Here is the difficulty with drones: the technology is so good that the criteria for using it are likely to be steadily relaxed. That’s what seems to have happened with the U.S. Army or with the CIA in Pakistan and Yemen.
Next time you hear a pundit say that to preserve America’s competitiveness or dynamism, we must replace the liberal arts with something more “practical,” take a second to check what they studied.
In a meeting between President Ronald Reagan and Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, when the friends were both in high office, the president asked Mulroney, “Brian, did you read that article in the Reader’s Digest that trees cause pollution?”
Dissent contributors on Michigan’s right-to-work law: Colin Gordon looks at the faulty economics, Richard D. Kahlenberg and Moshe Z. Marvit tell the ugly racial history of the idea, and Michael Kazin reminds us why people would miss unions if they vanished.
Southern conservatives—including “right to work” progenitor and avowed white supremacist Vance Muse—feared that if unions united working-class whites and blacks, they could upend the Jim Crow order.
Dissent contributors reflect on the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut. Read posts by Saul Cornell, Bryce Covert, and Elliott J. Gorn.
Nearly everyone on the battlefield is just fighting “to not get licked.” That’s more a testament to the poverty of our social relations than to the poverty of individual souls, and it’s just as pertinent to the impoverishment of our social imagination as it is to the amorality of war.
The Central Park Five is a powerful reminder of what can happen when innocents are caught up in racial divisions and tensions they didn’t create and railroaded for a crime they didn’t commit, and when all of the city’s institutions collaborate in the horrific act.
Conservatives and neoliberals envision a government that provides a comparable range of benefits to the one advocated by earlier American liberals. But rather than designing and delivering services directly, the neoliberal government provides coupons for citizens.
In 1937 autoworkers boldly grasped the means of production, gained recognition from General Motors, and proceeded to build the kind of institutional power that transformed history. It’s an incredibly seductive story. Perhaps too seductive.
Perhaps the ultimate irony is that in its critique of modernity and global capitalism, the Chinese New Left’s greatest tool has been neither market socialism nor anything native to China, but deconstructionism.
The rescue of public education must come from the grassroots, from a coalition led by parents and teachers. Such a movement has been taking shape gradually and gained visibility during the 2012 election cycle.
Kenneth Lonergan may be a relative novice as a film director, but he knows that high art, at its best, subverts the ground of our psychological or political being. Margaret is a film that makes no attempt to soothe its audience.
The United States is confronted with numerous threats to its economic well-being and security. The national debt is not one of them. The real challenges of our time are massive joblessness and the decrepit state of American infrastructure.
The cycle of debt illustrates that we cannot fix the problem through austerity. This tactic only deepens the devastation, since low wages further erode the tax base for cities, leaving them vulnerable to predatory lenders.
