Spring 2024

Those of us who have been alive for seventy years or more are sometimes visited with a strange impulse: to take the middle-aged and the young in a firm grip and urge them to listen to the stories of our …

I can think of at least two ways to approach history. There is the historian’s way, usually celebrated as realism, and…the “unhistorical” way, claiming for itself, in the name of an undogmatic moralism, nothing less than truth. The historian’s way …

When I first met Brendan Sexton in the mid-1930s, he was pure flame: an activist in the then still-vital Socialist party, a leader in the unemployed movement, a young man full of blazing energy. I saw him from a distance, …

Some of the contributors to this collection of essays would describe themselves as democratic socialists. Some as liberals. Others as liberal-socialists. And a few perhaps as people of the democratic left who prefer not to be labeled. So be it. …

If anything like a national mood can be discovered in America, then we ought to be facing a moment of harsh sobriety. The party is over; the plates are broken; the debts unpaid. After the Crash. What happened on Bloody …

Human nature didn’t change once Ed Koch became mayor of New York, but it soon began to display its shabbier sides. The mood of the city seemed to grow sullen, as if in contempt of earlier feelings and visions…. Quick …

This spring my book Politics and the Novel was reissued in paperback by New American Library. The publisher asked me to “bring it up to date” by discussing, however briefly, political fiction written since the Second World War. A formidable …

You need—said Oscar Wilde about the death of Dickens’s Little Nell—a heart of stone not to laugh. So too about Irangate, contragate, Reagangate.

Taking the train from Westchester County to Grand Central Station, you pass some dreadful slums. The abandoned houses in these neighborhoods are boarded up, but some are adorned with fake windows—”Occupied-Look” decals—that are supposed to trick you into believing they …

This past March the Nation marked its 120th anniversary with a special issue containing articles of varying interest. One of them, alas, stood out—a racist diatribe by Gore Vidal concerning Israel, American Jews, and “fifth columnists.” It is many years …

Does anyone remember Jacques Doriot? During the 1930s he was a leader of the French Communist party who drifted into fascism. Exploiting his gifts for demagogic oratory, he became a prominent collaborator with the Nazis in the Second World War. …

Christianity did not “die” in the 19th century. Millions held fast to the faith; churches survived; theological controversies flourished. Yet we can now see that in the decades after the Enlightenment Christianity suffered deep wounds that could not be healed, …

Let me add a brief note to David Bromwich’s trenchant article. The more public tumult about the Holocaust, the less likelihood that the memory of its terribleness will become a serious part of human consciousness. What has been happening with …

Of postmortems there will be no end. What follows is less ambitious, a mere personal response written three days after the election. • It was a severe defeat. There are a few consoling features, most of all the failure of …

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 …