Jim Rule has provided a textbook example of what I called in the last issue of Dissent “the great crossover” (“All God’s Children Got Values,” Spring 2005). The political projects that he rejects—”schemes involving vast short-term suffering on behalf of …
Nicholaus Mills defends confidentiality for journalists
Mexican Factory Workers’ Dream Dies on Altar of Free Trade
Why Don’t American Parents Protest?
Linda Gordon on Jon Wiener’s Historians in Trouble
Recently, a PBS Frontline documentary called “The New Asylum” showed how our jails and prisons have become, by default, the nation’s mental hospitals. This wasn’t an exposé. The prison under examination didn’t seem particularly bad. The staff seemed to be …
The reality of Venezuela under the rule of Hugo Chávez Frias, Gregory Wilpert tells us, is a “complicated truth” (“Venezuela’s Other Path,” Spring 2005). Whereas many observers see in Chávez another Fidel Castro, an authoritarian caudillo pushing his nation toward …
Local justice in Rwanda
The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert O. Paxton Vintage, 2005, 336 pp., $15.00 The Nazi Conscience by Claudia Koonz Harvard University Press, 2003, 362 pp., $29.95 Ever since William Wordsworth celebrated revolution as a gift of youth and Edmund Burke …
New Approaches to ‘Politicized’ Science Under the Bush Administration
Joanne Barkan asks whether globalization is turning Europe into a museum
The War in Iraq and Dissent
If poetry, as Wordsworth wrote, “takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility,” political thought should take its origin from contention and anger similarly recollected. I suspect that tranquility is in short supply among our writers, but still, we try …
If only working-class and poor people would register and vote, liberal Democrats would win every election-that’s what we thought, until November 2, 2004. Democrats work on voter registration, Republicans work on vote suppression. So tens of millions were spent on …
In the fall of 2002, the American Political Science Association appointed a Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy. The fifteen members of the task force are Lawrence Jacobs, chair (University of Minnesota), Ben Barber (University of Maryland), Larry Bartels …
