of which tested support for a hypothetical Kasidiaris-linked party. One poll put the figure at around 6 percent, the other at 8 percent. Neither appeared in the companies’ published results, however, with both effectively buried within vaguely defined “other” categories. However, a smaller polling firm released its findings on September 21, suggesting that Kasidiaris could secure up to 17 percent of the vote.

Withholding figures of that magnitude from public-facing polling risks obscuring politically important information. A convicted neo-Nazi is returning from prison with an electoral constituency potentially large enough to reshape Greek far-right politics and revive a movement many believed had been defeated.

Thirteen years ago, as Golden Dawn was establishing its position during the height of the crisis period, sections of the Greek commentariat openly wondered whether the country needed a “more serious” version of the neo-Nazi party. In September 2013, journalist Babis Papadimitriou — who would later become a New Democracy MP — publicly asked why a “more serious Golden Dawn” could not support a conservative governing coalition.

In many ways, that wish has since been realized. Successive governments under Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and his right-wing New Democracy have elevated politicians who passed through the far-right ultraorthodox LAOS party into some of the most powerful positions in the state. Adonis Georgiadis, once a LAOS MP, is today both health minister and a vice president of New Democracy. Thanos Plevris, another former LAOS politician, has been Greece’s minister for migration and asylum since 2025.

Plevris is also the son of Konstantinos Plevris, one of the most notorious figures of Greece’s postwar far right, a Holocaust denier who has openly described himself as a Nazi and fascist. Thanos’s own record on migration is grim. In 2011, he argued that border protection could not exist without deaths. In the same speech, he advocated denying undocumented migrants food, water, health care, and social assistance, with the explicit aim of making life in Greece so unbearable that it would deter others from coming. Plevris also announced a doctrine of “prison or return” for people without a right to remain and described arrivals from North Africa as an “invasion.”

These are precisely the kinds of ideas that once distinguished Golden Dawn from Greece’s conventional right. Golden Dawn’s migration politics rested on deterrence through dehumanization of migrants as an existential threat to the nation. What was politically radioactive in 2012 can now be spoken from inside a government ministry almost without consequence, a sign of how much of Golden Dawn’s political language has seeped into the state itself.

Seen against the broader European mainstreaming of the far right, Greece is far from the exception it is sometimes portrayed as being by media outlets broadly sympathetic to the government. Golden Dawn disappeared, but the far-right political space became very populated. Greek Solution and the ultraconservative Niki are still represented in the Greek Parliament and Voice of Reason in the European Parliament. MPs elected for Spartans are still sitting as independents after the party’s group collapsed following the ruling by the Special Highest Court.

The far-right field may soon become more crowded still. Right-wing former Prime Minister Antonis Samaras has spent much of this year teasing the prospect of yet another party, recasting himself as the aggrieved guardian of the nation. His speeches increasingly revolve around denunciations of the “woke agenda,” delivered with the theatrical indignation of a politician apparently determined to present yesterday’s culture-war slogans as an urgent national emergency.

In August, Kasidiaris’s brother Alexandros, himself a former Golden Dawn member, filed a declaration with Greece’s Supreme Court establishing a new party. It was formally unveiled on September 21 as the Alliance of Greeks. Little is known so far beyond the identities of a handful of leadership figures and prospective candidates, while Ilias Kasidiaris has yet to clarify what role, if any, he will play.

Under the electoral framework introduced in 2023, constitutional experts argue that he cannot formally lead a party until 2033. Nor is simply installing somebody else as leader necessarily enough, as the Supreme Court can examine a party’s real leadership and disqualify it if Kasidiaris is found to be directing it from behind the scenes.

But perhaps much of the damage has already been done. Kasidiaris has repeatedly demonstrated how insufficient these restrictions can be. Could a convicted neo-Nazi continue conducting politics from prison? He did. Could his statements circulate through social media while he remained incarcerated? They did. Could he boost another party into parliament while formally remaining outside its leadership? The Spartans provided that experiment. Even Elon Musk entered the story in July, publicly criticizing Kasidiaris’s continued imprisonment.

In 2023, writing in the Greek left-wing newspaper Efimerida ton Syntakton, I argued that the Greek state was living under the illusion that legal restrictions alone could prevent Golden Dawn’s political return. One of the main government figures defending the 2023 legislation designed to block Kasidiaris was Makis Voridis, then interior minister. Decades earlier, Voridis had led the youth wing of EPEN, the far-right party founded from prison by former dictator Georgios Papadopoulos — taking over a position previously held by Golden Dawn founder Nikos Michaloliakos. The man helping construct the legal firewall against Greece’s neo-Nazis thus came from a political tradition with deep roots in the country’s junta and its successors.

The conditions that allowed Golden Dawn to enter parliament in 2012 did not disappear when its leaders entered prison. Greece has spent years treating neo-Nazism as though it were principally a legal problem. Yet Kasidiaris’s journey exposes the limits of that approach. Parties can disappear while their networks survive.

