It took all of Ronald Reagan’s eight years. But it now appears that he achieved one of his major goals: hastening an end to the Second Reconstruction in America. Reagan not only succeeded in reducing the protection of specific laws; …
Day of Reckoning by Benjamin Friedman Random House, 1988, 323 pp., $19.95 The polls tell us that worship of laissez-faire is on the wane. Collapsing bridges, the Savings and Loan swindles, rising homelessness, the antics of Leona Helmsley and Ivan …
Self-Consciousness: Memoirs by John Updike Knopf, 1989, 257 pp., $18.95 A chapter from John Updike’s Self Consciousness ran some months ago in Commentary under the provocative title, “On Not Being a Dove.” Updike looked back at the loneliness that overtook …
Gavril Popov is a distinguished Soviet economist, editor of the prestigious monthly Voprosy ekonomiki, and a leading proponent of radical political and economic reforms in the USSR. Elected deputy to the Congress of People’s Deputies in March of 1989. Popov …
In early 1981, as the Reagan administration was getting under way, its first cultural controversy began. Nancy Reagan wanted new china for the White House. The cost of the china was the problem. The Lenox pattern with a raised gold …
In Transit: The Transport Workers Union in New York City, 1933-1966 by Joshua B. Freeman Oxford University Press, 1989, 434 pp., $34.95 Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-1960 by Gary Gerstle Cambridge University Press, 345 …
Michael Harrington had two qualities of the greatly good—patience, and an almost total freedom from vanity. A political worker by calling, he was also, irrepressibly, a quick-witted man, who could startle himself (in the middle of some careful analysis of …
The last time I saw Mike, we had lunch at a coffee shop in Greenwich Village. He had a chocolate milkshake, which had been his staple food since the cancer recurred. We discussed nineteenth- century literature and E. M. Forster, …
In the pilot film for the 1987 television series Max Headroom, an investigative reporter discovers that an advertiser is compressing television commercials into almost instantaneous “blipverts,” units so high-powered they can cause some viewers to explode. American television has long …
I first encountered Michael in 1976 when he spoke at Wesleyan University. The audience was peppered with people like myself who wanted, more than anything else, not to be “social democrats.” Unable, or unwilling, to comprehend his politics, we badgered …
The Italian Communists have finally tied the knot. Led to the altar by a new secretary general, Achille Occhetto, the party (PCI) has unmistakably espoused West European social democracy. The prenuptial maneuvers had dragged on for years, with a squeamish …
The conclusions of the Kerner Commission Report on the urban riots during the late 1960s have been widely accepted; namely that this angry black urban upheaval was driven by a gnawing alienation and despair among mainly working-class and poor Afro-Americans. …
Two distinct topics have been involved in the recent debate about the future of the humanities, and the worst failure of the debate is that it hardly seems to notice the distinction. The topics in question are the traditional study …
Viewed from the outside, bicentennial France seems to be resigning its major claim to political glory, its jealously guarded national treasure: the tradition of the Great Revolution. Foreign observers have noticed a sharp contrast between the republican glamour of the …
The main square in Nanjing, China is called the “Gulou,” named after a five-hundred-year-old bell tower that used to warn the city’s Ming subjects of impending attack. Today, the bell tower still stands, but is little more than a traffic …
