“Knee-jerk liberalism”—a term not heard much these days—was once used by conservatives to deride the supposed automatic nature of liberal responses to social and political issues. Conservatives conveniently forgot that one function of any set of beliefs is to create …
From field notes on city life: A woman is seriously injured by a mugger who follows her to an apartment door and snatches her purse. A couple out for an evening returns to find the apartment burglarized. A 13-year-old car, …
The bellicose nationalism of Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign and his insistence on the need for “nuclear superiority” help explain the interest stirred by Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth when it first began to appear in the New Yorker. …
The beginnings of the almost palpable meanness of spirit that pervades the Reagan administration’s domestic policies go back to the early Nixon years. The new element is the institutionalization of meanness; that is, meanness of spirit is now expected and …
Originally published by one university press in 1973, Paul Hollander’s work is now reissued in paperback by another. The publishing business being what it is a revised text is impossible, but this new edition does carry a new Introduction in …
Nations annually celebrate historic victories over past injustices and remember other historic events they do not celebrate. These are the recurrent nightmares that follow victories over tyranny and unjust social orders; those periods in which freedom must be defended but …
If the New Left put an indelible mark on the ’60s, the neoconservatives will surely become a major part of the image of the past ten years. Peter Steinfels’s anatomy of their ideology would be important if only because he …
Calling a book a popularization is usually taken as an unkind remark. This is mostly a matter of snobbery: the popularizer is writing for the masses and, therefore, his work must lack depth and sophistication. But popularizations need not be …
The Three Mile Island nuclear accident occurred a bare two weeks after The China Syndrome opened at first-run theaters—as always, life imitating bad art. Since the dramatic center of the movie was the possibility of a meltdown, it was taken …
Discussions of the death penalty have a lot in common with the traditional, tiresome arguments about race. In both instances there is a facade of rationality—some races are demonstrably inferior to others and executions deter homicidal crime. The available evidence on race and achievement clearly contradicts …
At first glance this is another history of “making it” in America: Robert Schrank, son of immigrant parents, leaves school during the Depression at age 14 to take an unskilled laborer’s job in a furniture factory, and then works his …
Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944-1964, by Steven F. Lawson, New York: Columbia University Press, 474 pp. Strategies for Freedom: The Changing Patterns of Black Protest, by Bayard Rustin. Columbia University Press. 82 pp. Jimmy Carter was able …
The Awareness Trap: Self-Absorption Instead of Social Change, by Edwin Schur. New York: Quadrangle Books. 213 pp. According to the revisionists, Candide decided to cultivate his own garden when he and his companions reached California. He gave himself wholly to that …
The American Intellectual Elite, by Charles Kadushin. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. 395 pp. The Long Dark Night of the Soul: The American Intellectual Left and the Vietnam War, by Sandy Vogelgesang. New York: Harper & Row. 249 pp. The …
PROSPERO: A devil, a born devil on whose unfortunate nature Nurture can never stick; on whom my pains Humanely taken, all, all lost, quite lost; And as with age his body uglier grows, So his mind cankers . . . …
