Bill Clinton has chosen the phrase “vital center” to characterize his second term. It’s half apt and half deceptive. True, the election was a contest between his “center” and the “right.” While a good many people voted for him out …
“I’m trying to be optimistic,” an Israeli friend said to me after last spring’s elections, “but my son goes into the Army next year and I shiver when I think of Netanyahu making life and death decisions for this country.” …
“In the land of nowhere,” fantasized Thomas More, “it had been established by King Utopus that it should be lawful for every man to favor and follow what religion he would.” It sounds so reasonable five centuries later that one …
Jim Rule, a valued Dissent colleague, and I have a very sharp disagreement. In the aftermath of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, I wrote in praise of this man’s revolutionary transformation while prime minister; it brought mutual recognition between the PLO and …
In this issue of Dissent you will find, for the first time in an American publication, George Orwell’s original preface to Animal Farm. This essay, a product of Orwell’s difficulties in getting his anti-Stalinist novella into print, offers an axiom: …
Should we, half a century later, reconsider the morality of Hiroshima? “No,” will retort apostles of what may be called “Patriotic Correctness.” (I borrow the phrase from Robert Hughes.) For these PCers, self-questioning is always tantamount to anti-Americanism. But a …
Irving Howe opened A Margin of Hope, his autobiography, by recalling a conversation in which Ignazio Silone asked him when he first became a socialist. “At the advanced age of fourteen,” was Howe’s reply. That would have been 1934, a …
It’s a sour moment. The right has attained new power, but its intellectual, not to mention moral, bankruptcy has never been more evident. The GOP’s “Contract with America” regurgitates Reaganesque ideas that brought this country to many of its present …
Hopes on the left, that social democracy might become the alternative to collapsing communism and rising market fundamentalism in Eastern and Central Europe after 1989, have proven to be chimerical. Today, except in the Czech Republic, social democracy barely exists …
A far-reaching transformation of global politics has made the world a freer but messier place. The cold war was never tidy, yet superpower competition did impose a simplicity—often an unfortunate simplicity—on perceptions of events, if not on the events themselves. …
Eugene D. Genovese writes powerfully against bad faith, against prevarication championed and recognized but not admitted. He is relentless: how can one confront impostors of liberation with timidity? Least of all when mendacity concerns mass murder and you admit your …
In Brussels, in August 1830, the revolution began at the opera. It was William I’s birthday and the fifteenth anniversary of this Dutch king’s rule over Belgium, a spoil of the Congress of Vienna. The evening was to crown three …
A little over a year ago, at a briefing at NATO headquarters in Brussels, I heard an American colonel, in quick succession, acclaim the organization’s new dialogue with ex-Warsaw Pact generals, argue for the continuation of NATO funding despite the …
Forty years after the founding of Dissent, and four years after the fall of communism, the words democrat and republican should be forsaken. Well, yes, these words did once denote worthy ideas. Democracy came from ancient Greek; demos (people) and …
Lucidity may have been Irving Howe’s favorite word, as much in prose as in politics. In a preface to the re-publication of Politics and the Novel, written shortly before his death, he remarked that nowadays, “when critical writing is marked …
