Whose Agenda, What Agenda?  

The revolution is over. While November’s election may have been a knock in the head to the Republican Party generally, it was a dagger through the heart of the Republican right. As moderate GOP governors swept to victory all across …





Art and Anxiety in Los Angeles  

Six months after opening, the Getty Center, the $1 billion mountaintop museum that has become Los Angeles’s biggest cultural attraction, started running newspaper ads asking people not to come. Featuring a dozen happy kids from different races, the ads were …



Finding Labor’s Voice  

From the Ashes of the Old: American Labor and America’s Future by Stanley Aronowitz Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998, 256 pp., $25 The appearance of Stanley Aronowitz’s new book on the future of American labor comes precisely a quarter-century after he …







Welfare and the “Third Way”  

Robert Kennedy was fond of this quote from Camus: “Perhaps we cannot make this a world in which children are no longer tortured. But at least we can reduce the number of children who are tortured.” In both the United …







Feminists and the Sex Scandal  

For the past year, feminists have taken a lot of heat for supporting President Clinton in Zippergate. What about that most basic of feminist insights: the personal is political? If people are politically accountable for their personal lives, why put …







Democracy Beyond the Nation-State  

It was a little more than 150 years ago that the transition from the feudal order to the democratic nation-state was debated in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt during the German Revolution. Today we have to begin a debate on the …



Understanding Du Bois  

W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line by Adolph Reed, Jr. Oxford University Press, 1997, 282 pp., $35 W. E. B. Du Bois’s productive use of his ninety-five years on earth casts a …