Fall 2024

I am not going to join the argument between Sean Wilentz and Martin Kilson, both of whom are fellow editors and friends of mine. But I do want to say in response to Kilson that I am glad that the …

The story that I want to tell about the new American right begins with the takeover of the Republican party by Barry Goldwater and his friends in 1964. Think of that as a dress rehearsal—though we thought it real enough …

I had planned an editorial on Bosnia for this page—a diatribe against the moral blindness and complacency of European governments and the leadership failure of our own, against the cowardice of NATO and the weakness and confusion of the UN, …

The second annual Locarno Conference on Politics and Society was held this past May at the Biblioteca Cantonale in Locarno, Switzerland. The conference brings together Dissent editors and writers with our European counterparts—this year with editors of Esprit (Paris) and …

I have been reading in the newspapers that the CIA is in trouble (in the same way, almost, that you and I might be in trouble). With the end of the cold war, it has lost its raison d’être; influential …

The publication schedule of Dissent doesn’t fit neatly with the political schedule of American democracy — so we were not able to “cover” the electoral disaster of November ’94. But the role of a quarterly is, in any case, to …

David Bromwich writes powerfully and at length about the sins of “culturalism,” and my response here can only be brief and incomplete. But these are issues that we will continue to argue about in Dissent; I will look for occasions …

To intervene or not?—this should always be a hard question. Even in the case of a brutal civil war or a politically induced famine or the massacre of a local minority, the use of force in other people’s countries should …

There has been a certain rapprochement between the American and European lefts over the past several years—a rapprochement in weakness and uncertainty, perhaps, but one marked also by a recognition of common interests and values, and common problems, too. One …

About a week before Arafat, I visited Jericho to see how “the autonomy” (as my Israeli friends call it) was faring. It was, that week, faring well. The city, bedecked in Palestinian flags, was quiet; the old police and new …

Two powerful centrifugal forces are at work in the United States today. One breaks loose whole groups of people from a presumptively common center; the other sends individuals flying off. Both these decentering, separatist movements have their critics, who argue …

I have always believed that the magazine is the crucial artifact of civilized life. Not the book—though good books are lovely things— for it is too solid an object, neither (as we say these days) reflexive nor interactive enough. Magazines …

This is a time for argument. The world after communism, after the fall of the last of the great empires, doesn’t conform to anyone’s expectations. There are still pretenders, left and right, to ideological correctness. But no one that I …