Recommended

Red Square podcasters ironically attend a Republican function as guests of Roger Stone (In These Times)

Few things obsess me quite like the schism on the left between those who would ally with fascists to bring the neoliberal world down, and those (e.g., me) who see fascists and neoliberals as part of the same nasty power complex.  To the "Post Left", the sincerity of my type of lefist is worse than fascist.  So much of the discourse on the left is spent attacking or defending oneself from the vitriol of other ostensible leftists that you may occasionally find yourself trying to Google to find out once and for all if Douglas Lain is on the CIA's payroll.  The permeable borders of the divide between the powerless but righteous traditional left and the monied and conspiratorial horseshoe left was a running theme in Naomi Klein's Doppelganger (probably my favorite book of the year) and it is also the subject of Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet's Losing the Plot: The Leftists who Turn Right in a recent issue of In These Times.*  For my money, Joyce and Sharlet's eminently clear-eyed piece nails the subject in a way that is readable in 30 minutes but that you will want to return to from time to time as the drama of late stage capitalism unfolds (and especially if in a trough of despair over the state of Democratic politics you find yourself nodding along to Jimmy Dore or Jackson Hinkle.) My last minute Holiday gift to you.

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* A discussion about the article by Tina-Desiree Berg of Status Coup with Oliver Lee Bateman is here.  I am haunted by Bateman's observation that in online battles between the left and the post left, the winner is the one who cares the least.