Greece is a country with a remarkable history of resistance to fascism but also an extraordinary capacity for forgetting how deeply Nazism has remained embedded within its political life. Kasidiaris’s return shows that the political environment around Golden Dawn changed sufficiently that many ideas once associated with a neo-Nazi organization no longer sound as politically alien as they did fourteen years ago.

Legal barriers may still prevent Kasidiaris himself from appearing on a ballot. However, they cannot dismantle the political and social constituency waiting for him outside the prison gates.

Iqbal sold tea in front of the medical campus at the University of Khartoum, setting up with three low stools, a few plastic chairs that did not match, a kettle that was black at the bottom, and a sugar jar with a spoon that was always wet. She kept her coins in a small tin.

She lived in Haj Yousif. Traveling to the university from her home involved hours on buses, not to mention the time spent walking and standing in the heat for a bus that does not come. She did it every day.

Her husband had run away — her choice of words — to fight with Abdelaziz al-Hilu in South Kordofan. I do not know the full story of what took him. What I know is that the farm outside the city had stopped paying for a life inside it, and that a rifle and a cause offer the kind of wage a collapsing farm cannot.

Iqbal stayed with their four children, who would be fed or not fed depending on how the day went. Around her, on the same stretch of pavement, Asyaa ran two kettles at once, while Fatouma sold tea and roasted nuts and knew which patients in Shar al-Hawadith had not eaten.

The women had come in numbers when the farms stopped paying. Men left for the mines or the militias. Khartoum needed cheap food, cheap warmth, and cheap care for students who could not afford a meal or companions waiting a week in a hospital corridor. The city got what it needed, but the women who provided it were deemed illegal.

The local authority sent a pickup with two or three men in uniforms that never looked fully clean. They seized the chairs, the kettle, the sugar, sometimes the gas cylinder, too. You had to go to their office and pay to get your own things back. We called the practice kasha.

The state had decided that Iqbal’s labor was not a business. It was an obstruction — and what it could not ignore, it taxed. When we saw the truck turn the corner, we hid her stools behind the labs.

A different truck offered her neighbor 15,000 pounds a day and a story he could tell his family. Two days of that wage was a month of rent on her street. You did not need a lecture on identity to explain why a boy answered the recruitment call. In a city where the state had made survival illegal and a collapsing currency had made the factory irrelevant, a soldier’s wage was the only thing that replaced the state.

In 2018, a man sat at her stall like any customer. He noticed her phone, which was basic and worn at the edges. Over the course of several visits, the talk moved toward money, and he offered her a new phone and weekly payments of real money. He wanted her to sit among us and report what the students said: who was organizing, who came and went.

She refused the offer. She did not tell us at the time and carried that refusal alone until the regime fell. When she finally mentioned it, I asked why she had never said. She said she did not want us to worry or do something stupid. Mostly — and this is the sentence that has not left me — she did not want fear to change what we were doing at the gate.

There was a small room in the pharmacy faculty where leftover donated drugs went to patients from the hospital next door. The tea women brought their children. A registrar looked at a sick child on a stool, and a pharmacist walked out with the medicine. There were no forms, and nobody paid 15,000 a day for any of it.

I sat with a miner from Jebel Amer whose hands were burned from mercury during the sit-in in May 2019, in the place we called Kolombia, the open ground behind the railway tracks. He said the RSF took 30 percent of everything.

The mine had closed after fighting with Musa Hilal’s men, and he had come to Khartoum with nothing. He joined the sit-in. He said if the RSF came, he would fight. On June 3, he disappeared, and I never found him afterward.

After clashes with Hilal, the RSF took Jebel Amer. At the peak, they were extracting something like forty kilograms a day. The metal was processed with mercury, then flown from Khartoum airport to Dubai — sometimes a hundred kilograms a flight, once a week — with no customs paperwork on the Sudanese side. From Dubai, it entered the global gold market, occasionally passing through European refineries that did not ask where it came from. Investigators later put the annual take at more than a billion US dollars.

From 2015, the same force was sending men to Yemen for Saudi and Emirati pay. The UAE had been cultivating Sudanese military figures since the early 2010s; when the Yemen war needed ground forces composed of men who could move fast and not ask questions, they called the RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemedti. Estimates of the deployment range from 14,000 to 40,000 fighters between 2015 and 2020.

The pay was in dollars, which meant you could recruit faster than the army, buy equipment, and build a buffer against any future rupture with Khartoum. Fighters rotated home having been trained in urban combat and logistics. I remember the new trucks in Khartoum that year. I did not know the money was Gulf money, although I knew the men who had burned villages in Darfur were moving through my city as if they owned it.

The RSF was not, by this point, a paramilitary force sustained by weapons. It was a mining and logistics operation that maintained an army. The weapons were evidence of its power, which derived from gold.

With that gold, Hemedti built an empire that ran parallel to the state instead of through it. Al Junaid, the family conglomerate, became one of the largest mining and construction operations in the country. In October 2019, people in Talodi, South Kordofan, set fire to one of its cyanide plants after the runoff poisoned their water and killed their cattle. Guards opened fire, but the crowd burned it anyway.

