Bill Clinton has chosen the phrase “vital center” to characterize his second term. It’s half apt and half deceptive. True, the election was a contest between his “center” and the “right.” While a good many people voted for him out …
Pop Internationalism by Paul Krugman MIT Press, 1996. 214 pp. $22.50. Paul Krugman’s Pop Internationalism is a collection of essays, most of which were previously published in Foreign Affairs, Scientific American, the Harvard Business Review, and similar journals. It works …
I’m pleased to have Professor Aronowitz’s confirmation that the editors of Social Text believe in the existence of an external world. But I never thought otherwise. When I asserted in the second paragraph of my parody article that “physical ‘reality’ …
Two brief anecdotes: (1) For two months I eagerly awaited the Fall Dissent, pleased as could be about the excellent symposium that my essay spurred. When it arrived I immediately phoned my uncle, a staunch, lifelong trade unionist and a …
Remarkably few recent presidential campaigns forecast the course of the following four years. Kennedy ran on the “missile gap” and generational vigor, not civil rights or the nuclear test ban. Johnson ran seeking “no wider war,” not seeking to send …
Beijing’s repression of the 1989 protest movement and the purge that followed resulted in the death, imprisonment, or exile of thousands of Chinese. With some notable exceptions, exile organizations have foundered, losing their sense of purpose or staggering under financial …
Multicultural Citizenship by Will Kymlicka Oxford University Press, 1995. 296 pp., $35. In recent years there has been a profusion of interest in the concept of citizenship—a development that is far from surprising. In her classic study The Origins of …
There’s scaffolding around the Anne Frank House on the Prinsengracht Canal in Amsterdam, the main thoroughfare in the now-trendy Jordaan section. A brochure you receive upon entering explains that the back annex needs a thorough restoration because of foot traffic …
In Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy’s classic nineteenth-century utopian novel, Julian West falls asleep on Decoration Day in 1887 and awakens from a deep trance 113 years later at the start of a new millennium. Julian’s trance has kept him from …
One audacity of neoconservatives is their appropriation of the radical egalitarian rhetoric of the 1960s. In his recent book, The Affirmative Action Fraud, for example, Clint Bolick calls for a restoration of the Founding Fathers’ “civil rights vision.” According to …
One of the great canonical shifts of recent decades has been the enthusiastic rediscovery of earlier American painting. Thanks to the success of the abstract expressionists after the war, Americans began to realize that they too had a world-class art, …
On June 15, 1990, the Los Angeles police attacked a peaceful demonstration of janitors and their supporters in the tony Century City district of Los Angeles. Local 399 of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) was seeking a union contract …
Has the American culture that could once generate an Edmund Wilson become incapable of generating anyone similar today? Has something fundamental changed in American life, and is the age of critics-in-general (and readers-in-general) behind us? The idea that some such …
Workers have had a difficult time in the move to a market economy in Eastern Europe. In the first few years after 1989, prices skyrocketed and real wages plummeted. Hundreds of thousands have lost once-secure jobs. In June 1996, even …
Explaining his now famous parody in Social Text’s “Science Wars” issue, Alan Sokal writes in Dissent (“Afterword,” Fall 1996): But why did I do it? I confess I’m an unabashed Old Leftist who never quite understood how deconstruction was supposed …
