The problem is, the problem isn’t just Bill Clinton. Fault the president for his timing and tactics on health care, for subordinating his investment agenda to deficit-reduction mania. But it was hardly Clinton’s doing that Kathleen Brown changed identities every …
Democratic Culture is the newsletter of Teachers for a Democratic Culture (TDC), an organization of somewhat under two thousand left academics, primarily from the fields of English and the humanities. Published three times a year, it consists of articles, excerpts …
Irving Howe opened A Margin of Hope, his autobiography, by recalling a conversation in which Ignazio Silone asked him when he first became a socialist. “At the advanced age of fourteen,” was Howe’s reply. That would have been 1934, a …
The bottom line of Michael Kazin’s potpourri of political hunches, reportage, and prescription (“Alternative Politics,” Winter 1996) is that progressives should support Democrats in 1996—hardly an item of controversy among this or other readers of Dissent. Kazin’s broader argument is …
The European Community (EC), the United States, and the United Nations have all contributed mightily to the death of Yugoslavia and the murder of Bosnia. German and Austrian overeagerness to recognize unilateral declarations of secession by Slovenia and Croatia assured …
The Republican ascendancy has brought with it some remarkable conservative revisions of history and literature. Various politicians and scholars have encouraged us to think nostalgically about the past. Longing for a golden age before the welfare state, some of these …
If the devil is in the details, the controversy over street names in former East Berlin tells the story. In September 1993 Berlin’s transport secretary, Herwig Haase, a Christian Democrat, impaneled an Independent Commission for the Renaming of Streets. Composed …
In 1993 Bill Clinton nominated Lani Guinier, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, to head the Civil Rights division of the Justice Department. Guinier was experienced in civil rights litigation and politics and was also a family friend. …
Populism is all the rage in this political season—an enraged and often outrageous populism. Judging from the last election, American voters have hit the boiling point. They hate taxes, big government, and spending on the poor. They hate the Washington …
Unemployment is not only an economic issue; it is also a political one. No government can afford to ignore it. A flourishing economy and ample jobs give governments legitimacy. They lose legitimacy if the economy stagnates and good jobs become …
When they passed legislation mandating their own compliance with federal labor laws in the first hundred days of the congressional term, Republican leaders already knew that in the next hundred they would begin the systematic dismantling of federal labor law. …
After a time of sickness and suffering, Irving Howe, in the year before his death, regained an animating interest in life. For a while, free of the grim paraphernalia of doctoring and hospitals, he gained shelter. His spirits revived, and …
In the 1960s and 1970s, Eugene Genovese revolutionized historical writing about the Old South. Using a supple form of Marxian analysis, he ended the reign of the “consensus” historians, who had viewed white southerners as guilt ridden liberals driven by …
In the debate over the Mexican bailout last January, U.S. stockbrokers, the Mexico lobby, and the mainstream media pressed hard for the rescue package. Their argument rested on the premise that economics had replaced military action as the basis for …
In a world where you are asleep with your fathers, in that part of the forest where trees read, your tree still reads to us. Tonight your branches bend over Conrad, Trotsky, Saba, the evergreen Irish. Joyce hated flowers, his …
