Social decline? Social decay? Social breakdown? We wondered which of these phrases, none of them “scientific” in nature, would best apply to the current situation in the United States. Social decline—too mild. Social decay—that suggests a process too slow. Social …
Can the mind confront a harder task than to imagine—truly, deeply to imagine—circumstances radically at variance with those of the immediate moment? Such an effort must be especially hard for intellectuals, who tend to impose theories drawn from the present …
Now that the exhilaration of glasnost is wearing off and the problems of perestroika grow acute, there is a striking change of response to Gorbachev. Wise men shake their heads. They mutter, with crocodile regret or burbling delight, that he …
Anyone who follows, even from a distance, the discussions now taking place among political thinkers in the Soviet Union, and who also remembers something about the history of Russian radicalism, must be experiencing an uncanny feeling. It’s as if the …
The recent political changes in Europe are so extensive, indeed, so astonishing that all of us have “fallen behind” in our thinking. It’s unavoidable. So let me here put down some quite obvious points, with no pretense to originality or …
I want to mention very briefly–not discuss, not analyze–a few matters that we will be returning to in future issues of Dissent. They are central to our moment. A few facts, perhaps known but worth repeating: Nearly one out of …
He was our voice, our hope, our pride. When Mike Harrington rose to speak, in that piercing alto of his, we all felt that the familiar language of socialism took on the complexion of youth, the freshness of truth. For …
I used to be an admirer of Eugene McCarthy. While Senator from Minnesota, he was just about the first prominent figure in the political establishment to come out unambiguously against the Vietnam War. When he started to campaign for the …
These have been stirring days. The popular uprising in China, begun by students and then taken up by hundreds of thousands of workers, farmers, and other citizens—who could witness this, however fleetingly, on television or read about it, however skimpily, …
Q: How do you explain that Dissent has survive for so long? A: True grit. Q: That’s all? A: Also the generosity of a few friends and the self-taxation of our editors. Q: In a book about the McCarthy period …
You might say that my first encounter with Joe Clark was not entirely friendly. He was speaking at a Communist rally in the Bronx, and several young Socialists, I among them, went with the intention of heckling. We tried, but …
I’m not quite as sanguine as some Dissent editors about Dukakis but when you look at the other candidate, Bush caving in to the troglodyte right and its Quayle, there isn’t any choice but Dukakis. He isn’t going to set …
Tremendously important changes are taking place in the world today, so rapidly it often seems impossible to keep track. The great powers are starting to back away from their military interventions, not because they have concluded that lions should lie …
A debate is now going forward—sometimes raging, sometimes smoldering—over the kind of curriculum that should be offered to college students in literature and the humanities generally. For example, core humanities classes are sometimes offered to freshmen and sophomores as a …
The best thing Jesse Jackson did during the Democratic primary was to name the problems. He was the one Democratic candidate who stressed that there are serious social wrongs in the United States requiring more than superficial treatment. He offered …
