The struggle against plutocracy and the striving for peace and democracy are forever reborn. - Michael Parenti

History has many unanswered questions, but it is no mystery as such—except for those who make it so.

There is a tradition of popular struggle in the United States that has been downplayed and ignored. It ebbs and flows but never ceases. Moved by a combination of anger and hope, ordinary people have organized, agitated, demonstrated, and engaged in electoral challenges, civil disobedience, strikes, sit-ins, takeovers, boycotts, and sometimes violent clashes with the authorities - for better wages and work conditions, a safer environment, racial and gender justice, and peace and nonintervention abroad. Against the heaviest odds, they have suffered many defeats but won some important victories, forcible extracting concessions and imposing reforms upon resistant rulers.

The efficacy of a label is that it propagates an evocative but undefined image lacking a specific content that can be held up to the test of evidence.