The Year in Dissent
The Year in Dissent
For Dissentniks, 2014 was a year of small miracles and stubborn injustices. Thousands of workers demonstrated for a $15-an-hour wage, but a party that hopes to destroy unions won control of both houses of Congress. Marriage equality became law in a majority of the states, while the deadly persistence of racial inequality galvanized protests across the nation. President Obama finally brought U.S-Cuba relations in from the cold, as he sent the U.S. military back to the Middle East in an attempt to defeat a brutal force inspired, in part, by the debacle his predecessor had created.
Fortunately, our pages and our website kept drawing new readers. They discovered there an engrossing variety of essays and reviews that show off the political intelligence, cultural curiosity, and sharp wit of our contributors. We also initiated a regular new section devoted to fiction and poetry, along with an innovative redesign, created by Rumors.
Among our most popular pieces were Fredrick C. Harris’s critique of respectability politics as preached by the likes of Al Sharpton and Magic Johnson; Atossa Abrahamian’s takedown of the efforts by digital zillionaires in San Francisco to “civilize” the homeless without actually helping find them homes; Ross Perlin’s passionate argument for preserving endangered languages; Katie Baker’s study of the pick-up artists treating the Ukraine conflict as “an X-rated game of Risk”; and Benjamin Ross’s revealing analysis of how suburban roadways endanger the walking poor. Here’s the complete list of our ten most viewed pieces:
- James Galbraith on Piketty: Kapital for the Twenty-First Century?
- Atossa Abrahamian, Let Them Eat Code
- Ross Perlin, Radical Linguistics in an Age of Extinction
- Atossa Abrahamian, Passports for Sale
- Fredrick Harris, The Rise of Respectability Politics
- Danny Postel et al, The War on ISIS: Views From Syria
- Trish Kahle, Prison to Table: The Other Side of the Whole Foods Experience
- Tim Barker, Spontaneous Order: Looking Back at Neoliberalism
- Daniel Solomon, Tony Judt’s Jewishness
- Katie Baker, Risk, Rated X: Geopolitics and the Pickup Game
And here’s some of what you will read in next year’s Dissent: a special section on the promise and limits of progressive politics in American cities large and small; another section devoted to the travails and resistance of migrants in the U.S. and around the world; Michael Walzer’s polemic against leftists who apologize for violent Islamists (and two rebuttals); a series that examines the potential of contemporary social movements; and a cornucopia of essays, reviews, and stories by the likes of Rachel Kushner, Samuel Moyn, Sarah Jaffe, and Jedediah Purdy.
It’s certain to be a stimulating year, and you can count on Dissent to keep bringing you the sharpest commentary and debate this side of the Brooklyn Bridge. Don’t take my word for it. In 2014, even the National Review admitted, “if you want to know what the Left is thinking, read Dissent.”
Better yet, subscribe.
Michael Kazin is co-editor of Dissent.
