ATTORNEY GENERAL A. Mitchell Palmer had barely begun his roundup of foreign born radicals when alumni of the Greenwich Village “Little Renaissance” of the 1910s began to write the movement’s epitaph. Waldo Frank’s Our America (1919) set the tone for …
Ruy Teixeira and I are in substantial agreement on many of the forces at work in contemporary politics—particularly on the central role of white, working-class voters in recent elections and the necessity of having an effective plan for promoting economic …
Defined simply as overt public bigotry, racism in the United States has fallen to an all-time low. Understood in socioeconomic, political, and institutional terms, however, American racism is as alive as ever. More than thirty years after the heroic victories …
What a difference fourteen days can make. On May 13, the center-left coalition that had governed Italy since 1996 lost control of both houses of Parliament to the center-right coalition led by Silvio Berlusconi. Journalists everywhere have already catalogued the …
Although Thomas Byrne Edsall’s review of my and Joel Rogers’s America’s Forgotten Majority is both thoughtful and perceptive (“Why Class Doesn’t Trump Culture,” Dissent, Spring 2001), some of his points aren’t quite fair to the book. Further, I disagree with …
As he accepted the 1996 Republican presidential nomination, Bob Dole, one of the Senate’s toughest infighters for more than a decade, cautioned his supporters that President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore were “opponents, not enemies.” Dole’s words of …
In the midst of bloodshed it is hard to keep in mind that in cases of prolonged conflict, peace is achieved, more often than not, after violent convulsions. So it was with the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the peace …
A few things are finally clear about the demonstrations against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle in 1999. First, Seattle is the international benchmark by which protests against corporately managed global trade are now judged. From Davos, Switzerland, to …
Noam Cohen makes several very good points about the possibilities of social change occurring from the technological revolution of the Internet. Before we on the left embrace the Internet as a cure-all for the woes of modern consumerism and alienation, …
On January 31, less than two weeks after George W. Bush became the forty-third president of the United States of America, the Six Rivers Planned Parenthood in Eureka, California, was fielding calls from worried patients. The clinic is nestled near …
If a presidential election indicates the health of the body politic, America’s civic condition may be hovering just this side of the intensive-care ward. Even by the low standard we’ve come to expect from the quadrennial circus, the 2000 contest …
The graffito made famous by American GIs as a marker of place, of having been somewhere, stands rewritten as the name for a travel agency on Zellescher Weg in Dresden: “Kilroy Travels.” This phrase, printed in English over a stylized …
Colin Powell, George W. Bush’s bedazzling secretary of state, emphasized the importance in his Senate confirmation hearings of tightening ties between trade and national security. There is a need, he asserted, for better coordination of American foreign economic and military …
Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert Putnam Simon & Schuster, 2000, 544 pp. Tucked away on a shelf in my parents’ home is a trophy honoring their achievements in the Knights of Pythias bowling …
America is a secular society nervous with its secularism. Since the nation’s founding, that nervousness has manifest itself in periodic redrawing of the boundary between church and state and in practices that compromise the “wall of separation.” Today, however, the …
