Fall 2025

Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth by Robert B. Westbrook, and Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty, Edited by Eduardo Mendieta

A labor victory in the new Congress depends on the definition of what it means to win. Labor’s broad agenda is passable in almost inverse relationship to that agenda’s capacity to strengthen the institutional and political power of trade unionism …

Four years after the war for democracy in Iraq began, it is evident that the project has failed dismally. Many analysts attribute this to flawed implementation. Although there is no denying that there were gross mistakes, the failure had much …

Robert Polidori’s photographs of New Orleans.

Is America moving left? Such a question would have seemed odd before last November’s election. Now it no longer seems so strange. Indeed, not only does the question not seem strange, but an affirmative answer can be given to it. …

Three Rwandan women in a village outside Kigali. Photo: Robert Guerra Nothing, I remember nothing,” the middle-aged witness insisted to the court. “I was sick during the genocide.” She was standing before a man accused of multiple murders, an audience …

The democratic ideal can be presented to peoples and countries that have not yet embraced it in two entirely opposite ways: through persuasion or through coercion and force. The European Union is a champion in persuasion, often combined with powerful …

The American project to spread democracy in the Middle East in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, and the Iraq War was doomed from the outset. That’s not because the Middle East is not compatible with democracy, but because the …

Iraqis show ink-stained fingers after voting in the January 2005 elections. Photo: Jim Goodwin (US Army) The editors of Dissent posed the following question to several respondents: Iraq has provoked the bitterest debate about American foreign policy since Vietnam. One …

Baghdad: Although there are arguably many different kinds of democracies in the world, an Arab one has yet to be established. Iraq is not the first attempt; elections organized largely domestically have been a regular, if not frequent, occurrence in …

Kay Trimberger and I are not far apart politically. We share a feminist perspective. We agree that “irreversible changes” have occurred to marriage and family life, and we agree that family change does not equate to moral decay. We agree …

When the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled in October 2006 that gay and lesbian couples must be guaranteed the same rights and benefits as heterosexual couples, the legislature saw only two possibilities: establishing civil unions or legalizing same-sex marriages. They …

This is the story of two economists—John Kenneth Galbraith, who died last year at age ninety-seven, and Paul Krugman, who at fifty-four is in his prime as an economist and a columnist for the New York Times. Like Galbraith, Krugman …

As someone who supported the war in Iraq, I am often asked these days—in some cases tauntingly and with a touch of Schadenfreude—if I have changed my mind. Even when asked politely, the question is vexing and, in any case, …