Every year since 1911, union members have assembled in front of a building on Washington Place and Greene Street in New York City on March 25. The building is cloaked in black. A fire engine ladder reaches toward the eighth …
October 28, 1963 is an important unacknowledged anniversary for the city of New York. On that day, vandals with a court order began to raze Pennsylvania Station more efficiently than their predecessors did the Roman Baths of Caracalla that inspired …
The disturbances in Kazakhstan in December 1986, the demonstrations by the Crimean Tartars in Moscow and those in the Baltic states in 1987-88, the incidents in Yakutia and Uzbekistan, the increased activity of the Russian “patriotic” association, Pamyat (“Memory”), the …
The sun is barely up when the old man taps on the McDonald’s door. “We’re open in a few minutes, sir,” a young countergirl answers. The old man points to the McDonald’s cap he is carrying. He is the “new …
The most important impact of Jesse Jackson’s campaign has been his ability to fashion for black Americans a parity-status within the Democratic party. A parity-status with regard to a political party is the opposite of a client-status. It entails the …
I am writing more than a month before the New Jersey Democratic primary, in which I shall not vote for Jesse Jackson. That would hardly be a fact worth mentioning except that large segments of the American left (including the …
In 1968 I wrote an essay entitled “Le Désordre nouveau”*— it was written hurriedly, in the heat of the events. There is a passion in it that may seem surprising today. But at least I gave no credence to expectations …
We know about Stalin’s and Hitler’s great crimes, the sycophantic Red monarchy of Kim Il Sung, and the bloody purges of the former French lycée teacher of Tirana, Enver Hoxha. More attention should be paid to another European example of …
I suggest that we think of the modern welfare state as a system of nationalized distribution. Certain key social goods have been taken out of private control or out of exclusive private control and are now provided by law to …
It may be a truism to say that a clash between two broad and diametrically opposed visions of society underlies virtually all democratic political debate. Yet these polar world views are seldom explored systematically; few thinkers, in this polemical and …
A few years back, acknowledging its losses in membership and power, the AFL-CIO launched a fairly serious critique of its policies and operations. If it did not come up with a lot of terrific answers, it did ask a lot …
Cuzcatlán, the title of Manlio Argueta’s new novel, is the old Indian name for El Salvador. In our own United States literature, names like that used to crop up often a century and a half ago: “Hiawatha,” “Chingachgook.” Unscrupulous poets …
Armed soldiers were not in evidence. At the airport it looked like business as usual. I was in Haiti as one of two observers sent by the Americas Watch Committee, which had set up an office in Port-au-Prince with the …
I can think of at least two ways to approach history. There is the historian’s way, usually celebrated as realism, and…the “unhistorical” way, claiming for itself, in the name of an undogmatic moralism, nothing less than truth. The historian’s way …
Asked two years ago whether the Teamsters would rejoin the AFL-CIO, President Lane Kirkland said: “If my grandmother had wheels, she’d be a trolley.” Kirkland had good reason to be skeptical, for the AFL-CIO had expelled the Teamsters in 1957, …
