Spring 2024

The Origins of the New Left and Radical Liberalism, 1945-1970 by Kevin Mattson

There are some who think that because the United States has global interests and a heart of gold, it is entitled to act just as it pleases, economically and militarily, anywhere it pleases-not a bad first approximation to the classical …

The vagaries of artistic reputation are a recurrent fascination of cultural life. Canons boom but also redeploy. There is a time to gather respect and a time to cast it away. The movements of conventional wisdom up and down, to …

The afterlife of the Vietnam War has lasted longer now than the war itself. Time makes new wounds. A host of legends clamor to make the disaster mean something. First things first. Symbolic Vietnam ought not to obscure the existence …

American Beach: How Progress Robbed a Black Town—and Nation—of History, Wealth, and Power by Russ Rymer HarperCollins, 1998 337 pp. $25 cloth $14 paper Russ Rymer has written a powerful book of what C. Wright Mills called “sociological poetry,” escorting …

Instead of critical culture, “struggl[ing] actively over how human beings should live,” we have a pale culture of critics. Censorship is a permanent irritation but serious-minded people (who can also be joyful, why not?) need to face up to the …

Collective memory goes up for grabs wherever people suffer from dispossession and feel the call of pride. Memories are not born but made, remade, not natural but “constructed,” and like the memorials constructed to overcome memory, they are—and of necessity …

A few years ago I visited the champagne cellar of Piper-Heidsieck in Reims, a city in eastern France. At the entrance there is a plaque proclaiming that the cellar had been dedicated by Marie Antoinette. At the end of the …

The politics of group interest has had many worthy successes. Identity politics delivers a lot of psychological, legal, and practical goods. So, after a full generation, it has become a sort of tradition. Still, even its defenders concede that there …

Iris Young (“The Complexities of Coalition,” Winter 1997) admits that the left is electorally feeble, but within her framework, it seems to me, she cannot explain the feebleness. Her enthusiasm for the remarkable Jesse Jackson efforts of the eighties may …

The academic tendency called cultural studies fiercely disbelieves that there are any unmoved movers at work in history. So proponents of cultural studies should not be taken aback by the view that cultural studies itself can be analyzed as an …

Remarkably few recent presidential campaigns forecast the course of the following four years. Kennedy ran on the “missile gap” and generational vigor, not civil rights or the nuclear test ban. Johnson ran seeking “no wider war,” not seeking to send …

Democratic politics in the world’s oldest democracy is losing popular appeal. Public cynicism about what government, or politics, can accomplish is rampant. American voting turnout has been declining for decades, though with occasional upticks. At the same time, Americans are …

If American culture is centrifugal, and things are falling apart, what is the center that is not holding? Presumably, it is some core of principles—individual rights and opportunities— united by the affirmation that America, heartland of the West, is their …

The crash of communism coincides with a loss of faith and face on the part of social democracy. Where social democrats remain in power, as in Spain and Norway, they are reduced to trimming the public sector—for some good reasons …