Spring 2025

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney recently took a strange trip. It was a short one, just a half-mile or so from the federation’s sandstone fortress near the White House to a sleek, smoked-glass office building that America’s fastest growing union, the …

The question seems to me wrongly put in one aspect. To hurl curses and insults at the Bush administration is a worthy, right, and just thing to do; and yet there is no reason to trip all over ourselves in …

The world is a grim place these days, but here at home, in the months since November, our spirits have lifted a bit, and in this issue of Dissent we are able to publish a few hopeful articles. It’s not …

Books discussed: Eat the Document by Dana Spiotta; American Woman by Susan Choi; The Darling by Russell Banks; The Company You Keep by Neil Gordon.

In the United States, the political future is constrained, for better or worse, by constitutional arrangements that have been in place for more than two centuries. Barring dramatic developments, such as nuclear war or major terrorist attacks, it is unlikely …

Even those, like myself, who opposed the Iraq War from the start on moral, legal, and strategic grounds cannot rejoice at whatever confirmation of our judgment comes from the scene of carnage, political turpitude, and human misery presented by contemporary …

Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth by Robert B. Westbrook, and Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty, Edited by Eduardo Mendieta

A labor victory in the new Congress depends on the definition of what it means to win. Labor’s broad agenda is passable in almost inverse relationship to that agenda’s capacity to strengthen the institutional and political power of trade unionism …

Four years after the war for democracy in Iraq began, it is evident that the project has failed dismally. Many analysts attribute this to flawed implementation. Although there is no denying that there were gross mistakes, the failure had much …

Robert Polidori’s photographs of New Orleans.

Is America moving left? Such a question would have seemed odd before last November’s election. Now it no longer seems so strange. Indeed, not only does the question not seem strange, but an affirmative answer can be given to it. …

Three Rwandan women in a village outside Kigali. Photo: Robert Guerra Nothing, I remember nothing,” the middle-aged witness insisted to the court. “I was sick during the genocide.” She was standing before a man accused of multiple murders, an audience …

The democratic ideal can be presented to peoples and countries that have not yet embraced it in two entirely opposite ways: through persuasion or through coercion and force. The European Union is a champion in persuasion, often combined with powerful …

The American project to spread democracy in the Middle East in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, and the Iraq War was doomed from the outset. That’s not because the Middle East is not compatible with democracy, but because the …