Disagreements may arise because of differences in opinion and evaluation or because of differently known and understood facts and logic. I sympathize with the spirit of Thomas Weisskopf’s essay (Dissent 1992), but I want to make three specific comments about …
The rise of “identity politics” forms a convergence of a cultural style, a mode of logic, a badge of belonging, and a claim to insurgency. What began as an assertion of dignity, a recovery from exclusion and denigration, and a …
In his new book, Morris Dickstein proposes to make a fresh case for a creature he calls the public critic. This is no easy job. Though the designation instantly calls to mind the achievements of George Orwell and Edmund Wilson, …
During the last three years, the ruling elites in the countries of Eastern Europe, especially Poland, have clearly aimed to limit or even liquidate entirely the welfare state. They have introduced various forms of commercialization and privatization into the sphere …
National Public Radio wrapped up its presidential campaign coverage in November with a piece on the Clinton waffle, that is, the candidate’s habit of slipping from side to side on disputed issues. Listeners heard journalist Sam Donaldson ask Clinton if …
What is going to happen to the American left, now that the world is turning upside down? Let me begin with a picture of what has happened in the past. In the century and a quarter since the American Civil …
America’s ambivalence about the roles of women today was played out most ironically in the past presidential campaign. The Republican National Convention gave the private, family-centered woman Barbara Bush a very public and political role as a highlighted speaker, while …
By spring of 1991 Yugoslavia was nearing terminal illness. The federal League of Communists had ceased to exist since the withdrawal of the Slovenian and Croatian branches. Although the federal premier Ante Markovic’s economic program managed to maintain relatively high …
I voted for Clinton, I was glad he won—if only because his victory brought to an end twelve dreary years of right-wing domination. Whatever our hopes or expectations, large or modest, regarding the near future, we know at least that …
Who is in and who is out?—these are the first questions that any political community must answer about itself. Particular communities are constituted by the answers they give or, better, by the process through which it is decided whose answers …
Three years ago, everything seemed much clearer: the Berlin Wall had collapsed, and with it communism in Eastern Europe. The failed coup in Moscow vastly expanded the terrain—psychological as well as geographic— of that collapse. But now, we live in …
Comrade Gene Debs: even to those Americans who can identify the name, it sounds antiquated, conjuring up a political culture that died long ago. It is difficult today for anyone (including, and maybe especially, anyone on the left) to utter …
There is a wonderful, even breathtaking, passage in Elliott Abrams’s book in which he reproduces a letter by his wife Rachel that expresses her fury at the prosecutors who secured the criminal indictment of her husband for improperly withholding information …
With the election of Bill Clinton, the war in Vietnam ended—finally. George Bush sought to make it a campaign issue by talking about Clinton’s draft record, yet Americans pronounced such matters irrelevant to their concerns—economic concerns, which are not so …
In southeastern Turkey roads often lead nowhere. Along the narrow dirt paths and partly paved roads that wind through this mountainous region, stone and mud villages stand empty, casualties of the battle between the Turkish Army and separatist Kurdish guerrillas. …
