Winter 2025

The American welfare state is in a profound crisis, and not just because the affably mean, pragmatic ideologue who is president of the United States is destroying some of the most important gains ever made by the people of the …

Traditionally, it has been the role of the left to question whether an adequate welfare program could ever be developed and maintained within the American economic system. Now, suddenly, we find politicians in both parties arguing that the development of …

Mr. Reagan, like his hero Cal Coolidge, turns out to be an accomplished union buster. (Was ever a union more skillfully finessed than the Professional Air Traffic Controllers? The adroitness of it all may be comparable to that of Silent …

The term “cold war” has long referred to American-Soviet relations since the Second World War, but beyond that there has been little consistency in its usage, even on how to set it in type. When capitalized, “the Cold War” usually …

: usually for comments, more or less weighty, on topics of the day. But this time we want to break with our tradition and say a word or two about ourselves. Dissent is now into its 29th year–a fact that …

Americans think about ethical questions in two quite different ways: sometimes we are moralistic, while at other times we are libertarian and relativistic. Usually liberals and socialists tend to conceive of the moralistic, “old-fashioned” view of ethical questions as a …

As activists in the American peace movement dedicated to the abolition of all nuclear weapons, we protest the actions of the Soviet government in detaining independent Soviet peace activists and seeking to prohibit their activities. Such actions—taken even as the …

“Admiring the view?” Jehovah asks. Or, rather, his witness: the Jehovah’s Witness. I heard someone arrive, footsteps on the snow, in the copse on the edge of the Little Camp, between the quarantine huts and the infirmary, the Revier. I …

The day I knew, I mean really knew that I’d left Los Angeles was the day I heard a Syracuse weatherman giving the national weather extremes. “It’s a beautiful 82 degrees in Waco, Texas,” he said with the bouncy enthusiasm …

Lester Cole and Steve Nelson were two American Communists whose active years in the party coincided—the years of the Great Depression, the New Deal, World War II, and the early cold war. Yet their experience and what they learned from …

is it not a disgrace that a society priding itself on its advoacy of human rights, on its sense of equality and individualism, would deny the symbolic recognition of these rights to women? It took a struggle of more than …

“The working men have no country,” reads a famous passage in The Communist Manifesto. “We cannot take from them what they have not got.” Marx and Engels add that with its penetration of world markets, the bourgeoisie was universalizing capitalist …