Portside

He authored the Constitution to forestall the rise of a despotic president. We’ll soon see if those safeguards suffice.

The Second Amendment was intended in the first instance to protect slaveholders from the people they owned.

The sentiments behind this slogan with Biblical origins animate many of the policies of the political left today.

The Right’s policy nostrums are failing across the board – from free-market extremism to austerity as a cure for recession to continuing the old health-care dysfunction – leaving only an ideological faith that this is what the Framers wanted. But that right-wing “history” is just one more illusion, writes Robert Parry.