Investigators at Global Witness later traced RSF payments moving through UAE-based front companies into accounts at the National Bank of Abu Dhabi and documented the purchase of more than 900 Toyota Hilux and Land Cruiser vehicles. There were real estate holdings across the capital, farms in Darfur, and a trucking fleet. The gold bought more than guns — it bought a parallel economy, booked in Dubai.

Russia’s Wagner Group arrived around 2017 for the same metal, exchanging military training and equipment for mining concessions in RSF territory. When the US Treasury sanctioned those operations in 2020, the networks reorganized through UAE-based intermediaries. The buyer did not change.

Swissaid, reading the UAE’s own trade figures for 2024, found that Dubai imported twenty-nine metric tons of gold from Sudan that year, a big increase from seventeen metric tons the year before. According to the same figures, eighteen additional metric tons came from Chad and nine from Libya, two countries that are not famous for their gold mines but serve as transit routes for metal moved out of RSF territory.

In September this year, Michael Waltz and Massad Boulos argued in Foreign Policy that peace in Sudan can only come after a weapons embargo, extending the old Darfur ban of 2005 across the whole country. Drones, they write, do not stop at Darfur’s border, and they are right about the geography. On September 11, the United Nations Security Council extended existing measures for one month, until October 9. Washington has been pushing for a nationwide ban, while Moscow opposes any expansion.

Waltz and Boulos frame the problem as one of supply: more than a dozen countries are feeding both sides, and an extension of the ban will block them from doing so. Some of that is right. But an arms embargo addresses a supply problem — the flow of weapons — while the political economy of militia recruitment is a problem of demand.

The UAE is not just one supplier among others. It is the buyer of last resort for Sudanese gold and the logistics node for the air bridge into Darfur. Dubai’s refineries process the metal, and the same financial infrastructure enables the flights.The profit is not incidental to the war. A force paid from the mine, through Dubai, does better when the country is in pieces.

None of this is a defense of the Sudanese army. It has a history of coups, of alliances with Islamists, of violence in the peripheries. But a ruined army still has to pretend it employs people on behalf of a state. It still needs ports, a capital, a population that eats if the flag is going to mean anything.

There are steps that could be taken in response. One important move would be to complement the weapons ban with Kimberley-style certification for Sudanese gold at the point when it enters refineries. Another would be to apply sanctions on UAE-based entities that form part of the air bridge and on the front companies and bank accounts that convert the metal into Toyotas.

Iqbal had to leave Haj Yousif when the fighting reached her neighborhood. She went to her sister’s place in Omdurman, not to work but to wait.

I called her from Halfa, near the Egyptian border, after I left. The line is always bad, always dropping in the middle of a sentence so you do not know if she heard you. At first, I talked too much, filling the silence the way you do when you are afraid the other person has gone. Then I learned to wait.

I kept asking whether she had found a stall. She had not. She said the city was not hers. Her voice came through tired but still the same.

I can still do the arithmetic from Soba to Haj Yousif in my head: 1,500 for twelve hours; 30,000 for a room; 15,000 for a day with a gun.

The truck paid better. She asked if I was eating anyway.

To be clear: the accusations against Regan are serious and demand serious inquiry. But the context in which they have been made renders them entirely unserious. Intimidation and harassment in progressive circles, and particularly in unions, is a real problem that must be stamped out. What is so frustrating about this politicized use of such allegations, turning justified revulsion against such behavior into a campaign smear, is that it makes real offenders much harder to punish. People see examples of accusations like these surfacing at such times and conclude that it’s all election-season theater. It’s not — or, at least, it shouldn’t be — but the release of these findings weeks before an extremely contentious election will certainly muddy the waters. This is all the more shameful given that it has been deployed to sink the one initiative standing in the way of the dismantling of Medicaid in California.

Many progressives and unionists have condemned Regan and SEIU-UHW, without first questioning who is making these accusations, when, and for what purpose. That includes the California Nurses Association, a Prop 40 supporter that has called on Regan to resign.

But others in the labor movement have been more careful. Lorena Gonzalez, president of the California Labor Federation, which has endorsed Prop 40, pointed out to the Los Angeles Times that the members of Regan’s union, overwhelmingly women and women of color, just reelected him. “Ultimately they have the ability to make this determination of whether he’s an appropriate leader, which they just made again,” she said. “What’s most important is that we have to keep our eyes on the fact that Medi-Cal is being cut and we have no solution but the billionaire’s tax to fill that cut.” By all means, after this election season, this internal SEIU squabble ought to be sorted through. But if you’re making a big show of this now, and you are also not doing everything in your power to see that Prop 40 passes with flying colors this November — ensuring that nearly 15 million Californians keep their healthcare coverage — it simply means that you are carrying water for the billionaires.

With the rise of left-wing politics in America, the political writer Tariq Ali has warned of the machinations of the “extreme center” and how centrist Democrat types have grown much more radical in their methods with the increasing polarization between left-wing social democracy and right-wing authoritarianism. The Left should be on guard against such methods, which will only grow more insidious and grotesque as the center’s base evaporates. It will do everything it can to cling to power, including smear campaigns that rely upon identity-based oppression, and a Left worthy of the name will be able to distinguish between a legitimate misdeed and partisan mudslinging.

