The New Tech Culture Wars
In our extremely online political times, content moderators have been cast as central players in the fight for democracy, whether as its antagonists or its delinquent guardians.
Winter 2025
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Let Them Eat Tech
Tech-oriented solutions to rural poverty and underdevelopment have become hallmarks of Democratic Party policy thinking. We need an alternative that redistributes the wealth generated by the high-tech sector—and recognizes its limits as a development strategy.
What’s Left of Generation X
To be Gen X was to be disaffected from the consumer norms of the 1980s, but to be pessimistic about any chance for social transformation.
The Seeds of Rural Progressivism
Many rural communities feel a contempt for the status quo that persists regardless of the ruling party. Organizers are helping them build their own political power, in service of their own needs.
Can Conservatives Write Good U.S. History?
By not giving the battle against racism and for equality its due, Wilfred McClay’s Land of Hope fails to explain how and for whom power was and continues to be wielded in America.
Why We Need a Working-Class Media
What could the political effects be of a media that actually served working-class Americans?
Scapegoat Country
Since the 2016 election, the American press has fixated on rural communities and created a dubious new genre: the Trump Country Safari.
The Obamanauts
What is the defining achievement of Barack Obama?
Five Years After Ferguson
For those active in the movement, Black Lives Matter provided a vision of the future that would allow black people to do more than simply survive.
The Rigorous Experimentalism of Ann Snitow, 1943–2019 
Ann demanded of us, and demands of us still, that we be as creative, relentless, and serious as she was in the pursuit of collective liberation.
Rural America Reimagined
Introducing our Fall 2019 special section, “Left Paths in Rural America.”
Why the Left Needs Liberals
Every reform era came about, in the main, when left-wing movements compelled liberal politicians to back some of their key demands and then collaborated with those lawmakers against their common foes.
Solidarity’s Promise
In the photo above, taken on May 1, 1989, Jacek Kuroń, a leader of the democratic opposition in Poland, marched with Solidarity, a movement he was instrumental in building. The demonstration came on the eve of victory for Poland’s anti-authoritarian …
The Example of Agnes Heller, 1929–2019
Heller, like Dissent’s founders, believed in making an unjust world a little better, while recognizing that justice could never be complete.
Design for a Green Future
The Green New Deal will require us to revolutionize the design professions, untethering them from the whims of private clients and capitalists and reorienting their work around movements for housing justice, environmental justice, and workers.
