Portside

A democratic foreign policy or empire building as central to U.S. action abroad? It's an old debate. Author Stephen Kinzer sees the alternatives set at the turn of the 20th century, when imperium boosters Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge and William Randolph Hearst squared off against Mark Twain and the Anti-Imperialist League. Here, Kinzer is queried about his analysis and his thinking on just where Trump and his malignant "America First" grandiloquence stand.

It's an old idea, but the people who will make it happen are young - and tired of the unequal world they've inherited. I will come of age in the era of Trump. It's a bleak generational landmark, but ideological capitulation and despair are not the answer. In the 1930s and 1940s, many of the most dedicated antifascists were communists. The antidote to radical exploitation and exclusion is radical egalitarianism and inclusion.

This first of two projected volumes of a new biography of the South Dakota Senator and 1972 Democratic Presidential nominee takes his story to the end of 1968. It offers some surprises about this significant, and some would say underrated, politician.

Political language, like poetry, is rarely uttered without intention. When Trump said, unconvincingly in his speech, that “we are one nation, and their pain is our pain,” I knew that the They was Us, this separate America, which he continually labels and addresses as Other.

It may only take 3.5% of the population to topple a dictator – with civil resistance

The creation of the UN in 1945 was a victory for the spirit of pacifism, an affirmation of multilateralism, a beautiful progressive idea. This idea must be maintained in face of the pipe dream of unilateralism.

If New Hampshire, Missouri and Kentucky succeed in enacting "right-to-work" bills, it would be the most states rolling back union power in one year since 1947, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Success in New Hampshire would also make it the first state in the Northeast with a "right-to-work" law. The bills are a further reflection of organized labor's falling clout. Just 10.7 percent of American workers belonged to a labor union in 2016.

Amnesty fears the immigration ban announced by executive order on Friday could “become permanent” and extend to more countries.

Already some are calling this vast movement the "resistance." Whether this label is warranted will depend on the degree to which these demonstrations actually challenge repressive power structures not only with public dissent but active disobedience.

Whether you voted for or against Donald Trump, whether you’re gearing up for the revolution or waiting for his next tweet to drop, rest assured that, in the years to come, the ideology that matters most won’t be that of the “forgotten” Americans of his Inaugural Address. It will be that of Goldman Sachs and it will dominate the domestic economy and, by extension, the global one.