In this particular case, the political question could not be more urgent. As a therapist who has worked for many years with low-income patients, many of them already struggling to navigate byzantine Medicaid requirements, I am bracing for the mental health crisis that the H. R. 1 cuts will have in my home state of New York. As bad as the mental health crisis is now, even more horrors are on the horizon: already overbooked clinics will soon be barring their doors, which means countless patients will soon end up on the streets, untreated and unmedicated. Already overburdened emergency rooms will be overrun. The state will be in fiscal crisis. All so that the ultrarich get to pay even less in taxes than they already do.

Having worked on New York City Democratic Socialists of America’s Tax the Rich campaign now for several legislative cycles, I know how long and difficult the fight for progressive taxation is. While much recent media attention has gone to political candidates on the Left, the possibility of taxing the rich in California to fund Medi-Cal might be the most important political opening in this upcoming midterm election. I do not know Dave Regan personally. What I do know is that nothing I could learn about Dave Regan right now — particularly about an interaction he had with someone almost two decades ago — could change my mind about the political and moral necessity of passing the Billionaire Tax in order to save Medi-Cal and keep health care coverage for nearly fifteen million Californians. I only wish we had a similar option in New York.

The squabble between SEIU California and Regan now goes up the chain to SEIU President April Verrett. Verrett could suspend Regan while the charges are heard, confirming a common perception of SEIU as a union in the Democratic Party’s back pocket, one already looking to score points with a possible Newsom presidential administration. At this particular moment, when Californians should be focused on saving Medi-Cal from collapse, this would amount to a declaration of unquestioned, unthinking loyalty to the extreme center.

But Verrett could also defer this mess, help push Prop 40 over the finish line, and thereby signal that SEIU is ready to be a voice for the working class rather than follow dutifully behind billionaire-backed political candidates.

Nothing less than the healthcare of fifteen million Californians — and soon, tens of millions of Americans — hangs in the balance.

In the Realm of the Last Man is an unusual book; an autobiography that pulls triple duty, it ruminates on its subject’s complex life, sets the record straight on past debates and criticisms, and closes by defending liberal democracy against rising competitors on the Left and Right. The book pulls off the first two admirably, though the apologia for liberal democracy highlights some of Fukuyama’s limitations as a commentator.

The self-portrait Fukuyama paints is of an intellectually inclined man who has always tempered his speculative impulses while keeping one foot firmly on the ground. Aside from giving himself the occasional and by and large justified pats on the back, Fukuyama comes across as a confident but relatively humble man well aware of what he owes to others. The long sections on how his ethnically Japanese family was interred in concentration camps during World War II are filled with righteous indignation. Honestly describing his complex relationship with his professor father, Fukuyama notes how he “remained a diehard liberal his whole life.”

The elder Fukuyama was disappointed when his son gravitated toward moderate conservatism. This rightward shift “pained my father greatly”, we are told. “He didn’t really understand what had changed my thinking; he told his friends that one of my professors had gone to work for the Pentagon and ‘brainwashed’ me after returning to academia.” Fukuyama admits to regretting some of this youthful animosity toward his father and ending up now committed to the kind of progressive liberalism he dismissed as a young man.

This transition from left to center-right to center-left critic of radicalism on either side takes up the bulk of Fukuyama’s reflections. Early on, he became fascinated with postmodern critical theories of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and other French philosophers. These were all the rage in the 1970s, and Fukuyama recounts that his “fascination with postmodernism led me to graduate from Cornell early and move to Paris so I could study with the masters.” Unfortunately, this exposure to unfiltered postmodern theory led him to conclude that these ideas were part of a project that was “essentially nihilistic, built on the assertions of the impossibility of reasoned discourse, inference from empirical evidence, and ultimately of philosophy itself. Truth claims simply masked the assertions of power by a dominant social actor at the expense of groups that were marginalized.”

Frustrated by postmodernism’s endless criticism, Fukuyama chose to move in the opposite direction. Before graduating he fell under the influence of Alexandre Kojève, Allan Bloom, and Leo Strauss, among others. Though they differed substantially in their theoretical and political beliefs, they were united in their conviction that philosophy’s pursuit of capital T truth was a noble enterprise.

Of particular importance to Fukuyama was the debate between Leo Strauss and the Hegelian philosopher Alexandre Kojève. In Natural Right and History, Strauss famously repudiated the strong versions of historicism — the view that social values and institutions were entirely the product of historical developments rather than human nature — associated with Edmund Burke, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Karl Marx. Whether in its more conservative or radical forms, historicism led to the view that what counted as true and good was largely settled by the norms of the time. Strauss was famously guarded about his own philosophical preferences but expressed a qualified admiration for the commitment to discovering timeless truths one saw in ancient philosophy.

Kojève, however, famously interpreted Hegel as arguing that human nature developed over time, and with it our ability to more richly understand our relation to truth and to one another. Consequently, the philosopher’s goal wasn’t to understand transcendent truths but rather the process of how our conceptions of truth became richer over time. Kojève gave this idea a political spin, hypothesizing that one day we would reach the “end of history”; there would be no more debates worth having because we will have worked out how to offer meaningful recognition to each and all.

