Christopher I.asch’s two recent books, Haven in a Heartless World (Basic Books, 1977) and The Culture of Narcissism (W. W. Norton, 1979), amount to an extended moral denunciation of contemporary American life, its frantic hedonism, vulgar opportunism, and pervasive hollow anxiety. Such jeremiads are scarcely in short …
Few historical judgments appear so unassailable as the almost universal condemnation of the harassment inflicted on Americans accused of Communist sympathies barely a quarter of a century ago. Only a few isolated sectarians on the far right today revere the …
The word fans out over the media from Washington and suddenly an impression, crystallized in a few phrases, is perceived as an established condition. It cannot be traced back to particular events or a single source, and sometimes it seems …
America in Our Time, by Godfrey Hodgson. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. 564 pp. Godfrey Hodgson is an Englishman who first came to the United States as a graduate student in 1955, served as a Washington correspondent of the London Observer …
The lead article in the January Commentary, prominent on the cover, was “Oil: The Issue of American Intervention,” by Robert W. Tucker.* It argues a case for the armed seizure by the U.S. of the Arabian coastline bordering the Persian …
By now Watergate stands not merely for the illegal and unethical acts of a President and his men but for the intensifying response of Congress, party leaders, and the public. The crisis has illuminated so many areas of American government …
Democratic societies with universal suffrage and competing political parties experience a cyclical alternation of periods dominated by protest from the Left and retrenchment by the Right. The notion that politics conform to such cyclical periodicity is scarcely a new one: …
I first became aware of George Lichtheim’s powerful and distinctive gifts in 1953 and 1954 when he wrote under the name of “G. L. Arnold,” although I had read him under his real name in Commentary on Middle Eastern and …
The Debate Among American Sociologists The old question of why there has been no socialism in the United States has often been answered by referring to the racial, ethnic, and religious divisions within the ranks of labor— which are the …
Those of us who for years have been concerned, as students of population, with the increasing number of people on the earth feel some satisfaction, though not always of an unmixed kind, over the recent rise of interest in the problem. …
There can be no possible doubt that the United States has violated in Indochina the laws of war laid down by the Hague and Geneva Conventions, the principles on which the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes trials were based, and several …
Noam Chomsky dedicates these essays “to the brave young men who refuse to serve in a criminal war.” This dedication reflects the tone and mood of the entire book, which is a record of Chomsky’s increasingly outraged response to the …
In last year’s U.S. pavillion at the Montreal World’s Fair I noticed a sign reading: Hall of the Great Society —Emergency Exit. Let’s take that exit right now! After the obscene happening at Chicago that went by the name of Democratic …
Lionel Trilling’s story “Of This Time, Of That Place” begins with a young English professor assigning to his freshman class as their first theme the writing of an essay on “Who I am and Why I came to Dwight College.” The …
One senses that the doves have won, or at least have gone far toward winning, the battle to influence public opinion. A mood of dissatisfaction with the war and unwillingness to approve any further escalation has begun to take hold. …
