It’s only too easy to get caught up in the Accidental President’s many foibles and, indeed, outrages. We shouldn’t let the antics of our court-jester-and-king-in-one distract us from staying informed about things that really matter, writes L.A. Times Contact reporter Matt Pearce.

Even the former speech-writer for George W. Bush has taken notice: the modern GOP has run off the rails of both objectivity and human decency.

California Democratic voters are energized, and Republican representatives in seven districts that went Hillary are especially in their sites for 2018.

In this smart op-ed piece, New York Times columnist David Brooks discusses the competing narratives vying for America’s soul and for her future. The Social Democrat wholly endorses Brook’s conclusion: that the only sane way forward is a model that “welcomes diversity, meritocracy, immigration and open trade” but also “invests massively in human capital, especiallly the young and those who suffer from the downsides of creative destruction.” In this community,” Brooks adds, “the poor boy and girl are enmeshed in care and cultivation,” and “everything is designed to arouse energy and propel social mobility.” Word!

Yes, you read that right. Jackson Mississippi’s new mayor, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, will bring a social democracy perspective to leading the major city of this deeply red state.

Under a new initiative, the Massachusetts Senate has voted $34 million targeted to expanded pre-K opportunities, after-school programs and higher salaries to retain talented teachers. As Massachusetts Senators Stand Rosenberg ad Sal Di Domenico write in this Boston Globe op-ed, “Serious and sustained investments beginning now will make the difference beteween a student falling through society’s cracks or becoming a healthy, resilient adult helping to drive our economy.” With a waiting list of 20,000 children for pre-K, and only 1,000 new places, however, The Social Democrat hopes more money will be coming soon.

A prominent German economist considers the state of social democracy in the U.S. in this insightful piece.

This Washington Post piece looks at the work of U MD prof Frances Lee, who has explored the intensification of partisan identities over the last several decades—and its effects on our democracies.

A recent ranking of health criteria finds social democratic Sweden, Iceland and Finland at the top of the list. The U.S. rank—number 28.

This is the rhetorical question asked in this smart article on Britain’s own brand of post-globalism’s political mash-up: “The Leave-versus-Remain rift cut across the old left-right axis, setting the global economy’s winners against those left behind and cosmopolitan liberals against pull-up-the-drawbridge nationalists.”

June 9, 2017 – The Social Democrat finds it fascinating to watch politics in a nation where social democracy is an established, ongoing experiment. No issue has been more prominent in French politics of late than France’s extensive employement code. Critics, like France’s new president, claim that its protections for workers go too far, hindering job creation. For the old-guard socialist left, the employment code is sacred turf, its critics traitors to the leftist project.  Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell offers a neat summary of the issue.