Fukuyama describes his own view as “middle ground between the Strauss and Kojève positions, and indeed the middle ground is what I tried to elaborate in The End of History and the Last Man.” He is sympathetic to the view that historical processes shape human convictions, and that changes in politics and society are possible. This includes the prospect of improvement through the cautious application of reason; most radically, this increasingly includes the ability to apply science to alter major features of human biology even prior to conception. The prospect of endless unconstrained change worries Fukuyama, who insists that there is such a thing as human nature. What he means by this is a “core set of faculties and inclinations that ultimately served to limit human autonomy and ensure that there was also continuity in the human experience over time.”

One of these core human inclinations is what he, drawing on ancient Greek philosophy, calls the thymotic desire for recognition. In his book Identity, Fukuyama describes thymos as the “third part of the soul” alongside desire and reason. Thymos is “the seat of judgements of worth. . . .  [individuals driven by thymos] also crave positive judgements about their worth or dignity. Those judgements can come from within. . . . but they are most often made by other people in the society around them who recognize their worth.” Fukuyama thinks that while liberal societies have done much to rationally organize societies to secure many human needs, they have long struggled to offer anything like equal recognition to all their members. This stirs the thymotic yearnings of the soul, leading to resentment of those who are recognized as greater or more valuable.

Fukuyama is not usually understood as a thinker interested in human psychology, but this is more a product of a general failure to read more than the title of The End of History and the Last Man. Few familiar with this work ever “ bothered to read the last five chapters of my book, which dealt with the problem of the last man.” The book is a considered rumination on whether liberal capitalism was indeed the last ideology standing at the end of history. At the time Fukuyama hypothesized it might be, left-wing alternatives to liberal capitalism were lifeless — the Soviet Union was still tottering on in 1989 when Fukuyama wrote the essay, “The End of History?”, on which he based his book, but it collapsed two years later, as if to promote his hardcover.

The fall of the Soviet Union profoundly discredited communism, while many of the Left’s brightest minds had become enamored with trendy but ultimately “nihilistic” postmodern critical theory of which Fukuyama had always been wary. Drawing on Friedrich Nietzsche, the last chapters of The End of History make the case that many right-of-center personalities will remain driven by “megalothymonia” — a yearning for a sense of superiority and greatness that makes them discontented with merely being the well-paid but bored technocratic managers of docile nations and respectably successful companies. As he put it near the close of The End of History:

It is reasonable to wonder whether all people will believe that the kinds of struggles and sacrifices possible in a self-satisfied and prosperous liberal democracy are sufficient to call forth what is highest in man. For are there not indeed reservoirs of idealism that cannot be exhausted — indeed, that are not even touched — if one becomes a developer like Donald Trump, or a mountain climber like Reinhold Messner, or a politician like George Bush? Difficult as it is, in many ways, to be these individuals, and for all the recognition that they receive, their lives are not the most difficult, and the causes they serve are not the most serious or the most just. And as long as they are not, the horizon of human possibilities that they define will not be ultimately satisfying for the most thymotic natures.

Fukuyama remains committed in broad strokes to the story he told more than thirty years ago. Liberal democracy provided material affluence and rational government for many. But personalities like Trump did indeed find simply being real estate developers and New York playboys destined for an esteemed place in the Epstein files unsatisfying. They wanted to be Alexandrian men of destiny, but they could only do this by smashing the liberal order and replacing it with one of their own making.

Fukuyama shows real insight into the enduring populist appeal of the Right when he notes that liberals failed to recognize how these prejudices concealed a yearning to make moral judgements about the world that were more forceful than what mere toleration seemed to allow. In addition to failing to address the emotional needs of those who had no interest in just being an equal citizen in a society of equal citizens, liberalism failed to recognize the need people have for meaning beyond living day-to-day.

These dissatisfied constituencies were primed to listen to megalothymotically driven populists who stoked their anger at being looked down upon by self-righteous liberals that chastised their moral views as so many racist, sexist, homophobic, and nationalist prejudices. What Trump et al. offered them was confirmation of their own moral superiority over those who pretended to be their betters, alongside a sense of cosmic significance in combating the evils of a decaying elite liberal order. For Fukuyama, the January 6 protesters didn’t just riot because they thought the election had been stolen from them. They wanted to “play-act at being armed revolutionaries defending their way of life” against sinister globalists and immigrant baristas making $7.50 an hour alike. The reality was that “they were simply dupes enlisted to soothe the ego of a single narcissistic fraudster.”

