Has the Bush administration properly balanced security and liberty? Let’s address this question through two routes. 1. When national security is threatened, any nation is likely to reduce liberty in some way. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus. During World War …
After September 11, 2001, Dissent published a series of articles that critically assessed traditional left ideas about America and its place in the world. For some time, Cynthia Fuchs Epstein and I have been thinking about undertaking a similar review …
Jason DeParle’s American Dream
The threat of terrorist attacks on the scale of those of September 11, 2001, or worse cannot be denied. That reality calls at a minimum for a reevaluation of the balance between liberty and security. If a diminution in liberty …
Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America
Yes, the Bush administration does pose a serious danger to basic liberties and constitutional democracy. Do the NRA and the ACLU agree on what that threat is? I doubt it. Each organization represents a pole in the partisan battle that …
My article aims to identify a small set of foreign policy initiatives that could be taken in the first few months of a new administration so as to begin to repair the damage to U.S. global standing and influence wrought …
The family house has left the family. Built in 1898, the two-story frame house was sold last fall for far more than I would have guessed and probably more than it was worth. The 1200 block on Carmen Avenue in …
Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society by Michael K. Brown, Martin Carnoy, Elliot Currie, Troy Duster, David B. Oppenheimer, Marjorie M. Shultz, and David Wellman
With health care the number-two priority of voters-behind jobs but still before terrorism-hopes are riveted on the 2004 election for reform that would extend coverage to forty-five million uninsured and safeguard the care of those lucky enough already to have …
Vladimir Putin’s Russia is awash in Soviet kitsch. In St. Petersburg’s popular “Idiot” café a bust of Lenin sports a racy polka-dot tie. Trendy eateries with catchy names such as “Propaganda,” “CCCP,” “Soviet Kitsch,” and (no kidding) “Lenin’s Mating Call” …
The International Criminal Court in Northern Uganda
The role of Jews as a people is becoming an issue again in ways that were thought to be consigned to history. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century two major issues appeared to have been settled. The revulsion …
Making Molehills out of the Mountains
You go shopping and find yourself in a long line, waiting for help from a competent but overwhelmed cashier. On your right you see four self-service stations with no lines. A cashier stands ready to train you on how to …
