When we talk politics at home, in a bar, or at a party—that is, wherever there are no bulbs flashing or cameras rolling—there’s at least a good chance we’ll speculate, “Will the Democrats/Republicans raise/lower taxes and the Congress vote in/out …
Not long ago, my seniors’ writing class at MIT considered the essay of one student—a kind, strapping fellow: no fool—on a political subject of his choice, of all things, the virtues of prostitution. Well, not the virtues of it, exactly, …
The Reagan administration’s assault on the rights of minorities and women has focused on the existing policy of affirmative action. This strategy may be shrewd politics but it is mean-spirited morally and insupportable legally. The attack on affirmative action is …
Say what you will about Ronald Reagan, he seems never to have supposed that we live in a time marked by “the end of ideology.” It’s also true that he may never have heard of the phrase. But with those intuitive …
The jacket of this book presents an image that its text carefully challenges: a 1937 photograph of a Munich street shows a crowd ecstatically saluting Nazi leaders on parade; underlining the apparent conformity, two small children ape their elders, ranged …
The history of the last half-millennium can be written as the story of rising classes, each pronouncing itself a universal class that embodies the general good. More narrowly, just as Virginia gentlemen stressed the virtues of breeding and farmers extolled …
I saw prophets tearing at their pasted-on beards I saw imposters joining sects of flagellants butchers disguised in sheepskin who fled the anger of the people playing on a block flute I saw I saw I saw a man who …
When President Carter appointed Andrew Young ambassador to the United Nations, a new era began. For the first time in this century, a key figure in the foreign-policy establishment was Afro-American, with his writ extending especially to African affairs. Young’s …
Two young, politically engaged film-makers, Julia Reichert and James Klein, with one successful documentary (Union Maids) to their credit; a subject full of human and political complexity; seven years in preparation, including 400 interviews (only about a dozen make it …
It is an appalling visitation. You turn on the television and watch the president of the United States. He delivers his right-thinking homilies, fudges his ignorance, composes his chuckles, strains to summon a fact or two from failing memory banks …
The pattern repeats itself every generation or so in America. Things go wrong, at home or abroad, and an explanation is demanded. For some, it is inconceivable that the source of the difficulties might lie within the American system itself. …
It was the most radical periodical of its time. The intellectual successor to the dry socialist Comrade, the Masses was a magazine of “free expression” that embraced Marxists and Freudians, socialists, atheists, Wobblies, women’s suffragists, feminists, free love advocates, rebels, …
n 1890, Thomas Stevens, an American journalist, set off from Moscow for the Crimea, riding a horse he had purchased from a traveling Wild West show. Earlier, he had written a book about his travels in East Africa, and a …
This book is a posthumous collection of essays and reviews, most of them originally appearing in Dissent, by a leading contemporary political theorist. While ranging far and wide, The Real World of Liberalism is unified by a consistent concern: to …
In October and November 1982, following the most controversial military campaign in Israeli history, Amos Oz set out to take the pulse of his country by talking to people from different walks of life. The result, In the Land of …
