The Soapbox Left

The democratic left has always operated on a theory of trickle-up politics. Strikes, protests, and acts of civil disobedience all begin at the bottom—on the shop-floor, in the university, at the town square—and then make their way up. The abolitionists got their start on the steps of Boston’s Faneuil Hall, decrying the moral corruptions of the North as well as the human degradations of the South. Early labor radicalism grew out of a band of discontented mechanics and tailors in Philadelphia. And American socialism—yes, there once was such a thing—emerged from the tight-knit immigrant communities of cities like New York and Milwaukee.