I want to talk as a philosopher today—a practical and engaged philosopher. I won’t argue for particular policies, but I also won’t remain at the level of abstract principles. If philosophy is to engage with politics, it had better be …
The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age by E.P. Thompson The New Press, 1997 225 pp. $25 This posthumous collection of essays and reviews by E.P. Thompson makes a companion to the last book he completed, Witness against the Beast—a …
The Tiananmen massacre of June 4, 1989, set off extraordinarily deep reverberations within American public opinion and led to strange movements within American politics. Tom Brokaw recalls that while he was doing a story on Los Angeles street gangs, the …
Two years into the Sweeney era, the American labor movement seems to have found its own rather rocky rhythm: victory, disaster, victory, disaster. In late summer, the stunning success of the Teamsters strike at United Parcel Service was followed by …
Fidel Velásquez, the ninety-seven-year-old Mexican labor baron, finally expired on a Saturday morning last June. Those Mexicans who owed him the most were in full attendance at his wake: the free-market, ruling-party elite led by the government finance minister, and …
Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa by Keith B. Richburg Basic Books, 1997 263 pp $24 In 1923, a then-little-known poet named Langston Hughes embarked for Africa. Just twenty-one years old, Hughes had produced the epochal “The Negro …
Much that Allen Graubard writes would be fair if stated with less exaggeration: of course, public schools continue to track (although less than before); many (not all) high schools are authoritarian (though there’s variety within schools); basic skills tests are …
Political scientist Peter Irons once wrote a book about people who took their constitutional claims to the Supreme Court. They included Mary Beth Tinker, who successfully challenged her school board’s policy barring her from wearing a black armband to protest …
A few years ago, it was revealed that the Southern Baptist Convention had compiled elaborate demographic maps of the United States. The maps displayed painstakingly calculated estimates of the number of citizens in each state who had been saved (46.1 …
Radical Son by David Horowitz Free Press, 1997 468 pp $27.50 A good many readers of Dissent subscribe to the New Republic, and those readers will thrill at the opportunity to discover anew the following letter-to-the-editor, which ran in the …
Hong Kong’s “transition” seems to have faded from the international headlines. Contrary to the expectations of doom and gloom, the handover to China, or the “takeover,” as the New York Times put it on July 1, did not have a …
Early in 1969, when my children were five and seven, I wrote “A Marriage Agreement” proposing that the tasks of child care and housework be divided equally between husband and wife. Like most women of my class and generation born …
I spent a good part of my summer reading cures for liberalism. One prescribed a limited but activist government; another a colorblind, egalitarian nationalism; others an affirmation of democratic universalism, a revival of civic republicanism, a program of economic populism, …
This should be the New Democratic moment. Clinton II began with the banishing of liberals, their places filled by wall-to-wall New Dems: for Leon Panetta, Erskine Bowles; for George Stephanopoulos, Rahm Emanuel; for Robert Reich (in his domestic policy maven …
When I was a college student, back in the early seventies, people I knew made it a point not to talk about their grades. To this day, I have no idea how my friends did in college—they all graduated, which …
