Portside

A year after the attack on the Capitol, the country is suspended between democracy and autocracy. That sense of uncertainty radically heightens the likelihood of episodic bloodletting in America, and even the risk of civil war.

In his lifetime, Robert Welch toiled in the mocked and marginal fringe. Today his ideas are the mainstream of the American right.

What makes this noteworthy is that it comes from an economist who gained his reputation as a researcher with vaguely left-of-center sensibilities but was far from a radical. The times are such that even honest moderates are driven to radical remedies

This is yet another of the recent books by conservative and libertarian writers that pretend to explain Marxism and socialism to their far right wing and pro-fascist audiences.

“Has the prevailing memory of the ‘Good War,’ shaped as it has been by nostalgia, sentimentality and jingoism, done more harm than good to Americans’ sense of themselves and their country’s place in the world?”

Since the French Revolution, the Right has deployed a common set of arguments to resist the drive to democratize economic and political power. The Left will only win if we analyze their rhetoric — and counter it.

Tongo Eisen-Martin’s latest book of poems challenges whiteness and the status quo with a strong revolutionary practice.

bell hooks was a revolutionary...Like Ella Baker and Assata (and Audre Lorde and Barbara Smith and Angela Davis, etc) she has her share of "daughters." Literally thousands of amazing young Black women leading radical movements and making radical art

While her contributions to feminism are widely appreciated, bell hooks also published groundbreaking work on film, the visual arts, education, and a host of other subjects. She helped shape the modern U.S. cultural landscape.

Historical scholarship is looking anew into the ways that slavery was intertwined with the movement that created the American Revolution. Here is one of the most recent forays into that line of inquiry.