Something’s busy dyin’, but is anything being born? The age of market extremism, as Kevin Phillips has termed it, is shuddering to a halt, undone, as in all its previous incarnations, by its own excesses. The shift in public opinion …
It’s nap time in America. As I write, in the summer of our content, the nation seems blissfully oblivious of the presidential campaign, and the candidates themselves are doing little to rouse it from its rest. In the case of …
Twice since John Sweeney became president of the AFL-CIO, the federation has held national conventions, and on each occasion Sweeney’s keynote address has been preceded by the same distinctive introduction. In 1997 in Pittsburgh, and again in 1999 in Los …
One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left In the Twentieth Century by Donald Sassoon The New Press, 1997, 965 pp., $22 The literature on communism, the Russian Revolution, and the Soviet Union fills libraries. It is the stuff …
The revolution is over. While November’s election may have been a knock in the head to the Republican Party generally, it was a dagger through the heart of the Republican right. As moderate GOP governors swept to victory all across …
Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America by Richard Rorty Harvard University Press, 1998 159 pp $18.95M On behalf of countless readers whose reaction to most left academic writing over the past two decades has increasingly been not so …
Two years into the Sweeney era, the American labor movement seems to have found its own rather rocky rhythm: victory, disaster, victory, disaster. In late summer, the stunning success of the Teamsters strike at United Parcel Service was followed by …
This should be the New Democratic moment. Clinton II began with the banishing of liberals, their places filled by wall-to-wall New Dems: for Leon Panetta, Erskine Bowles; for George Stephanopoulos, Rahm Emanuel; for Robert Reich (in his domestic policy maven …
It’s not just suspense that’s missing from this year’s elections. It’s hope. Oh, there’s plenty of hope that the Democrats will win—holding the White House, retaking the Hill, wresting control of the national agenda from Newt and Trent and Bob. …
If the 1995 off-year election provides any portents for 1996, they are that the best the Democrats can hope for is a defensive victory. In the November elections in Virginia, Kentucky, New Jersey, and elsewhere, the Democrats did not run …
The problem is, the problem isn’t just Bill Clinton. Fault the president for his timing and tactics on health care, for subordinating his investment agenda to deficit-reduction mania. But it was hardly Clinton’s doing that Kathleen Brown changed identities every …
Midway through Year Two of Bill Clinton’s presidency, the most striking aspect of his tenure in office is the demobilization, the silence, of the coalition that brought him to power. As far as the nineties are concerned, the Schlesinger thirty-year …
In the midst of last year’s New York primary, Bill Clinton brought his stump speech to Wall Street. The Street was not impressed. “The problem with the past twelve years,” Clinton told a noontime rally in the financial district, “is …
