Like Americans, Canadians will be going to the polls later this year. When they do, chances are that the biggest issue on their minds will be a treaty with the U.S. that most Americans have never heard of. Maybe they …
The air snapped and crackled. December weather. The white Christmas mini lights were already lit in New York. It was a funny day, this eighth of December. Overnight one had got accustomed to the American flag and the hammer and …
Money is not the only gauge of political vitality, but in the case of both the Republican and Democratic parties, money reflects the general stagnation of partisan competition as the Reagan years come to a close. For the Republican National …
The obligatory allusions to the 1960s in press reports about the national student convention held at Rutgers University the first weekend in February were as disappointing as they were relevant. Newsday in particular ran a photograph of a barefoot activist …
I an isolated “holler” in northern Tennessee, Marie Cirillo, an ex-nun, has lived and worked with local people for twenty years. The rivers of the area are polluted by runoff from coal mines, and the people seem irrevocably poor. This …
What lies behind the veil of economics? Vision and ideology. What does the complicated subject matter of economic analysis conceal from view? Our deep-lying, perhaps unanalyzable notions concerning human nature, history, and the like; and the various disguises by which …
Since the early years of the twentieth century, historians have characterized the American Federation of Labor (AFL), the preeminent organization of American trade unionists from the 1890s through the early 1930s, as craft-dominated, procapitalist, and politically tame. America’s pioneer labor …
No one seriously interested in higher education can afford to read The Closing of the American Mind. Or so the late Dwight Macdonald might have put it. He practically did. Substitute “international relations” for “higher education” and you have the …
Much of American political history can be interpreted as a long series of deliberate betrayals of some of the ideals that inspired most of the troops that fought and won our War of Independence. While they were fighting, these ideals …
Although Soviet writers have been repeatedly exhorted to employ the “weapon” of satire, the range of its “permissible” subjects steadily shrank over the years. The New Economic Policy of 1921-25, with its tolerance of a relatively pluralistic economic structure and …
When I saw the Soviet film Repentance in Moscow last year, it was still being withheld from general distribution. Since it could only be seen at private screenings in places like the Writers Union, it had the cachet of the …
America declared “war on poverty” twenty-five years ago, yet in most inner-city neighborhoods conditions are worse now than they were then. In the years since Michael Harrington opened an innocent nation’s eyes to the sorry reality of “the other America,” …
The Historikerstreit or historians’ controversy that erupted in summer 1986 was an intellectual event unprecedented in postwar West Germany. Its importance lies less in its originality or profundity than in its intensity. Never before have the “spirits” been so divided, …
The Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) agreement will be ratified by the Senate this spring, setting new precedents for arms control agreements: (1) actual reductions in the number of nuclear warheads held by the superpowers; (2)asymmetrical reductions of weapons; (3) …
The deep farm crisis of recent years has made the urban majority aware of anguish in the countryside, even if the world of modern farming—and even more of farm policy—is so remote that it is hard for outsiders to grasp. …
