In part one of this essay (“The HMO Revolution: How It Happened, What It Means,” Dissent, Spring 1998) I explored the rapid growth of HMOs, noted potential advantages that prepaid group practices held over traditional fee-for-service arrangements, and considered a …
If class is the key to history, here in America it is a secret key, at once central and unsayable. Informing so much of our national life, it is at the same time the social divide we will not permit …
As the European Union (EU) moves steadily toward fuller political integration in the form of the single European currency, attitudes on the left toward projects of supranational governance remain ambivalent. Currently in Britain, the Labour Party under Tony Blair presents …
In recent years the last episodes of certain long-running sitcoms have become a major cultural events in American life. Record numbers of us turn on our television sets to watch what is going to happen to people who have been …
I am a professor of English at a small, selective college in central New York. Isolated in an obscure valley, the school and its surrounding village sometimes remain white with snow until late spring. A black tenured member of this …
BEFORE THE Jamaican elections last December I visited Clive Dobson, president of the National Workers Union (NWU), at the union’s modest, two-story office amid the Victorian decay of downtown Kingston. Michael Manley headed this union for nearly twenty years before …
Should “Americanization” take place by consent of the governed? The question was posed eight decades ago by a rebellious intellectual, Randolph Bourne. He was responding to polemics—both political and cultural—about “hyphenated-Americanism,” roused by immigration but more broadly by a changing …
This is a good and useful book. At a time when mediocre economic performance is celebrated as though it were excellent, and when even the ugly consequences of mediocre performance, such as rising inequality, are commonly treated as though they …
The collapse of the Asian economies was one of the great economic surprises of the last half-century. Countries recently celebrated as “economic tigers” are now recipients of a $121 billion bailout from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and are seen …
For some time time now it has been fashionable to bemoan the end of the age of the great French intellectuals. In the early 1980s, Sartre, Barthes, Lévi-Strauss, and Foucault all passed from the scene. Louis Althusser experienced a metaphorical …
At the 1992 Republican Convention, Newt Gingrich hurled the nastiest salvo he could think of toward Bill Clinton, saying that the allegedly libidinous governor of Arkansas had “Woody Allen family values” (in stark contrast to Garth Brooks’s televised eulogy for …
The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism by Thomas Frank University of Chicago Press, 1997 272 pp $22.95 Over the past decade, cool has become the trademark of American consumerism. The triumph of cool …
In October 1996 a rebellion broke out in eastern Zaire and spread with astonishing rapidity from one end of the country to the other, toppling in the course of seven months the thirty-year dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko. For those …
Our interview with the leader of the Italian Democratic Party of the Left, Massimo D’Alema, suggests the difficulties faced by European social democracy as it struggles to adjust to, but also to resist, the material and ideological power of the …
In December 1997, the Edwards Aquifer Authority conducted a series of public hearings in five south Texas communities. It wanted to know what people thought about proposed new rules governing withdrawals from the region’s large aquifer. Years of excessive pumping …