The end of history ended after about twenty-five years, give or take, and we are very much in an era in which liberal democracy faces pressure on all fronts. Fukuyama has deep insights into the roots of the attack from the Right, which makes a great deal of sense given his early attraction to Strauss, Bloom, and the neoconservative movement — although his understanding of the Left’s impulses is more questionable. Throughout In The Realm of the Last Man he expresses considerable regret for where this early attraction led him. He signed a periodical calling for the United States to invade Iraq and unseat Saddam Hussein in the late 1990s. This of course ended in the death of almost a million Iraqi people and thousands of Americans troops. Fukuyama admits that he was driven to sign the letter more out of group loyalty than hawkishness. “The problem was psychological, and not a matter of policy judgement or moral disagreement. The issue was a mental block against taking a public stand against the views of longtime friends.” When Fukuyama did eventually break with the neoconservatives, it came at a significant cost, though he admits it was “liberating” to abandon right-wing orthodoxy and adopt more social democratic positions.

Despite Fukuyama’s journey of maturation to the social democratic left, he still struggles with understanding the instincts and ideas that animate it. His curt dismissal of complex thinkers like Foucault and Derrida is just the tip of the iceberg. Fukuyama rather lazily dismisses the students who set up pro-Palestinian encampments as privileged ne’er-do-wells who “want a break from their lives of steady and unheroic striving” and quips that they are not “similarly outraged at the situation of Ukrainians besieged by Russia or victims of the civil war in Sudan.” The difference — that America’s government isn’t allied to Russia or Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces but is deeply committed to supporting Israel — seems not to register to Fukuyama.

Elsewhere in In the Realm of the Last Man, Fukuyama complains that there is “no clear systematic vision on the left for what kind of society should replace liberal democracy, as there once was.” He is deeply wary of the recent tendency of young people to become “more sympathetic to socialism or Communism than previously” since in the past these have led to “nightmares.” This take is wildly out of date. Proposals for everything from “Nordic socialism” to “socialism in the twenty-first century” to “liberal socialism” abound. Moreover, these didn’t come out of a vacuum. Any decent history of socialism would show it is a political and economic tradition that’s as internally diverse as liberalism and conservatism are.

A general refusal to draw too deeply on left-wing insights limits major dimensions of Fukuyama’s diagnosis of liberalism’s woes. He’s absolutely correct that the Right has always had a significant constituency made up of people who are dissatisfied with the prospect of being their brother’s equal and keeper. They want to conceive of themselves, and be acknowledged as, “recognizable superiors”, as Friedrich Hayek noted in his thoughtful essay “Why I Am Not A Conservative.” Many of the resentments that appear on the Right are fueled by anxiety around dispossession; that the unworthy, unwashed multitudes of the world are threatening to take away the hard-earned riches of citizens or positions at Ivy League universities. This combination of believing oneself to be simultaneously a superior and also a victim of the weak is very powerful and has given the Right a lot of cultural pull.

But Fukuyama’s book doesn’t sufficiently interrogate the social origins of these attitudes, perhaps because its author remains at least somewhat sympathetic to them. He often chimes in to acclaim the importance of meritocracy and even gives one cheer for megalothymia as a “necessary motivator of any kind of human excellence. . . . ” What this doesn’t interrogate is just how the very emphasis liberals place on meritocratic mythologies has contributed to festering social resentments. Given his stated admiration for Michael Sandel, Fukuyama might have engaged with the former’s important book The Tyranny of Merit. Sandel is very critical of how the meritocratic myth that everyone ought to be given a (very unequal) opportunity to succeed while acknowledging that most will not succeed has produced pathological results. We have a vulgar ruling class that increasingly tells itself it owes nothing to anyone, and worse, many poor and lower-middle-class people who are told that if they can’t make it they have no one to blame but themselves. The message for the poor under meritocratic liberal capitalism is simple: save your pennies, cut out the Budweiser, and either go to college or invest early in Bitcoin. It should come as no surprise that a society riven by such toxic ideas would generate mass forms of resentment, and much of the blame must be laid at the feet of liberals who propagated meritocratic mythologies even in the face of mounting evidence showing the immeasurable amount we owe to others for whatever success we are lucky enough to achieve.

At the conclusion of the 1989 essay, Fukuyama admitted he could “feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed”. Now history is once again back, the older Fukuyama mainly seems to feel a powerful nostalgia for the post-historical 1990s. He should be careful what he wishes for. It is perhaps appropriate that he would remain, to the last, someone whose political allegiances are stamped by the ideological parameters established back when neoliberal hegemony seemed untouchable. Over time, Fukuyama has steadily moved from the neoliberalism and neoconservatism of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush to the moderate progressivism of Bill Clinton and Joe Biden. But it was the failure of just these forms of centrism that paved the road to Trumpism — and they will not save us from it.

Across India’s cities and industrial belts, the basic act of cooking a meal is becoming increasingly precarious for low-income households. Part of that shock reflects spillovers from the conflict in the Middle East, particularly due to disruptions around the Strait of Hormuz, a key transit route for crude oil and LPG.

India depends heavily on LPG imports, making domestic prices highly sensitive to global energy markets and external supply conditions. Fluctuations in international fuel prices and supply disruptions are increasingly passed on directly to households.

Provision of India’s LPG subsidy, which exceeded 400 billion rupees annually in the mid-2010s, fell sharply by 2020–21 before being partially restored in recent years. Government budget data shows LPG subsidy expenditure has fluctuated sharply over the past decade, reflecting a broader shift toward market-linked pricing.

