Fall 2025

The preferred response of the Bush administration.

Call this a reckless claim, but I know I made the main point of my article clear—that is, Dissent magazine’s editors and writers in the 1950s didn’t criticize the liberals for not being socialists; they criticized liberals for not defending …

Sheri Berman’s The Primacy of Politics Social Democracy and the Making of Europe’s Twentieth Century

The Left desperately needed some good news last summer, so it was ready to claim a major victory when the Supreme Court unexpectedly struck down the military tribunals at Guantánamo Bay. Commentators enthusiastically called Hamdan v. Rumsfeld a “stinging rebuke” …

Looking for a reason for the author’s silence.

On October 25, 1946, three weeks after the handing down of the verdicts of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, the United States established Military Tribunal I for the trial of twenty-three Nazi physicians. The charges, delivered by Brigadier General …

When it’s not clogged with protestors or full of summer concertgoers, the National Mall in Washington, D.C. is often overrun by softball players. Every year, staffers from dozens of congressional offices and nonprofit organizations field teams to compete in the …

For a quarter of a century, Iran has been ruled by a militant theocracy. After the shah’s regime–authoritarian, brutal, and backed by the United States–was overthrown, the new regime quickly proved itself to be authoritarian, cruel, and self-warranted by Islamic …

In July of 1945, U.S. president Harry Truman wrote in his diary, “It is certainly a good thing for the world that Hitler’s crowd or Stalin’s did not discover this atomic bomb. It seems to be the most terrible thing …

The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege by Damon Linker

The editors of Dissent asked a number of distinguished commentators to respond to the following statement and questions: For a quarter of a century, Iran has been ruled by a militant theocracy. After the shah’s regime–authoritarian, brutal, and backed by …

Goma, provincial capital of North Kivu and the second-largest town in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), lies at the heart of the world’s most destructive conflict since the Second World War. In the last decade, around three million Congolese …

A criticism of Pascal Bruckner’s anti-anti-Americanism.

We have been told that the August 2006 plot to attack several U.S.-bound flights departing from London’s Heathrow Airport was hatched largely by Muslim Britons. This is becoming a familiar story. Earlier this summer, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police foiled …

An argument over Cold War liberalism