The Case for Carceral Minimalism

When Karl Marx wrote that the past “weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living,” he wasn’t talking about 2020, but he may as well have been. That year weighs particularly heavy, it seems, on democratic socialists running for office. Everyone from New York’s Zohran Mamdani to Wisconsin’s Francesca Hong has been confronted with statements they made in that year, generally on the subject of defunding or abolishing police and prisons. In almost every case, democratic socialists have walked…