Soon after Barack Obama won a second term with surprising ease, Pulitzer-Prize-winning artist Clay Bennett depicted a wealthy, white-haired man staring grimly at his television screen while around and behind him four servants, white and black, go about their jobs …
By working outside structures of power one may circumvent coercive systems but not necessarily subvert them. Localizing politics—stripping it of its larger institutional ambitions—has its advantages, but without a larger structural vision, it does not go far enough.
Liberals have an obsession with the presidency. Since Franklin D. Roosevelt strode across the political arena like a colossus (albeit a colossus in a wheelchair), liberals have tended to equate success with electing one of their own to the White …
Is this country ready for democratic elections? That’s a question we often ask about countries emerging from despotic rule or civil war. But it’s a good general question; it invites political introspection and collective self-criticism. With regard to our own …
Calling this year’s political fight about funding for contraception a “war on women” may be a catchy slogan and a strong mobilizing call. But as an analysis, it is misleading. True, birth control does affect women disproportionately, because women still …
Republic Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It by Lawrence Lessig Twelve, 2011, 381 pp. Money talks. It is also a conversation stopper. Almost any discussion among progressives of what is really needed to solve the nation’s …
The People’s Pension: The Struggle to Defend Social Security Since Reagan by Eric Laursen AK Press, 2012, 818 pp. Eric Laursen has written a highly readable, exhaustively researched history of the last thirty years of struggles over Social Security. His …
Social movements can be very grand. Years ago, Richard Rorty wrote an article in Dissent describing Christianity and Marxism as prototypical social movements (“Movements and Campaigns,” Winter 1995)—they aimed to transform the world and to create “new” men and women. …
The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin by Corey Robin Oxford University Press, 2011, 304 pp. Conservatism is idea driven. Its idée fixe is the defense of inequalities of wealth and power against challenges from below—that is …
When state and municipal governments accord the rebel flag honor or recognition, they sanction all that the flag stood for: treason, slavery, and a race state.
Such as it is in the United States, the welfare state, a term for which exegesis will soon be supplied, came under intense fire even before the OPEC coup slowed economic growth, upset a precarious political detente over the size …
The uneven development of world economy has resulted in a disastrous split between the industrialized West and primitive East; but it has also brought another split, at the moment quite as important, between the United States and its own allies. …
For American radicals these are not times of easy political choice. They are all the more difficult if we continue to think in terms of elections, candidates and parties.