Today LPG subsidies have become increasingly targeted rather than universal. In 2025–26, the government allocated around 120 billion rupees to support Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY), a program that subsidizes cooking gas for low-income households, reflecting a narrower approach to welfare support.

For consumers, this translated into a steep rise in refill costs. The price of a standard 14.2-kilogram domestic LPG cylinder, which hovered around 400 to 500 rupees a decade ago, crossed 1,000 rupees in many cities in 2022, before easing slightly to around 850 to 950 rupees. For low-income households, this remains prohibitively expensive.

While subsidies still exist, many households report receiving little meaningful relief. For a daily wage worker earning 300 to 500 rupees, a single refill can consume two to three days’ income, making regular use difficult to sustain. Parliamentary data indicates that PMUY beneficiaries use significantly fewer cylinders annually than other consumers, underscoring the affordability constraint.

In Sangam Vihar, one of Delhi’s largest informal settlements, Parveena sits outside her one-room house, an empty LPG cylinder resting beside her like a useless object.

“For the past few days, we have been running from one gas agency to another,” she says. “We are not getting refills on time. Without gas, we cannot even cook one meal.”

A mother of two and a daily wage worker, Parveena has already begun cutting back. “For two days, my children have slept hungry,” she says. “Prices are rising every day. Even if we find LPG, it is too costly. We are poor; how can we pay so much just to cook food?”

While India has expanded LPG access significantly over the past decade, sustained usage among low-income households remains uneven. In recent months, that strain has deepened. Reports from multiple states, including Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra, point to refill delays, long waiting times, and rising dependence on alternative fuels.

In some areas, households have begun reverting to firewood and kerosene fuels associated with both poverty and long-term health risks.

Parveena’s neighbor notes quietly, “We cannot just leave this place. At least the men find some work here. . . .  Somehow we survive with that.”

In neighborhoods like these, leaving is rarely a real option. Survival depends on staying and adjusting. But adjustment has limits. For women in particular, the burden is immediate and physical. When LPG runs out, it is they who must find alternatives like collecting firewood, managing inefficient stoves, or stretching meals across days.

In working neighborhoods across India, families report reducing the number of meals they cook, delaying refills, and stretching cylinders beyond their normal use. “We adjust” is how several workers describe it.

Faheem, thirty-two, a migrant worker from Gujarat currently working in Bengaluru, describes the situation as disturbing.

“We can’t get gas here, and now we are being forced to leave our home,” he says. “Cooking has become difficult, sometimes even impossible, and we don’t know how to manage our house and land anymore. Everything has become too hard.”

“Sometimes it’s expensive; sometimes it’s not available at all. Life has really become difficult,” he adds.

For many households, alternatives remain out of reach. Electric cooking is often presented as the next step in India’s clean energy transition, but it requires up-front investment in appliances and a reliable electricity supply.

For precarious urban and rural households, both remain uncertain. As a result, the transition to cleaner energy is unfolding unevenly, shaped as much by income as by infrastructure. On the outskirts of cities, firewood and kerosene are reappearing as fallback options.

Chulhas, traditional Indian stoves once replaced in the name of clean energy, are being used again. Health experts have long warned about the consequences of such reversals.

Prolonged exposure to smoke from firewood and biomass fuels is linked to respiratory illnesses, particularly among women and children who spend the most time near cooking spaces. What appears as a short-term coping strategy can carry long-term health costs.

Anjali, thirty-three, a mother of two and resident of rural Odisha, says, “Since we are not getting refills on time and sometimes have to wait weeks, we are being pushed back to firewood.”

“In our village, most homes once switched to LPG, but nearly 30 to 40 percent still burn firewood for cooking, even with connections, especially among poorer families.”

“The smoke makes our children cough, and my wife spends hours every day tending the chulha,” Arun Kumar, her husband, adds.

As the train begins to depart from Hazrat Nizamuddin railway station, Ramesh Varma climbs aboard.

“I came here to earn,” he says. “But if I cannot even eat, what is the point?”

In homes like Parveena’s, the uncertainty continues. Across India, in thousands of kitchens, the same question lingers.

The film is not helped along by having our hero played by the stupefyingly dull Andrew Garfield. As the fictional farmer called simply “Ploughman,” he’s in perpetual mourning over his family that died in the black plague. Pushed to his limit by the royal taxes that are beggaring his community, Ploughman assaults the tax-collecting hirelings of King Richard II, thus kicking off the revolt.

Ploughman explains that his name refers to the fact that he and his work are regarded as one entity, but hearing it said over and over gets very distracting. What’s with that name anyway? Ploughman. Is he the worst superhero ever? Is his superpower growing potatoes?

I should add that Garfield is in no way believable as a fourteenth-century farmer. He has the soft-boy look of some random coffeehouse laptop jockey, yet we’re supposed to accept that he’s a formidable figure, lean and sinewy from a lifetime of hard labor. Wielding his favorite weapon, the sickle — don’t get your hopes up, communists! — he’s such a deadly fighter, he readily defeats the knights who are guarding the king, one after another, in an absolutely delusional action sequence that arrives late in the movie. Honor labor, Greengrass, by acknowledging that a farmer might be very handy with his sickle and still not be able to defeat, on his own, several highly trained knights whose lifelong calling is combat.

