The seemingly uncontrollable movement of American policy toward domestic repression and imperial warfare makes it of the utmost urgency that we understand what is involved in our “new conservatism.” The most perceptive understanding may come not from a hurried look …
At the corner of 15th Street and Union Square West, on June 1, James Morrissey and Ralph Ibrahim, two seamen, watched outside the Amalgamated Bank while bags of ballots were loaded from the vault onto a truck for delivery to …
I AM NOT, I HOPE, INDULGING in that most middle-aged of pastimes, boasting of how terrible things were when I was young. And yet, it must be said that, for all the current talk of repression in American society, what …
THE POLITICS OF UNREASON, by Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab. New York: Harper & Row. 547 pages. $12.50. FEW SCHOLARS HAVE INFLUENCED our thinking about “extremism” as much as Seymour Martin Lipset, professor of social relations at Harvard. The …
LET US BEGIN by referring to the new thinking of some civil libertarians. Classic threats to civil liberties from legal and illegal government repression are easily recognized. The threat to civil liberties from nihilistic eruptions of pseudopolitical groups are also …
ON THE WHOLE DISSENT BOARD there is not one general. Not even a colonel. The most we can show are a few ex-sergeants, World War II vintage, who never achieved fame as military strategists. So we just don’t know whether …
THE STUDY OF HISTORY is under attack today on many fronts, both from within and without the historical profession. Where free choice replaces a required curriculum, students increasingly desert the study of Western civilization for the sociology and psychology courses …
IN 1959, THE GERMAN SOCIAL DEMOCRATS adopted a new program. At the same time, the British Labour party also adopted a new program. Each of the two was trying to shed the image of a Marxist workers’ party and to …
Last summer Michael Walzer began writing some notes on the problems of “citizens politics”—that is, the kinds of local groups, some tenacious and others short-lived, that have grown up throughout the country during the last few years. Naturally enough, his …
IN INDIA, we have exhausted our exclamatory diction in describing the triumph of Mrs. Gandhi in the recent elections. So I will simply say it has been the greatest ever—quantitatively as good as Nehru’s, qualitatively better still. She had been …
RONALD LAING MUST BE ACCOUNTED one of the main contributors to the theoretical and rhetorical armory of the contemporary Left. By the contemporary Left is meant that soft variant of the utopian urge which has jettisoned the Marx of Capital …
THESE ARE REBELLIOUS DAYS, the kind of days in which we tend to become polarized about law. Some stridently emphasize the need for respect; others stridently express their contempt. This contempt has come in our society from both the Right …
WHEN HE SPEAKS against kitsch he seems to be speaking from the point of view of art,” wrote Harold Rosenberg, describing the stance of a certain well-practiced critic of mass culture; but “when he speaks about art it is plain …
IN AN ESSAY I wrote a while back, “The Hippies as Contrameritocracy,” (DISSENT, July—August 1969), I argued that the movement was essentially a response to meritocratic pressures bearing down not only upon youth but upon the society as a whole, …
PATRICIA SEXTON’S CLAIM in the February 1971 DISSENT article “Women Debate the Equal Rights Amendment” that “the vulnerable woman down at the bottom of the job ladder” will in the long run be pulled up by the Equal Rights Amendment is …
