Winter 2026

The New McGovernites

In critical reviews and essays about my father, Irving Howe, one frequently encounters a certain neat formulation that declares he was a man who wrote about what he lived and knew.* He grew up with Yiddish as his first language, …

For the last several issues, the thrust of Dissent has been increasingly hard to take. It reminds me of the early years of the Vietnam War era, when some Dissent editors apparently thought the New Left was a greater menace …

Sweatshops and Political Responsibility

In The Right Man, a memoir of his experience as a speechwriter in the Bush White House, David Frum claims that after September 11, “There was no more domestic agenda. The domestic agenda was the same as the foreign agenda. …

What William Bennett Doesn’t Understand

Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be So Hated by Gore Vidal Thunder’s Mouth/Nation Books, 2002, 160 pp., $16.50Why Do People Hate America? by Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies Icon Books, 2002, 231 pp., $19.99″What We …

There were few mourners at welfare’s funeral. In fact, its demise was widely celebrated when congressional Republicans teamed up with a majority of their Democratic colleagues and then-president Bill Clinton to enact a new welfare law in 1996. The law …

If wishes were arguments, the strongest argument for an American war would be the most ambitious-the wish, or prayer, that by deposing Saddam Hussein and occupying Iraq, the United States would install the first democratic regime in the Arab world, …

Last fall’s disastrous elections should have taught the Democratic Party many lessons. The list opens with the minor and tactical (it should not parade before the public a national chairman who delivers himself of ill-advised and oafish outbursts before the …

Is Baghdad simply another miserable regime? Just one of those unpleasant tyrannies that, sadly, speckles our globe, but ought not to compel overbearing concern? Much depends on how one answers this question. The answer, I think, is no. Saddam Hussein’s …

In the midst of the Second World War and the 1944 election, it was the example of Abraham Lincoln, “the greatest wartime President in our history,” that Franklin D. Roosevelt evoked when he addressed the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. …

Unilateralism is a weak name for the foreign policy sketched in “The National Security Strategy of the United States of America” -a document released by the White House in September 2002 and discussed inadequately in the press. The strong name …