This book was first thought of, so far as the central idea goes, in 1937, but was not written down until about the end of 1943. By the time when it came to be written it was obvious that there …
Two and a half years as book editor at the Muppets opened my eyes: we live in the age of the licensed image. Before my sensitization, I admit I’d never reflected on the “source” of, say, the Mickey Mouse watch …
Seventy years ago, American elites knew how to enforce the two-party system. “In 1924,” Robert and Helen Lynd reported in their classic study, Middletown, “It was considered such ‘bad business’ to vote for the third party [the Progressives, who ran …
I am not going to join the argument between Sean Wilentz and Martin Kilson, both of whom are fellow editors and friends of mine. But I do want to say in response to Kilson that I am glad that the …
In The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald introduces us to the nativism that was so much a part of 1920s culture. “The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged,” Tom Buchanan tells …
“In just six months we’ve changed the labor movement,” newly elected AFL-CIO president John J. Sweeney told the labor federation’s convention delegates last October. “Now we’re going to change America.” It was the bravado of victory speeches, to be sure, …
Last spring, Cruising, a 1980 film about a serial killer who stalks the gay sex clubs of New York City, played before packed houses at San Francisco’s Roxie Cinema. Little controversy attended the week-long run at the city’s premier revival …
Two years ago I came to know a forty-year old woman living in a housing project in a decayed industrial city north of Boston. When I met Lois, she had just lost her job at Head Start after her car …
The End of Racism is an ambitious book. It seeks to demonstrate that liberal policies and the culture and behavior of African Americans, rather than racism, lie at the root of black Americans’ problems. It attempts to dismantle pragmatism and …
Democratic politics in the world’s oldest democracy is losing popular appeal. Public cynicism about what government, or politics, can accomplish is rampant. American voting turnout has been declining for decades, though with occasional upticks. At the same time, Americans are …
If the 1995 off-year election provides any portents for 1996, they are that the best the Democrats can hope for is a defensive victory. In the November elections in Virginia, Kentucky, New Jersey, and elsewhere, the Democrats did not run …
On Monday, maybe a million black men will march on Washington. Coming after the O. J. Simpson verdict, the march promises to be a pivotal moment in our nation’s life. As the writer Greg Tate has rightly noted, the verdict …
Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History predictably earned him a skeptical response when it appeared a few years ago, especially from critics on the left, many of whom, one suspects, had not read the book. (There are some notable exceptions, …
The story that I want to tell about the new American right begins with the takeover of the Republican party by Barry Goldwater and his friends in 1964. Think of that as a dress rehearsal—though we thought it real enough …
In this issue of Dissent you will find, for the first time in an American publication, George Orwell’s original preface to Animal Farm. This essay, a product of Orwell’s difficulties in getting his anti-Stalinist novella into print, offers an axiom: …
