It was widely expected that the Republicans would make significant gains in 1994. The Democrats were in disarray, suffering from powerful anticongressional sentiment and from too close an identification with their president, Bill Clinton, a man plagued by bad political …
It is called the California Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI), and if enacted, it would end affirmative action in California. The state and its subdivisions would be prohibited from using race, color, sex, ethnicity, or national origin to discriminate against or …
Richard Rorty’s case for “prosecuting campaigns” (“Movements and Campaigns,” Dissent, Winter 1995) rather than “defining movements” rests on a carefully built construction of superimposed oppositions: tactics versus strategy; focusing on “what is to be done here and now” rather than …
In 1954, the year in which he founded Dissent, Irving Howe published an essay called “This Age of Conformity” in Partisan Review. Partisan Review was the organ of what has been dubbed (by T.J. Clarke) the “Trotskyite-Eliotic” culture of the …
Mexico’s 1994 presidential election was supposed to bring both clean elections and the political comeback of the left. Instead, Mexico escaped the worldwide wave of democratization one more time. The Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), which includes center-left ex-members …
Is sexual harassment understood differently by men and women? If so (as seems likely), whose understanding should set the standard for court decisions? These questions, which lawyers have argued about for almost a decade, reached the general public with the …
Rose Laub Coser died August 21, 1994 at her summer home in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, ending seventy-eight years of intense and passionate commitment to her family, the institutions of which she was a part, sociological analysis, and the cause of social …
It’s a sour moment. The right has attained new power, but its intellectual, not to mention moral, bankruptcy has never been more evident. The GOP’s “Contract with America” regurgitates Reaganesque ideas that brought this country to many of its present …
If you have grown up as a baseball fan, you know that one of the cardinal rules of the game is that you root for your home team. It doesn’t matter if they are lousy and another team is better. …
Until recently, the question of the origins of fascist ideology seemed a fairly academic affair. Not only have the events of World War II receded in historical memory, but the collapse of communism made it appear that the “age of …
A diaphanous screen seems to separate “liberals” from opponents, who are often grouped together (by “liberals”) in clumps called “communitarians,” or here “culturalists.” One of the things that doesn’t seem to get through the screen is the sense attributed to …
Not long ago I was part of a “focus group.” The idea of these things is that a publisher assembles some academics and asks them to assess the need for new materials in a given subject . . . to …
James Wilson contends that there is a universally human moral sense that makes possible the existence of stable human ‘societies. He divides his moral sense into four parts: sympathy, fairness, self-control, and duty.Wilson thinks that many prevailing doctrines in and …
My friend Ferenc Fehér was a remarkably learned, eloquent, brilliant man. But he did not live a happy life, and suffered more than his share of injustice in three worlds. The Nazis murdered his father when he was still a …
The collapse of intellectual conservatism in America has been as complete as it has been swift. Consider a few contrasts. In 1984, the leading conservative spokesman in the media was George Will; by 1994, it was Rush Limbaugh. The basic …
