There is mounting evidence that American children are more and more in peril, in part because they are less and less assured of the sustained care, support, and safety that comes only with order in their immediate environments. Children are …
Movies have become machines for the sadomasochistic imagination. Die Hard 2 is said to depict 264 killings. But so-called serious cinema has also been skidding down a slippery slope, aiming to meet schlock halfway. Since The Wild Bunch (1969) and …
It was always unlikely that the democratization of public life in the Soviet Union would continue if combined with a collapsing economy, a disintegrating political system, and internal separatism. Something had to give, and the most likely victim was democratization. …
The collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe reopens the question whether there is any form of socialism that might be adopted, with popular support, in the advanced societies. The experience of communism suggests, fairly unequivocally, that such a system …
In the Gulf War that Saddam Hussein forced on the whole world it was only natural that the Iraqi president should be portrayed as if he were the essential problem. If Iraq were routed, Saddam destroyed, and the Iraqi military …
Recent discussions about the plight of African Americans—especially those at the bottom of the social ladder—tend to divide into two camps. On the one hand, there are those who highlight the structural constraints on the life chances of black people. …
Anyone who thinks that the collapse of the Soviet and East European regimes discredited Marxism and socialism is-to put it charitably-having an off day. As Alasdair MacIntyre, no sympathizer, once observed: “The barbarous despotism of the collective Tsardom which reigns …
Over the last decade poor young adults in rural areas have not been finding enough work to support themselves. Federal social programs are an important buffer: food stamps, Medicaid, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), Head Start, and job …
Historians of women were confronted with an unusual dilemma a few years ago, when their work became the object of impassioned debate in an unlikely forum: the courtroom. In 1984, defending itself against an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) lawsuit …
Sunday morning in the capital city of a midwestern state. Four people sit at a table in the corner of a deserted hotel ballroom, sipping dreadful coffee and eating scrambled eggs and sweet rolls. They are there because the SENATOR …
During the last thirty years the perspective on the African-American urban experience has changed dramatically. Gone, to a large extent, is an interpretive model that stressed the social pathology of black life. Attributed, in its nonracist forms, to the destructive …
The “common people,” Walt Whitman observed in 1871, are too often “degraded, humiliated, made of no account.” American democracy must uplift “the specimens and vast collections of the ignorant, the credulous, the unfit and uncouth, the incapable, and the very …
Remember when the university was called an “ivory tower”? Bookish college presidents? Absentminded professors? Befuddled students? These types belong to a distant, perhaps mythic, past. Today no one charges that college presidents are too scholarly, that professors wander about in …
“The guy had a magic touch. He was a dream man. Under Reagan, you know, it was like anesthesia,” Harry Angstrom, the aging hero of John Updike’s Rabbit at Rest observes. Rabbit’s observation is shrewd, but as the 1990s—with an …
To say that we are losing the war on crime is a cruel understatement. Today we are a nation reeling from rates of violent crime that in many places outstrip anything we have seen before in our history. The basic …
