Fall 2024

Mr. Kabe, who was in his mid-forties and on welfare, first came to the attention of the police when, with a running start from the West, he jumped the Wall in mid-Berlin, heading East. Right by the Wall he had discovered …

Editors: Gordon Beadle, in “Orwell and the Neoconservatives”(Dissent, Winter 1984), has disposed of the neoconservative attempt to “steal” the Orwell who wrote throughout his life as an unorthodox leftist and fought in Spain on the side of the revolutionary anti-Stalinist …

Lydia Maria Child was one of the most remarkable American women of the 19th century. An author and reformer, she wrote extensively on social and cultural issues, was active in the antislavery movement, and supported women’s rights. Her literary output …

Theoretical economics, for understandable reasons, is rarely a topic of public discussion. For economists, it is perhaps just as well; they are spared the task of explaining their highly abstract and often irrelevant models. But times of crisis produce demands for …

For the first time in 16 years, Boston has a new mayor, former South Boston State Representative and City Councilor Ray Flynn, and he has become a cynosure of hope for many. Flynn’s record, however, is not such as to …

My experience of dissent is extremely individual, even though, like any personal experience, it reflects in some way broader, more general, and more ramified developments, and not only the events of my own life. I have never belonged to any …

It might be illuminating for someone in the stands at a big-league baseball game to ask youthful white fans, randomly, “Did you know that until 1947 black players were not allowed on big-league teams?” I suspect at least half would …

Unemployment averaged 7.1 percent in 1977, declined in the next two years to 6.1 and 5.8 percent, and jumped upward again in 1980 to 1977’s 7.1. For January 1981, the month the Carter administration departed, the statisticians registered a figure …

Haitians are so far down on their luck that if a world prize existed for the most hapless people, they would be edged out on a technicality by perhaps the Chads or Bangladeshis. Haiti, for most of its population, is …

“Strong democracy” is an approach to politics that emphasizes participation and community. It reflects a conviction that representative institutions have done as much to undermine as to undergird democratic practice, and that our problem today is that we have too …

Pursuing a halt to the arms race is like unraveling a ball of snarled string. Half a dozen promising strands hang loose. You take up first one, then another, untwisting, disentangling—will this be the thread that finally releases the whole …

I am grateful to the editors of Dissent for the opportunity to reply to Deborah Meier’s article, “‘Getting Tough’ in the Schools: A Conservative Prescription,” reviewing my book, The Troubled Crusade, in the Winter 1984 Dissent. I hesitate to call …

In 1983 Ronald Reagan did as president what he had never been able to do as an actor—he had a significant impact on the movie industry. Not that the president got the Reagan equivalent of PT-109 produced or that his …

“Knee-jerk liberalism”—a term not heard much these days—was once used by conservatives to deride the supposed automatic nature of liberal responses to social and political issues. Conservatives conveniently forgot that one function of any set of beliefs is to create …