Portside

What to expect if Trump loses? More attempts at gridlock, and more anger, and an ever-widening opening for the extremist right to dig their heels further into the GOP.

Assuming that not even Donald Trump can destroy American democracy, the real challenge begins for whoever is sworn in as president on January 20 2017. Americans need more economic security for their enlightened sides to shine through again. This means more good jobs at living wages for men as well as women. Only then can the country begin to close the social chasms revealed and fueled by Trump’s campaign.

The numbers will be clear: downscale whites are a big pool of untapped votes. Yet if a cordon sanitaire is placed around that demographic territory and hung with the notorious label, “Trump Vote,” the Democrats will be even more likely to let the party system drift down its current path: into the culture-war politics of the reactionary Tammany-versus-Klan 1920s, rather than the class-based politics that followed.

In fact, they've been doing scientific research since the days of Florence Nightingale

A few decades from now, when the realities of climate change have hushed even the loudest, densest deniers, we may look back on October 2016 as the month political journalism died. Amid the relentlessly tawdry campaign news, there has been a near total absence of any discussion of substantive issues, including global warming and the environment. TV news celebrities, and horse-race coverage, driven by Twitter, bluster and clickbait, have left them all in the lurch.

Then came the bitterest drop of reality: Hillary Clinton was the nominee. That meant her election was all that stood against Donald Trump. And THAT meant we would be forced to choose someone we didn’t want, even hated, to head off a result that would open the floodgates of a fascist insurgency.

The convention's keynote address was delivered by noted sociologist, historian, civil rights activist and author W.E.B. Du Bois. Titled "Behold the Land," the speech was one of the last major orations by Du Bois, who was 78 at the time. It remains timely today with its calls to unite blacks and working-class whites.

When the Nobel Foundation awarded him the prize for literature in 1997 they said he “emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden”. When he received the prize he said the award was also for “the people in countries like Turkey, Afghanistan and Argentina who had been jailed for performing my plays.