Preliminary Theme You could feel the frost as soon as I posed the question. The week before I went to see Philip Glass’s opera Satyagraha, which is subtitled M.K. Gandhi in South Africa, I attended a screening of a documentary …
Turn the page, turn the page! No, not the one you are reading, not just yet. It is the country that needs to turn onto a new page. It is hard to think of an aspect of our political, social, …
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Nineteen sixty-eight was a formative year for a generation of the left. Later, some observers (and participants) of philosophical bent thought to capture “the events” in a comment made long before by Hegel. After seeing Napoleon enter town following the …
A determined offensive is underway. Its target is in the Middle East, and it is an old target: the legitimacy of Israel. Hezbollah and Hamas are not the protagonists, the contested terrains are not the Galilee and southern Lebanon or …
Are there dumb laws of nature? This reasonable question occurred to me some years back after I heard an eminent economist explain why automakers ought not to be compelled to install seat belts. Yes, it is safer to wear them, …
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Paris: Last year an American socialist on a long stay in France ambled almost daily past the Socialist Party (PS) headquarters of Paris’s fourth arrondissement. He thought to stop in. “What are local Socialist politics like?” he wondered. After all, …
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Botched presidencies open the way to change, sometimes for better (let’s hope now), sometimes for worse. Think of Jimmy Carter’s tenure, which left us in “malaise,” Ronald Reagan in Washington, and Ayatollah Khomeini in Tehran. Carter’s agenda for federalism and …
Containment or rollback? Of the Republicans, I mean—not communism in the 1950s. It is a question about the (happy) results of the midterm elections. Were they just a vote against George W. Bush or do they represent a decisive shift …
Mr. and Ms. Left, tear down these words: Totalitarianism, Imperialism. No, I don’t mean that our voices ought not to roar against these bad, brutal things, just that we should stop using these terms. Once they had value; now they …
How to think straight about America’s imbalanced politics? It’s not so easy nowadays. David Plotke’s smart article in this issue ought to initiate considerable debate about how we went from the New Deal to Bush’s bum deal. Bush has not …
