Fall 2025

The author reads Dissent from the 1950s to determine the failures and successes of cold war liberalism

How to think straight about America’s imbalanced politics? It’s not so easy nowadays. David Plotke’s smart article in this issue ought to initiate considerable debate about how we went from the New Deal to Bush’s bum deal. Bush has not …

It is no longer possible to dismiss American religiosity as an odd residuum of hillbilly culture. It is now a vivid and organizing force in a mobile America defined by McMansions and office parks. Indeed, the alliance of advanced capitalism …

In English for the first time, with an Introduction by Stanislao G. Pugliese

On a Saturday afternoon in March, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa stood with others leading a march of more than five hundred thousand people protesting anti-immigrant legislation making its way through Congress. It was the largest demonstration in L.A. history. …

Have George W. Bush’s administrations produced a large shift to the right in politics in the United States since 2001? The answer is no—but this is mainly because of prior shifts in that direction. My aim in addressing this question …

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the debate over the American war in Iraq, revived talk of totalitarianism among liberals and leftists thinking about radical Islamists and Middle East dictatorships. With varying degrees of enthusiasm, respected former dissidents …

Elizabeth Borgwardt’s A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights

Paris: The first thing I noted on arriving here at the New Year was the number of homeless in an especially cold winter. They seemed to me, a frequent visitor, to have expanded exponentially in recent years. Then, in ensuing …

The Disposable American by Louis Uchitelle

Put a conservative in the driver’s seat, and he can sound like a utopian Marxist. If you ask him about food, housing, or health care, he’ll explain how buying it and selling it in the marketplace creates the best of …

When I think about intellectuals and movies, I think of Susan Sontag. For Sontag, movies were the most promising form of modernist expression, in part, because they elided the domineering and interpretative hubris of the intelligentsia. “In good films, there …

Peter Beinart’s The Good Fight: Why Liberals – and Only Liberals – Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again

Student loans, for more than half those attending college, are the new paradigm of college funding. Consequently, student debt is, or will soon be, the new paradigm of early to middle adult life. Gone are the days when the state …

Whether in agreement or demurral, one reads Michael Walzer with interest and respect. His work is a welcome contrast to the vicious rhetoric of accusation and denunciation that is so much a part of our public life. The basics of …