When it comes to Romania, political squalor is taken for granted. But the transition to democracy didn’t start out that way. In December 1989, Romania was the only Soviet bloc country where the revolution appeared to be both bloody and …
The very respectable journal Le Monde Diplomatique recently published an ethnic map of Europe. It portrays the western part of the continent in solid colors coinciding perfectly with state boundaries. The eastern part, however, is a crazy quilt of overlapping …
This book traces the development of the German left since 1945, concentrating on what was West Germany. The main difficulty of democratic socialism in Germany, the authors argue, is the success of a welfarist version of capitalist democracy in the …
This spring agents of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals staged the largest raid in the ASPCA’s 129-year history. Aided by thirty New York police, a dozen ASPCA agents swooped down on a converted movie theater …
Toward the third hour of the hagiographic documentary about Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, a moment of truth emerges. Chomsky is lecturing at the University of Wyoming. He has just finished his familiar stump speech: fifty reasons why we live in …
A few years ago, pundits on both sides of the water were pleased to announce the imminent convergence of British and American politics. There were said to be international forces at work too powerful for merely national political cultures to …
As I write, in the summer of 1995, we do not know how many of the measures proposed in the Republican Contract With America will finally become law. But whatever the final legislative result, the Contract With America has already …
The profession that used to be known as sovietology has been torn apart by debates over who failed to predict the collapse of communism, and why. But a greater failure of prediction, by any lights, was Russia’s slide into chaos, …
Leo Ribuffo’s mild rebuke of the left’s typical response to American religiosity (“Religion, Politics, and the Latest Christian Right,” Dissent, Spring 1995)—a response of horrified incomprehension—gets most of it right. But Ribuffo doesn’t address in any depth the sources of …
“It ain’t that hard to understand,” Newt Gingrich said recently, referring to the idea of using “shame” to stamp out undesirable behavior. “Read Himmelfarb’s book. It isn’t that complicated.” Certainly, Gingrich’s summary of The Demoralization of Society could not, as …
Should rights play an important role in feminist theory and practice? The answer to this question is not as simple as it first appears, for contemporary feminism has a profoundly ambiguous relationship to rights. On the one hand, so many …
Are we a nation?” The question was raised, in an address of that title, by Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts after the Civil War. At the end of the twentieth century, the question of whether America is a nation has …
The welfare state is about security. It is about employment security, income security, and communal stability. It is premised on macro-economic policies designed to mitigate the business cycle and its employment and income effects and to ensure that advancing technologies …
As we lurch toward the end of the twentieth century, it is easy to think that our public discourse has gone through a core meltdown. The cold war is over, and we are free from the fear that our leaders …
Some of the disagreement between Peter Laarman and me derives from our different perspectives. I wrote about the latest Christian right from the perspective of a historian who—odd as it may seem these days—was trying for a little detachment. Laarman …
