Political impotence doesn’t always weaken the critical faculties, and some degree of aloofness from the well-known corruptions of power and money is essential for an independent social observer. Less known, though, is the effect on those faculties of going years …
This is a defining moment for the American labor movement—a moment ripe with opportunity and terror. On the hopeful side, the AFL-CIO is finally moving again. The “new voices” leadership team of John Sweeney, Richard Trumka, and Linda Chavez-Thompson—which ran …
When I heard the sad news, two memories came to mind. I met Bernie in September 1950. I had just finished my graduate course work and been lucky enough to get my first teaching job as an adjunct at Hunter …
ANXIETY… ANGER. . . LOSS. . . DISILLUSIONMENT. . . CONFLICT. . . CONFUSION. . . . SHAME. . . . The dark words, in tall letters on a large pad mounted on an easel, were being taken down with …
If you think of Wisconsin as a progressive pioneer in the development of social welfare policy, the first state to offer unemployment compensation, it pays to remember that it was also the home of Joseph McCarthy, who built his career …
I had planned an editorial on Bosnia for this page—a diatribe against the moral blindness and complacency of European governments and the leadership failure of our own, against the cowardice of NATO and the weakness and confusion of the UN, …
In his fine book on Hannah Arendt and Albert Camus, Jeffrey Isaac makes an entirely convincing case that one can respect the tragic aspect of political action without losing hope in its possibilities. Perhaps it’s because Jeff Isaac has so …
Some conservatives complain that if immigrants want to live in this country, they should learn the language. Tell that to Aracely C., who has worked in the sweatshops of Los Angeles’s garment industry for the thirteen years she has been …
To pursue a steady commitment to freedom of speech is a difficult choice. It entails a suppression of the desire to silence or somehow restrict the opinions of people with whom you disagree, a decision to allow their speech in …
When I read Jeff Isaac I fell into depression. Twenty years of my life—and thousands of others’—wasted! In the depth of my despair, however, I had a revelation. Isaac was right. “A new `activist public policy,’ centered around the problem …
As two executions have been carried out in California in recent months, with several more due to take place shortly, these events have assumed a form as predictable as a Noh play. First comes the flurry of rejected legal appeals. …
In today’s politics of the family, the right has claimed the high ground. They’re the ones laying down the law on “family values.” Come to think of it, they’re the ones who concocted that tendentious term and slipped it into …
“Whenever A and B are in opposition to each other,” wrote George Orwell in 1945, in “Through a Glass, Rosily,” “anyone who attacks or criticizes A is accused of aiding and abetting B.” He added: “It is a tempting maneuver, …
Jeff Isaac believes contemporary progressives face serious new problems of program and agency: identifying “what is to be done” to advance egalitarian democratic values under present economic and social conditions, and finding someone to do it. Sharing these values with …
Gay rights parades, those annual celebrations of the 1969 Stonewall riot, are festivals of the shocking. In cities across the land, Dykes on Bikes, looking for all the world like Hell’s Angels, roar by on souped-up Harleys. Elaborate floats carry …
