I had planned an editorial on Bosnia for this page—a diatribe against the moral blindness and complacency of European governments and the leadership failure of our own, against the cowardice of NATO and the weakness and confusion of the UN, …
In his fine book on Hannah Arendt and Albert Camus, Jeffrey Isaac makes an entirely convincing case that one can respect the tragic aspect of political action without losing hope in its possibilities. Perhaps it’s because Jeff Isaac has so …
Some conservatives complain that if immigrants want to live in this country, they should learn the language. Tell that to Aracely C., who has worked in the sweatshops of Los Angeles’s garment industry for the thirteen years she has been …
To pursue a steady commitment to freedom of speech is a difficult choice. It entails a suppression of the desire to silence or somehow restrict the opinions of people with whom you disagree, a decision to allow their speech in …
When I read Jeff Isaac I fell into depression. Twenty years of my life—and thousands of others’—wasted! In the depth of my despair, however, I had a revelation. Isaac was right. “A new `activist public policy,’ centered around the problem …
“Whenever A and B are in opposition to each other,” wrote George Orwell in 1945, in “Through a Glass, Rosily,” “anyone who attacks or criticizes A is accused of aiding and abetting B.” He added: “It is a tempting maneuver, …
In today’s politics of the family, the right has claimed the high ground. They’re the ones laying down the law on “family values.” Come to think of it, they’re the ones who concocted that tendentious term and slipped it into …
As two executions have been carried out in California in recent months, with several more due to take place shortly, these events have assumed a form as predictable as a Noh play. First comes the flurry of rejected legal appeals. …
Gay rights parades, those annual celebrations of the 1969 Stonewall riot, are festivals of the shocking. In cities across the land, Dykes on Bikes, looking for all the world like Hell’s Angels, roar by on souped-up Harleys. Elaborate floats carry …
Jeff Isaac believes contemporary progressives face serious new problems of program and agency: identifying “what is to be done” to advance egalitarian democratic values under present economic and social conditions, and finding someone to do it. Sharing these values with …
George Fredrickson is one of this country’s most prolific and influential historians of race relations and racial thought. His earliest book in this area, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (1971), …
Multinational countries live in a state of permanent trouble, all the more so if economic anxiety makes solidarity an issue and ideologues and politicians dream of cultural homogeneity. Federalism has proved to be the most viable way to satisfy both …
After Ella Fitzgerald died last June, I picked out a few CDs, played them over and over, and became happier and happier at what I heard (except in the case of a horrible album with Andre Previn on piano, and …
In August, President Bill Clinton signed a bill that ended the sixty-year-old program for Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). To be sure, this was not an entirely new development. Since the 1960s, when the welfare rolls expanded, Republican …
When Jeffrey Isaac calls for chastened political expectations, I can’t help but agree. Given the political blockages and intellectual disarray of the moment, who wouldn’t? As I write this, in early July, the New York Times reports that federal cutbacks …
