Lucidity may have been Irving Howe’s favorite word, as much in prose as in politics. In a preface to the republication of Politics and the Novel, written shortly before his death, he remarked that nowadays, “when critical writing is marked …
Today’s novel New Deal coalition offers the only plausible chance for progressive reforms.
If Howe’s intellectual evolution has meaning for today’s left, it is to be found in his struggle to transcend sectarian mindsets while remaining principled.
Trump’s refusal to accept accountability for anything in this crisis is emblematic of something in our culture.
Heller, like Dissent’s founders, believed in making an unjust world a little better, while recognizing that justice could never be complete.
No regime identifying with Bolshevism has led to anything that can be called “liberation,” as early left-wing critics like Julius Martov and Rosa Luxemburg foresaw.
This month’s “Manif pour tous” was most obviously against a law called Mariage pour tous (Marriage for All). But something bigger is stirring. Is it, as Le Monde put it, “The Awakening of Reactionary France”?
Do you remember the proverbial “herd of independent minds”? That was critic Harold Rosenberg’s description, decades ago, of the New York intellectuals. These days some packs are still (alas!) on the left, some on the right, and some run somewhere …
M. Cohen: Lessons for the Left
An old conservative-minded contention goes something like this: if you start with an egalitarian ethos, you will bottom out at complete leveling. It’s a slippery slope to the end of individuality. This was not simply a social or economic claim. …
Do some artists—authors, painters, composers—have an uncanny capacity to jell a political moment and anticipate the next in their own media? It’s an old, admittedly romantic question, and it crossed my mind as I watched Patrice Chéreau’s treatment of Leoš …
When the Berlin Wall cracked on November 9, 1989, the clock struck thirteen in the Soviet bloc, and its hands halted. History went on. Rotting dictatorships in eastern and central Europe, long sustained by and for Moscow, had been crumpling …
Can an anti-war opera be reactionary? This question crossed my mind as I watched the recent production of John Adams’s Doctor Atomic at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. “Reactionary” usually means backward-looking or backward—doing, but it implies more—a response to ideas …
Another America spoke up this past fall. Barack Obama’s victory over the Reagan Revolution’s latest surrogates opens new possibilities. It is a moment for hope, but not for messianic expectations. “Lead us into the Promised Land,” someone cried out a …
George Lichtheim is missing. You may not have noticed, especially if you don’t peruse political journals from the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s (or didn’t read them back then). You may have noticed if the history of the left matters …
