Some books are written to inform. Some are written to inspire. And some are written because the author looked at the world around them, felt the full weight of what was happening, and decided that silence was no longer an option.
PROJECT 2026: A Mandate for Leadership on the Progressive Promise is that kind of book.
Studio of Books is proud to announce the release of this urgent, wide-ranging, and deeply personal work from Jacqueline Murray Brux — development economist, political and social economist, global author, immigrant, mother, grandmother, and lifelong progressive — whose voice has never been more necessary than it is right now.
This book began as a series of blogs written across the first year of Donald Trump’s second term in office, under the unflinching title The World Is A Cruel Place For Those Whose Hearts Are Easily Broken. What emerged from that year of writing is something far larger than a collection of essays. It is a document of witness, a body of analysis, and a call to action — one that spans continents, policy areas, and the full breadth of a life spent caring deeply about the world and the people most vulnerable within it.
Brux writes from a place of extraordinary breadth. As a development economist, her expertise and her heart are rooted in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Her chapters on Gaza and Sudan carry not just intellectual rigor but profound moral urgency. As a U.S. immigrant and dual citizen with Canada, she writes on immigration with both personal experience and policy precision. As a global author on nationalistic populism, she maps the rise of Trumpism not as an isolated American phenomenon but as part of a wider authoritarian wave reshaping democracies on both sides of the Atlantic. As a mother and grandmother to a multiracial family, she writes on white supremacy and racism with the particular clarity of someone who sees its consequences in the faces of people she loves.
Every chapter is both personal and political — because for Brux, those things have never been separate.
At the center of PROJECT 2026 is a conviction: that the trajectory of the United States can still be changed, but only if progressives organize, unite, and show up with a coherent vision rather than fragmented opposition. Whether through the 2026 midterms, the 2028 presidential election, or the sustained pressure of an engaged and mobilized citizenry, Brux argues that the window remains open — but it will not stay open indefinitely.
To that end, she puts forward ten concrete policy proposals that form the progressive mandate of the book’s title. They cover the full landscape of the issues she believes matter most: Affirmative Action and DEI, Criminal Justice Reform, Free Palestine and campaign finance reform, Foreign Assistance, Global Cooperation, Immigration Reform, Public Education, Single-Payer Universal Comprehensive Healthcare, Social Safety Net, and Tax Reform.
She is clear-eyed about the fact that not every reader will agree on every proposal. Some of her lines are firm. Others, she acknowledges, leave room for dialogue. But the animating belief beneath all ten is consistent: that a just society is one that measures its character by how it treats its most vulnerable — domestically and globally — and that the United States is currently failing that measure in ways that demand a serious, sustained, and collective response.
PROJECT 2026 is not a book of despair. It is a book of resistance — and resistance, Brux insists, is always a form of hope. It is written for the progressives who have felt, over these past years, the specific exhaustion of watching things they care about come undone. It is written for the policy thinkers who want a serious platform to rally around. It is written for the global citizens who understand that what happens in Washington does not stay in Washington — that American policy reaches into every corner of the world, with consequences that fall heaviest on those least able to absorb them.
And it is written for anyone who believes, as Brux does, that it is never entirely too late — that the work of democracy is always, in every generation, the work of showing up anyway.
Jacqueline Murray Brux brings to this book a lifetime of scholarly expertise and genuine human passion that is rare in political writing. Her academic background in development and political economy gives her analysis rigorous grounding. Her personal life — as an immigrant, a mother, a grandmother, an in-law to a Kenyan family, a dual citizen, a neighbor to the Norwegian social model she so admires — gives her writing its soul. She is not writing about the world from a distance. She is writing from inside it, with everything she has.