Portside

With the election of Donald Trump, labor faces a unique opportunity. It will face hostility in all branches of the federal government, and will have to maintain a multi-pronged fight. Yes, union density numbers are at historically low levels, and the bulwark of public-sector unionism may suffer a major blow at the Supreme Court through a case challenging the constitutionality of fair-share fees in the public sector...It has the existential imperative to reform itself.

It could be the biggest mobilization yet in response to a presidential inauguration. March organizers hope that the work of the march will reach far beyond January 21. The work of this march is not only to stand together in sisterhood and solidarity for the protection of our rights, our safety, our families and our environment - but it is also to build relationships and mend the divides between our communities.

Kayla DeVault writes, Standing Rock requires us not to forget cultural identity. Conversations about climate, loss and damage, must include loss and damage done to a way of life, to the sustainability of an entire identity of people. Is devastating policy brutality against water protectors in North Dakota a harbinger of what's to come? Interview with Sophia Wilansky's father, who was injured Tuesday by a concussion grenade after police assault on water protectors.

We need a reconstructive politics that would link opposition to the far-right to a nationally embedded Green New Deal, sustainable reindustrialization, new budget priorities to cut military expenditures and fund job creation and integration, and the development of economic democracy.

This book, says reviewer Cass Sunstein, "might well be the best book ever written on the founders and their handiwork." It is the kind of book that helps provide useful context for this complex political moment. Readers interested in this topic might also look at America's Constitution: A Biography, by Akhil Reed Amar (Random House, 2005).

“Standing Rock is a call to all of us to protect what we love.”

What can anti-Trump liberals and progressives actually do? With his party in control of the White House and Congress, and with Trump about to tip the balance of the Supreme Court, it’s easy to despair over how little leverage the Democrats seem to have. One episode from history reveals reasons to hope. In 1850, like the Democrats and their allies in 2016, the abolitionists took a terrible hit...

Amid all of the talk about economic populism this election cycle, one group has been largely left out: working class Americans of color.

A note from the editors of ThinkProgress: We won’t do racists’ public relations work for them.

Tony often observed, regarding capital’s revanchist attack on working people that has steadily intensified over the last four decades, that what we would now call the neoliberal Democrats had nothing to offer those who have been or fear being ground into the dust by the juggernaut. He cautioned that, if the left and the labor movement didn’t find ways to connect with that growing population of those hurting, ... other, nasty and dangerous tendencies would.