Winter 2026

All politicians these days run for office scared. It’s harder and harder to get elected. But now we have the sight of a politician “running scared” for nomination to office! And three years to go!

“Income Revolution” Editors: May I be permitted a comment on the exchange between Gabriel Kolko and Henry Pachter concerning the “Income Revolution” in America? [DISSENT, Summer 1957]. In general, I sympathize with Kolko’s views on this matter, but it seems …

Dissent An American Quarterly Magazine called DISSENT has published a special number about Africa. I dissent emphatically from almost all its judgments about the East and Central African territories, and I should be astonished if that were not the attitude …

The June decisions of the Supreme Court were major decisions; this is so even if those to whom the decisions applied directly, or who had initiated the actions that led through the federal courts, have already left the scene. The …

Having found rather poor enlightenment in the hour-by hour thrillers of Khrushchev’s coup d’etat, we must admit that we prefer historical novelists to Russia experts when it comes to relating who did whom in. But we have been fascinated by …

If I had to select items of twentieth-century evidence to be found one day by future historians and archaeologists, the gas chambers of Auschwitz and the protocols of the Moscow trials would be high on my list. Twentieth-century man has …

So great a legion of ideological interests is choking the media of communication of the world today that I deem it advisable to define the terms in which I speak and for whom. In the heated, charged, and violently partisan …

My thesis is that the United States is moving simultaneously toward and away from social equality, and that the tension between the two movements is to a large degree responsible for the present social and political mood. The movement toward …

Writers on the problem of ideology frequently describe it as an expression of a group or class view which gives the individual both an awareness and rationalization of his particular social role. Developing complex ideological systems along these lines was …

Among professional political scientists the late Franz Neumann easily took a position hors cadre. In a drab trade he excelled in brilliance. Among circumspect searchers of validated facts he stood out as a man of ideas and an author of …

A close study of Mr. Gabriel Kolko’s article, “The American ‘Income Revolution’ ” in the Winter 1957 issue of DISSENT shows its scientific apparatus to be faulty; but I shall confine my criticism to the tables on pages 48-49, which …

All men are equal, only some are more equal than others. By the same token, man’s situation is always extreme, only sometimes it is more extreme. If we ever thought that, although human beings were individually mortal, the species itself …

In a concluding section, the authors of Union Democracy (subtitled “The Internal Politics of the International Typographical Union”) observe, “For men of good will, there is much to learn in the history, institutions and arguments of American printers.” Such “men …

Editors: I thought the following little item might be of interest to you: The Danish Communist party, at its “extraordinary” 19th national congress, just concluded, adopted by a vote of 300-odd to 2 a resolution supporting Soviet action in Hungary. …

This issue of DISSENT is devoted to reports and interpretations—mostly reports—of the American scene. We have asked a number of writers to describe those aspects of our national life with which they are most familiar. What they wrote, we have …