Portside

Only by understanding how Trump fits within our recent history will the left be able to figure out where we go from here. We are once again at a moment of consequential political realignment. Both major parties are deeply divided. We need to engage in shaping the newly emerging parties. The Democrats may or may not move left; they, like the Republicans, may split.

Reader Comments: Trump Failure Answer is Single Payer; Gorsuch-"Originalist" Disaster; Israel Segregationist and Apartheid; Left Growth Today - Religious Left, Socialists, Feminists; Censorship and Art - Emmett Till painting; PBS; Maine Fishermen; Job Growth and Worker Injury; Resources: Teachers’ Union Guide for Immigrant and Refugee Children; Announcements: Black Women in the Media; Chicago-April 4; 81st Annual Celebration of the Lincoln Brigade; and more...

After more than a half-century in the wilderness, the socialist left reemerges in America. Bernie Sanders helped give renewed meaning and salience to democratic socialism as a political identity. His emergence as the moral conscience of the American left was nearly impossible to anticipate. Perhaps the most important aspect of Sanders's run in the Democratic primary was cultural rather than electoral.

Sometimes compared to Canada’s youthful prime minister, Justin Trudeau, Klaver – who has a Moroccan father and a mother of Indonesian descent – said on polling day that the left’s answer to the far right’s rise in Europe was to stand up for its ideals.

By running for the D.N.C. chair, the Minnesota congressman hopes to lead a populist opposition against Trump.

If and when a twenty-first-century left comes into being, immigrants—whether freshly arrived or one or two generations in—will be at the heart of it. A path to citizenship for all those now rendered vulnerable by their resident status is essential to building a more pluralistic, multicultural society. Yet a new left must go further, not merely defending the civil liberties of these new Americans but seeking to give them a new power and a new voice.

If we are to look beyond the next four years, we must create a movement that is not simply anti-Trump, but that presents left politics as a compelling alternative. In preparing to fight the anti-labor, anti-immigrant, racist, and misogynist policies of a Trump administration, history can help us understand how activists and radicals in previous eras of social turmoil fought for a better future.

Hope belongs to the left. Social hope entails searching collectively for public solutions to our public problems rather than pretending that everything is up to the solitary individual. Hope creates action, but it is equally true that action creates hope. It is the action of movements, rooted in people's needs and longings, attempting to change the world in small ways and large.

Brexit has come to the United States. For thirty years now, in Europe and the United States, a bipartisan neoliberal consensus has embraced the benefits of globalization and the rise of the "knowledge economy." If only workers would go back to school, retrain, and send their children to college, the good jobs that disappeared would somehow return. But those good jobs did not arrive, and voters have opted for a faux populism that promises to reverse globalization.

Reader Comments: Global Nuclear War Danger - Avoiding the Unthinkable; Hillary Clinton and Working Class Voters; Art as Politics: Star Wars New Movie; What Now for the Left; Viewers debate the Russian-Election Frenzy; Brazil; W.E.B. DuBois and the Working Class; Student Digital Literacy and Technology; Butter - Good for You?; #NoDAPL December Month of Actions; Responsible and Ethical Cuba Travel; Special - Holiday Book Offers; and more ...