Nothing could be more foolish than to blink the extent of the defeat we have suffered in the recent election. By “we” I have in mind both the larger “labor-liberal” community and the smaller “democratic left.” If Carter’s defeat can …
We asked Dissent editors whom they, as individuals, were going to vote for. Some threw up their hands, some groaned, some wrote a few words. Here is a representative sample of those who wrote their personal opinions — Eds. Irving …
When I was teaching for a few years at Stanford in the early ’60s, that excellent university was as politically dormant as American universities were then supposed to be. Perhaps the first political meeting held on campus in some years …
He is a small man, neatly turned out, compact, looking maybe like the chap who runs your stationary store, reminding me improbably of William Faulkner, quiet, dignified, never raising his voice. He speaks before some two dozen people at a …
The question nags, gruesomely: is the fate of the Cambodian people as dreadful as that of the Jews and gypsies in Europe? It isn’t a question one need finally answer; a modest distinction will hold us. The Jews and gypsies …
For some time now, the Newsweek columnist George Will has been praised as a civilized conservative. He tries to reason, he doesn’t often rant, he looks good by comparison to William Buckley (a modest enough test). But he remains a …
Whatever else it may be, Eurocommunism—or the range of political phenomena we conveniently bunch under that label—represents something new. To say, something new, is not necessarily to say something good; it is just to say, something new. There can be …
What a tourist can learn in a few weeks about the political situation of a country is notoriously questionable. All I propose to do here is to supplement Menahem Brinker’s report with a few observations and speculations gleaned from talking …
New York After the Summer Looting The looting that took place during the power blackout in New York last July showed what should never have been forgotten. It showed that the social order in America contains deep segments of disaffection; …
1 Being an American, we have been told repeatedly, is a complex fate, and being an American writer still more so: traditions ruptured, loyalties disheveled. Yet consider how much more complex, indeed, how utterly aggravating, it could have been to …
The crisis in the Communist countries is a permanent one. It may flare up at some moments and die down at others, but it now seems to be built into the very structure of that society. For their own survival …
There are writers with so enticing a style that, in their own behalf, they must stop themselves and ask: “Is what I am saying true? Charming yes, persuasive also; but true?” This has, or should, become a problem for Lillian …
An important discussion has begun among European Socialists. Should they enter the kinds of electoral alliances with Communists that the French and Italian Socialist parties have entered but other Socialists deplore? Have the Communists changed sufficiently so as to be …
Freedom prevents not the proletarian from eating but the tyrant from sleeping. —Edgar Morin What is the use of deluding ourselves or trying to delude others? The recent destruction of democracy in India is a severe political blow to people …
It is finally over. The outcome had not really been in doubt for some years, and only a massive intervention by the U.S., if even that, could have changed it. Elementary humaneness therefore yields a kind of relief. Whatever sufferings …
