After losing a national election a party reassesses where it stands and what it must do to recoup its fortunes. It is now the Republicans’ turn. One early conclusion is the necessity to return to a vision of the party …
Recent history has not been kind to the ideas of “socialism” and “tradition.” The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union— “the only existing socialism” according to some friends and foes alike—seems to make socialism an …
These two rather different voters seem to be voicing a question every voter answers at some level of thought or intuition: Whom can I trust? In the past this was mostly an implicit question that assumed that a satisfactory answer …
There is a touch of farce to some incidents in the Iran-contra affair: Robert MacFarlane carries a cake from a Tel Aviv bakery as a gift on his secret mission to Teheran; Fawn Hall smuggles official documents out of Oliver …
Think of the statistician’s bell curve and you have the shape of public opinion today. At one tail are antiwar partisans for whom the Gulf War is a continuation of Vietnam, while at the other tail is an equally automatic …
Readers of the financial pages are familiar with resignations or firings (“has left to pursue other interests”). Nothing remarkable here, as the continual movement of people in and out of jobs is a capitalist fact of life. It must have …
Last year, at about the time a young black man was killed on the streets of Bensonhurst, Cardinal Glemp, the Roman Catholic primate of Poland, abrogated an agreement to relocate a convent from the site of Auschwitz. Aside from being …
The subtitle of Todd Gitlin’s book about the sixties, Years of Hope, Days of Rage, echoes the famous tag, “the best of times, the worst of times.” It was an intensely political time and for some the memory shines with …
Greed was once more the occasion for moralistic comment in the wake of last fall’s Ivan Boesky affair. Newsweek led its December 1 story with a quote from a Boesky commencement address at the University of California’s School of Business …
In 1971 the A. H. Robins Company purchased the rights to market the Dalkon Shield, an intrauterine device. The doctor who developed it and conducted the original research on its effectiveness and safety was an owner of the company that …
The intellectual is a modern phenomenon. I do not mean that there was no intellectual work before the modern era; rather, in other times intellectual work was not undertaken so self-consciously or as a task justifying one’s existence. Now it …
Earlier this year the morality of American business again became a hot public issue as one scandal after another hit the headlines. “Old-line manufacturers exposed cheating the Pentagon. Venerable banks caught laundering money. A securities firm found fraudulently kiting checks. …
When Bernhard Goetz was approached on a New York subway by four young black men demanding $5, he drew a revolver and fired all its dum-dum bullets at them. Two were hit in the back; one remains paralyzed and comatose …
A specter is haunting American capitalism—the specter of unrestrained greed. So it appears from a story by Anne Crittenden in the New York Times (August 19, 1984). She reports the fears expressed by many academic and business luminaries ranging from …
Political parties,” Gary Hart told the Alabama Legislature during the primary season, “must free themselves from the grasp of the special interests and once again address the country’s national interests.” There is no doubt that he struck a sympathetic chord …
