A few months after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Michael Walzer wrote an article for Dissent, “Can There Be a Decent Left?,” which made a number of American leftists rather mad. In it, Michael reproached those who saw the …
Betty Friedan certainly deserves all the post-mortem attention she is receiving on the golden anniversary of the publication of The Feminine Mystique. No woman did more to spur the feminist awakening of the 1960s and 70s. If she were still alive, Friedan, …
Contrary to what everyone who loved—or hated—his inaugural address seems to think, President Obama has yet to demonstrate that he is determined to launch a new liberal era. The big speech did gesture in that direction. Obama declared, in the …
House-to-house canvassing is the epitome of routinized labor: you knock on the doors the campaign’s algorithms determine you should knock on; campaign officials ask you to follow a “script” they have tested in polls and focus groups. Efficiency is paramount. …
Soon after Barack Obama won a second term with surprising ease, Pulitzer-Prize-winning artist Clay Bennett depicted a wealthy, white-haired man staring grimly at his television screen while around and behind him four servants, white and black, go about their jobs …
One week after the presidential election, the Catholic bishops of the United States unanimously endorsed a female anarchist for sainthood. That news is not quite as shocking as it seems. Dorothy Day’s anarchism was of a decidedly pious kind. In …
Liberals have an obsession with the presidency. Since Franklin D. Roosevelt strode across the political arena like a colossus (albeit a colossus in a wheelchair), liberals have tended to equate success with electing one of their own to the White …
By echoing a creed that failed the nation at the end of the nineteenth century, the conservatives who rule the GOP make it almost impossible to have a serious debate about how to solve our problems in the early twenty-first.
Michael Kazin: ?Supporting Our Troops,? Staying Silent on War
Michael Kazin: A CEO in the Oval Office?
F. Scott Fitzgerald once offered some sound advice to those left-wing Americans unsure whether to support Barack Obama’s campaign for re-election. “The test of a first-rate intelligence,” observed the novelist, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind …
Mention the Democrats in Congress, and the emotional response of most left-leaning Americans will veer from moderate disappointment to frothing cynicism. Some pols fail to live up to their own hype as zealous reformers, while others seem mainly concerned with …
Michael Kazin: Why an Amendment on Campaign Finance Makes Sense
Michael Kazin: A Polish New Left
Michael Kazin: Revive Socialism!
