Portside

Reviving the History of the American Left

History lessons are being wiped from the internet, California is retreating from ethnic studies, as education swings away from curriculums that are seen as too progressive. School curriculum had been restricted before, notably during the Red Scares

Reader Comments: Defeating Fascism-Learning From History; Red Scare: Then, Now; Amazon Plan-Replace Half Million Jobs; Gaza Ceasefire; Human Toll of Gaza War; Remembering Arthur Waskow; Young Republicans-Young Fascists; Letter from Jewish New Yorker

If we want to understand how we arrived in this authoritarian moment in 2025, we need to understand one of the central pathways that brought us here: McCarthyism.

Trump's brand of thoroughly vulgar and outlandish demagogy, his politics of racism, cruelty, vindictiveness, and gleeful resentment is not new, it has deep roots and is deeply, fundamentally American.

The web of Atlantic trading routes and solidarity among maritime workers, many of them Black, meant fugitive slaves’ chances of reaching freedom were better below deck than over land.

A radical legal philosophy has undermined the process of constitutional evolution.

Trump’s deportation regime revives a colonial blueprint first drafted by the American Colonization Society, when Black lives were exiled to Africa to safeguard a white republic.