About PSAN

PSAN started, like a lot of commentary projects, out of frustration with the alternatives. Too much of what passed for political analysis seemed to exist either to reassure an audience that already agreed with it, or to manufacture controversy for its own sake. Neither approach seemed particularly useful if the actual goal was understanding why the world’s political systems behave the way they do.

So the mission, from early on, has been fairly narrow: take world events seriously enough to look past the headline, and be honest about where our own perspective comes from rather than pretending to write from nowhere in particular. We’ve never claimed neutrality. We think a stated point of view, argued honestly, is more useful to a reader than a false neutrality that hides its assumptions instead of naming them.

Over time, that’s meant covering a fairly wide range of subjects — economic policy, protest movements, institutional politics, socialism, generational shifts in political identity — connected less by geography than by a shared interest in how power actually moves through a system, as opposed to how it’s officially supposed to move through it. Those are often very different things, and a lot of the value in political commentary comes from being willing to point out the gap.

Socialism has been part of our intellectual toolkit from the beginning, though we’ve tried hard not to let it become the only tool in the box. There’s a version of political writing that reduces every event to the same underlying story regardless of the specifics, and we think that habit makes for worse analysis, not better analysis, even when the underlying framework has real merit. We’d rather apply socialism, or any other lens, only where it actually illuminates something, and set it aside where it doesn’t.

What hasn’t changed is the basic approach: read past the press release, be skeptical of both the official story and the easiest counter-narrative, and try to write the piece that’s actually useful to someone trying to understand what happened and why, rather than the piece that’s easiest to write or most satisfying to an audience that’s already made up its mind.

We don’t expect everyone who reads PSAN to come away agreeing with us. We’d rather be read carefully and argued with than agreed with reflexively. That’s been true since the beginning, and it’s still the standard we’re trying to hold ourselves to.