Unsurprisingly, this lame attempt at an action-oriented historical epic is bombing badly at the box office. It’s the second of two failed films in a row for Garfield after The Magic Faraway Tree, which is the real title of a real movie that opened a few weeks ago and was immediately consigned to oblivion by a disgusted public.

Making Ploughman the superhuman Everyman at the center of The Uprising pushes into secondary roles the more interesting historical figures who actually led the revolt, played by more exciting actors — Cosmo Jarvis as renegade soldier Wat Tyler and Jamie Bell as seditious priest John Ball. There was a certain poetry and logic to soldier and priest, sword and scripture, joining forces to lead the most massive peasant revolt in English history. But here, it gets thrown out of whack by shoving a sad-sack farmer into the foreground.

Greengrass wants to make sure that women get some screentime too, which is fair enough, so there’s a fictional character named Alyce (Thomasin McKenzie), an ex-nun who was raped by a priest and had her newborn child torn away from her, who’s now a head-shaven toughie ready to fight. And the worried mother of troubled boy king Richard II, Joan of Kent (Katherine Waterston), prays that he’ll find the strength to rule independent of his corrupt and self-serving counselors who include the archbishop of Canterbury, Simon Sudbury (Stephen Dillane), Sir Robert Hales, the grand prior of the Knights Hospitaller (Tom Hollander), and nobleman politician William Walworth (Jonny Lee Miller).

Woody Norman as fourteen-year-old Richard II, tormented by nightmares and conniving advisers and presentiments of doom, does a nice job of making the boy king both pitiable and disturbing. He appears to be a weak reed on which to build any confidence, yet the peasants still believe intensely in kings divinely ordained by God and are convinced he’ll cast off his evil counselors once the people petition him with their grievances. When the boy king finally does find the strength to lead, well — I probably don’t have to say “SPOILER ALERT!” when I tell you that this doesn’t go well for the peasants. Or for peasant leaders.

Just to give you one example of what ultimately happened — though it’s not handled this way in the film, which chickens out at every turn — the priest John Ball was executed by being hanged, drawn, and quartered. If you look it up, you’ll find that’s a gruesome multiple-step form of medieval capital punishment that certainly wasn’t the origin of the word “overkill,” but that term comes to mind nevertheless.

But that’s a bummer, right? So Paul Greengrass decided to find a way to tack a happier ending onto The Uprising. And this really is a SPOILER: Greengrass has Ploughman escape and then turn up again in an idiotic denouement when the heavily guarded royal coach bearing King Richard II and the Queen Mother is lumbering through the woods and gets surrounded by a bunch of masked figures all wearing dull green who drop down out of the trees.

“It’s Robin Hood and his Merry Men,” you think with a sinking sense of despair, and it is, only this bunch is anything but merry. It’s Robin Hood and his Morose Men, starring Ploughman as the beloved masked outlaw of Sherwood Forest, not in the least cheered up by finding this liberating form of ongoing rebellion and guerilla-style warfare. Ex-nun Alyce is now one of the low-spirited gang. Any hopes Greengrass might have cherished that The Uprising would kick off a rebooted Robin Hood series die a well-deserved death right here.

Where’s Errol Flynn when you need him? When somebody in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) says in shocked tones to Flynn’s Robin Hood, “You speak treason!” he answers with heartening élan, “Fluently.” So goddamn proud of himself and his fellow rebels, I mean. Those were the days. But here, we have the worst of both worlds: gritty “realism” and absurd Hollywood convention.

Here Ploughman/Robin Hood has a chance to kill Richard II, this little royal sumb-tch who betrayed Wat Tyler and John Ball and slaughtered thousands of trusting peasants who believed in him. But you can’t count on these dreary depressive half-hearted rebels who never really commit to their own revolution. Ploughman/Robin Hood merely drags the king out of his carriage into the dirt and says scornful words at him. He promises that, after this schoolyard-style humiliation, the boy king will be harassed by a fresh set of nightmares till the end of his days. Yeah, that’s real punishment. An already nightmare-plagued teenage king, safe in his castle, has more nightmares. That’ll show him.

How media-makers have embraced utter toothlessness even in fictionalized narratives of historical rebellions is sickening to contemplate. Movies like this are just one more way of reminding ourselves that for decades we’ve been macerating in weak equivocation and class-traitor spinelessness.

So there’s yet another promising cinematic premise gone down the chutes — with a bomb this size, nobody will be able to make another 1381 English Peasant Revolt movie for who knows how long. And I’d like to see a unsparingly realistic version of that film that includes some of John Ball’s famous incendiary speeches, such as the one with the mocking kick-ss line, “When Adam delved and Eve span, who then was the gentleman?”

Then it should show Ball’s hanged-drawn-and-quartered execution after Richard II reneges on every promise to his too-trusting subjects in order to get them to disband and then hunts down their rebel leaders.

Let’s look at this historical uprising squarely. It has, shall we say, enduring relevance.