The Syriza Problem
Greece’s Syriza party has substituted rhetorical bluster for concrete plans—and has had an extraordinary free ride from the global left even as it has become the party of surrender.
Spring 2024
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Back to Class
It is time to think about class. The insurgencies we most need today are the insurgencies of large numbers.
The European Crisis
The EU as a whole is once again, as Europe was in the 1930s, a world of borders and refusals.
Islamism and the Left
Most leftists have no difficulty opposing Hindu nationalists, zealous Buddhist monks, and the messianic Zionists of the settler movement. Why won’t they take a firm stance against Islamists?
In Place of a Hero
Young people today have no spokesmen. The day of the youth league and its ideology seems to be over. Today we have the club again, and the gang, and perhaps the family. It might even be wrong to say that …
Did the U.S. Really Break Iraq? Response to Kathleen Cavanaugh
I was glad to read Kathleen Cavanaugh’s article on “Sectarian Entrepreneurs: How the U.S. Broke Iraq.” It is full of information, and it is an excellent guide to how many leftists think about Iraq and other similar places. But did …
A Foreign Policy for the Left
Is there such a thing as a leftist foreign policy? What are the characteristic views of the left about the world abroad? When have leftists, rightly or wrongly, defended the use of force?
The Humanitarian Replacement
For the last few years the blogosphere, though only in its more obscure places, has been full of comparisons of the Spanish and Syrian civil wars. The Workers International to Rebuild the Fourth International called for a new International Brigade …
The Last Page 
Marshall was a good friend over many years—almost half a century; he was a political comrade for all those years; and he was a lovely human being. My wife, Judy, and I knew him first as a very vulnerable young …
Dissent’s Sixtieth
The following remarks were delivered at Dissent’s sixtieth anniversary celebration on October 24, 2013. In the summer of 1956, I had just graduated from Brandeis University; Judy and I were living in a tiny apartment on top of a noisy …
Were We Wrong about Syria?
According to a recent article in the New York Times, more than 2 million Syrians have fled or been forced out of the country, and more than twice that number have been displaced from their homes inside the country. This …
What is the Responsibility to Protect?
The debate over what to do or not do in Syria has brought new attention to a legal doctrine that is also an internationalist commitment: “the responsibility to protect.” What is this responsibility? Whose is it? I want to try …
Syria: What Ought to be Done?
Many people have been criticizing President Obama for dithering over what to do in Syria. Not me; dithering seems an entirely rational response to what’s going on there. The difficulty is that we don’t really know what we want to …
What Obama Omitted
Dissent is a magazine for people who worry. So here is something to worry about, highlighted by Barack Obama’s inaugural address. I am certainly glad that it was his inauguration, but what he said or, better, didn’t say, illustrates one …
Becoming a Dissentnik
Now that I am about to become an ordinary Dissentnik, I want to describe how that happened once before—in 1954, when I held the first issue of the magazine in my hands. I grew up in the Popular Front, reading …
