Jim Sleeper - Dissent Magazine

Stopping Trump’s Coup

Jim Sleeper ▪ September 30, 2020

After a disastrous debate, we need leaders to insist that the republic and the people are bigger and more important than any president.

The Plutocracy Comes to Campus

Jim Sleeper ▪ May 15, 2018

When undergrads challenged a rich donor close to Donald Trump, his biggest defenders were their own university’s leaders.

Trump’s Nomination May Not Be the Worst of It

Jim Sleeper ▪ July 21, 2016

Republicans have locked down control of the House of Representatives for at least the coming decade.

Conservatives Have Only Themselves to Blame for Today’s Campus Wars

Jim Sleeper ▪ April 25, 2016

Conservatives have turned college students into isolated, heavily indebted consumers of career training.

The Ambiguities of Heroism

Jim Sleeper ▪ August 25, 2015

Spencer Stone, Alek Skarlatos, and Anthony Sadler had a remarkably high, democratic morale. But it will take more than heroes to overcome today’s political violence.

In 1920 the New Republic ran “A Test of the News,” a special supplement to the magazine (published soon after as the book Liberty and the News) by Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz showing that in the three and a …

With Friends Like These… Who Will Defend Liberal Education?

Jim Sleeper ▪ Fall 2012

Like free markets and Christianity, liberal education in the United States has more noisy claimants than true friends. Lately, it’s conservatives who’ve been crying hosanna to the humanities and funding campus institutes that conscript classic texts into training future Platonic …

Social Conservatism Isn’t “White”

Jim Sleeper ▪ January 20, 2012

There they go again: Republican candidates are saying things and sending signals that show that racism remains widespread, routine, hideous—and sometimes even laughable, when it strains to deny its own existence. And, again, some of us white leftists and liberals …

Kissinger’s Diplomatic Review

Jim Sleeper ▪ November 14, 2011

Jim Sleeper: Kissinger?s Diplomatic Review

Markets, Media, and the Occupiers

Jim Sleeper ▪ October 21, 2011

Jim Sleeper: Markets, Media, and the Occupiers

It’s Not Just a Scandal, It’s a Syndrome

Jim Sleeper ▪ July 20, 2011

Jim Sleeper: The Murdoch Scandal Is Really a Syndrome

An Unlikely Pragmatist

Jim Sleeper ▪ Spring 2011

Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition by James T. Kloppenberg Princeton University Press, 2010, 296 pp. TOWARD THE end of James Kloppenberg’s Reading Obama, the author ponders an anecdote from the candidate’s speech on race in Philadelphia …