Students remain active in a variety of left-liberal causes. Students have marched with unionists at Yale and Harvard, staged anti-contra sit-ins in congressional offices in upstate New York, registered voters in Kentucky, protested campus racism in Michigan and Massachusetts, and …
Between 1977 and 1986 there occurred a sweeping assault upon gays and their culture. Sadly, the left failed to respond to this offensive. This was not an episodic lapse but an abiding failure of the left to take homosexual politics …
The subtitle of Todd Gitlin’s book about the sixties, Years of Hope, Days of Rage, echoes the famous tag, “the best of times, the worst of times.” It was an intensely political time and for some the memory shines with …
American unions have been generally more interested in pension benefits than pension funds. The employer-pension system originated in the late 1880s as a management device to ensure worker loyalty to the firm. Most pensions weren’t portable (and still aren’t); the …
Inside a small and somewhat shabby little office building in a rundown part of San Salvador, a group of activists is beginning a political experiment that may shape the course of events in Central America for years to come. The …
For my sins, I turned the tv on in time to hear Pat Robertson at the Republican convention. His main accusation against Dukakis was that the Governor is a member of the ACLU—the godless American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU …
Tremendously important changes are taking place in the world today, so rapidly it often seems impossible to keep track. The great powers are starting to back away from their military interventions, not because they have concluded that lions should lie …
A clever and capable man, Michael Dukakis is the kind of politician the Democrats once could produce with ease from year to year. He happens to be the first of his kind whom they have found to run for president …
A society that won’t spend the money to keep murderers and rapists behind bars is understandably puzzled about how to deal with nonviolent criminals. We hesitate to toss bribe-takers and stock-manipulators into the pokey with cutthroats and muggers. Yet we …
The history of postwar Eastern Europe begins with “Yalta.” Why quotation marks? “Yalta” signifies more than the historical meeting of Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill in the Crimea, in February 1945. “Yalta” signifies a major trend in the wartime diplomatic efforts …
American universities in the 1980s have witnessed some striking developments at that tender point where academic research meets big business and big government. Some of the most dramatic of these have involved technologies of genetic engineering—biotechnology, for short—with their much-contested …
His is one of those lives that invites counter-factual questions. A founder of the Italian Communist party, a brilliant writer and devoted militant, Antonio Gramsci was imprisoned by the Fascists in 1926 when he was only 35 and died in …
I was embarrassed at first to admit how good I felt about the Democratic party convention; then I realized that the four evenings I spent in front of the tv were a training period—like an athlete’s spring training for a …
Is Socialism Doomed? is an elegant analysis of the experience of the French left in power after 1981. The general reader will learn much about France and its left from the book. Singer combines two rare qualities—a compelling writing style …
There is something fundamentally wrong in the country, and the country knows it. It is not that families sit around the dinner table talking about deindustrialization and federal deficits and the new underclass. It is rather that people feel what …
