Jim Rule has written a wonderfully bracing but also a strangely high-minded critique of United States foreign policy. By “high-minded” I mean first of all abstracted from all the difficult decisions of past and present policy making. And I mean, …
At the Greyhound, Seven Stages, and Trailways bus stations, when you approach the ticket agents behind the glass that separates the world of employees and rules from the public at large, you may be asked, “Where are you trying to …
Fifteen years ago, Todd Gitlin offered a precise and devastating metaphor for what he saw then as the academic Left’s default from democratic politics. In The Twilight of Common Dreams, Gitlin noted that while the Left was “marching on the …
I want to focus on the question of patriotism. If an American child and a Peruvian child were drowning, would you rush to save the American child first? If you were in charge of feeding an international crowd of travelers …
Jim Rule’s reference to me is hard to parse, because the language is vague, but he’s essentially saying that anyone who now warns against a swift and complete withdrawal from Iraq must be trying to justify an earlier decision to …
For seventy years the disparate “Left” supported, belittled, glamorized, ignored, or attacked Saul Alinsky and his tradition of community organizing. Today, it should embrace community organizing, participate in it, and play the role that non-sectarian left organizers do in the …
The year 2006 pushed me into electoral politics. Not only did right-wing Republicans control the White House, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the public agenda, but in my very blue home state of Maryland, too many establishment …
The invasion of Iraq was a defining moment for the United States. This was the kind of war that many Americans believed formed no part of this country’s repertoire—an aggressive war of choice. Its aim was not to stop some …
I came out to my mother in a letter. I was twenty-eight. “I was born this way,” I wrote, following with the most shattering high note of self-loathing I can think of: “If there were a straight pill,” I lamented, …
The rise of a genuinely left Confucianism in China would be a welcome development, but Dan Bell’s account of what this doctrine might look like, and how it is invoked by contemporary “new leftists,” leaves me unpersuaded that it could …
“I am human and I consider nothing human alien to me”: this statement has always struck me as preposterous. Of course there are human creations and activities that are alienating, or worse. (The famous sentence in Terence’s comedy is in …
What relationship American intellectuals should have toward mass culture—television, films, mass-market books, popular music, and the Internet—will vary as much as the people themselves. I think that it’s good if there are some intellectuals who get deeply involved with these …
In 1989, I strongly supported the student-led pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square. Without knowing much about China, I guess I supported the students partly out of a form of self-love; it seemed they wanted to follow my social and political …
I don’t know if my mother intended to die on Valentine’s Day. But she did. At nearly ninety-six and a half, Beatrice Katz had reached one of her goals, outliving her oldest sister by a few months. Her hospice nurse, …
From the start of the current economic crisis, commentators have compared the ongoing unpleasantness to the crash of 1929, with the implication that we might soon begin to suffer a version of the Great Depression if we did not avoid …
