Fall 2024

This article is an attempt to explore the nuclear dilemma which faces the world forty years after the first atomic bomb was dropped at Hiroshima. In the course of it I shall try to put some flesh on the bones …

Does anyone remember Jacques Doriot? During the 1930s he was a leader of the French Communist party who drifted into fascism. Exploiting his gifts for demagogic oratory, he became a prominent collaborator with the Nazis in the Second World War. …

Analogies both tempt and mislead. Still, it is hard to avoid recalling the merry 1920s, the last occasion when international and domestic credit stimulated pundits to project endless prosperity premised upon ever-rising stock prices. Roger Babson saluted Hoover’s victory in …

The balance of political and economic power in the nation’s capital is in flux. By the end of the 1985 session of the 99th Congress, the House had passed a tax reform bill shifting—over the next five years—$140 billion of …

This is the worst book I have read in ages. Its central conceptual flaw can be detected in the title. The author believes that psychotherapy existed in Hitler’s Germany. Just as students of jurisprudence have persuasively argued against the misuse …

JANUARY 1986: See if you can guess the trouble spot for U.S. foreign policy I am describing: A poor country, struggling to industrialize, richly endowed with natural resources but suffering from decades of retrograde political leadership. The United States, in …

With a sigh of relief, the Italian Communist party (PCI) laid to rest the “Soviet Question” in the early 1980s. For more than two decades, the leadership of this massive party (29.9 percent of the vote in the 1983 parliamentary …

There’s no return to the point before Solidarity; that can never occur. The idea of ten-year cycles is not correct. There are two important differences: first, the group in power is different from any other that has held power in …

Elliott Currie criticizes conservatives, of which he takes me to be a leading representative, for their views on crime (“Crime and the Conservatives,” Dissent, Fall 1985). Since I have not yet seen Mr. Currie’s book, I do not know what …

On the subject of totalitarian states, it has been said that the most reliable writers essentially pertain to two categories: those who live outside and are not allowed in—and those who live inside and are not allowed out. In recent …

Aside from the request at Passport Control that I remove my cap to confirm that I was the bald man in the picture, entering Warsaw was uneventful. I was waved through after having had to buy zlotys at the official …

From the beginning, the New York Hospital Workers—Local 1199 of the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU)—projected an exceptional image among American labor unions. Its first strike for recognition in May 1959 came at a time when many longtime …

In response to a segment on the homeless, a TV anchorperson recently quipped, “Well, that’s the price of progress!” Those who had tuned in to this Reaganite one-liner (an ideological relative to the old Stalinist quip, “You can’t make an …

Based on impressions gathered from the media in the course of the past year, the canyons of Lower Manhattan, in the vicinity of the Wall Street Corral, have been reverberating with the sounds of shoot-outs as a puzzled public tries …