Portside

Sociologist Theda Skocpol tells what drives the angry right -- and what comes after the government shutdown. The Right in this country, over the last half century, has recognized that fighting across many localities and states is worth it. And they've developed mechanisms for doing that, and that turned out to have a big payoff in Congress. The real problem that you've got right now on the Left is how to defeat this stuff, how to contain it, how to beat it.

In the popular imagination, opposition to the Vietnam War was driven largely by the privileged, while supposedly reactionary blue-collar workers supported the war effort. That memory is wrong.

As Republicans insist on tarring an idea they came up with as the resurrection of Lenin, Democrats find themselves defending a policy they would have scoffed at a decade ago.

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is set to review a case involving graduate assistants at New York University. If it is favorably reviewed it could reopen the door to unionizing thousands of graduate employees at private universities.

“I don’t think you have to make this choice about being on one side or the other side. My feeling is that when we are committed to growing the economy and making sure that our public employees have a place at the table through collective bargaining, everyone wins.” -- Mary Burke

Asked whether the court had gotten its ruling wrong, Judge Posner responded: “Yes. Absolutely.” Back in 2007, he said, “there hadn’t been that much activity in the way of voter identification,” and “we weren’t really given strong indications that requiring additional voter identification would actually disenfranchise people entitled to vote.” The member of the three-judge panel who dissented from the majority decision, Terence T. Evans, “was right."

Anti-government hysteria has fueled everything from congressional kamikaze attacks on Obamacare to actual kamikaze attacks on federal buildings, and those who get hurt are inevitably people doing their jobs.